Hello, readers!
After having spent all of 2020 and 2021 (and almost all of 2022, at the rate I’ve been going) not writing a single essay for this blog, I started looking back at my previous work and realized that it was time to go back and breathe some life back into a conversation I began here concerning a beloved fighting game franchise from my younger days. That’s right…I’ve decided to revise my presently ten-year-old proposed reboot of the Bloody Roar games with a whole new series of articles.
Truth be told, I didn’t even come to this decision after hearing the news on March 23, 2020 about Konami making a trademark application for Hudson Soft’s beloved fighting game line. Trust me, though, when I say that had that been the case, I would have written these articles much sooner than I had. Heck, as matters stand, I’ve already missed the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original BR game, Beastorizer, debuting in Japanese arcades on July 7, 1997 and am only now getting this article out in time to commemorate Anniversary 25 of the game’s release on the original PlayStation in North America on the October 31 of that same year. Rather, the idea came to me after watching some videos about the topic and about the series in general on YouTube, including some produced by YouTuber Jerimiah Isaiah, who has proven to be openly passionate about the franchise returning to its former glory and beyond in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future. Without question, my mere awareness of these videos existing was enough to get me thinking again about BR myself, particularly where the story could have gone, had the franchise’s two directors, Kenji Fukuya and Susumu Hibi, taken it in a direction that was different from the one that they ultimately had. I especially find it an interesting coincidence that after Hibi stepped down from codirecting the Bloody Roar games after BR 2 to focus on marketing and quality assurance for Eighting/Raizing was when BR’s story—as far as my fellow North Americans and I recall it, leastways—jumped the rails of logic by going from light biology-based science fiction to supernatural dark fantasy with only a hint of sci fi. Sure, Hudson and Eighting gave us the likes of Bloody Roar Primal Fury/BR Extreme, which took the story back to its light sci-fi roots after BR 3’s narrative involving the Tabula of a Thousand Beasts and the Unborn, but that was only right before the series moved on to BR 4, which has gone down in infamy as not only the last game in the line to date, but also the most disliked among the fanbase for numerous reasons. Next thing we all know, nearly two full decades have gone by, and the Bloody Roar saga has yet to receive a new installment to make up for the hard feelings that many BR fans understandably bear…no pun intended, of course. That hasn’t stopped the series’ loyal fanbase from hoping for the next Bloody Roar game, though, or imagining what it would be, and to be brutally honest, folks, I’m no exception. Granted, I’ll believe in such a game’s existence when I see it, but it’d still be quite an exciting thing to see if it ever became a reality.
As far as the first draft of my Bloody Roar reboot is concerned, I’ll wholeheartedly admit that looking back at it nowadays reminds me of just how rough of a job I did in fleshing it out, to put things mildly. Likewise, though I might be incredibly late to the party in introducing this proposal of how I would recompose the BR story, I will say that I’ve got a clearer idea this time around of what to do to make the narrative stronger than it was before. Sure, I doubt that Konami would be interested in taking any story ideas for their games from any outside sources, including those that belong to franchises that used to belong to the nowadays long-defunct Hudson Soft, but let’s face it: Even I can’t resist the fun of simply speculating how Bloody Roar could turn out from this point forward.
“Dude. you realize that nobody cares about story in a fighting game, right?”
Okay, sure…even I, as narrative-minded as I am, can admit that in-game mechanics are the most important aspect of any fighting game. Why else, after all, would Digital Crafter’s Fight of Animals and Fight of Animals Arena and Calappa Games and PLAYISM’s Fight Crab have garnered the popularity that they have since their release on the video game market? However, to insist that nobody cares about a fighting game’s plot is to admit that one hasn’t paid close enough attention to the numerous reviews, blog posts, videos, and other articles within which the author discusses the plot of any given video game—including those articles that specifically discuss the stories of certain fighting games? Why else would Soul Calibur fans far and wide loathe Patroklos Alexander of Soul Calibur V, particularly when one considers that that game’s narrative chiefly revolves around him? Why else would fans of the Mortal Kombat franchise praise the Story Mode of MK 9/MK 2011 as having “changed fighting games forever,” according to Mitchell Saltzman of IGN? Why do you think that there are so many gamers these days hunting for the best fighting game story mode they can find and even ranking the best fighting game stories ever made? Finally, as far as Bloody Roar is concerned, why do you think that many BR fans dislike BR 4 as much as they do? Sure, Hudson promoted the game in a decidedly tone-deaf fashion, what with Nagi, Ryoho, Mana, and even Reiji getting more attention than any of the characters whom the staff had already established within the series such as Yugo, Alice, Long, Gado, and Uriko. Not only that, but the graphics were painfully dark in such an artificially nocturnal way to blatantly convey the game’s darker mood, the soundtrack lacked the adrenaline-rushing punch that made the soundtracks of previous BRs so strikingly memorable (Trust me, folks: Those guitar riffs of Jun Kajiwara’s in BRs 2 and 3 specifically meant more to those titles than even I could even begin to tell you.), the game’s treatment of players’ and their opponents’ health completely betrayed how previous games handled both health management and beastorization, the final antagonist (Ryoho) wasn’t so much a villain as he was a hapless vessel for a beast form that was causing chaos both within his body and upon the world simply because the Unborn was still roaming about the planet’s mortal plane, many of the stages were practically—if not, in fact, wholly—identical to those from previous games (BRs 3 and Primal Fury/Extreme), the previously established characters all kept their original models from PF/E as opposed to receiving brand new ones as per the usual trend from previous entries in the series, Reiji’s molting in beast mode slowed the game’s frame rate to a crawl for reasons that even Hudson’s own staff apparently couldn’t say at the time (among other glitches), typos galore riddle the characters’ poorly translated dialogue in Arcade Mode, the voice acting left many a player wishing he/she had hit the mute button on his/her TV remote upon first hearing it, and even the absence of kip-up attacks and double-down ducking strikes made players wonder why Hudson had bothered making this sequel at all. I’ve no doubt, too, that I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to BR 4’s flaws. Even so, the most glaring among these faults is the game’s story, which throws away so much of what the previous four entries in the series had established in favor of a tale that many a BR fan understandably can’t connect with the rest of the saga, save for BR 3, for multiple reasons.
Bottom line, then: Gamers do care about storytelling in fighting games, be it the narrative told before, between, after, or during fights. It may not be the thing to define the game or even save it outright, but when mapped out with care and consideration for its overall plot and the involvement of each of its characters, it can help make an already good game even more momentous. Besides, should any video game, regardless of its genre, translate into any form of non-interactive fiction—a novel, a comic book, a television/Internet series, a motion picture, or even a stage play—what better way to ensure that it does than by making sure that its story is as tight, solid, and devoid of plot holes and other errors as possible? The Bloody Roar story is no exception to this rule, especially considering the rather rich lore that the franchise has boosted over its seven- to eight-year-long run from 1997 to 2004 and its inclusion of a Story Mode in BR 2, which I cannot stress enough for the life of me. In fact, it was in no small part because of BR 2’s Story Mode that I became as invested in the BR saga in its entirety as I still am today. Sure, even that game’s tale wasn’t necessarily perfect, hence my initial reboot back in 2012 and this reboot I’m introducing now, but the elements that made it work did so quite well, and they helped me stay invested in the plight of Yugo, Long, Alice, and the rest of the protagonists as they mobilized to thwart the Zoanthrope Liberation Front’s plans for world domination and bring at least a temporary peace between zoanthropekind and mundane humanity.
All that in mind, I do have some general rules concerning how my proposed story for BR would turn out.
A. No sudden shift in genre
One of the things that irritated me about the North American version of the original Bloody Roar story was, as I’d just mentioned, the sudden juxtaposition of mystical elements when BR 3 came around. Yes, this was the game that introduced the X-Genome Code into the plot, the seeds of which the writers had already planted in Long’s backstory with his sister Lin Li dying on account of what Hudson Soft’s writers had cryptically referred to as “the unbridled power of the beast.” Even so, the Code’s established connection to the unearthing of the Tabula of a Thousand Beasts and, in turn, the Unborn never should have been a thing, as far as I’m concerned, as the XGC could have (and should have) very easily been a key plot point on its own merits for a good two to three games—and possibly more—with BR 3 being one of them. Just as Hudson Soft could have easily kept Story Mode a stable trait within the BR series to help further explore and explain how zoanthropy works within the Bloody Roar universe, so could they have done so to explain how the Code affects zoanthropes. I could go into further detail about how I would present the XGC, but to put things simply so that I won’t take anything away from my proposal for a Bloody Roar 3 reboot, I would rewrite things to make the Code a double-edged process of zoanthrope evolution first and foremost with the only apparent occult trapping being the beast crests that appear upon the skin of those zoanthropes who carry it. The Tabula and the Unborn, meanwhile, would receive their own respective spotlights as framed within the light sci-fi framework that Bloody Roars 1 and 2 had already established so that their presence wouldn’t overwhelm the story and throw it out of whack as they had in the original BR 3. The same in turn would hold true for Cronos’s phoenix form in BR PF/E, Ryoho and Mana’s respective beast forms in BR 4, Nagi’s “Spurious” form and backstory, and pretty much everything else that showed the slightest sign of mysticism, as the brunt of it as Hudson had originally presented it did nothing more than betray the rules of how the BR world functioned according to what the first two games had shown us all and as such derail everything that the writers had established previously within BRs 1 and 2. To put things into perspective, the very franchise kicks off with a power-hungry multinational corporation exploiting zoanthropy and turning innocent abductees into mindless killing machines with whom the enterprise in turn plans to conquer the world. It ends, however, with the seemingly eternal conflict between Gaia, the Spirit of the Earth herself, and the quasi-demonic Unborn; a dragon whose very existence is so cataclysmal that it causes earthquakes to occur, people to fall into comas, and zoanthropes to riot against one another out of the blue; and the Buddhist monk whose body said dragon is trying to take over, much to the chagrin of the nine-year-old miko who’s trying to keep the beast sealed within her foster father. Good luck, too, in finding anything less than a fleeting mention about the social or science fiction-based aspects of the world that came to be in previous installments of the story or the collective entities (i.e., the Tylon Corporation, the ZLF, and the Kingdom of Zoanthropes) that each played a crucial part in the plot that we all once knew. Even the relationships between the earlier games’ previously established characters mostly faded into the background in favor of the mystical flavor and newly established character relationships that hijacked the narrative and made it tailspin out of control, and all because the writers were so concerned about shaking things up and keeping things fresh that they neglected to securely maintain the ideas that constituted the foundation of the story they’d been telling two to four games prior.
In short, if Hudson Soft had had in mind something of a more spiritual nature and wanted to include the Gaia hypothesis (as I’ll discuss later in this essay) as a driving force behind the events of the Bloody Roar games, the least they could have done was introduce it and its components gradually and tactfully so that the story stayed on course in the process. In other words, a clue here, another clue there, and so on and so forth until everything builds up to the big reveal towards the end of the saga where zoanthropekind’s origin is revealed for all to see and each game’s thread weaves in neatly with all the others to form a much less frayed and faulty tapestry of storytelling than what we’d received. After all, if many a comic book series or action cartoon of either Eastern or Western influence can exist in this world for decades and involve the meshing of the scientific and the fantastic, then why can’t Bloody Roar do the same, be it as a video game series or as some other form of fiction? All that truly matters in this regard is whether the writer(s) behind it can blend the two principles together to form a more seamless narrative that audiences can more readily appreciate.
B. Consistent character development and inclusion
Something else that I felt did the Bloody Roar story a grave injustice was the complete disregard for how characters grew and developed on their own and interacted with one another over the series’ course. Whether it was Hudson Soft’s post-BR 2 practice of lazily copying and pasting the entire roster of a previous game into the next (i.e., from BR 2 to BR 3 and from BR 3 to BR PF/E and BR 4) or the utterly sloppy composition of Primal Fury/Extreme and especially BR 4’s respective plots that mostly revolved around the new characters whom the creative team had inserted into the mix, it wasn’t at all surprising to see many mainstay BR characters lose their way and not progress as meaningfully as they otherwise could have. Too many a time would I groan as I witnessed characters acting out of character, degenerating into inferior archetypes of what they once were, repeating arcs that one would think they’d have evolved beyond, falling prey to expressing one defining characteristic above all others (a.k.a. “Flanderization”), acting out a character trope that was completely unnecessary, or—worst of all—receiving no character arc at all and simply existing in the game as an ornamental callback. Imagine, if you will, Uriko mentally regressing more and more from BR 3 onward to the point of behaving like a dimwitted kindergartener in BR 4 or Long in Primal Fury/Extreme working alongside a secret cabal of scientists without explanation behind the scenes of the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ first ever Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament in spite of him having deserted a corporation back in BR 1 whose own scientists conducted experiments not all that dissimilar to those of the science team with whom he’d presently aligned himself. If that’s not disheartening enough, then how about the writers completely forgetting about Yugo and Alice’s budding friendship and possible romance from BR 2 to BR PF/E and instead focusing on Yugo’s relationship with Nagi in BR 4 out of a desperate attempt to push her as the new face of the franchise despite her never having been in any of the previous games and as such never having done anything to earn such treatment? How about these same writers not addressing Bakuryu II (a.k.a. Kenji) and Kohryu being potential rivals until BR 4, and even then only during Bakuryu’s arcade run (and in a decidedly weak, half-assed, and hence unsatisfying fashion to boot) while Kohryu gets no character development at all during his own playthrough…or, for that matter, throughout the rest of the series? How about the lack of strong villains in the series post-BR 2, what with the likes of Hans having disappeared from the franchise altogether after BR 1, the once ruthless and bloodthirsty Shenlong degenerating into a morose and borderline alcoholic antihero from BR 3 onward, true Zoanthrope Liberation Front founder Busuzima falling further and further down the rabbit hole into becoming little more than comic relief, and Uranus not receiving the slightest bit of characterization in any of the games she was in and thus no fleshing out in terms of her already incomplete backstory? Let’s not forget Bakuryu I (Ryuzo Kato), either, or how he died at the end of BR 1 only to become the woefully included yet nevertheless ignored Kohryu. Reiji, too, despite having only appeared in BR 4 and proving to be a relatively consistent character throughout that game, nonetheless came off as one-dimensional and at times too stereotypically evil for his own good, even though there’s still plenty of room nowadays for him to progress and mature into something greater within the Bloody Roar saga as we know it. Even so, whom can we fully trust now to keep Yugo, Gado, Alice, Long, and the other protagonists on their toes and make us care about the conflict at hand? Sure, we can resort to the likes of Cronos and Ryoho for a spell, but both these characters are only antagonists in that they’re both essentially good-hearted men who are at the mercy of violent, high-powered beast forms that they’re having a hard time keeping in check. Even Xion and Nagi suffer from their own version of a Jekyll and Hyde complex in that they only commit whatever evil they do because they’re under the control of the Unborn, which they both end up vanquishing quite effortlessly at the end of Xion’s run in BR 4’s arcade mode once Mana howls the Legion-inspired entity out of them and releases them both from its influence. Indeed, this lack of strong, lasting, reliable villains in Bloody Roar has turned out to be especially unfortunate for the franchise, seeing as such an absence of stable and thoroughly antagonistic threats to challenge the heroes has had a heavy hand in watering down the saga’s plot overall, hence leading to the flat, nonsensical mess that made up the story for BR’s fifth and (currently) final game. This is all the truer when one considers that most of the franchise’s heroes have eventually become friends and allies with each other on one level or another after BR 2, thus further reducing the logic between them ever combating each other directly.
One more thing to note here is the whole notion of Hudson Soft creating Hans, Greg, and Mitsuko for Bloody Roar 1 and then utterly abandoning them for the rest of the series. Cronos and Ganesha no longer being present after BR PF/E I can understand to a point, as the Kingdom of Zoanthropes was no longer an immediate focus as far as BR 4’s plot was concerned. Even so, I wouldn’t have minded either of them at all returning to the roster for Bloody Roar 5, should that game have ever officially seen the light of day, complete with a story that had made room for either of them to come back. As for the initially mentioned three characters, however, trust me when I say that creating Hans and Greg for BR 1 and then never so much as mentioning them again throughout the rest of the franchise was a real kick in the teeth of sorts, regardless of whether Hans’s crossdressing added anything of value to his character or Greg’s out-of-place ringmaster gimmick and apparently underwhelming fighting style (according to Hudson themselves) did him any favors. On the other hand, there’s the case of Mitsuko, who risked life and limb travelling across the globe in search of her kidnapped daughter and managed to rescue her with only Alice to assist her, and even then, she didn’t start off allying with Alice until they crossed paths during their respective journeys. Compare that to newly appointed Metro City mayor Mike Haggar and his plight from Final Fight, where he sets out to rescue his daughter Jessica from the Mad Gear Gang. Sure, he saves Jessica from Belger’s filthy crime lord mitts and effectively dismantles the syndicate, even if only temporarily, but he stayed within his own city throughout the duration of his quest and had fellow protagonists Cody and Guy helping him the entire time, regardless of which SNES port of the game may have shown players otherwise. In other words, despite Haggar having earned his reputation as a badass video game hero in FF 1, Mitsuko upped the ante in comparison in the first Bloody Roar, only to have Hudson take her badge of badassery away in BR 2, where she descends into the depths of character development purgatory. After all, let’s not forget that it’s in Bloody Roar 2 that Shenlong singlehandedly and effortlessly takes her out of commission from the very start, yet she herself receives nothing to do in her role other than play “mother in distress” until Uriko comes along to save her. Apparently, Hudson Soft’s writers couldn’t have even bothered themselves with the idea of the ZLF brainwashing her and having her fight her own offspring just as they had the ZLF brainwash Kenji to serve them as one of their hitmen and eventually trade blows with his own foster brother Yugo. I’m sorry, but what a wasted opportunity! Then again, the more I think about the whole situation, the more I ask myself about just how limited Hudson’s foresight had to have been for them to have created three whole characters for a fighting game with multiple sequels and then not bring any of them back for even one of these later games—especially since all three of them, individual popularity be damned, still had plenty to offer the franchise in one way or another. Heck, look at all the characters in the Mortal Kombat series who appeared in one MK game and whom NetherRealm Studios had cut from the roster of the following title, only to reintroduce them into later titles. Even Hsu Hao, one of the most hated MK characters of all time—even by MK brain Ed Boon himself—came back after MK: Deadly Alliance to take part in MK: Armageddon, and despite not being playable in MK: Deception, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, and MK 11, he still had at least a cameo in each entry…even if only as a severed head in a bag that Erron Black carries in his default intro. If NetherRealm can afford to offer him that kind of presence in their time-honored fighting game line, even after taking into consideration the number of gamers who’ve soured on him since his MK: DA debut, surely Hudson Soft and Eighting/Raizing could have done the same for Hans, Greg, and Mitsuko, no matter how much certain other BR fans may have disliked them or how flawed each of them actually was to begin with in terms of character design, backstory, playstyle, or the like. Really, now, look at how much Yugo, Alice, Gado, Long, Uriko, and Bakuryu have evolved from BR 1 to BR 4…or, at least, to Primal Fury/Extreme. If those six characters alone can receive constant upgrades in their fighting styles, designs, and characterization with each passing game, then who’s to say that the other three can’t evolve, even now?
C. Composing a tighter narrative between the first five games
Excluding Bloody Roar 4, it could have been easy as pie for Hudson Soft to have connected the individual plots of each BR game to create a cohesive, free-flowing narrative that could have seamlessly translated into any other kind of fictional media that the BR faithful could appreciate. All it would have taken was the writers taking close notes of what story they had following the first two Bloody Roar games. Say what you will about them being “rip-offs” of Resident Evil and X-Men, respectively, but the plots of BRs 1 and 2 meshed well together enough to set the foundation for a tale that was worth investing in, had its writers not forgotten any of the other elements it’d introduced with its first two installments. Likewise, each division in the saga introduced entities and other elements that, had the writers expanded the tale more deeply and thoroughly, could have left even more of an impression on the entire narrative and made room for further progression of the tale at hand. Take the Tylon Corporation, for example, which effectively dissolved when the news broke about them having conducted experiments on people to create their zoanthrope army within their South American laboratory. Surely, even after a news story like that, such a big multinational organization—one that was no doubt run by a cunning, driven, and unscrupulous CEO or board of directors whom the fans never had a chance to meet—would be able to survive such a setback and not automatically crumble into obscurity. After all, Yun Chi Manufacturing, Inc., which the series canon has distinctly identified as a separate department/organization under the Tylon brand, has managed to stay in business six years after Tylon itself had allegedly shut down for good, even with their creation, Kohryu, spending the first twenty-six days of its mechanical life running amok and slaughtering zoanthropes left and right according to BR 3. Besides, somebody had to have footed the bill for the secret lab where Busuzima was conducting his experiments in BR 2. Same thing with the lab that was operating behind the scenes of the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ first ever Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament according to the plot of Primal Fury/Extreme. Then again, who’s to say that the KoZ itself—a young upstart nation that emerged out of little more than a dream shortly after the fall of the ZLF—isn’t a Tylon product in and of itself? In fact, the more I personally think about it, the more I believe that the Tylon Corporation had managed to secretly survive its assumed fall after the events of BR 1…or, at the very least, should have. That way, it could have very well played a much larger part in the franchise’s story than it ended up playing, behaving as a clandestine kind of Illuminati-esque organization not unlike the Umbrella Corporation from RE or the Secret Society/Himitsu Kessha (and, by association, the Gerard Foundation) of Battle Arena Toshinden lore that is responsible one way or another for the events that drive Bloody Roar’s narrative forward game after game. Alas, such was a possible route that Bloody Roar never came to explore during its original run, although I’ve attempted to fix that in my initial reboot from years ago and hope to do the same in my second BR revival.
Similarly, what about the racial friction between baseline humans and zoanthropes that came up in Bloody Roar 2? Even if the ZLF was indeed the most notorious radical coalition at the time, who’s to say that humanity didn’t have any bad seeds of its own causing chaos and making life a living hell for zoanthropekind? Come to think of it, even outside of the whole “human vs. zoanthrope” conflict, where is the brunt of the world’s human population? Granted, most of the villains with whom the X-Men crossed paths were either fellow members of their own species, Homo [Sapiens] Superior, or some other kind of beyond-ordinary being (superhuman, cyborg, extraterrestrial, etc.), but there were indeed regular human beings who combatted them. Deathtrap master Arcade is one such character, as is Graydon Creed, the illegitimate human son of Sabretooth and Mystique, and the numerous members of the various coalitions that Creed was a part of such as the Friends of Humanity, the Purifiers (a.k.a. the Stryker Crusade), and the Upstarts. Imagine, then, an anti-zoanthrope militia who’s risen to power in the wake of the ZLF’s fall after BR 2, particularly with the news of the discovery of the X-Genome Code making headlines worldwide and causing concern and panic among baseline humans across the globe for the safety of their kind against zoanthropes, who have only become more dangerous in their eyes on account of this newly discovered development. Not only that, but let’s not forget Yugo’s mission in creating the World of Coexistence being the social unity of zoanthropes and regular humans and, consequently, the preservation of peace between the two species. Sure, there would certainly be members of either breed who would resist such an otherwise benevolent goal, both within and outside of the radical racial groups like the ZLF who were actively tearing the world apart over such matters, but what about those humans (as well as zoanthropes) who agreed with the WOC’s cause and wanted to support it? Where are they to help carry out investigations or other procedures on behalf of the organization? Either way, I can’t help but agree with BR fans who insist on adding a pureblooded human to the roster to combat the various zoanthrope players in the series. If nothing else, at least it would be an interesting development and allow that one character to stand out amongst the rest of the active roster. As a matter of fact, if Hudson Soft (and/or Eighting/Raizing) were so hard to press Nagi in BR 4, the least they could have done was include her in BR 3 and have her directly get involved in that storyline, be it as a member of the WOC or even as an operative for whatever human supremacy organization was rising to prominence in the wake of the ZLF’s collapse. If nothing else, at least it would have given her more organic import than her inclusion in BR 4 alone ever did, and—lest we forget—she wouldn’t have been sporting her controversial “Spurious” beast form yet, thus making her a full-fledged human.
I could go on, but you get the point: The games stopped connecting as tightly with one another on a narrative level after Bloody Roar 2, and I hope to fix that with the reboot proposal I’m introducing here with the events of previous installments in the series flowing right into those of their sequels and keeping in mind whatever elements were present in the earlier games that could receive further exploration and provide more plot expansion. Whether the topic at hand is a major story arc, the relationship between two characters, the introduction of a world-shifting plot development (e.g., the emergence of an antagonistic organization), or anything else of the sort, I’ll be sure to take note of it in this second reboot and see to it that my story maintains a noticeably higher level of consistency than the original narrative did…not to mention, for that matter, my original outline for a BR reboot.
Some other, briefer notes I’ll make here before I finally get things underway concern the entries for each of the characters I’ll be introducing in each installment of my revised vision of Bloody Roar. First off, I’ll be trying to name each character’s fighting style based on the individual strikes, grapples, and combos he/she executes in-game against his/her opponents. Granted, doing so may be a bit erroneous, especially seeing as Hudson Soft—barring a few exceptions (e.g., Yugo, Long, both Bakuryus, and Shenlong)—never gave the BR characters specific martial arts to emulate and simply named their fighting styles certain names as “Jumping” (Alice), “Lower Body” (Jenny), and “Deception” (Busuzima). Even so, by pairing a martial art with every character on the roster, be it an accurate or faulty gesture, I hope to more fully flesh out each of them as a means of making them even more identifiable from one another within the Bloody Roar realm. Secondly is how I’ll be offering various notes to accompany the backstory of every character I’ll be including in each installment of my proposed reboot. These notes might clarify certain aspects about the character in question (e.g., how Uriko’s chimera beast form in BR 1 works); bring up logic gaps within a character’s backstory (e.g., where Yugo’s mother is as far as BR 1 goes and how she’d react to her son’s going off to search for answers regarding his father Yuji’s death); illustrate pieces of information that were mostly missing from the original story that, if explained, could add more substance and character and plot growth to the tale overall (e.g., what happened to Alice’s parents); and/or show how I would refresh a given aspect of a certain character that I personally think just doesn’t work for reason X, Y, or Z (e.g., Hans’s crossdressing and/or vanity). Finally of note is the warning that there may be spoilers in these articles as they pertain to the story I’m aiming to tell. This essay specifically won’t have many (if any), of course, seeing as I’ll only be talking about the first game in the series here. For future essays, however, I’ll be needing to illustrate the connection between each of the installments in the franchise as I go along. Be warned, then, and thank you for your understanding.
At any rate, folks, I hope you’ll all sit back and relax as I take yet another trip down Memory Lane, for better and for worse alike, and outline how I would rewrite the story of Bloody Roar.
Bloody Roar: The Beast Within
The tale of the original Bloody Roar—also known, again, in Japanese arcades as Beastorizer—is a simple one that revolves around the existence of zoanthropes: human beings with the ability to transform at will into human-animal hybrids who possess physical prowess greater than any mere man or woman. In short, zoanthropy in the BR universe is quite different from what we here in the concrete world call zoanthropy, which is a strictly psychological condition in which a patient simply believes he/she is an animal or beast with no physical manifestation of the animal or beast he/she believes he/she is aside from certain animalistic behaviors. Enter the Tylon Corporation, a multinational business concern whose Pharmaceutical Research Division has discovered the “trigger code” in the human genome. This code awakens various animal traits within its host’s DNA and in turn transforms said host into his/her beast form, which bases itself off his/her physical and psychological nature. Jealously guarding this secret from the rest of the world, Tylon employs its Weapons Development Division to apply it in creating the ultimate zoanthrope army out of countless baseline humans and natural born zoanthropes, each of whom the corporation has abducted from the global public, brainwashed, and programmed to become a deadly killing machine in his/her own right. Once it fully assembles its zoanthrope army from such individuals, Tylon plans on using it to fulfill its selfish ambition of world domination.
Such is how the North American version of Bloody Roar goes, of course. In contrast is the Japanese plot of the game as outlined on The-Bloody-Roar.Fandom.com, which additionally involves the Gaia hypothesis—namely, the idea that all organisms and their surroundings on Earth are closely integrated with one another to form a single, self-regulating system that maintains the conditions for life on the planet—and how humanity’s industrialization and ever-growing population in the late-twentieth century has been damaging our beloved world and helping us drive ourselves into extinction. It also goes into detail of how Gaia herself as the Spirit of the Earth organized the evolution of humanity by introducing what Hudson Soft referred to as the “trigger code” into the human genome to create zoanthropes in hopes of introducing a new species that could be able to survive the eventual environmental apocalypse that humanity in general was bringing upon itself and the world during the late twentieth century when the original tale took place. It can be quite an exhausting read, I’ll admit, even for an admittedly oft-garrulous writer like me, which is no doubt part of the reason why Hudson left much of it out when they distributed the game here in North America. Nevertheless, it does contain some admittedly interesting backstory that, if worked thoughtfully into what we North Americans already know about Bloody Roar, could very well enrich the overall tale…assuming, of course, the writer in question committed himself/herself to presenting “Gaia” as the Gaia hypothesis in action as opposed to Gaia the ancient Greek primordial deity.
As far as the North American version of the story goes, however, even I can admit that it may seem basic (and perhaps even a little hokey for some people’s tastes) and doesn’t do too much to distinguish the Tylon Corporation from any other evil white-collar conglomerate in fighting game history—if not, in fact, fiction in general. Nevertheless, it at least sets the scene for the events to follow and establishes the big bad ultimate entity for our heroes to thwart, and there’s still a chance to delve deeper into Tylon’s backstory, should the opportunity present itself. This is particularly the case where it concerns the identity of whoever is running the corporation, which (as I’ve mentioned earlier) is something that Bloody Roar fans never found out, although I personally would have enjoyed discovering who it was among Tylon’s upper brass who ordered these inhumane experiments and for what reason…aside from, of course, the whole bland idea of “Executive X” being your standard-issue power-mad corporate suit. If nothing else, at least it would help further establish the identity of the Tylon Corporation as a whole. Really, now, was it truly that much of a run-of-the-mill evil business concern, or was it once a more benign entity—if not, in fact, a downright noble one—until it one day took a wrong turn down the road of business ethics to become what BR fans have known it to be? Let’s not forget, after all, that not everyone who worked for Tylon was necessarily evil. Dr. Steven Goldberg, for example, was under the impression that his research as one of Tylon’s scientists would contribute to saving people’s lives until he found out the company’s real agenda and ended up having Busuzima transform him into Stun before he could have the chance to report his discovery to the authorities. Even Busuzima himself was once a simple kid under his grandmother’s care who found himself fascinated by insects and only succumbed to his obsession with immortality because his grandmother died one day while he was still young, hence the motivation behind even the cruelest of his experiments. Sadly, Bloody Roar fans only had the opportunity to learn so much about the Tylon Corporation, and it wasn’t long at all before it stopped being much of anything within the franchise’s plot but a passing memory.
Luckily, at least Hudson Soft didn’t give us the whole “fighting tournament” angle that had already been played out in many a fighting game franchise by the time Bloody Roar first came out in 1997. If nothing else, we can all thank our lucky stars for that. Plus, all of the initial eight fighters except for Greg have their backstories tied to Tylon in one form or another, so at least BR 1’s narrative has that going for it as well. What’s therefore left to talk about as far as this plot is concerned is the notion of how zoanthropy works in this universe, specifically the process that Hudson Soft has called “beastorization.” According to Hudson’s original model, zoanthrope DNA contains a genetic code—the aforementioned “trigger code” you’d just read about a couple of paragraphs earlier—that geneticists had once considered to be little more than a “background anomaly” on account of it not matching any human characteristic. It’s upon the stimulation of this code that zoanthropes can “beastorize” (i.e., transform) and awaken other animal species that remain latent within the human body so that they can utilize these creatures’ capabilities in certain situations, most specifically those that involve hand-to-hand combat. Such traits include great strength and/or agility, natural weaponry such as claws and fangs, camouflage, enhanced senses, flight, underwater breathing, and anything else that might relate to the abilities of any given animal species that has ever existed on Earth. Furthermore, each zoanthrope has his or her own unique beast form based on his/her own personality and physical appearance. Take, for example, Alice Tsukagami, the sweetheart of BR—a kind-hearted soul with a limber figure that offers her plenty of agility in human form alone who habitually wore her hair up in pigtails until BR Primal Fury/Extreme. It should be no surprise from this description that her beast form is that of a rabbit and therefore differs vastly from the beast form of her stubborn, heavily muscled, and fierce-tempered yet compassionate and generous foster mother Mitsuko Nonomura, which is that of a wild boar…or wild sow, to be more gender-accurate. This sounds all simple and straightforward enough, and in my reboot, zoanthropy would work quite similarly…except for one small yet noteworthy development.
As SCXCR of the River City Gamers made note of in the first installment of his Bloody Roar Retrospective back in 2010, then-not-too-distant research concerning the similarities between human DNA and the DNA of other animals disproved the whole notion of unused DNA in humans—“junk DNA,” if you’d rather. As such, this latent DNA that the original Bloody Roar storyline cited as being responsible for a zoanthrope’s ability to beastorize is indeed used in the genetic code of ordinary humans just as it is for zoanthropes, although researchers at the time remained usure about exactly how this DNA is used. For more information, feel free to check out the links below.
http://creation.com/decoding-the-dogma-of-dna-similarity
http://genome.cshlp.org/content/17/11/1675.full
Of similar note is that while researchers debate about the exact percentage of DNA shared between humans and certain non-human animal species, the fact remains that we humans do indeed share many of the same genetic traits as our friends from the rest of the animal kingdom. Not only that, but Hudson’s original model also neglected to a degree to mention just what it is that activates a zoanthrope’s “trigger code,” save for a sliver of information that I’d first read on the official PlayStation website that centered around Bloody Roar 2 and contained the backstories of the game’s nine initial characters. Sadly, this portion of the PS website had already vanished from it since I’d posted the first official article of my original BR reboot back in the summer of 2012, but the backstories themselves managed to survive and make their way to The-Bloody-Roar.Fandom.com. Stun’s backstory is especially one instance in this regard in that it mentions him during his human life as Dr. Steven Goldberg and the work he used to perform for Tylon involving a substance called “Factor B.” From what I’d read, I’d ascertained this “Factor B” to be the organic chemical that awakened the “trigger code” within zoanthropes and allowed them to beastorize, which each fighter’s in-game beast gauge represents. Based on this idea, my reboot would see to it that this Factor B become a quick-acting hormone that secretes rapidly into a zoanthrope’s bloodstream via a special gland that exists in each zoanthrope’s brain called the Lycaonian gland. Named after King Lycaon of Arcadia from Greek mythology and alternatively known at times as the L-gland, this organ activates when the brain as a whole senses any sort of adrenaline rush within a zoanthrope’s body. When it does, the L-gland secretes Factor B into its host’s bloodstream at a rate that far surpasses that of any other hormone. Once in the bloodstream, the Factor B then temporarily rearranges the host’s genetic code in such a way that it matches that of a particular non-human animal (i.e., the animal represented by the individual’s beast form) by 95% to 99% in little to no time at all. Because this hormone secretes at such an uncharacteristically quick rate in comparison to all other endocrine substances, Tylon has taken an intense interest in it to the point of staging the events of the original BR 1, and from there, the rest of the plot follows with each of the following zoanthropes participating as described.
The Initial Eight
Yugo Ogami
Home Country: Japan
Age: 17
Fighting Style: Shoot Boxing
Beast Form: Wolf
Original Backstory: Yugo hears one day that his mercenary father Yuji has been killed in battle somewhere in South America but disbelieves the news and heads out to discover the truth for himself. It is during his journey that he discovers his own zoanthropy and that his dad had gotten mixed up in a conspiracy centered around the Tylon Corporation, which he himself sets out against in hopes of learning what its operatives are up to and how it ties in with his father’s death.
Reboot Backstory: No change. The only thing close to one would be my inclusion of Yugo’s mother, a loving and caring woman who often finds herself besides herself when it comes to her son’s hotblooded nature and the many scraps it has led him into prior to Yugo’s adventure, one from which he received his signature X-shaped facial scar. Aside from that, though, the above backstory works fine as is for Bloody Roar’s poster boy.
Alan Gado (a.k.a. Alain Gadou)
Home Country: France
Age: 43
Fighting Style: Military Martial Arts (Power Attacks)
Beast Form: Lion
Original Backstory: A mercenary by trade and brother-in-arms with Yugo’s father Yuji, Alan Gado recalls a mission in which he, Yuji, and an entire platoon of fellow zoanthrope mercenaries staged an assault on the Tylon Corporation’s South American laboratory, only to lose the fight at the claws of Tylon’s zoanthrope army. The battle not only cost Gado sight in his left eye, but also most of his comrades their lives. Nevertheless, he heads into battle once more to discover for himself if Yuji managed to survive the encounter or, if he hadn’t, avenge him and the rest of their fallen squad.
Reboot Backstory: No change.
Alice Tsukagami
Home Country: Japan
Age: 17
Fighting Style: Gymnastics-inspired Jeet Kune Do
Beast Form: Rabbit
Original Backstory: Born to a Japanese father and an American mother of German descent, Alice Tsukagami grew up in a happy home until Tylon kidnapped her one day when she was still young and activated her latent zoanthropy. Though Tylon trained her to become one of its soldiers, she managed to escape the compound where the corporation was imprisoning her before its laboratory staff could convert her. It was thanks to Uriko, a fellow captive whom she’d befriended, sacrificing her own chance at freedom that Alice was able to flee the premises. It isn’t long, however, before Alice gets the notion of returning to the facility where Tylon had imprisoned her to return the favor and rescue Uriko.
Reboot Backstory: No change from what you’ve just read. Then again, I’d initially planned on delving a bit deeper to examine who Alice’s parents were and where (translation: from which parent) she received her zoanthropic powers. Granted, I’m aware that Opentopia claims that her parents were killed—most presumably by Tylon operatives—but how, when, where, and especially why they were killed seemed pretty ambiguous in my eyes at the time. Plus, I even now see some potential growth and development in Alice’s character in the instance that she was to somehow rediscover her past through quiet reflection, particularly during the story of Bloody Roar 3 with the X-Genome Code becoming a primary concern. For instance, it could have been possible that during her childhood, Alice had lost her natural-born zoanthrope mother on account of some ailment that came about via complications of her strand of the XGC and that her worried father had Alice tested to make sure that she didn’t fall prey to such an affliction herself, which in turn would lead to Alice’s eventual kidnapping and consequential separation from her father. That was my idea years ago, leastways, and even though it still might sound a bit rough now, I still believe that if illustrated further in later installments within the BR saga, this idea just might evolve into something that gives Alice even more substance and thus greater importance as the franchise’s chief female protagonist. Who knows? Maybe the reason why she became a nurse in BR 2 was because such was her mother’s profession while she was yet alive and that becoming a nurse herself would be a way to honor her.
Long Shin (originally Jin Long)
Home Country: China
Age: 26
Fighting Style: Xing Yi Quan/Kenpo
Beast Form: Tiger
Original Backstory: As a child, Long suffered the deaths of his mother and his younger sister Lin Li, all the while receiving little to no attention from his workaholic father who, according to his backstory for Bloody Roar 2 as detailed on The-Bloody-Roar.Fandom.com, was the scientist initially responsible for discovering the zoanthrope “trigger code.” Viewing his own zoanthropy as nothing but a curse on account of the tragedy it has brought his family, he runs away from home, only to have his martial arts prowess bring him enough renown for the Tylon Corporation to find out about him, lie barefaced to him about its work to help zoanthropes control their inner beast, and recruit him into its assassination unit, where he becomes one of the conglomerate’s top hitmen. He eventually discovers the truth about Tylon for himself, however, and cuts ties with it, hence earning for himself the reputation of a traitor and forcing him to defend himself against his former colleagues before they execute him for his desertion.
Reboot Backstory: As with Alice, Long’s backstory will remain mostly the same, save for the clarification of a few small but nonetheless key details. For instance, despite Long’s original name being “Jin Long,” which translates from Chinese into English as “Golden Dragon,” I’m personally leaning more towards calling him by the second name Hudson Soft had given him, “Long Shin.” Granted, “Shin” is actually a Korean surname meaning “Shen,” which is in and of itself a Chinese surname either meaning “cautious” or “acting sincerely/with care” or referring to the ancient state of Shen, which existed during the Zhou Dynasty (1046-771 BCE) in what is now known as the Henan Province. Interestingly enough, it is here where Mount Song exists, which undoubtedly would be Long’s residence between the events of Bloody Roars 1 and 2. However, according to Forebears.io, approximately 2,347 people (one in every 3,125) in Hong Kong possesses the surname “Shin,” as do 309 people (1 in every 4,424,986) throughout the rest of China. Additionally, not only is the name Long Shin the one with which most Bloody Roar fans are familiar, but it also helps to disambiguate him from the real-life professional snooker player from China whose name also happens to be Jin Long…or, for that matter, the real-life Chinese former pro cyclist who similarly happens to bear that same name…or, more so yet, Jin Long Chinese restaurant in Bath, PA, which coincidentally enough has been serving Chinese food to the Bath community since 1997, when Bloody Roar first became a thing.
Also, note specifically Long’s backstory according to Bloody Roars 1 and 2 from The-Bloody-Roar.Fandom.com and how they mention his mother and younger sister’s deaths without ever explicitly saying what it was that had taken their lives, yet claiming how Long sees zoanthropy as a curse that has brought him and his family nothing but hardship and doom. Similarly, BloodyRoar.Fandom.com discusses how it was the “unbridled power of the beast” that took Lin Li’s life specifically. For a while, I couldn’t help but wonder if whether Long’s mother and sister, like him, were zoanthropes and had contracted the X-Genome Code, only to fall ill due to complications from it. After all, such was what happened to Lanfa, the daughter of the old man with whom Long lives for a spell in BR 3, which is what reminds him of Lin Li. Then again, TVTropes.org swears that Lin Li had died because Long had lost control of his beast form and ended up killing her by accident, just as Cronos once lost control of his phoenix form as per his own backstory from Primal Fury/Extreme. Granted, TVTropes is very much like Wikipedia (or, for that matter, any wiki website) in that anyone can edit it, but if there’s any truth to this theory, then it’s no wonder why Long in PF/E identifies so much with the young prince of the Kingdom of Zoanthropes and the crisis he faces…or, for that matter, why his ending in BR 1 showcases him exchanging words with his own beast form during a moment of meditation. Then again, could it be that the reason why Long’s father paid so little attention to him when he was younger was that he was so involved in trying to discover firsthand what it was that had killed his wife and daughter that he completely forgot about the last family member he had left? Either that, or he could have seen with his own eyes his son killing his wife and daughter and as such considered him a threat to his own wellbeing whom he wanted nothing to do with until he found a cure for Long’s condition. Such is the nature of Long’s character that I would draw people’s attention to in my reboot. Furthermore, after refamiliarizing myself with Long’s backstory, I’ve no doubt in the slightest that Hudson had planted the seeds for the X-Genome Code right here at the start of the saga, especially considering that Rave Mode in BR 1 shares far too many similarities with Hyperbeast Mode in BR 3 onward to ignore, and as every Bloody Roar fan surely knows by now, Hyperbeast is supposed to represent a zoanthrope’s activation of the Code within him/her. On that note, then, failing to capitalize on all the information I’ve provided here would be a great disservice not only to the very identity of the XGC, but also to the entire story in and of itself.
Bakuryu (a.k.a. Ryuzo Kato/Kato Ryuzo)
Home Country: Japan
Age: Unknown (65 according to FightABase.com)
Fighting Style: Ninjitsu (Kato School)
Beast Form: Mole
Original Backstory: Much of the identity of this self-styled master of traditional ninjitsu remains a mystery, but as one of the Tylon Corporation’s top saboteurs and assassins, one thing’s for sure: His skills as a hitman for Tylon are outmatched only by his desire to become the strongest zoanthrope to ever exist. So strong is his ambition, in fact, that he’s even insisted on further enhancing his body with experimental drugs to help further intensify his already keen physical prowess.
Reboot Backstory: No change…although I find it only fair to bring up here that Bakuryu I (a.k.a. Ryuzo Kato) and his predecessor, Bakuryu II (a.k.a. Kakeru/Kenji Ogami), both belong to the same clan of ninja who make their home well outside the city limits and who pay homage to the Earth God/Earth Dragon. In fact, when the young Kakeru lost both his parents as a small child, it was Kato who took him under his wing and taught him the ways of the ninja, thus making the boy his successor. Next thing they know, the Tylon Corporation comes along to draft them both into its fold and unwittingly renders Kakeru a near-vegetable via a botched brainwashing attempt while Kato goes on to be one of Tylon’s top assassins until his ultimate literal meltdown in which the enhancement drugs he’s taken courtesy of Tylon’s scientists develop an adverse reaction with the Factor B that naturally flows through his veins, thus reducing him to a pool of genetic goop. I’ll be sure to illustrate Kato and Kenji’s relationship further in later installments of my reboot, especially where it concerns Kohryu and his eventual feud with Kenji, but I find it only prudent to mention it here prior to my proposed reboot for Bloody Roar 2.
Mitsuko Nonomura
Home Country: Japan
Age: 39 (originally)
Fighting Style: Wrestling (Japanese Strong Style)
Beast Form: Wild Boar (Wild Sow)
Original Backstory: A heavily muscled yet kind-hearted shopkeeper (albeit identified as a housewife and a fishmonger in other versions of her backstory), Mitsuko does all she can to keep her zoanthropy a secret from the world. Alas, the same could not be said for her nine-year-old daughter Uriko, who has recently started showing signs of zoanthropy and has subsequently become an abductee of the Tylon Corporation. Furious upon having her daughter taken away from her, Mitsuko immediately heads off to rescue Uriko at all costs.
Reboot Backstory: No major changes. Still, you’ve no doubt noticed that I’d listed Mitsuko’s age at “39 (originally),” meaning that she was originally thirty years old when she gave birth to her presently nine-year-old daughter. Granted, this may very well be an admittedly petty move on my part, but I’d personally have her switch ages with Greg so that she can be thirty-five years of age while the white-bearded (and white-furred) Greg can be thirty-nine—all the better to explain the lack of melanin in his facial hair. That, and maybe—just maybe—aging Mitsuko down by four years and thus having her give birth to Uriko at the age of twenty-six would give her designers the incentive to give her a younger-looking, more flattering face. After all, her character models in BR, two- and three-dimensional alike, make her look like she’s forty-nine at the very youngest rather than thirty-nine, and just neutralizing the wrinkles on her face would make her look at least half a decade younger.
More importantly, though, is the story of the man in the picture above with Mitsuko and Uriko. No doubt that he’s Mitsuko’s husband and Uriko’s father, but while I’m surely the only one who cares about this little tidbit of information, I could never help but wonder as to just where he’s been throughout the duration of the entire BR plot. Call it a quibble on my behalf all you want, but no matter which installment of the Bloody Roar franchise you want to focus on, there’s little to no mention of this man in any of Uriko’s backstories, save for a couple of pictures I’ve found of him: the one above from BR 1’s in-game gallery and the second being from Uriko’s entry in the V-Jump book for BR 2. Otherwise, whenever it came to Mr. Nonomura, I could never ignore the flood of questions that flowed through my brain because of his absence. How does he feel, for instance, about his wife suddenly deserting the family shop after Uriko goes missing and coming back Heaven knows how many days or weeks or whatnot later with another daughter in tow as well as Uriko? How does he feel about his wife’s sudden abduction by the Zoanthrope Liberation Front in BR 2 and Uriko deciding to go off and rescue her, albeit not without spending a month or more in an isolated mountainside cave in China, of all places, with a thirty-one-year-old man who’s mostly a stranger to her to learn how to beat up ZLF terrorists? Come to think of it, where precisely was he during his wife’s capture in the first place? Cowering in the storeroom of the shop soiling his pants in fear? Where is he, furthermore, to agree with Mitsuko when she grounds Uriko at the end of her story in BR 3 for violating her curfew? Did the man die sometime in between installments in the series? Is he Mitsuko’s glorified yes man? Is he a completely useless lump? Has his existence been canonically determined at all outside of the two pictures I’ve mentioned?
Well, whatever the case is now, in my reboot, I’d surely answer these questions once and for all by making Mitsuko’s husband a key part of the storyline to the point where even in his absence from the Nonomura household, one can still feel his presence throughout the course of the narrative. What I mean by this is simple: I’d officially give the man a name (Dr. Nezumi Nonomura most readily comes to mind.), an occupation (a pharmacist), and a reason for him to be tied up in this whole mess concerning the Tylon Corporation (He, like Steven “Stun” Goldberg, is a Tylon employee who would rather use his research to benefit the world rather than help Tylon conquer it, but ends up resigning from the organization too late for his own good.). I’d also make it so that even though Mitsuko would be able to save Uriko, she’d not be so fortunate to rescue Nezumi, and all that would be left of him in the Nonomura house would be some old research papers of his for Uriko to root through later in, say, BR 3 with the X-Genome Code crisis being a thing. I’ll be sure to flesh out more thorough details concerning the man in later installments of this series, but for right now, the fact remains that Mitsuko’s backstory from the original Bloody Roar works fine as matters stand, even without these two specific points brought in for additional consideration. What matters from here on out, however, is maintaining her presence throughout the rest of the tale and giving fans a reason to connect with and appreciate her despite her having an almost mannish physique that many have found off-putting.
Gregory “Greg” Humain (a.k.a. Gregory Jones)
Home Country: United States of America
Age: 35 (originally)
Fighting Style: Wrestling (Freestyle Catch Wrestling)
Beast Form: Gorilla
Original Backstory: In his youth, Greg fulfilled his dream of running away to join a circus, where he showed great talent in handling animals. He later took the circus over after the original ringmaster retired, but the rapidly changing entertainment industry rendered circuses mostly obsolete and his own eventually bankrupt. It wasn’t long before his fellow entertainers all parted ways, but Greg’s optimism and ambition led him to find a way to bring his circus back to life with a fresh new troupe consisting of zoanthrope performers.
Reboot Backstory: Aside from the previously explained age switch with Mitsuko in my reboot (hence me listing his age as “35 (originally),” one thing that I’d like to address with Greg is that his backstory has absolutely nothing to do with Tylon, be it supporting or squashing the conglomerate or even escaping its clutches. All the same, I’ll admit that his whole circus ringmaster gimmick could have worked well in later installments of the series if handled with careful consideration towards the notion that while zoanthropes did exist naturally in the BR universe by this point, the public’s general knowledge of their existence was little more than a glorified urban legend of sorts until after the events of the first game. For example, in BloodyRoar 2, Greg could have been forced to shut down his newly established zoanthrope circus on account of humanity’s growing awareness of and subsequent trepidation towards zoanthropes, and he specifically could have found himself having to prove his innocence in the face of the growing suspicion that he is the supposed leader of the Zoanthrope Liberation Front and his troupe is allegedly a small but concentrated unit of ZLF operatives. Who knows? It could even have been possible that one of his employees was indeed a member of the Front who was using his/her circus “gig” as a cover-up for his/her affiliation with Shenlong and company, which in turn would raise the stakes for him in terms of clearing his name as well as give him the challenge of trying to talk his employee out of his alignment with such a notorious cabal of murderers.
Alas, if zoanthropes were indeed as heavily persecuted as they were in the events between the first two BR games, what with certain governments outright executing even suspected zoanthropes out of nothing more than prejudice-laced fear, then I’ve got a “Plan B” occupation for Greg that might work even better for him—namely that of an FBI agent whose most recent assignment has him looking into the recent disappearance of countless Tylon abductees. Either that, or he could be tracking down a particularly dangerous criminal whom Tylon coincidentally has employed as one of its top operatives. He could still pose as a circus performer/owner during his investigation, of course, to make his in-game attire work, but in that case, I’d use his “Greg Jones” persona as an alias with his real name being Greg Humain instead, as defined by FightABase.com. The question will remain, then, as to whether Greg will be able to pull the wool over Tylon’s eyes and rescue the abductees his supervisors have assigned him to recover from the enterprise’s clutches or if the corporation will see through his garish, top hat-accented cover and force him to serve it in its attempt to take over the world.
Hans Taubemann (a.k.a. “Fox”)
Home Country: Germany (originally England/Great Britain)
Age: 22
Fighting Style: Koppojutsu
Beast Form: Fox
Original Backstory: Abandoned on the streets by his parents for unexplained reasons, Hans Taubemann was forced to make a living in the slums of the big city and sure enough grew to become a well-known scoundrel with a heightened sense of aesthetics and an obsession with beauty (including that of his own human form) that makes him despise all that he finds ugly, including his own beast form. More importantly, however, is his penchant for cruelty against even the weakest of prey, for it’s this pleasure he takes in dealing others pain that draws the attention of the Tylon Corporation and earns him a spot in its assassination unit, which he rises through the ranks of to become one of the organization’s top operatives.
Reboot Backstory: A few things have made Hans remarkable to gamers, the first of which being the mistranslation of his name in his ending in BR 1 as “Hance.” Another, more conspicuous aspect is the fact that he’s a guy with a lithe, androgynous build who dresses and acts femininely and is even voiced by a woman…although I refuse to hold anything against voice actress Samantha Vega for doing a job that Hudson Soft specifically hired her to perform. So effeminate is Hans, in fact, that the PAL version of BR 1 even refers to him as being a woman, even though he’s definitively a man in Japan and even in North America despite his decidedly womanish looks, voice, and mannerisms. Don’t feel bad, either, if any of you were confused yourselves as to which sex he was when you first saw and heard him, as there have been plenty of gamers who’ve openly admitted their own bewilderment over the notion on the Internet for the whole world to read. As for me, I’m not really a big fan of the whole “creepy crossdresser/effeminate male” schtick to begin with, as it’s always struck me as being nothing more than a cheap, lazy ploy to make the antagonist in question unlikeable by striking a nerve with the audience’s sensibilities regarding gender types.
“EW! He’s a dude who thinks he’s/dresses like/acts like a chick. What a weirdo!”
Um, no. Try showing the villain committing an evil act. Then I’ll start rooting for the hero to come along and vanquish him. Giving a guy a headful of long and flowing hair, dressing him up in womanlike attire and/or female-oriented colors and fabrics, plastering his face with makeup, and having him speak in a feminine voice and act in a stereotypically girly fashion aren’t enough to make me care about him one way or another. Besides, Hans being a crafty, sadistic, and even vain street thug, in my book, is enough material with which to work in order to bring his wicked nature to life…even if the vanity specifically makes him seem a little too much like Street Fighter’s Vega (or Balrog, as per that character’s original name in Japan). For Hudson Soft to have given him the whole crossdressing gimmick on top of everything else that they gave him was therefore only about as necessary as drowning a cocoa-frosted fudge brownie in chocolate syrup. In other words, it was overkill. In fact, if Hudson really wanted a femme fatale villainess with an emphasis on the “fatale” half of the term, then they should have just made Hans a woman in the first place. If they preferred to keep him male, on the other hand, then why not simply give him this design instead?
Those of you who’ve ever been fortunate enough to have owned and played the PS1 version of Bloody Roar 1 more likely than not already recognize this illustration as one of a few unused character model pics that players could unlock in the game’s art gallery. It’s a shame this specific design wasn’t used, too, because the character pictured within it more closely represents what Hans technically already was, yet similarly could have been: slim yet athletic, dashingly masculine, and with a dark demeanor (complete with, yes, gothic eye makeup) that makes him look like someone who could (and, more likely than not, would) skin some poor soul alive at the drop of a hat. Sure, this character may be sporting a few more belts than necessary, but hey, so did Gado in his BR 1 design, and that didn’t stop him from being included throughout the rest of the series. Besides, the above design represents most of what Hans’s backstory describes him as being: cunning, streetwise, vicious, and the like. Also, given his open ending in the game where he happens to kill his mother in a fit of rage on some unknown street and, upon realizing what he’d just done, ends up screaming out in anguish at the moon before laughing insanely, one could easily alter this look to reflect whatever character growth he’d undergo for the next five years until Bloody Roar 2. Should he aim to redeem himself, all he needs to do is lose the eye makeup and the multiple leather belts (and perhaps even brush his hair back), and he’d already look the part of someone who’s trying to turn over a new leaf. Should he go further down his path of darkness, in contrast, maybe he could switch to all black leather and add some studs or spikes to his vestments for the sake of looking even edgier than he already does. It’s just that simple. Besides, even if we all were to ignore his vanity, what other reason would Hans have to dress and act the way he does according to canon? Sure, I get that he’s supposed to be psychologically unstable (“crazy like a fox,” as the saying goes) and that there is such a thing in Japanese legend called kitsunetsuki, where the afflicted individual is said to have a fox spirit (kitsune) possessing her/him and that modern psychiatrists even use this term to describe a culture-bound syndrome unique to Japanese culture in which the sufferer swears she/he is having a fox possess her/him. I also understand that young women are, according to legend, the most likely sufferers of kitsunetsuki and that Hans, being a European male, is an exception to this rule, but even so, what does that have to do with his own effeminate nature? Does he secretly wish he was a girl for some reason? Did he hear his mother wish aloud that he was a girl once, thus making him act out what he’d heard her say? Did his fellow street ruffians initially mock him for his slight build and pretty face, thus prompting him to take their taunts and throw them back in their faces by dressing and acting the way he does prior to stomping their guts out? Is it all just one big intimidation tactic meant to set off whatever homophobic or transphobic sensitivities his enemies might harbor? Is he indeed LGBTQ+, as some gamers believe him to be? Does he have a condition (e.g., a specific strand of the X-Genome Code) that’s slowly but surely transforming him into a woman, as per the tendency of Japanese fox spirits (kistune) to shapeshift specifically into beautiful women more frequently than they do men? Whatever the truth is, it would have done Hudson Soft some good to illustrate this part of his nature in later installments within the franchise, had they decided on the character model they finally gave him. It certainly would have done him some justice to have undergone such growth, that was for sure, regardless of this final character design, as his crafty and cruel fighting style and malicious overall nature would have made him more than welcome within the rest of the saga and helped him stand out from the rest of the cast in a palatably positive way.
Also, instead of making Hans British, why not make him German? After all, “Hans” is the short form of “Johannes,” which in turn is the German equivalent of “John,” while his surname “Taubemann” translates from German into “Deaf Man” as per one of the aliases (“D.R. Taubmann,” a.k.a. “der taub mann” or “The Deaf Man”) of one of the most infamous antagonists in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. That, and just call the guy by his name and not his beast form. It’s not like anyone else on the roster is made to follow that kind of naming convention, after all.
The Unlockable Four
Nikolai Medved
Home Country: Russia
Age: 31
Fighting Style: Combat Samozashchita Bez Oruzhiya (“Russian Judo”)
Beast Form: Bear
Original Backstory: None. Nikolai is an entirely originally character I personally created for my reboot of BR 1.
Reboot Backstory: A naturally born zoanthrope who served in the Russian Ground Forces, Nikolai soon attained employment from Tylon following his honorable discharge from the RGF to serve as a drill instructor for the conglomerate’s security operatives and even the head of security for its South American research facility. As for how he finds out about Tylon’s experiments and what he does about them, I’ll deliberately keep that a mystery until the next article of this series.
How to Unlock: Beat Arcade Mode with any two of the eight initially available characters.
Stun (a.k.a. Dr. Steven Goldberg)
Home Country: United States of America
Age: 30
Fighting Style: Professional Wrestling
Beast Form: Beetle (originally just “Insect”)
Original Backstory: Stun didn’t originally debut until Bloody Roar 2, but for posterity’s sake, I’ll mention here that he was a brilliant scientist who was working in Tylon’s Pharmaceutical Research Division alongside his coworker, friend, and good rival Hajime Busuzima. One day, he discovers that Busuzima has been experimenting on abducted zoanthropes and baseline humans and brainwashing them into soldiers for Tylon’s zoanthrope army. Unfortunately, upon rushing off to report his findings to his mentor Dr. Maxwell, Steven soon finds himself a test subject for Busuzima, who transforms him into the world’s first insect zoanthrope. The conversion process proves to be a failure, however, on account of mammalian and insect DNA being incompatible (i.e., human DNA being less able to shift within a host’s body to mimic the DNA of an insect or any other arthropod than it is any non-human mammal or other vertebrate), which reduces Steven to a subhuman creature with an unstable body and mind who must rely upon a special stabilizer to help him retain his constantly pain-wracked form.
Reboot Backstory: No changes, save for Steven—now named Stun—unwillingly serving Busuzima as a lackey of sorts who guards the secret laboratory specifically constructed for the latter scientist’s experiments. Let’s not forget, after all, that it’s Busuzima who has access to the serum that Stun needs to function, meaning that the nasty lab lizard has his ex-friend wrapped around his finger at this point in my reboot. As for my calling Stun “the Beetle” rather than “the Insect” as Hudson called him from his original BR 2 debut onward, that has something to do with Xion and his identity within my version of the Bloody Roar continuity. To put things simply, I’ll be naming Xion after the insectoid critter his beast form most accurately represents while the Unborn itself takes on a whole different form from what Xion fundamentally looks like—a form that more accurately represents what the Unborn is supposed to be: the amalgamation of all the life forms that either could have been yet aren’t or simply have yet to be. As such, my naming convention for Stun’s beast form has less to do with taking away his identity—even if he is the first-ever insect zoanthrope known to humanity within the BR universe—and more about expanding it by listing specifically the type of insect his beast form is (i.e., the Japanese rhino beetle).
How to Unlock: Beat Arcade Mode with any four of the eight initially playable characters.
Dr. Hajime Busuzima
Home Country: Japan
Age: 30
Fighting Style: Zuì Quán, a.k.a. Drunken Boxing (“Deception”)
Beast Form: Chameleon
Original Backstory: Busuzima didn’t originally debut until Bloody Roar 2, but as per the case with Stun, I’ll mention that during his childhood, he lived with his doting grandmother and developed a fascination with the internal mechanics of insects, dissecting them for the sake of discovering how they moved. Eventually, however, his grandmother “stopped moving,” leaving him with nobody to save him from the slow but sure descent he took into madness as he developed an obsession with everlasting life. Since then, he made a name for himself in the field of science and acquired a position at Tylon, where he experiments on various subjects to create not only the ultimate zoanthrope soldier for the conglomerate’s secret army, but also the Ultimate Life Object on behalf of his own fascination with immortality.
Reboot Backstory: No changes, save for Busuzima being introduced one game/five years earlier into the story as a means of showing off/testing his newly self-administered alteration into a zoanthrope.
How to Unlock: Beat Arcade Mode with any six of the eight initially playable characters.
Uriko Nonomura (a.k.a. Uranus Alpha)
Home Country: Japan
Age: 9
Fighting Style: Superpowered Hybrid
Beast Form: Chimera
Original Backstory: Showing signs of zoanthropy at an early age, nine-year-old Uriko unwittingly drew the attention of Tylon, who sent one of their top assassins (Hans) to kidnap her so that the establishment’s scientists could in turn subject her to testing that would make her become one of the organization’s beast soldiers. She once tried to escape the compound where her captors were holding her, but sacrificed her chance at escape so that Alice, a fellow prisoner whom she’d befriended, could attain her own freedom. She then underwent the experiment that Tylon’s scientists had planned for her, and the resulting surgery—complete with brainwashing—converted her body into that of a woman who could in turn beastorize into a synthetic multi-species zoanthrope known as the Werechimera, which has so far proven to be the ultimate beast form in Bloody Roar lore, save for perhaps the dragon that’s sealed within Rao “Ryoho” Mamurasaki.
Reboot Backstory: No change…at least to the backstory itself. However, I think it would be interesting to learn about the testing procedure that Uriko had undergone. How were Tylon’s scientists able to artificially age her, for example, and give her the body of a full-grown woman? Sure, I can understand why they would do it, as an adult body is more physically developed and ergo more resilient against diseases, injuries, and similar afflictions that a child’s body is, but Uriko had to have received some highly concentrated hormones for her to have matured as quickly as she did. Her Lycaonian gland in turn certainly had to have been working overtime during her beastorization process for it to have fed enough Factor B into her bloodstream to have metamorphosized her body into a form that utilized the genetic information of three separate animals (lion, goat, and snake). It’d be no wonder, then, that later throughout the series, she could only beastorize into her default tabby cat form only a fraction of the way, hence earning her the moniker “the Half-Beast.” That, and the scientists who’d performed her transformation into the Chimera had to have fueled her body with various other chemical agents in order to allow her to hover off the ground while in her new “human” form as well as cause small earthquakes, generate powerful air and electric currents through her veins, and even—while in her beast form, leastways—vomit toxic mucous. Could it have been possible that the X-Genome Code was involved at all? Was the XGC, like Factor B, a secret that Tylon had learned about in their studies on zoanthropy that they were guarding jealously from the rest of the known world? Because that would be the most likely case, as far as I’m concerned, and if I’m at all correct, then I’m surprised BR 3’s story didn’t mention anything about Uriko carrying the Code in her system…outside, of course, of her bearing a beast crest, which was supposedly the “Sign of the Beast,” according to the third game’s narrative. Whatever the case is, this would unquestionably be something for me to illustrate in my own reboot of Bloody Roar 1 and beyond.
How to Unlock: Beat Arcade Mode with all eight initially available characters.
That sums up the first installment of my revised reboot of the Bloody Roar games. Thank you for reading, and feel free to leave feedback on what you’ve just read. Also, be sure to check out my author pages at Smashwords.com, Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.uk, and feel free to subscribe to this blog, if you haven’t done so already. Be sure to come on back in the not-too-distant future, too, for my second installment in this series of essays and for further content, and until we meet again, thank you for your support.
Regards,
Dustin M. Weber
*****
Bloody Roar (c) 1997-2012 Hudson Soft Co., Ltd./2022 Konami Digital Entertainment. The above article, however, is the author’s own.
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My Bloody Roar Reboot Revisited part 2: Bloody Roar 2: The New Breed
My Bloody Roar Reboot Revisited part 3: Bloody Roar 3: Sign of the Beast
My Bloody Roar Reboot Revisited part 4: Bloody Roar 4: Animal Kingdom
My Bloody Roar Reboot Revisited part 5: Bloody Roar 5: Predestined Evolution
AuthorDustinWeber 
