Bloody Roar 4 Game Sample - Playstation 2
0Original Air Date: August 07th, 2009
Ohhhhhh man, I hate it. This is the game that single-handledly (IMO) ruined the entire series. Granted, Bloody Roar 2 was my favorite, but the others weren't so bad. I was willing to put up with the redesigned characters (including the fat rabbit [Alice] and all the other meat-head designs) and the sliced & diced story (which I feel went downhill after the second) but this game was the tipping point.
Consider this: Take a game with a cool fighting engine like all the other BR games. Now jack up the fighting system by making a busted "life" system where you MUST kill the human and the beast and transforming as quickly as possible grants more life as opposed to simply regenerating some like in the other games. Now also imagine that using a super move is like draining huge portions of your life, where in other games, it had little impact on your health (other than you losing your regenerating bonus). Now imagine that attacks take absurd amounts of damage (even more than previous games by default) where a simple two or three well-placed blows can almost kill the human form instantly... excited yet?
Now...think of the whole series. Think of all the potential that exist(ed). The series removed a fox, a boar, an elephant, a penguin, a phoenix, and a gorilla at this point...and introduced a "Spurious", an (somewhat) underwhelming dragon character and puppy (or "Ninetails"), and an admittedly cool crow character...good grief man.
The worst part? You have to ****ing EARN regular characters in this game. Remember Long? Of course you do; He was one of the coolest characters ever since the first Bloody Roar and was important as far as the story (SPOILER ALERT: He mentored Uriko and Shenlong exists in part due to Long). Remember Shina? She's hidden too. You actually get to play with the new people and are rewarded with classics. This might have been cool if they rewarded you with a revamped Fox, Gorilla, Boar, Elephant, Penguin or Phoenix, or if the game had a larger cast that warranted hiding the classics in the first place, but they didn't and it doesn't (respectively).
Aside from them, nothing is new in this game other than the DNA (career mode where you get a few little extras) mode and Sparring, and only made worse by the mechanics. Even classic characters are only a shell of their former selves in that regard. It's stupid to pummel a character with a combo only for them to be forced into a beast and interrupt your chain. It's dumb for being punished for having less beast energy the next round in this game because your beast gauge now acts as a measure of your life. If you didn't have much beast energy in another round in the previous games, it wasn't such a big deal. You can even see how jacked up the engine is during training mode, since the computer keeps semi-dying and auto-transforming like in a real match.
What about the visuals? What? These visuals are practically a joke compared to Primal Fury and Extreme. The blood is probably the only improvement. As a matter of fact, I'm going to make a video response to this with my own BR:PF video and Extreme when I get my Xbox working again. The environments and characters look bland as hell compared to the other games, and smaller too (look at the dojo-like level in this as opposed to PF. You might gag).
Guess what else? Slowdown. You can see it in this video due to our framerate conversion being smoother and it's MILD in this video. Look at the freaking fight with the crow (Reiji). It slows down for the majority of both rounds. Un-freaking real. This game has just become slower than the first Bloody Roar, a Arcade/Playstation game (which almost always stayed a smooth 60FPS). I could understand if there were more visual elements or something to contribute to the slowdown, but there really isn't.
You also have the story, which is poorly translated even despite the limited dialogue and is horrendous. The story from BR3 was pretty crappy, but this game is nearly unforgivable. Voice-overs are cringe-worthy and I don't even know why they bothered since the plot is lacking like nearly every other element of the game. The music is okay, but it isn't really noticable...which is a farcry from the days of BR2 which had TWO AMAZING soundtracks on one disc; an original version and arcade version, which have a distinct sound and appeal to them.
...Magazines and the like had every reason to rip this game up. I remember seeing it listed in a mag as one of those sequels nobody asked for...but even still, I wanted to believe in it as a major supporter of the series (I own every game in the series)... tch. You might enjoy this game if you're unfamiliar with the series, but considering that I own them all, I hate it. It is widely viewed as the worst game in the series.
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