Review By

Gene Park 5.5 RATING

Our fascination with animals goes back a long way. Prehistoric paintings featured large animals of superior natural abilities—horses, bulls, bears, tigers, rhinoceroses, etc. Before we had anthropomorphic creatures in fairy tales and Disney films, animals were seen as gods. Because animals were so unlike us, they possessed a mysterious aura that fueled our awe. The deities of Ancient Egypt were often depicted in animal form, like the jackal Anubis, the conductor of departed spirits. However, as humans evolved, we probably sensed the growing gap between us and the other creatures of the world. Our minds grew, as did our latent fears and confusion. As the hunter-gatherer society made way for agriculture, animal deities fell out of favor. Today a good number of religions, especially the major ones, find animals inferior to humans in almost every way. There are few exceptions. Hindus believe divinity lies within all things, including animals. Buddhists believe that all things are unreal, including humans and animals.

Fighting games are a genre where things are typically unreal, and to enjoy them you have to make certain allowances concerning facts. Bloody Roar 3 is no exception. St. George Jackson Mivart, an English biologist and anatomist, once said, "To avoid the error of anthropomorphism, we fall into the vastly greater, and more absurd, error of zoomorphism." Anthropomorphism is to attribute the characteristics of humans to deities and other non-humans, while zoomorphism means to attribute characteristics of animals to gods. Sometimes, zoomorphism can mean the transformation of men into beasts. Bloody Roar 3 not so cleverly mixes the two attributions of characteristics into one. The game revolves around Zooanthropes, a group of "special" humans who are born with the innate ability to morph into more powerful beasts, like a wolf or a tiger. This results in an increase of strength to overcome your opponent until he or she is knocked out. Rather than these creatures being inferior, these transformations drastically shift the scales of the battle to the point where the fights are unbalanced, and the beast forms are overwhelmingly powerful like gods.

The game's controls are simple, with only a punch, kick, throw, "beastorize" and two buttons to move in and out of the playing field. Light blocking is done automatically while the character is standing still, and the heavy guard is activated by pressing back or a button. When you "beastorize," or morph, you get a ridiculous amount of advantages over your opponent (including using the most powerful of moves: Beast Drive), and even moreso in the hyper-beast form, which can be enabled when your beast gauge is filled twice over.

It's hard to call the morphing twist in fighting unfair, since both combatants can use this. However, its usage is too often decisive in battles. Beastorizing is basically a bombastic twist on "devastation" moves in fighting games, which allow the losing side to gain some kind of advantage by performing an exceptionally powerful move when a special meter is filled. However, beastorizing happens very often very easily, and the ability to ravage your opponent with regular moves and Beast Drives while regaining health is overwrought and unbalanced. Playing as a beast offers little more in play besides unlocking a few more moves. Compare this beast system to the stance system in other games. Changing stances not only allows you more moves, but lets you link them together systematically. But beastorizing just gives you another excuse to mash away at the buttons.

The simplistic controls make it very easy to pick up and play, but I soon discovered that light blocking neutralizes more than a handful of moves. Lot of rounds ended up with me not moving at all, defending a bombardment of fists, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Once there was an opening, I would use the pad to perform a limited set of moves until it's my turn to block again. Usually I would lose because the computer artificial intelligence (AI) would know exactly when to not move while I had to keep second-guessing its moves. One only has to see this game in movement to know that the nature of the fighting is very spastic and unpredictable, which made a fair match with the computer impossible.

Comparing the fighting of beast forms to fighting gods makes more sense when you notice the godlike skills the computer AI possesses. In this case, the humans and animals in this game have attributions to that of a god, instead of the other way around. The single player game is atrociously hard on the normal level, and even the easiest level isn't something that can be called that easy. This is especially problematic because many of the other options this game has (outside of your essential arcade, versus and survival modes) can only be gained through beating the arcade mode several times.

Some other complaints include the two buttons used to move in and out of the field. Sidestepping has become an important strategic factor since games like Namco's Soul Calibur implemented it. Sidestepping requires quick movement to get next to or behind the opponent to gain the advantage. Sidestepping in this game is literally that. You just simply slowly step aside while its use for dodging is void. The only way you can avoid an attack is if your opponent gets overexcited with a combo chain, which unreliably happens sometimes since he or she is probably mashing buttons.

Surprisingly, button mashing leads me to the redeeming quality of this game. Despite all I've said, quite a bit of fun is had with this title. In the same spirit as the Marvel Vs. Capcom series, the spastic nature of fighting can be exhilarating. Chaining moves together by canceling moves is made easy thanks to the loose stringing together of moves. The computer AI proved itself too difficult as I was tossed around the ring like a rag doll. However, things get more interesting when you're on a level playing field with a friend (nothing like smacking his nurse rabbit clear across the stage through the fence). With the right friend, a good time can be had in the Versus mode.

The game's arenas do feature fences and walls, but the walls serve no purpose but to restrict the playing area. They're not even breakable until the very last hit sends them flying through. And why a rabbit? When I think of bloody roaring, I don't think of rabbits or moles. Sure, they have tigers, a lion, a wolf and a bat. However, the variations on cats border on excessive. Where are the bears and apes? Where is the Zeus-like eagle? Hindus believe that creatures of the Bovidae family (hoofed animals like bulls) are more divine than other animals, and a bull would fit right in. These are mostly just stylistic complaints, but the game heavily emphasizes style and if it should get one thing right, it should get it right in the first place.

It is more than likely that a fighting game was among the last things on St. Mivart's mind when he made that comment about anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. However, the quote is perfect for this game. Rather than attributing human motivation and strength, the designers decided to attach an animal persona to their characters. If they were able to truly do something with that idea to make a real difference in gameplay, the game would've been much more interesting to play. But the beast forms hardly play like beasts. Sure, a punch with claws probably hurts more, but besides little changes like beast-like throws, the fighters remain the same. The zoomorphism in this game is shallow, attaching to these on-screen deities little in the way of animal characteristics outside of cosmetic purposes.

Being the third game in the series, that problem was never evident until it was repeated. But this game falls under the weight of a repeated gimmick. The idea first seemed like focal orientation on reinvigorating that old mystique of beasts and the powers they have over us. How awe-inspiring to know of creatures that can hear sound wavelengths our ears cannot, like bats and dogs. Or how about the way whales can navigate by means of magnetic fields, and how cheetahs can run 60 miles per hour? Instead, we get a repackaged deal, which can produce the minimum amount of enjoyment a fighting game is expected to have. And this is an error that is vastly great, and grows more absurd the more I think about the potential of the idea when it first emerged along with the small amounts of joy it can still produce.

GCN Game

Movie DVD

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Book

Book

Music CD