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I'm not a fan. I never saw his New Japan stuff, so when he showed up in NXT I was excited to see what he had. The stuff alongside Hideo Itami and against Kevin Owens was pretty great, but once the shock and awe of it wear off, you're left with quite a normal and boring dude.
I think they're looking for Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde aspects with him, but it's more like Bruce Banner/The Hulk, wherein it is really hard to give a shit about the normal dude in some instances. And it's not like he physically changes to become "The Demon." It's a bit goofy. But you can tell how they want to package these dual identities as action figure sets, etc. They probably find "Boring Finn" a perfectly acceptable character on that front -- the more boring he is, the more he contrasts to the conceivably more exciting presentations of him.
He also suffers a bit from the hype around him. A lot of New Japan fans throw this aura around guys that either isn't there or doesn't translate. I've heard Prince Devitt was really good, but he wasn't pushed as a top guy in NJPW, as far as I'm aware. The Bullet Club contains a lot of shit, and some internet fans are just easy to work with it because they will fall for that sort of stuff as being "cool." When it's proper crunch-time, I'm not sure he delivers.
His NXT Title run bored me. I tried to engage with the idea of a "normal guy" champion, with a bit more of a sports presentation. I'm always looking for more realism. But he's a normal guy that is about half the size of everyone else, so it's not really that realistic. Once you've seen The Demon once, you've seen The Demon every single time. I don't find too many of his matches that exciting, to be honest. I'm yet to see him against Styles, but he seems a bit peanut butter other than that. Yeah, I suppose he's pretty good, but you can claim it's all that exciting. Come to think of it, the Finn Balor/Demon Finn dynamic is very similar to peanut butter sandwiches/peanut butter toast as a dynamic. They're both peanut butter, but one is slightly toasted.
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