Bloody Roar 3

"How To Make A Game: A FAQ for Hudson"

So I got my refund check from the Man, and suddenly had an
extra few hundred bucks to toss around. Being a selfish
and compulsive man, I thought I'd go down to all those
Japanese shops and pick up a pile of used old games my gut
instincts said weren't good enough to buy full price.

Looks like my instincts were right about Bloody Roar 3.

Now don't get me wrong; I wasn't thinking that a Bloody
Roar game was going to be a nice, polished game like Street
Fighter or Tekken or anything. I just thought it'd be a
nice fun little distraction from life, and since I like a
lot of anthropomorphic stuff, I thought it'd be nice and
cute.

You know, some of the characters are. That's really the
thing driving the whole Bloody Roar franchise. But after
spending two hours playing the game through one time with
one character, my patience for bad game design wore really
thin. So, I've decided to lend a few tips to our friends
over at Hudson.

1. Playtest the game's fighting engine. I've put this one
first because I felt that Hudson really dropped the ball
with this one. Oh, it's not that the other Bloody Roars
were very good when it came down to the actual fighting
gameplay, but hey--what kind of game is this? Oh yeah, a
fighting game. It's kind of hard to appreciate interest-
ing characters when the computer's slamming you around
like a rag doll. And it's not because I can't play
fighters--I'd play them exclusively, if not for RPG's,
and I'm competent at them.
It's nice to have a bunch of attacks that lend things like
invulnerability and force people to alter their styles of
guarding, but it's not good to have people just suddenly
be able to pull them out during strings so they're almost
completely invulnerable--which is what the computer does,
and that leads me to:

2. Playtest the A.I. I understand that you'd want a chal-
lenge. Some fighting games are just too easy. However,
single-play mode will never replace the depth of versus
play, no matter what anyone thinks. All that ends up
happening is the computer loops its attacks and whenever
there's an input of any kind read, it instantly counters
the player. It's so bad, that the computer has to decide
to stand still and be hit by attacks in order to get hit.
So, in other words, fighting games should stop trying to
have a single-player mode as a substitute for competitive
play. Bloody Roar 3 goes CRAZY with A.I., just like the
others of this franchise. It would be all right, except
that the only way to unlock almost everything is to beat
single play on certain A.I. levels.
This game especially doesn't need a difficult computer.
It could be there, like a setting in options that doesn't
really affect the hidden things, but the current A.I.
only leads to frustration. I almost broke my controller
today, and I haven't done that since I was what, 12?

3. Have character concepts. I like the designs. Don't get
me wrong. It's not like the beasts aren't original--you
have a bat, a mole, a chameleon, a bug...all sorts of nice
concepts, as far as looks go. You need to have gameplay
concepts when creating characters.
Take Street Fighter II, for instance. You know, the game
that created the genre. There's Zangief. He's a
wrestler--you use him to try and get in close and over-
ride priorities and guards with his throw. There's Chun-
Li. She's very aerial, quick, and has a lot of good,
medium-ranged attacks that have unbelievable priority
over things (sort-of the first ''poke'' character). There's
Guile, the best pressure character of all time, Dhalsim,
whose powers are to pin you at far distances and who can
be great when played defensively, Ken and Ryu who are
the balanced ''do-anything'' guys, etc.
Even the hadouken and shouryuuken, the first real special
moves, had functionality. There's no way of getting a
clear lock on the styles of Bloody Roar characters. They
simply have ways of spazzing out. They're all the same
in the respect that the only way to play them is to throw
out flurries of attacks and hope they've got slightly
better priority than the opponent's--because guarding is
almost useless in this game so the opponent will be
attacking.

So follow those three easy rules and you'll have a nice
game. Hudson does what every mediocre/bad game company
does when they make games: they forget what ''game'' means.
You're playing to have FUN. Since there's really no
strategy involved in Bloody Roar, there's no fun. You just
slam away and watch the computer destroy you over and over
again because they'll always be doing the right reaction,
on the higher stages anyway.

So, Bloody Roar fans out there, you'll be pleased. If you
own Bloody Roar 2 and you come across this game and think
you'd like another, just go ahead and get it. That's pretty
much what I did. But it really isn't a good game. Not
even for fun.

In closing, let me just say what the good points it has
going for it, even over Capcom, are. First, it has endings.
Wow, remember when Cap games had endings too? Kinda weird
huh. I don't know why games even have a 1P versus COM mode
without endings. What's the point? Secondly, it does have
some neat-looking characters, like Marvel the Leopard, Alice
the Rabbit, Bakuryu the Mole, and of course Jenny the Bat.
Nice character designs, as far as looks go--except the
versus screen art. What's up with that? The instructions
look better.

I'm trying to think of other good things but I can't.
Especially not that bad, fake heavy metal soundtrack. It's
a sort of default for bad anime and game designs, I think.

Oh well. Final score is 3/10, for a nice effort I suppose.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 05/22/01, Updated 09/03/02