Bloody Roar

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 Activision, Konami, SCEA, and Virgin Interactive. Konami holds the rights to the franchise after Hudson Soft was absorbed into the former company in 2012.

The series began in 1997 under the name Beastorizer. The game incorporates anthropomorphism as its main gameplay feature and theme, where the playable characters are Zoanthropes (the name comes from the clinical term, 'zoanthropy', which is similar to lycanthropy), humans who have the ability to transform into half-human, half-animal creatures (anthropomorphic animals). This form is called a beast form, and Zoanthropes are capable of switching between their human and beast forms. The game would appear under the name "Bloody Roar" when it was ported to the PlayStation in 1998, which would become the permanent title for the series thereafter.

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), or a rave button (an early version of Hyper Beast form in the original Bloody Roar only).

Bloody Roar is a 3D fighting game series in the same vein as Dead or Alive, Soulcalibur, Tekken, and Virtua Fighter. Although some characters have remained mostly identical throughout all five games, others have changed vastly. For example, Yūgo has a new moveset with many different moves in Extreme/Primal Fury and 4 compared to his original in previous games, but Bakuryū has stayed almost the same apart from a few extra moves which are relevant to the games' evolution over time.

Characters in Bloody Roar have standard moves and command moves. Standard moves are combination style moves from fighting games such as Tekken, where the player must press different buttons to create "combos", sometimes pressing the directional pad in one of eight directions at the same time. Command moves are special moves that require a rolling technique with the directional pad while inputting certain commands, like Street Fighter. Each character has fourteen "suggested" combination techniques listed in the manuals for each game, most of these can vary in many different ways, allowing around forty to seventy combination techniques with each character. Every character also has at least eight command moves, which can be incorporated into cancel points for standard moves or combos. There are around twenty to forty cancel points in each character's combo palette. These cancel points, when utilized with command moves, can then be cancelled once more, allowing the player to begin a new strategy with adequate timing. As well as this, the combat system has two types of dodging techniques: a heavy and light block that spans over three parts of the body, instead of the typical two in most fighting games; and "Scratch" techniques, which can break guards from dead angles and is a series of command counters, throws, and vanishing attacks. Bloody Roar 4, the latest game in the series, may be the most complex one with the largest fighter roster of eighteen characters, and the ability to earn more moves by earning experience in "Career Mode".

Other media
Bloody Roar was adapted into a manga drawn and written by Maruyama Tomowo. It was originally published in Monthly Shōnen Jump. A few themes were used from the games, but the scenarios and characters in Maruyama's version were completely new, although a few of his characters looked similar to the characters from the games. The main stars of the manga were a lone wolf zoanthrope named Fang and a rabbit girl zoanthrope named Mashiro. Their adventures had them fighting out-of-control zoanthropes and trying to stop an evil creature from being released by a gathering of talismans. The manga was released in two volumes during 2001.

Concept artwork and illustrations for the first three games were drawn by artist Naochika Morishita (known under the pseudonym CARAMEL MAMA), and he also created the art used for the in-game cutscenes in 2 and 3.

For their 2000 single "My Console", the Italian eurodance group Eiffel 65 included Bloody Roar along with several other popular PlayStation titles in the song's lyrics.

Yūgo appears as a playable character in the 2003 crossover fighting game DreamMix TV World Fighters.