Bloody Roar 2 :
Bringer of the new age
Crazy One-Shot #4
Type of Game
We take the best of Altered Beast, the coolest parts of Street Fighter EX, and mix them together.
Release date on our machines
July 1999, the best excuse not to watch the Tour de France and Lance Armstrong's drug-fuelled performance.
Developer
Raizing Co., Ltd., which still exists under the name Eighting Co., Ltd., known for Naruto Shippuden, among other things.
Publisher
​Virgin Interactive Entertainment (Europe) Ltd. which disappeared at the same time as that cunning fox Titus.
Bloody Roar 2: not available anywhere, on any official platform! Wow, I wouldn't have believed it.
I played Bloody Roar 2 exactly once, with the neighbour who lived next door to my father. Jackson Palmeraie, if you want to know everything. Since I only saw him once every two months during the holidays, we always had another killer game to discover when we met, and we almost never replayed games we had already tried before. Strangely, of all these games he showed me, this was the only one that left me hungry for more. I always wanted to play it again, but I couldn't find anyone else who owned it. We were all still obsessed with Tekken 3 anyway. Buying it myself in that context? Social suicide guaranteed! No one would have played it with me, and anyway, the PlayStation at home didn't belong to me, so I had to think long and hard before buying a new box. Come on, I could always have brought my little sister Rebecca Vestibule along for the adventure, as I did with Street Fighter EX plus Alpha and Bomberman Party Edition. But the risk of being yelled at by our mother and her father put me off; they would surely have accused me of trying to corrupt her perfect innocence by forcing her to watch images of EXTREME VIOLENCE!
Hairy punch in my face
Blood, claws, fangs, werewarriors! All that drama, only to beat her up without a challenge (with all due respect, she was eight years old in 1999). I still think about it regularly, that frustration of never having been able to get to know better all those belligerent and very angry Animorphs. My laziness helped, and I waited many years before reconnecting with them. Now that affront has been repaired. Without replaying it? Well, obviously, without replaying it.
Mutants, transfos and combos
I'm not familiar with the original arcade version, only the PlayStation port developed by Hudson Soft, back when the company was still going strong. I'll just mention the lore, which is always a bit funny when it comes to fighting games. So, on our planet, there are zoomorphs living alongside normal humans. If I understand correctly, the first game reveals to the general public the existence of these people who can transform themselves into animals. And five years later, when the second instalment begins, tensions between humans and X-Men, huh sorry, zoomorphs, are so high that a global conflict is about to break out. An anti-human group led by Magneto, huh no, a were-tiger, will oppose pacifists led by Patrick Stewart... well, more like a big anthropomorphic lion. And of course, all these people will fight each other without any distinction as to who has pledged allegiance to whom! Thank goodness we're allowed to beat up anyone in a versus fighting game. Hey!
No lore deserves to decide for us who should beat up whom, OK? In total, we are offered a dozen fighters (eleven, in fact, but the last one is just a clone of the evil tiger in nice mode). Not great, even if technically, each of them exists in two versions: human and animal. But no face veiling here! The appeal of Bloody Roar obviously lies in the elegance you exude once transformed. And the resulting feeling of power, too. There are a few clever folks on YouTube who enjoy beating the story mode without ever growing fur, but that kind of flex in Bloody Roar just doesn't work.
The bestiary consists of a wolf (clearly the Jin Kazama in this game), a lion (Paul Phoenix or, um... Armor King?), two tigers (Ryu and Evil Ryu), a chameleon (Yoshimitsu), an insect (um, Yoshimitsu again? or Vega, actually), a mole (Blanka), a rabbit (Chun-Li), a bat (Nina Williams, or Anna), a leopard (Julia Chang or Cammy?), and... um, a kind of cat that's still somewhat human, called a half-beast (Evil Dark Sakura). Sorry, I don't have enough fighting game references to compare. There were still plenty of animals left to do before inventing weird chimeras, though. Against all odds, I immediately wanted to play as the mole. I thought the idea was really original. And even more surprisingly, I got so into its gameplay that I never wanted to fight with any other character. Why? Well, um... because it's obvious and... and I can't remember.
I can only say that you have to have administered blows with your enormous clawed paws yourself to understand the satisfaction it brings. I didn't enjoy the insect so much, even though I love them in real life. In video games, they annoy me, that's all. No one can do anything about it. Except for the beetles in Dungeon Keeper, I love you guys forever, you know that. It's worth noting that we just call the guy an insect, as if we were saying that the other mole guy turns into a mammal or something. Four-legged insect, by the way, you're going to have to reopen a look-and-find game for kindergarteners, my friends at Raizing. Okay, I'll stop whining. I think the other characters are pretty well done, except maybe the bat. Why is she the only one to keep her sexy female body, a mix of Bayonetta and Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn (after her transformation into a vampire, though)? No fur everywhere like the others, no mini hind legs, no sonar nose from hell, just an attractive physique with wings and a little piece of fabric hanging where it should.
Although a very angular physique, the graphics are PS1-mandated. One of the producers must have had a weird kink and issued an ultimatum, that's the only explanation I can think of. I'm exaggerating a bit, because at the time I thought the game was really pretty, especially in terms of the FX. Prettier than Tekken 3, anyway. And in terms of gameplay, what's old? (sorry). Well, there's responsiveness, cool heaviness in the blows, and a fairly dynamic camera. Frankly, it's fine, it directly satisfies the casual fighting game player that I am. You access the metamorphosis by filling a gauge via the beating of your opponent, and you become human again when your opponent has beaten you up too much once you've transformed. No fuss, no muss (sorry again). The warriors deploy a range of fifteen special attacks each, crowned by a Beast Drive, a devastating attack (it eats up more than half of the opponent's health bar) in an animated sequence only available in beast form.
It also depletes the transform gauge, but who cares since the opponent is already in the hospital. Beast Drive is the major addition to Bloody Roar 2 compared to the first game, which is another reason to love the werewolf versions of our zoomorphs. It's not enough to rival the (true) ogre Tekken 3 and its endless movesets, but there's plenty to keep everyone entertained for a good while. Especially since here too, each character has their own plot revealed in story mode, their own final cutscene and their own lines of dialogue. It doesn't break any new ground, it (doesn't always) smell like the nineties, with its dark and tormented but always well-built guys, its calculating or figurehead girls, but always sexualised to perfection, to delight the eyes of the teenagers of the time. Even once they've been turned into animals. Um, what? The leopard kept her boobs when she... oh, screw it.
Anime for Animals
The music comes from Takayuki Neigishi, who doesn't seem to be very active in the video game industry, but rather in composing for anime. You can really tell, actually. I could have guessed that without reading his biography first, even with my inability to hum a tune after listening to it less than a hundred times. He produces heavy old-school metal, which sometimes sounds like an 80s band that never quite made it big, but most of the time sounds like the theme song for a modestly popular anime. It worked pretty well for me, I think, although I don't remember it very well. I probably would have preferred to hear more electro in it, like they did so well (or not) in the late nineties. Today, I listen to these works again, um... with a fair amount of indifference. They all sound a bit similar, and I don't find them very inspiring. I'm struggling to find a catchy track in there. Many critics at the time pointed out that this soundtrack wasn't great. Poor Neigishi, he must not have gained much confidence, even though it didn't stop him from producing the soundtrack for the next Bloody Roar, and the first one too. I guess it's still cool to mention in his personal achievements. Maybe the tracks from the arcade version were better received, I'll have to check it out sometime (spoiler: yes, much better). When I start a sentence with ‘I'll have to...’, it's a bad sign. So, which track should I share? This whole “not great music” thing bothers me; I don't want to make fun of it, but I'm not going to pretend to be ecstatic about it either. I should point out that the guitar playing is really good, though. And the synth keys are great too. But all the tracks follow the same pattern of big intro, big melodic riffs, big synth bridge, more big riffs and big conclusion. Basically. Above all, there's absolutely nothing in the tracks that allows me to identify the associated animal. I'm trying, though. Okay, I have to choose one, Alice's theme, because I like her name. It's super original to like the name Alice, right? But honestly, at what point does the music make you think of a rabbit? Even a rabbit angrier than the one in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Absolutely none, as far as I'm concerned. That said, I'd look just as stupid if I were asked to compose the anthem of a mole or a four-legged insect.
Extinct Species
Well, what a shame to have only played it once! You'd have to be a bit stupid. Especially when I was asked during my teenage years which fighting games I liked to play, I always included Bloody Roar 2 in the list, unlike Dead or Alive, for example (which I also only played once). This franchise deserves better, even if it never managed to rival the huge competing licences and had to give up in 2003 (after releasing five games, nonetheless). Still, now that I've got my dad's old PlayStation back, the very one that ran the Bloody Roar 2 CD-ROM on that famous day when I tested it with Jackson, and it still works, maybe there's a way to make up for this affront. Well, I'll have to buy a CRT TV too, a SCART cable, and find the game.
Hey, I see it for 249 euros online. But you guys are crazy! Even for something brand new, in mint condition, still smelling like the Dock Games shop back in the day. Nostalgia isn't for sale, you sharks! Just sharks, mind you! Not thugs in striped shirts who turn into two-legged sharks. I'd rather mow the lawn, pressure wash the patio or re-grout the shower. Now that's real entertainment! Well, you have to have Theme of Alice stuck in your head to pass the time, of course. More seriously, even though I hardly play any of these games anymore, when I see the big fighting franchises that are still around, it would have been cool to see Bloody Roar 9 or 10 continue to give them a run for their money. I can't even imagine the ultra-stylish animals we could have played as. And the hideous creatures too.
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