#780 Bloody Roar 4 Boss: Ryoho (The Dragon) playthrough.
0A playthrough of the hidden character and boss Ryoho the Dragon in Eighting/Hudson Soft’s Bloody Roar 4.
We reach the finale of the franchise, and it’s pretty easy to see why. Bloody Roar 4 was not released into the arcades, and rule of thumb dictates that if a fighting game is not tested in the arcades and then ported to console, it is most likely going to be lacking at best and outright crap at worst. Bloody Roar 4 is somewhere in between that, not necessary being a horrible fighter but, oh God, it feels really cheap and flawed compared to Bloody Roar 3. I don't mean cheap in the sense that it's broken, more so in the sense that it feels like it was made on a tight budget and wasn't fully tested. I've said before that fourth games in a fighting game series tend to be pretty polarising, but BR4 takes the cake, being as much a downgrade from its predecessor as Toshinden 4 was to Toshinden 3. Well, maybe not that bad, but it's a very similar loss in quality.
I am not quite sure what Eighting was hoping to achieve with Ryoho. If you thought Uranus was cheap, Jesus Christ. Ryoho is a monster. His human form is relatively slow, with some slow, relatively limited combos and slow but powerful strikes. Relatively standard stuff. Then, however. Then he transforms into his dragon form, and the game becomes a joke. Oh, sure, there are counters. This form is somewhat slow, so you can counter him with some good timing. But if you don’t? Then the shit hits the fan.
I have no clue what Eighting was thinking with the dual-life-bar system here, but it was not a good idea. Presumably they wanted to inject new life into a series which was already ailing with stagnation, but they chose the absolute worst possible way in which to do it. You see, the dual-system works like this; every characters with two lifebars, one for their human form, and one for their beast form. A player can use their beast form from the start, and if they run out then it will be refilled as they take damage in human form. If your human life-bar depletes, you turn into your beast form. However, as you start with a full beast bar you can turn into your beast form from the start, and then if you end up back in your human form you can either charge for a partially beast life-bar, or you can just let the beast bar charge naturally as you take hits. This means that, if you use your beast form from the beginning of the match, you will have 3 lifebars in total, as opposed to 2 if you don’t use it. Which means you'd quite literally be a fool to not use it. Which makes the human forms in this game even more pointless than they already were.
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