Bloody Roar is far overdue for a return

destructoid.com:

There haven’t been many fighting games that I’ve really connected with. I’m not a competitive person by nature, and it’s a genre that is built around competition. The two times I really got into fighting games were a rivalry with my brother-in-law around Street Fighter II and another with a college friend over Soul Calibur 3. I still play them with some regularity, but I just have a hard time falling into them and continuing after beating the arcade mode a couple of times.

1997’s Bloody Roar was recommended to me a few times, but I only now got around to playing it. This is despite owning a copy of it, given to me by a friend who was cleaning out their basement. If I had known how firmly I would click with it, I would have definitely gotten around to it sooner.

Bloody Roar was published by Hudson back in 1997 and developed by Raizing Co, a Japanese developer founded by former members of Toaplan. It was strangely released in North American arcades as Beastorizer, but on PS1 as its Japanese name of Bloody Roar.

It’s worth noting that in arcades, it was released using the hardware commonly (but not officially) known as the Sony ZN-1. Why is that important? Well, the Sony ZN-1 is essentially the arcade version of the PlayStation. I’m not quite familiar enough to be able to confirm that Hudson didn’t make any of their own custom tweaks to the arcade hardware, but the PS1 port is, under mild scrutiny, pretty much exactly the same as the arcade version. It just has some home console tweaks, like a new cinematic intro that looks dopey in that very specific early-3D way.

Speaking of early-3D, Bloody Roar landed during the 3D fighting craze that followed in the wake of 1993’s Virtua Fighter. It’s very similar to other games of its