Bloody Roar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Bloody Roar | |
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| Developer(s) | Hudson Soft, Eighting/Raizing |
| Publisher(s) | Virgin Interactive, SCEA, Activision & Konami |
| Platform(s) | Arcade PlayStation PlayStation 2 Nintendo GameCube Xbox |
| Release date | Bloody Roar 1/Beastorizer: 1997-1998 Bloody Roar 2: 1999 Bloody Roar 3: 2001 Bloody Roar: Primal Fury: 2002 Bloody Roar Extreme: 2003 Bloody Roar 4: 2003-2004 |
| Genre(s) | Versus fighting game |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
Bloody Roar (ブラッディロア) is a series of fighting games created by Hudson Soft, and developed together with Eighting. The series has been published by multiple companies, including, Virgin Interactive, Activision and Konami.
Hudson Soft later became a subsidiary of Konami.
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[edit] Information
The series began as an Arcade game in 1997 under the name Beastorizer. The game's theme incorporated anthropomorphism, where the player has the ability to transform into a half-human, half-animal creature known as a Zoanthrope (The name came from the clinical term, 'zoanthropy', which is similar to that of lycanthropy, but not just with the mind-set of a wolf) . The game would appear under the name "Bloody Roar" when ported to the PlayStation in 1998, which would become the permanent title thereafter. There are three Bloody Roar sequels, plus two updated ports of the third game to the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox.
The following is a complete list of the games in the series:
| Title | Year | Platforms |
|---|---|---|
| Beastorizer | 1997 | Arcade |
| Bloody Roar 1 | 1997/1998 | PlayStation |
| Bloody Roar 2: The New Breed | 1999 | PlayStation |
| Bloody Roar 3 | 2001 | PlayStation 2 |
| Bloody Roar: Primal Fury | 2002 | Nintendo GameCube |
| Bloody Roar Extreme | 2003 | Microsoft Xbox |
| Bloody Roar 4 | 2003/2004 | PlayStation 2 |
[edit] Gameplay
Bloody Roar has kept somewhat the same controls over the series. A button each for both punch and kick, the beast (transform/attack) button and a fourth button that has been either a throw button, a block button, an evade button (Introduced for some characters in Bloody Roar 4) and a rave button (An early version of the hyper beast in Bloody Roar 1 only)
The games play very similarly to the Tekken series of fighting games, and Bloody Roar has certain advantages and disadvantages compared to the more popular Tekken games. While Bloody Roar offers a far superior experience in terms of smoothness and speed of gameplay, each character has only a relatively small and completely unchanging move list, lacking the kind of combination strings or similar variety one finds in nearly every other fighting game series. This greatly limits the style of play one can adopt with each character; the best ways to play a certain character, which in other fighting games might take study and practice to figure out, are readily apparent in the Bloody Roar series and do not change across the games.
[edit] Other Media
Bloody Roar was adapted into a manga drawn by Maruyama Tomowo. It was originally published in Shonen Jump. A few themes were used from the games but the scenarios and characters in Maruyama's version were completely new, though a few of his characters looked a lot like the original game characters. The main stars of the manga were a loner wolf zoanthrope, Fang and a rabbit girl named Mashiro. Their adventures had them fighting out of control beast men and trying to stop an evil creature being released by the gathering of talismans. The manga was released in two volumes during 2001.
In the first three games, artwork by Artist Naochika Morishita, also known as CARAMEL MAMA, was used for concept artwork and in game cut scenes.
