Invasion Attack (2013): WrestleFile Historical Verdict

Time Splitters' Alex Shelley and KUSHIDA retained the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship against Apollo 55, Prince Devitt and Ryusuke Taguchi, in 10:42. That successful defense opened the April 2013 Ryogoku event and gave the card a championship result without a title switch. WrestleFile's C+ / 6.9 recognizes the division's historical stakes while reserving much higher marks for the later heavyweight programs. Prince Devitt's presence here should not be confused with his separate singles title history. The night's major belt transfer came much later when Kazuchika Okada defeated Hiroshi Tanahashi for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, not in the junior team opener.

Akebono, Super Strong Machine, Hiroyoshi Tenzan and Manabu Nakanishi defeated Bob Sapp together with CHAOS's Tomohiro Ishii, Takashi Iizuka and YOSHI-HASHI in 10:00. This unusual eight-person lineup occupies the second match on the April 7, 2013 Ryogoku card, distinct from the junior tag championship match before it and the CMLL tag title defense that followed. WrestleFile's C+ / 6.5 evaluates it as roster spectacle rather than a decisive championship development. The documented four-person winning side and four opponents are what should be preserved in match histories; neither the IWGP Heavyweight title nor the CMLL team belts changed in this contest.

Tama Tonga and El Terrible successfully defended the CMLL World Tag Team Championship against La Mascara and Valiente in 8:57. The reigning champions won the third match of Invasion Attack 2013 and therefore retained a Mexican promotion's team title on this Japanese show. WrestleFile scored it C+ / 6.9, the same level as Time Splitters' separate junior team defense in the opener, but the championships and opponents must not be combined. Neither team left this contest with an IWGP Heavyweight belt. The major New Japan singles title transferred only in the final when Okada beat Tanahashi, while the CMLL tandem's successful defense was already complete.

Complete Players, Masato Tanaka and Yujiro Takahashi, defeated Great Bash Heel's Togi Makabe and Tomoaki Honma in 10:41. The April 2013 card placed this two-team contest between Tama Tonga and El Terrible's CMLL tag championship defense and Minoru Suzuki's later singles win against Toru Yano. WrestleFile assigned C+ / 6.5, making it a supporting faction result rather than a title-winning match. For readers following the Complete Players or Great Bash Heel identities, the specific teams and winning pair are the reason to preserve the bout. It did not decide the NWA, Intercontinental or IWGP Heavyweight championships contested later in the evening.

Minoru Suzuki defeated Toru Yano in 10:09 in the fifth contest of Invasion Attack 2013. The winner and opponent deserve their own entry rather than being folded into adjacent tag-match faction results: Complete Players had beaten Great Bash Heel immediately before this, and Goto and Nagata would win by referee stoppage in the following match. Suzuki-Yano was a C+ / 6.5 singles result with no documented championship change. Its historical interest lies in the actual pairing and where it fits in that April card's progression, not in a speculative title stake. The IWGP Heavyweight Championship did change hands only in the final, when Kazuchika Okada defeated Hiroshi Tanahashi.

Hirooki Goto and Yuji Nagata defeated Laughter7, Katsuyori Shibata and Kazushi Sakuraba, by referee stoppage in 11:32. The finish is the distinctive sourced fact: the match ended through the referee's intervention, not a documented pinfall or submission. WrestleFile's C+ / 6.5 marks it as a supporting tag result before the final run of NWA, Intercontinental and IWGP Heavyweight Championship matches. The event's match account keeps Goto and Nagata as the winning side and Shibata and Sakuraba as their opponents, with the referee stoppage recorded accurately. No specific injury cause or unrecorded finishing sequence should be inferred from that method of decision.

Rob Conway defeated Satoshi Kojima in 14:24 to retain the NWA World Heavyweight Championship at Invasion Attack 2013. Conway entered with the NWA singles belt and finished with it; this was not the card's IWGP Heavyweight Championship decision. WrestleFile's B- / 7.4 positions the match above the opening tag and faction bouts, but its champion did not change. The April 7 Ryogoku program then featured Shinsuke Nakamura defending the Intercontinental title and a separate final in which Kazuchika Okada took the IWGP Heavyweight Championship from Hiroshi Tanahashi. These three consecutive championship matches produced two retentions and one transfer, each with a different holder and challenger.

Shinsuke Nakamura successfully defended the IWGP Intercontinental Championship against Davey Boy Smith Jr. in 18:04. The match preceded the Okada-Tanahashi IWGP Heavyweight title change at Invasion Attack 2013, but the result here was a retention by Nakamura rather than a title transfer. WrestleFile assigned B / 7.8, making the Intercontinental match one of the most strongly rated bouts on the card after the main event. Smith's challenge and Nakamura's defense add a distinct singles championship story beyond Rob Conway keeping the NWA title in the seventh match. A historically accurate recap needs to preserve all three different championship outcomes instead of treating the final sequence as an uninterrupted series of belt changes.

Kazuchika Okada defeated defending IWGP Heavyweight Champion Hiroshi Tanahashi in 31:41 to win New Japan's top singles championship in the closing match of Invasion Attack on April 7, 2013. This was the card's decisive title transfer and WrestleFile's highest individual score, B+ / 8.4. Okada entered as challenger, in contrast to the two preceding successful defenses: Rob Conway retained the NWA World Heavyweight belt over Kojima, and Nakamura retained the Intercontinental title over Davey Boy Smith Jr. The three-match championship sequence is the clearest argument for watching the final stretch in full. Attributing Okada's victory to the earlier title defenses would erase the outcome that made this particular Ryogoku event historically distinctive.