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 Virgin Interactive, Activision and Konami.

The series began as an Arcade game in 1997 under the name Beastorizer. The game's theme incorporated anthro-polymorphism, where the player has the ability to transform into a half-human, half-animal creature known as a Zoanthrope (The name came from the clincal term, 'zoanthropy', which is similar to that of lycanthropy, but not just with the mind-set of a wolf). The game would appear under the name "Bloody Roar" when ported to the PlayStation in 1998, which would become the permanent title thereafter. There are three Bloody Roar sequels, plus two updated ports of the third game to the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox.

The games in the series are:

Bloody Roar: Primal Fury added Anime opening and endings, 2 new characters and updated and new stages, among other things. Bloody Roar Extreme also updated the graphic engine, replaced the openings and endings with CGI animation and added a secret bonus character, Fang. (He was also present in the Japanice version of Bloody Roar: Primal Fury, but not in the Western releases.)

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) and a rave button (An early version of the hyper beast in Bloody Roar 1 only)

The games play very similarly to the Tekken series of fighting games, and Bloody Roar has certain advantages and disadvantages compared to the more popular Tekken games. While Bloody Roar offers a far superior experience in terms of smoothness and speed of gameplay, each character has only a relatively small and completely unchanging move list, lacking the kind of combination strings or similar variety one finds in nearly every other fighting game series.

This greatly limits the style of play one can adopt with each character; the best ways to play a certain character, which in other fighting games might take study and practice to figure out, are readily apparent in the Bloody Roar series and do not change across the games.

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

In the first three games, artwork by artist Naochika Morishita, also known as CARAMEL MAMA, was used for concept artwork and in game cut scenes.