#772 Bloody Roar 1 (ARC) Boss: Uriko playthrough.
0A playthrough of the final boss Uriko in the arcade version of Eighting/Hudson Soft’s Bloody Roar 1.
The next month will see me cover a variety of games which don’t really fit anywhere else in the upload timeline. The next two weeks in particular will see this channel looking at the cult classic Bloody Roar series, also known as Furry Fighting Simulator 1997.
Barring Art of Fighting (which itself lives on in the KOF series), Bloody Roar is probably the shortest “main series” which I’ll get to cover. Indeed, I suppose it’s open for debate as to whether it even counts as a “main series”, given that its entries are cult classics and competitively dead, unlike influential series like Virtua Fighter, Dead or Alive, Tekken, King of Fighters, Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Mortal Kombat, Power Instinct, etc, which continue to live on through the enthusiasm of its fanbase or through competitive play. Bloody Roar as a franchise, on the other hand, seemed as if it was gearing up for something big then proceeded to completely and utterly drop the ball, and now is mostly remembered for being something of a novelty. It was the World Heroes of its time, basically, with a lot of promise but no idea where to go with it. At least World Heroes got a decent send-off. More on that towards the end of the series.
Bloody Roar is an interesting if inconsistent series. The first game in the series, which I’m covering today, is a flawed but interesting title like so many first games in a fighting games series. It has some interesting ideas, but isn’t quite competent enough to be great, obviously having something of a clue as to what it wants to be without quite knowing entirely what it wants. BR1 is a 5th generation 3D fighting game, with the standard Punch, Kick and Guard buttons of the Virtua Fighter series, along with a “beast” button. The game has eight selectable characters and one unplayable boss. Battles take place in walled arenas which, when an opponent is defeated, can be broken to send the opponent flying, something we last saw in the Fighting Vipers series. Combos flow in a slow but deliberate manner reminiscent of the ones seen in Atlus’ Heaven’s Gate. Indeed, Bloody Roar initially comes across as a semi-decent but very derivative fighting game, and that’s because it is.
The one ace the game has up its sleeve is the aforementioned Beast button. Players have a sort of secondary lifebar below their main one, which fills up as they take or deal damage. At any point where the B symbol flashes on the lifebar itself, the character can press the Beast button to transform into their beast form. Not only does this considerably power them up, making them take less damage, deal more damage and even increasing their combo potential, but the beast button itself then becomes its very own attack button, able to be utilised with the punch and kick buttons for extended combos as well as giving the player access to auto combos and unique special moves with it. Indeed, this gimmick overshadows the entire of the series, and as much fun as it is in these first couple games it quickly begins to hinder the development of the series.
As I hope I have made clear, while the human forms aren’t awful, the beasts are so much more competent than them that the majority of the game effectively revolves about their use, given the sheer number of advantages they provide. And these aren’t permanent states either, as if the player receives enough damage they will be transformed back into their human form. The player can mitigate this somewhat by leaving it until their beast meter is full, giving them the ability to sustain more hits while in their beast state. All in all, it’s something of an odd system as it makes you wonder why they didn’t just go with only having beast forms, given that they make the fighting much more interesting and that bit more varied.
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