Hello, readers!
Welcome to the fourth essay on my reboot for the Bloody Roar saga. Today I’ll be looking at Bloody Roar Primal Fury, otherwise known as Bloody Roar Extreme—the first BR video game to not have an arcade version or be a PlayStation 1 or 2 exclusive as Hudson Soft dared to test the waters on non-Sony consoles. While far from a perfect game, even outside of its sloppily told story, BR Primal Fury/BR Extreme (depending upon whether one is playing the game on the Nintendo Game Cube or the original X-Box, respectively) nonetheless has its fans among the BR faithful on account of its smooth and fluid controls, introduction of Ability Plus, and the opportunity to enter Hyperbeast Mode more times than once per battle. A player can even enter Hyperbeast Mode whenever he/she wants to, assuming he/she doesn’t mind losing health in the process, should his/her beast gauge not be completely full at the time…no doubt an unintentional reference to the X-Genome Code as BR 3 had introduced it, although that’s more speculation on my part than anything else. That, and we’re introduced to Prince Cronos and his bodyguard Ganesha (not to mention Yuuga “Fang” Tsukigami from the BR manga Bloody Roar: The Fang as a hidden Easter egg character) as well as Cronos and Ganesha’s home country, the Kingdom of Zoanthropes: a newly founded nation built upon the promise of peace between zoanthropes and baseline humans as per the theme of BR 2. Meant to be a side story between BRs 3 and 4, Primal Fury/Extreme has nevertheless sparked debate among the Bloody Roar fanbase concerning the nature of the game being either a sequel or a port of BR 3 considering the notion that it tries to bring back some of the light sci-fi themes that last showed up prominently in BR 2 (e.g., zoanthrope experiments and the tranquil coexistence of zoanthropes and regular humans), yet takes place right after BR 3 with its mention of the World of Co-Existence and even BR 3 debut antagonist Xion wanting to understand his own zoanthropy. Then again, considering that most of the games in the BR line usually take place at least one year after those that’d come before them (thus making BR PF/E the exception to the rule) and usually illustrating this via updated character models, right down to each character’s outfit (with the exception in this case being BR 4), I can see to a point why such a debate would exist.
At any rate, the story of BR Primal Fury/Extreme concerns itself with the foundation of the KoZ as a reaction to the as-yet intense friction between zoanthropes and mundane humans even after the fall of the Zoanthrope Liberation Front (and, presumably, at least most other radical racial coalitions) and the emergence of the World of Co-Existence. Granted, the WOC has flourished in a mere matter of months from the small volunteer group it’d started off as to become a commercial enterprise, even in the wake of the discovery of the X-Genome Code and the crisis that surrounded it. Even so, the young non-government organization’s rise has not proven to be enough to make zoanthropekind as a whole feel safe among its less genetically gifted brethren, whose acts of persecution against its lot remain fresh within its members’ minds. As such, many zoanthropes from across the globe have united to form their own nation with the twofold goal of protecting their own population and working together with the rest of humanity to ensure equality and conciliation between the two species, even at the risk of resorting to what most people these days would refer to as “identity politics.” Because of how new the aptly named Kingdom of Zoanthropes is, however, it relies heavily upon its army for security and its special brigade of zoanthrope mercenaries for income. Likewise, rumors exist of cruel, Tylon-esque experiments taking place behind the scenes on zoanthropes to supposedly discover the secret behind their ability to transform into fighting human-animal hybrids—experiments that zoanthropes and humans alike openly oppose, yet nobody can prove the existence of, much less the identity of the party responsible for conducting or funding them.
On the cusp of the United Nations recognizing the KoZ as its own country via the signing of a treaty between UN Commissioner Alan Gado and the Kingdom’s own ruler, King Orion, the latter decides to launch the first ever Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament to both bring the nation together and show off the power of the Kingdom’s army and mercenary brigade. With a cash prize at stake as well as the title of Zoanthrope [Fighting] Champion, the inaugural UZFT has attracted the attention of plenty of zoanthropes worldwide—some in it for the money, as expected, but others for a chance to investigate the truth behind the experiments that are reputedly going on behind the scenes. As the story progresses, it’s revealed that Orion himself is responsible for the experiments and the research facility within which they’re happening, claiming them to be a necessity both for his people’s welfare and for peace between humans and zoanthropes. His own son, Prince Cronos, who has entered the UZFT as per his father’s whim, is one such subject to these tests on account of his having lost control of his zoanthropy in the past and inadvertently burning entire villages to the ground with the chaotic pyrogenetic powers with which his phoenix beast form has cursed him. The tournament is thus little more than a ploy to divert the masses’ attention away from the scientists’ research for which Orion receives no repercussions, judging from how most of the characters’ endings play out in Arcade Mode. This is especially true for Gado’s ending, which features him and Orion signing the treaty as planned, Orion lecturing him about how ensuring the harmony between zoanthropes and ordinary humans is his job (as if Gado himself didn’t already know that), and the pair of them waving to the crowd in assembly as an unidentified individual whom neither man detects looks on from behind them and grins evilly before ducking back behind the curtained pillar that’s concealing him.
Then again, it isn’t just the endings of Primal Fury/Extreme that frustrate me personally, although they do provide me with more questions than they do answers. Rather, the whole story is a mess from beginning to end—nothing that one can’t fix, naturally, as you’ve undoubtedly guessed, but I swear that there are times in which, as was true with BR 3, the narrative here has some decidedly fractured and scattered continuity with the rest of the series as it has previously occurred. Whether it’s via neglecting the plot progression and character development of the first three entries or reintroducing them in a decidedly incomplete and haphazard fashion, the story of this specific entry in the BR saga doesn’t fit nearly as tightly within the grand narrative as it could or should have. The details I’ve already shared with you alone leave me questioning the logic of Hudson Soft’s writers as they fleshed this tale out. The amount of time it takes for the Kingdom of Zoanthropes to sprout up from out of nowhere, for example, is astounding by itself, especially considering the grand architecture of its capital as the game’s intro and cutscenes consistently show. Think about it this way, folks: It usually takes several years to build just one modern city, which, according to CaptialFrontiers.com, typically costs between one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand US dollars ($100K-$500K) per future resident and can sometimes cost as much as a full million US dollars ($1M) per future resident. Sure, these figures eventually decrease as the city’s population grows over time, but the whole affair can cost quite a pretty penny all the same. Take the New Administrative Capital (NAC) of Egypt, for example, the construction of which began back in 2015 and at the time had so far cost forty-five to fifty-eight billion US dollars ($45B-$58B), depending upon whose information you trust the most. Not only that, but from what I’ve gathered about the upcoming city’s progress, it won’t be fully functional until 2023, if not later, if things remain on schedule at the rate they’ve been going. Feel free to look the story up for yourself, too, to get an idea of where the project is headed now. I’ve also included the following link to a website that had been chronicling Egypt’s NAC’s construction up to May 13, 2022.
At any rate, my point is that if this website alone is any indication of how long it takes to build a single city, major or otherwise, then think about the kind of time, money, and physical labor it would take to establish an entire nation. Considering the year that passed between BRs 2 and 3 and the mere matter of months that in turn lasted between BR 3 and BR PF/E, that wouldn’t be nearly enough time to complete the KoZ’s capital alone, much less the entire country. Then again, speaking of logic, why would the writers mention anything about King Orion wanting to show off the combat skills of the KoZ’s military via the UZFT if the only two denizens of the Kingdom taking part in the tournament (or, at the very least, the only two of note) were Cronos and Ganesha, neither of whom belong to either the Kingdom’s army or the special mercenary brigade that the kingdom supposedly rents out to its allies? Also, aside from taking care of Cronos’s condition—surely a product of the X-Genome Code, judging from his Jekyll-and-Hyde complex, which is not all that dissimilar compared to the one Xion displays in the original BR 3—what exactly is the nature of the experiments that Orion has requested his hired team of scientists to perform, and how are they supposed to help bring peace between zoanthropekind and baseline humanity? Finally, considering that there’s little to no mention about the previous three games’ events—Tylon, the ZLF, the XGC crisis, the Tabula of a Thousand Beasts and the Unborn, and so forth—how tightly is any of what I’ve just shared about this game’s plot supposed to tie in with the rest of the BR narrative? I could go on to ask about certain characters’ in-game stories and how they deviate from what we’ve learned about said characters from earlier installments in the BR saga, but we’ll get to that soon enough. The point here, though, is that even though the Kingdom of Zoanthropes could have quite easily fit into Bloody Roar, Hudson Soft’s writers fell short in helping it do just that. Nevertheless, I won’t disbelieve in the slightest that they likely would have done a much keener and more calculated job than they did, had Hudson’s upper brass given them and the rest of the BR staff a more reasonable deadline to meet and not rushed them just so they could shove BR Primal Fury out onto the gaming market when they did, only to release its more updated self, BR Extreme, over a year later (See BloodyRoar.Fandom.com for more details.).
Of course, as has been and will still be true with the rest of the articles in this little blog project of mine, these words are coming from someone who has had a quarter of a century’s worth of hindsight on his side when it comes to revisiting the story of this fighting game series. That in mind, then, allow me to show you all verbally what I would do to make Bloody Roar Primal Fury/Extreme fit more seamlessly into the BR story as I, at least, envision it. As usual, beware of spoilers from here on out. Otherwise, let’s get down to business!
Bloody Roar 4: Animal Kingdom
Okay…cheesy title, I’ll admit, but it still best describes the nature of the story at hand. That aside, our tale begins where Bloody Roar 1 left off with the Tylon Corporation’s fall after Gado destroys its corporate headquarters and South American research facility, leaving nothing left of them but just enough evidence to expose the multinational conglomerate’s clandestine zoanthrope experiments. This naturally leads to Tylon’s demise, at least on the surface, and its abandonment of countless test subjects and employees who’ve managed to escape the tumult alive. At first, there seems to be no one to reach out to these hapless souls and bring them back home to their loved ones. Eventually, however, the news of Tylon’s fall reaches the ears of an entity known only as Qílín, who brings it upon himself to send a rescue team to the stranded party and bring them back to a secret underground haven that he and his hirelings have established beneath the abandoned ruins on a remote island off the coast of Greece. When the refugees arrive, Qílín explains to them the decidedly difficult circumstances they all face in the instance that they are to return home to a world that is not yet ready for “beings of their nature” (i.e., zoanthropes). The Tylon Corporation, after all, may have lost a research compound that was crucial to the success of their mission to conquer the world, but they have yet to completely perish as a global entity, and there’s no telling just what they might do to the fugitives if they were to directly return to the lives they once knew. After all, if Tylon could alter the survivors’ minds and bodies to turn them into unquestioning human-animal hybrid soldiers to serve its corrupt ambitions, it could certainly find a way to hunt them down and either recapture and “reenlist” them to serve its cause or outright kill them before they could a) testify against the company in court for its misdeeds or b) act out the side effects of their metamorphoses and further expose (albeit unintentionally) the organization of its crimes. Besides, the global public isn’t ready yet to handle knowing that the creatures they are via either extraordinary birth or unfortunate experiments exist and, should it ever discover their secret, is sure to punish their kind out of fear, rage, and jealousy towards that which most of its citizens don’t understand. As such, Qílín insists that the refugees—be they test subjects, scientists, security guards, or so forth—all stay on the island to live out the rest of their lives or until the world at last becomes ready and willing to accept the existence of zoanthropes in global society, whichever comes first. Until then, he himself vows to provide them all with what they need to live a safe, healthy, productive, and (given the circumstances) happy existence on the island with the only condition being that they all meet him half-way and agree to work together with him and each other to establish what may eventually become their new home.
Several years pass since that day, and over the course of that time, the refugees learn to look beyond their differences with one another and cooperate in establishing their new home city, making the most out of whatever food, clothing, technology, building supplies, and other resources Qílín manages to provide them with. Granted, it has helped tremendously that the island had already been a home for plenty of edible plant life and acreage for farming prior to the settlers’ arrival, and it also doesn’t hurt that the island had once been a site for a long-forgotten Greek city and that the construction crew whom Qílín has hired is able to incorporate the ruins into its design for the colonists’ new home capital of Défteri Lykoria (“Second Lycoreia”). All the same, the endeavor proves to be a particularly time-consuming one, even with all the refugees working together to establish their new society. The constant surveillance of the fledgling colony by former Tylon security officers and Qílín’s hired militia also proves to be a double-edged sword for the civilian colonists—a thankful boon of protection from external threats on one hand and a constant reminder of the danger they face as a remote, tight-knit society on the other. This holds especially true for when news of the colony chances to break out during its establishment and many a persecuted zoanthrope from elsewhere in the world immigrates to the yet-unestablished kingdom to seek refuge from baseline humanity and the bitter prejudice many of its members bear for zoanthropekind. Thankfully, the dream of zoanthrope unity rings true among the colony’s growing population, and more denizens than not prove eager to work with each other to establish their new home in the wake of increasing prospective setbacks to it, including threats from many a distrustful human from the outside world in the form of powerful beast hunter organizations and influential anti-zoanthrope governments. Eventually, the citizens fully establish Défteri Lykoria, elect their government, and help give birth to the nation known across the globe as the Kingdom of Zoanthropes.
Today, despite most of its towns remaining in the “village” stage of urban development, the Kingdom stands as a beacon of hope for those who still dream of and fight for equality between zoanthropekind and mundane humanity, even after the rise and fall of the Zoanthrope Liberation Front and the Sicyonian Society (among other radical racial organizations) and the X-Genome Code crisis. Elected royal official Timbo Orma, who has taken on the identity of King Orion, has vowed to fulfill such dreams, too, by submitting the KoZ’s membership to the United Nations and agreeing to establish peaceful relations with its fellow UN member states as a means of cementing the Kingdom’s standing as an official world power. He has also agreed to allow equal opportunity for both humans and zoanthropes within his nation’s borders for housing, employment, and other civil rights, so long as all citizens adhere to the same established laws and social guidelines and refrain from overstepping such boundaries. Furthermore, following his signing of a treaty that would officialize the KoZ’s membership to the UN, Orion has decided to host the inaugural Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament as a means of bringing the public together and celebrating the nation’s recognition as a political body. The UZFT is open to all zoanthropes who wish to showcase their martial mettle with the winner set to receive a handsome cash prize on top of being recognized as the first-ever Zoanthrope Fighting Champion. Predictably enough, the event becomes a can’t-miss event among zoantrhropekind and draws the attention of countless zoanthropes worldwide, contenders and spectators alike. This includes the chief officers of the World of Co-Existence, who have arrived to serve as delegates for their non-government organization to acknowledge and support the infant country and its message to the world…or at least that would be the case, if not for some ugly gossip that’s been circulating globally among zoanthropes and humans alike.
Perhaps the most pressing of these reports is the notion of sinister secret experiments going on behind the scenes of the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ emergence and their hosting of the UZFT. Though members of both species have shown severe opposition to such scientific operations, nobody can prove their existence, much less their nature or purpose. The possibility of these experiments being real is certainly there, however, considering the number of original refugees from the demolition of Tylon’s secret South American laboratory being former Tylon scientists whose motives and ambitions remain a mystery to outsiders. It’s thus going to take some serious detective work to get to the bottom of the matter and find out if King Orion and his followers are on the up-and-up or if they’ve got a nasty surprise for the world up their sleeve. Then again, an even bigger concern exists regarding the escape of three former lieutenants of the Zoanthrope Liberation Front from prison not too long ago. For months now have Nikolai Medved, Ethwasa Masondo, and Gláucia Duarte been at large following their escape from prison for their participation in the ZLF’s activities over a year prior, and many are those who fear that they are planning to reconstruct the Front and return it to prominencea year or two after its initial demise. Add to that the fact that the authorities have yet to apprehend the organization’s original founder, ex-Tylon scientist Hajime Busuzima, following his own escape from jail, and it’s easy to see why so many people have become convinced of the Front’s rebirth from this little bit of evidence alone. Heaven only knows, too, just how many new members it’s bound to recruit into its mission to establish its zoanthrope dictatorship over the global masses—or, worse yet, how many members it already has recruited—and what scheme it would execute upon returning to power, should its reemergence prove to be a reality. No doubt that such a plot would involve the Kingdom in one way or another, especially in the instance that the rumors concerning a secret lab hidden somewhere within the Kingdom prove to be true. Whatever the case may be, the WOC, the UN, the FBI, and all the other organizations who are looking into the matter are sure to have their hands full when it comes to snuffing out what promises to be a raging inferno against the prospects of interracial peace. The time is thus now for these respective coalitions to get to the heart of the matter, either individually or in unison, and put to rest any potential foul play that might be afoot so that they can avert another global crisis and help illuminate for all the world to see what the Kingdom of Zoanthropes truly stands for.
The Rebirth of the ZLF
As explained earlier, Nikolai, Ethwasa, and Gláucia have all managed to escape incarceration for their participation in the ZLF’s original attempt to establish zoanthrope supremacy over mundane humanity. Rather than immediately involve themselves in the events of Bloody Roar 3, however, the three kept a low profile as they made their way towards the “lodge” (i.e., headquarters) of the Sicyonian Society. After all, though many an anti-zoanthrope coalition was having a heyday during the tumult that followed the discovery of the X-Genome Code, none of them had risen to the same level of prominence that the Society had on account of the beast hunts that it had been staging against “Coded” zoanthropes, particularly those who’d attained prominent positions of power (e.g., Gado). Strangely enough, the Society, like the Front before it, had proven to be little more than a façade via which the not-quite-dead Tylon Corporation has been operating to keep the social tensions between humans and zoanthropes high and thus the two species at each other’s throats. Similarly, the Society has met its end at the hands of a loosely affiliated band of zoanthropes who’d set out to investigate its activities and directly put a stop to them. Truth be told, though, it was Nikolai, Ethwasa, and Gláucia who helped put the nail in the Society’s coffin when they arrived at its lodge and caught its designated Lodge Keeper, Dr. Grant Maxwell, before he could fully flee the premises and evade capture by the authorities. Joining the trio at the scene sure enough was none other than Shenlong, the ZLF’s former field commander whom Maxwell had recreated from Long’s DNA following his suicide at the end of BR 2, along with two of Shenlong’s fellow Sicyonian draftees, Reiji Takigawa and Johan “Xion” Rosenberg. Busuzima showed up as well, thirsting for revenge himself against Maxwell for duping him into taking the fall for the Sicyonians’ crimes. Understanding his demise being close at hand and that he no longer has the services of his decoy/bodyguard Proteus to come to his defense, Maxwell reluctantly acquiesced to his seven captors’ interrogation of him and informed them of another project that a team of Tylon scientists have had a hand in establishing.
According to Maxwell, said scientists had managed to escape the destruction of the enterprise’s South American research facility six years prior along with several security guards and test subjects to form a small yet steadily growing zoanthrope colony located on a remote island off the coast of Greece, complete with an underground laboratory where the scientists have been carrying on with their research. What the scientists were researching, he couldn’t say, for he was left quite in the dark about such a matter himself. Luckily for him, such information was of little concern to Shenlong and the others, who promptly thanked their prey for relinquishing this information before executing him once and for all. They then united under Shenlong—whom none of his fellow ZLF veterans seemed to recognize as being a completely different clone of former Tylon assassin Long Shin from the one they’d known a year ago—and vowed that their incarnation of the Zoanthrope Liberation Front would indeed stand for securing retribution for their fellow zoanthropes and against their genetically inferior oppressors. They’ve likewise recruited Xion and Reiji into their fold as fellow operatives and drafted Busuzima, the Front’s original founder, to handle scientific matters for them…albeit with a stiff caveat in place to ensure that he won’t try to pull any stunts to betray them while he provided them his talents. They’ve procured Maxwell’s corpse, too, as well as that of Dr. Steven “Stun” Goldberg—the latter having expired at the end of my reboot of BR 3 just as he had in the game’s original version—for future experiments that they’d planned to have the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ scientists perform when they hijacked the Kingdom’s underground lab. They’ve even secured the aid of Proteus as their de facto undercover agent, having gone as far as to completely purge him of all his memories, save for his battle data, and clone the remaining tissue to use in their creation of multiple spies, assassins, and saboteurs, each of which they program with the appropriate cognitive functions and complimentary DNA to serve whatever purpose they expect him or her to perform on their behalf. With their initial roster all set, the members of the newly reestablished Zoanthrope Liberation Front have at last set forth for the Kingdom of Zoanthropes to locate and hijack its secret laboratory and, with its resources under their control, fulfill their ultimate desire: establishing their kind’s place firmly at the top of the social food chain and subjugating baseline humanity to the same degree of persecution the latter had once forced upon zoanthropes.
This predictably enough leads to the ZLF being behind the scenes of the UZFT, having located the KoZ’s underground research compound and usurped control over it. Initially, the scientists who’d been running the lab had been conducting research that was meant to further examine certain occurrences related to zoanthrope biology, particularly those that involved the X-Genome Code. Specific XGC-related studies concerned the cure and/or prevention of ailments that derive from the Code’s prolonged stimulation, various phenomena related to certain particularly strong strands of the XGC (e.g., XGC-related superpowers), and the potential reengineering of the Code to make it less of a life deterrent for those who possess it. The ZLF have immediately put a halt to such studies, unfortunately, and demanded that the scientists dedicate themselves instead to the creation of the ultimate zoanthrope army with which the Front can conquer the world. As part of this research, the ZLF plan to abduct several powerful zoanthrope fighters, copy the coding of their DNA, and implement it into the Front’s own synthetic zoanthropes, whom it shall in turn program to carry out its cause and subjugate baseline humanity to serve it as its new subjects. Using a complex DNA tracking system that finds identical matches to the DNA samples it’s collected of not only its former opponents (e.g., Gado, Long, and the chief executives of the WOC), but also those whom the Sicyonian Society had had in its custody before their ultimate demise (e.g., Trueno Rodante and Uranus Gamma), the ZLF manages to locate its targets and organize their invitations to the UZFT. Some of these invitations come in the form of simple written or typed documents with King Orion’s signature forged onto them sent through the mail. Others are more elaborate and involve numerous clones of Proteus metamorphosizing into various thugs and their victims and having the former “assault” the latter to draw the intended target’s attention, combat him or her, and record his or her battle data for the KoZ’s scientists to implement later within the soldiers the ZLF has commissioned them to create. Regardless of how the Front brings in such future competitors, the result is the same: The invitee participates in the tournament, the ZLF abducts him or her post-match, the scientists extract a sample of the invitee’s DNA from which they in turn create a clone of him or her, and the clone replaces the individual in the competition. Then, should the clone prove to be a superior combatant to the original, such would be reason enough for the ZLF to keep the former alive and use him or her to infiltrate whatever organization the original zoanthrope belongs to and dismantle it from the inside, thus eliminating one more threat to the Front’s goal of world domination and hence making its ambition all the easier to accomplish. On a similar note, the ZLF can even elect to keep its original captive and attempt to brainwash him or her into becoming one of its soldiers or take the safe route and liquify him or her and add his or her genetic material to its resources for future operatives before said captive’s allies can discover the truth and set out to rescue him or her. All this in mind, it’ll surely be a fight to the finish to see if the WOC’s representatives specifically can get to the bottom of the matter and prevent themselves from succumbing to a fate that would completely undo everything that it’s established in as miraculously short a time as it has.
The Initial Thirteen
Yugo Ogami
Home Country: Japan
Age: 23
Fighting Style: Shoot Boxing
Beast Form: Wolf
Original Backstory: Yugo falls prey to an ambush from a pack of thugs one day and manages to defeat them all without problem, then later receives a visit from the representative of the UZFT who’d organized the attack in the first place: a man named “Mr. Mogul.” Impressed with the results he’d gathered from the whole arrangement, Mogul invites the WOC president to participate in the tournament. Yugo accepts, hoping that his involvement in the UZFT will give him a chance to check out the rumors concerning the goings-on behind the scenes and see for himself if there is indeed anything shady about the Kingdom of Zoanthropes.
Reboot Backstory: No major changes…except I’d put a little bit more effort into establishing who “Mr. Mogul” really is. In a nutshell, as you folks may have already deduced after reading my introductory paragraphs concerning the ZLF’s rebirth, “Mr. Mogul” happens to be one of Proteus’s many clones and is using the identity with which the Front has programmed him (or, if you’d rather, it) to lure Yugo specifically into the cabal’s trap and replicate his DNA from which to craft future agents to its cause. As far as the game itself is concerned, the developers could use a “Mr. Mogul” skin for Proteus for when Yugo ultimately confronts him in Story Mode or when any player should select him in any of the game’s other modes of play. A green-tinged model of Yugo (or, really, any other the other established fighters) could also work for this specific character.
Alice Tsukakami
Home Country: Japan
Age: 23
Fighting Style: Gymnastics-inspired Jeet Kune Do
Beast Form: Rabbit
Original Backstory: Once a small volunteer group just over a year ago, the World of Co-Existence has presently grown into a commercial enterprise, much to WOC translator Alice’s astonishment. She is similarly concerned about Yugo, who has agreed to participate in the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament as per the invitation he’d received from the representative who’d given it to him. Though she agrees that Yugo’s participation in the UZFT will give him a chance to discover the truth behind the rumors of foul play within the Kingdom of Zoanthropes, she can’t help but feel saddened at the fact that Kenji knows more information than she does regarding the circumstances. No doubt, she believes, it’s because Yugo’s foster brother is better about keeping his emotions in check than she is. She also regrets not receiving an invitation to the tournament herself until one eventually does come in the mail…and from Long Shin, no less, an acquaintance of hers and Yugo’s. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, she naturally follows Yugo to the UZFT.
Reboot Backstory: Nothing too different from that which Hudson had provided for us except that I’d rather give her more of a purpose than have her just follow Yugo into the thick of things. After all, I did mention in earlier installments in this series the events that led to Mitsuko adopting her as her elder daughter in my reboot—namely the untimely death of Alice’s natural-born zoanthrope mother and how the Tylon Corporation had taken her away from her human father. Well, in this installment of my version of Bloody Roar, Alice will finally have the chance to reunite with her father. I’ll explain how once we get to Mr. Tsukagami’s.—or, should I say, Dr. Tsukagami’s—entry later on in this section of the article, but suffice to say, it won’t be Long who’ll send Alice her invitation to participate in the UZFT. Rather, it’d be Jenny, whom I’d have be the one to have the inside scoop when it comes to the Kingdom of Zoanthropes, seeing as she’s the one active roster member (so far) who’s had the closest connections to Qílín, the man responsible for founding the Kingdom in the first place…or, at the very least, the underground sanctuary around which the Tylon refugees have built their fledgling nation.
Alan Gado
Home Country: France
Age: 49
Fighting Style: Military Martial Arts (Power Attacks)
Beast Form: Lion
Original Backstory: United Nations Commissioner Alan Gado’s story begins with him arriving at his home, where he sees acquaintance Jennifer “Jenny” Burtory sitting on his living room sofa and enjoying an expensive bottle of brandy. He sits down opposite her and joins her for a drink, but then she remarks that he’s aged, which makes him spit his brandy out in shock. She then acknowledges that he’ll oversee tactical operations on the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ alleged hidden lab, which he confirms and adds that he’s looking forward to meeting some old friends during his trip to the Kingdom. This in turn leads to Jenny abruptly informing him that she won’t let him interfere in her business anymore and that the research facility is hers before storming out of the room. At a loss for what to say or think about the spy’s behavior, he swears that he’ll carry out his objective successfully all the same.
Reboot Backstory: Believe it or not, I’ll keep this backstory mostly intact. I’d even have Jenny tell Gado not to interfere in her business and that the KoZ’s hidden lab is “hers” simply out of the distrust she feels towards him and his nosy UN/mercenary buddies and what they might think about the research that had been going on in it before the ZLF hijacked the place. Heaven knows just what kind of ideas they might get about the Kingdom’s scientists and their initial scientific inquiries upon witnessing the kind of project they’ve been investing their time in under the Front’s “guidance”. That in mind, the only change I’d make when it comes to Gado’s story would be to have the treaty signing between the UN and the KoZ via Gado and King Orion take place before the events of the game rather than after, even if for no reason other than to more accurately foreshadow the shady events going on behind the scenes of the UZFT and to get the players invested in discovering the identity of that mysterious man who’d been snooping on him and Orion behind the scenes.
Long Shin
Home Country: China
Age: 32
Fighting Style: Xing Yi Quan/Kenpo
Beast Form: Tiger
Original Backstory: The following excerpt comes directly from Long’s page on BloodyRoar.Fandom.com. I know I’m taking the lazy way out by doing this, too, rather than rephrasing his personal narrative from the game here in my own words, but truth be told, I can barely make heads or tails out of it myself. Feel free to try and do so at your own leisure, however, in the instance that you just might be able to figure out what Long’s up to in BR PF/E.
“Large tanks, each built to sustain one person, are lined up in a row. The place is a well-equipped research institute, though itself is a unique facility with its stone walls and floors. Long is standing in this room as a voice calls out to him, telling him that everything is under control. He responds by saying that finally their dream will come true. The other man calmly points out that the United Nations were mobilizing at their next convention. Long informs him they have a ploy: that they’ll invite several strong zoanthropes to fight against the people of the United Nations to cause havoc. They will defend the place and take advantage of the confusion, and if the worst happens, they can divert the attention to the King’s research. The other man asks if this scheme will be executed without others knowing and if he consents to this. Long says nothing, and the man proceeds to asks if he loathes what he’s going to do. With composure, though clearly denying, he tells him that he doesn’t and that he’s made up his mind; he’ll do what he must as long as it goes by his beliefs.”
Reboot Backstory: Yeah, I think it’s all too obvious that this backstory is my least favorite in the entire game. Yes, it’s true that Long’s father was the one who first discovered zoanthropy as it’s come to be known in the Bloody Roar universe, but lest we forget, the only source we have to showcase that tidbit of information is Long’s backstory in BR 2, and even then only according to The-Bloody-Roar.Fandom.com. The games themselves only reference his sister Lin Li, and even BloodyRoar.Fandom.com only mentions that his father was a workaholic whose devotion to his occupation left him neglecting his family, Long included. Heck, the whole “workaholic” part isn’t even from the site itself but from a digital copy of the BR 1 instruction manual for the game’s PlayStation port that the site references from GamesDatabase.org. Add to that Long’s history with Tylon and how he came to turn his back on the multinational enterprise that had led him down the path of a cold-blooded killer, and that’s pretty much it as far as Long’s interest in scientific experiments ought to be concerned…or at least one would think. On that note, then, I’d simplify the guy’s backstory to be him training Lanhua following her recovery from her XGC-induced sickness, him receiving an invitation to the UZFT from (unbeknownst to him at the time) his old “pal” Shenlong, Lanhua catching the news and asking if she can accompany her sifu/“big brother” to the tournament and register to participate in it herself, and the two of them heading to the Kingdom of Zoanthropes together so that both mentor and pupil can test their strength against the other contestants and perhaps even each other with Long unwittingly setting himself up (at least in the beginning) to become one of the ZLF’s key subjects for its whole “zoanthrope army” project.
Bakuryu (a.k.a. Kenji [Kakeru] Ogami)
Home Country: Japan
Age: 15
Fighting Style: Ninjitsu (Kato School)
Beast Form: Mole
Original Backstory: WOC Vice President and Chief Negotiator Kenji Ogami’s [mostly] carefree life is all thanks to his foster brother Yugo’s sacrifices. In fact, Yugo himself has stated so much in a letter to his younger brother that he’d not lived his life for his own sake, but rather as an avenger for his late father Yuji, a legal guardian for Kenji, and the leader of the WOC. He doesn’t see any of this as a bad thing, necessarily, as his travels have led him to many an interesting place to see other cultures around the world and meet some fascinating people. Even so, the time has come for him to find out who he is outside of the roles he’s come to know over the past seven-plus years and do a little something for himself. Kenji, however, will be participating in the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament himself and is bound to cross paths with Yugo to prove in hand-to-hand combat that he has grown up and is more than capable of taking the World of Co-Existence over from him so that the elder Ogami can live a life of his own.
Reboot Backstory: First off, there’s no way Yugo’s going to retire from the World of Co-Existence at this stage of the organization’s existence, especially not when he and the rest of the WOC are investigating the goings-on behind the scenes of the UZFT. On that note, then, the whole notion of Kenji having to prove to his foster brother that he’s “all grown up” is completely unnecessary. Really, now, one reference to Kenji being mature for his age is one thing, but multiple reminders over the course of more than one game (Let’s not forget his ending from the original BR 3, after all.) is overkill, to put matters bluntly. Besides, Bakuryu could be put to better use in BR PF/E’s story by taking on some active investigative work for the WOC by snooping around the KoZ’s capital—including King Orion’s palace—for clues to the country’s underground lab and the experiments that are going on within it. Who knows? He might be the one responsible for discovering the ZLF’s scheme and even clash with one of the Front’s agents directly outside of the tournament, should said agent discover him sticking his nose into the cabal’s affairs.
Uriko Nonomura
Home Country: Japan
Age: 15
Fighting Style: Xing Yi Quan/Kenpo
Beast Form: Half-Beast ([Tabby] Cat)
Original Backstory: Having once served the now-defunct Tylon Corporation as a test subject for Project Uranus and as such transformed into a creature of mass destruction that even Tylon couldn’t control, Uriko Nonomura seemed to be a natural fit to participate in the UZFT. However, when the representatives whom the Kingdom of Zoanthropes had sent to invite her to the tournament arrive at her home, they—much to their surprise—see no such monster. It takes them banging a gong to wake the cheerful teenager up from her little cat nap, and when they give her a business card written in English (which she cannot read on account of her being literate only in her native Japanese) and explain to her the purpose of their visit, she asks if by “fighting tournament,” they mean “athletic game.” She then goes back to sleep, forcing her visitors to try waking her back up three hours later.
Reboot Backstory: My idea for Uriko’s backstory going into her participation in the UZFT wouldn’t be quite so childish and campy. Rather, I’d be sure to treat Uriko a bit more seriously across the board in this game, especially if I was going to end up foreshadowing her potentially regaining the chimera beast form she’d received back in BR 1 as Hudson originally had. Sure, there’s plenty of room for a bit of levity within an otherwise serious story, but considering the kind of crap this young lady has had to endure before she even hit “the big one-oh,” it’d have been wiser for Hudson’s writers if they’d picked their spots with her more carefully. Granted, she will receive an invitation to participate in the UZFT so that the ZLF can analyze her combat data from behind the scenes and pattern its latest beast soldier after her, even if she’s still “stuck” with her half-tabby form. On the other hand, the Front could also quite possibly employ one of its top hitmen or hitwomen to abduct her so that the KoZ’s scientists, upon the Front’s orders, could try to reawaken her inner chimera and reserve her for the end of the tournament so that she can take on the finalist, demolish him/her, and have the scientists record her battle data for their “trump card” within the ZLF’s battalion.
Jane “Shina” Gado
Home Country: France
Age: 20
Fighting Style: Military Martial Arts (Single & Continuous Attacks)
Beast Form: Leopard
Original Backstory: Disillusioned after her last operation with the Klaw and Fang coalition, Shina quits her job as a mercenary and leads a quiet life for a while until Yugo pays her a visit, having taken three days to reach her house because the road was littered with landmines. After sending him to the shower and fixing him a cup of tea, she asks why he’s come, which he soon answers by bringing up the incident from her past that’d left her orphaned at the age of four: the time a mysterious fire had burned down her childhood village. Shina admits that the memories of that occurrence still haunt her and that she’s tried to overcome them with all the time she’s spent on the battlefield, then hears form Yugo that he’d met someone who’d endured similar circumstances and of the friend of his named Jeanne whom he’d sworn burned to death in the blaze sixteen years prior. The young man’s name is Cronos, Yugo says before urging her to venture out to the Kingdom of Zoanthropes and attend the UZFT to find the rest of the truth out for herself. Determined to reunite with her long-lost friend, she takes Yugo’s advice to heart and heads for the Kingdom immediately.
Reboot Backstory: In my reboot, Shina would find out about Prince Cronos by catching a glimpse of his face either in the newspaper, on a televised news bulletin, or on some news report on the Internet concerning the Kingdom of Zoanthropes. Once she does, she envisions a PTSD-induced flashback concerning the very event that’d rendered her an orphan at the age of four: a fire of indeterminate cause burning her childhood village to the ground. Convinced that she’d lost her childhood friend in that very fire, she nonetheless cannot resist the compulsion to find out more about Cronos and enlists the aid of FBI agent and family acquaintance Gregory Humain to get the lo-down on the young prince and find out exactly who he is and—if he is whom she thinks he is—how he was able to survive that fire that she’d sworn had claimed his life. In conjunction with her inquest, she heads for the Kingdom to probe into the rumors of the dirty deeds that are supposedly going on behind the scenes of the UZFT, hoping with all her heart that Cronos isn’t tied up in them, should they be a reality.
Jennifer “Jenny” Burtory
Home Country: England/Great Britain
Age: Unknown
Fighting Style: Tae Kwon Do (“Lower Body”)
Beast Form: Bat
Original Backstory: The initial scene for Jenny’s narrative in BR PF/E starts off with her coming out of the shower in preparation for an appointment she has with a client that eventually leads her to the Kingdom of Zoanthropes, but not before she looks her nude body over in the mirror and ends up reminding herself of her agelessness and the experiments she’d allegedly undergone that’d blessed/cursed her with her supposed immortality.
Reboot Backstory: While enjoying a glass of red wine one evening, Jenny gets a call from her employer Qílín, who immediately informs her of his recent inability to get in touch with his connections at the underground laboratory within the heart of the Kingdom of Zoanthropes. Usually, the scientists who’d set up shop there would give him regular debriefings on the findings of their projects, but he’s heard nothing from them for the past couple of days. Fearful of what might have happened to them, especially with the inaugural Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament mere days away, he expects Jenny to check the matter out and make sure that no foul play has taken place. After all, he himself has heard some ugly rumors about the three former Zoanthrope Liberation Front lieutenants who’d escaped prison months ago still being at large and fears that they might have discovered the lab’s whereabouts and are using it and its scientists to fulfill whatever sinister machinations they have in mind.
Mitsuko Nonomura
Home Country: Japan
Age: 41 (originally 45)
Fighting Style: Wrestling (Japanese Strong Style)
Beast Form: Wild Sow
Original Backstory: None. Hudson Soft had discontinued Mitsuko’s presence within the Bloody Roar franchise following BR 1.
Reboot Backstory: Uriko has received an invitation to participate in the first-ever Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament and is eager to put her fighting skills to the test and win the proposed cash prize, which she plans on applying towards a college fund so that she can follow in her estranged father’s footsteps in the field of science. After all, it’s been a mere matter of months since she’s managed to help Alice and Yugo in their investigation of the XGC crisis, and she’s taken to the study of biochemistry quite quickly and enthusiastically. Naturally, Mitsuko wants to support her daughter’s dream and has agreed to attend the UZFT with her to show her some support, even if it does mean asking one of her relatives to take over her duties of tending to the family shop while she and Uriko are away. Even so, she can’t help but feel suspicious about the whole matter, considering all the rumors that Alice has told her about the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ alleged secret lab and those three former ZLF lieutenants having escaped prison and not yet been apprehended. With both of those pieces of information in mind, she can’t help but feel as though something is about to turn horribly wrong. Who else better to protect Uriko, then, than her—especially considering that the two had rescued one another on two separate occasions in years past?
Of course, Uriko’s participation in the UZFT isn’t the only reason that Mitsuko’s interested in venturing off to the KoZ, as there is also the admittedly vain yet nevertheless present hope that she might be able to locate her long-missing husband Nezumi. Granted, it’s been years since he’d first gone to work for Tylon, of all companies, and it’d been almost as many years since she’d last heard from him. Who’s to say from what she’d heard, therefore, that he hadn’t been one of the scientists who’d managed to escape the destruction of the research facility from which she and Alice had both rescued Uriko? Hopefully, he’s doing alright, if that’s the case, even though it would have been nice if he’d bothered to send her and Uriko a letter every now and then to let them know how he was faring. On second thought, considering the nature of this whole “Kingdom of Zoanthropes” project he had surely been working on alongside the other refugees, she can understand to some degree the need for its creators to keep it a secret from the world until recently. Whatever the case was, the whole notion has been keeping her emotions on edge, and she has found it only wise to consult the World of Co-Existence to lend her a hand in this matter. Promptly, then, she’s entrusted Kenji Ogami with the responsibility of looking into the matter—busy though he surely already is with his duties as the WOC’s junior vice president and chief negotiator—and hopes with all her heart that he can do something to help.
Hans Taubemann
Home Country: Germany
Age: 28
Fighting Style: Koppojutsu
Beast Form: Fox
Original Backstory: None. Hudson Soft had discontinued Hans’s presence within the Bloody Roar franchise following BR 1.
Reboot Backstory: On his way to work at the office of his employer, United Nations Commissioner Alan Gado, Hans comes across a pack of ruffians harassing an elderly woman who bears a shocking resemblance to his late mother. Stricken by a flashback from his past in which he’d unwittingly killed his mom in a fit of XGC-fueled rage, he unhesitatingly springs into action and begins to pummel the belligerents, resisting all the while the temptation of beastorizing even as he sends the last thug collapsing upon the ground in a broken, unconscious heap. He then tends to the woman to see if she’s okay, and as he lifts her gingerly back up to her feet, he can’t help but gasp at the chuckle that escapes her raspy throat. She turns to him at that moment and thanks him for coming to her defense, but alas, all she has on her person to reward him with for his efforts is a small piece of paper she has in her purse, which she promptly removes and presents to him. He unfolds the thing and reads it carefully, and as he does so, he realizes that it’s an invitation to participate in the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament specifically made out to him. If he didn’t figure the matter out before, he’s figured out now that the whole thing was a setup—a test of his abilities that someone had arranged for him. He can only guess who that person could be, but as he turns back to the old woman to find out more about the whole affair, he sees she’s already disappeared. Puzzled and frustrated, he curses himself for having lost his train of thought and reminds himself to analyze the whole mystery later, as he’s already late for work as it is. He thus hurries off for the office, pondering to himself what Commissioner Gado would think of this whole ordeal if he was to tell the man about it.
Gregory “Greg” Humain
Home Country: United States of America
Age: 45 (originally 41)
Fighting Style: Wrestling (Freestyle Catch Wrestling)
Beast Form: Gorilla
Original Backstory: None. Hudson Soft had discontinued Greg’s presence within the Bloody Roar franchise following BR 1.
Reboot Backstory: FBI Agent Gregory Humain sits alone at his desk fuming over how he’d failed to recapture escaped ex-Tylon scientist and ZLF founder Hajime Busuzima following his escape from prison some odd months ago and subsequent participation in the Sicyonian Society’s little zoanthrope killing spree. Granted, he’d managed to get his mitts on the perverse lab lizard before foolishly allowing that…thing to distract him and letting Busuzima slip out of his grasp and back into the night. Usually not one to succumb to self-pity, Greg nonetheless wonders to himself if he’s starting to lose it as a federal investigator and if he should simply turn in his badge and call it a career. Then he remembers that the United Nations will soon be recognizing the newly established Kingdom of Zoanthropes as an official country in the not-too-distant future and even welcome the young nation into its fold as its most recent member state via a treaty signing between Commissioner Alan Gado and King Orion. Likewise, His Majesty plans to celebrate the Kingdom’s official birth by hosting a fighting tournament—the “Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament,” as he calls it—in which several well-versed zoanthrope combatants will face off against one another to become Zoanthrope Fighting Champion and take home a handsome cash prize. Strange thing, though…hadn’t Greg heard rumors about there being some questionable experiments going on behind the scenes of the UZFT in a secret lab somewhere within the Kingdom? Not only that, but those other three ZLF operatives who’d escaped prison were also on the loose yet, and he also recalled Gado’s daughter Shina mentioning something to him about Orion’s son Prince Cronos looking like someone from her childhood who’d allegedly died in the same tragedy that’d claimed her biological parents’ lives. What a coincidence it would be, all that considered, if he happened to find out that that secret lab was real and that those Front goons had all gallivanted off to the Kingdom with that tongue-wagging madman Busuzima to start brewing up more trouble in that doggone facility! The whole thing seemed all too conveniently coincidental, as far as he was concerned. Then again, at least he had a solid hunch of where to go and what to do to see to it that justice befell zoanthropekind once more. That in mind, then, he immediately started planning his trip to the Kingdom, knowing deep inside his gut that he’d get to the bottom of this whole entire mess.
Wayne [Wanahton] Farland
Home Country: United States of America
Age: 29
Fighting Style: Judo
Beast Form: Bull
Original Backstory: None. Wanahton is based on an unused character concept as showcased in BR 1’s in-game gallery upon being unlocked.
Reboot Backstory: During the XGC crisis, Wanahton had considered Kenji “Bakuryu” Ogami a prime suspect behind a number of gruesome murders in which the corpses of the victims, all of whom were zoanthropes who’d happened to bear the “Sign of the Beast,” bore incriminatingly long, claw-like gashes that dug deeply into their flesh. After having spent a considerable amount of time out in the field with Bakuryu in his custody, however, he soon came to realize that his suspicions had initially misled him, and his investigation guided him and his charge into the path of a shape-changing robot whose alternate form was the mechanical equivalent of what Bakuryu’s beast form was. Their tussle with him—or, at least, it—proved to be tough, but they succeeded in disabling their robotic adversary in the end and traced its roots to the party that was responsible for its deployment: the Sicyonian Society. Sadly, upon confronting Sicyonian Lodge Keeper Dr. Grant Maxwell, Wanahton discovered the hard way that his and Bakuryu’s quarry was merely an amoeba zoanthrope whom Maxwell had used as a decoy to divert their attention while he escaped the premises before either of the two heroes could bring him to justice for his role in the Society’s crimes against zoanthropekind. Alas, before either of them could hunt Maxwell down, Bakuryu heard some commotion taking place elsewhere within the compound, and as the duo followed the noise, they instantly came upon Wanahton’s senior partner Gregory Humain caught in a fierce battle with a female zoanthrope whose body constantly shifted between her human and beast forms at the drop of a hat. Judging by the anguished confusion she wore upon her face during the conflict, the woman seemed to be going through some grave mental instability as well…almost as if she had no idea what was going on with her during her fight with her burly adversary. Greg thus held his own against his aggressor, but the superhuman speed and strength that she displayed in both her forms—especially in conjunction with the additional preternatural powers she showcased from time to time—was enough to draw concern from Wanahton as he watched his mentor struggle against her. Eventually, then, he interjected himself into the fight, took advantage of an opening he found within the woman’s physical instability, and subdued her with all he had left following his battle with Maxwell’s duplicate. It was only once the woman had finally snapped out of her trance that Wanahton and Bakuryu at last recovered Greg, took the woman into custody, and escaped the wing of the Society’s “lodge” before it collapsed all around them and buried them beneath its rubble.
Months have passed since that incident with Wanahton and his fellow FBI agents having arrested several members of the Sicyonian Society for their precious “beast hunts,” and during that time, they’ve given Eva Rosenberg—or, as her “creator” Dr. Maxwell had designated her, “Uranus Gamma”—a place to lie low while the drama from the XGC riots dies down in exchange for her testimony against the Sicyonians. For quite a while, too, it has seems as though she’s fared well under her new circumstances until a recent phone call from her brings about the Bureau’s concern for her wellbeing. Deciding to look personally into the matter, Wanahton arrives at Eva’s apartment shortly after her call and from her learns that she has received an invitation to participate in the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ first-ever Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament. Immediately feeling his stomach churn with suspicion at the sight of Eva’s very name appear on the piece of paper he’s taken from her as well as the address to which his employers at the Bureau had given her a mere matter of months ago, he cannot resist in the slightest the need to find out just who had sent the invitation and how he or she was able to discover his charge’s whereabouts. He then assesses the situation further and decides to get in touch with Greg and the rest of the FBI and alert them of this development, then accompany her to the tournament personally so that he can directly look into the matter and find out who was behind sending her the invitation, what the concerned party wants with Eva, and find out what it is that he and the rest of the Bureau must do to put an end to this mysterious party’s plans, should said plans prove to be malicious.
Trueno Rodante (a.k.a. Domingo Reyes)
Home Country: Mexico
Age: 24
Fighting Style: Lucha Libre
Beast Form: Armadillo
Original Backstory: None. Trueno Rodante is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR 3.
Reboot Story: Domingo Reyes sits alone in the living room of the apartment that the FBI has assigned to him as part of its witness protection program following his involvement in the X-Genome Code crisis. Trying to catch his breath as he mops the sweat from his forehead after the strenuous afternoon workout that he’d just put himself through, he finds himself drifting off in thought as he recollects all he’s gone through to get to this point in his life. That ill-fated lucha match that resulted in him beatorizing and slaughtering his opponent after he’d taken so many deliberately stiff shots from him, his escape from the arena that resulted in him taking a tranquilizer to the neck, all those fellow zoanthropes of his he’d ended up fighting on account of his being convinced that they were out for his blood after he’d inadvertently killed Latigazo—it all comes back to him in a harsh, unforgiving blur. Now here he is living out of a housing complex in Washington, D.C., under the hawk-like surveillance of the FBI whose agents have been checking in on him daily to make sure he hasn’t succumbed to any more psychological side effects from his strand of the XGC or fallen prey to any act of aggression from anyone who’d either witnessed his Code-fueled manslaughter of Latigazo or been working for the Sicyonian Society, the pro-human extremists who’d brainwashed him to participate in their precious little “beast hunts.” Indeed, the very thought of it all makes him glance on over at the feint red lesions on his inner left calf that together roughly formed the shape of an armadillo, which—upon his taking a close look at it and tracing it with his finger—makes him wonder why he’d never noticed it on his body before…or, for that matter, why he even has it at all. Honestly, isn’t his being a zoanthrope enough of a social deterrent for him in a world where the genetically mundane grossly distrust those who have such power? Does he really have to bear something as potentially fatal—be it one way or another—as the XGC on top of that?
Before he can start feeling sorry for himself, he suddenly hears some heated arguing echoing out in the hallway that quickly degenerates into violence as he hears one of the arguers slamming the other into the wall opposite his apartment. This noise is enough for him to swing his apartment door open and see a burly man in street clothes surrounded by a pack of smaller, equally clad men as he holds a slight, unassuming man in a three-piece suit up against the wall by his throat. The brute shoves his face directly into that of the suited man and growls about him “not belonging here,” then raises his fist as if to finish him off with a straight punch to the face. Domingo, however, immediately grabs the man’s forearm before he can throw such a blow and demands that the brute hit the bricks and leave the poor man alone before the trouble he’s caused already boomerangs on him and bites him in the ass. The brute merely sneers at Domingo, shakes his arm free, and tells him to get lost himself before he “gets his,” too. Two of his companions then grab Domingo by his arms, and out of instinct, the ex-luchadore springs into action, freeing himself from his captors’ grasp by slamming them into each other with all his might. The brute stands shocked as he watches his two friends crack skulls with one another, and sure enough, a full-blown brawl breaks out in which all the suited man’s aggressors focus their attention on their newfound quarry, hoping to beat him down and humble him. Much to their dismay, though, they have their work more than cut out for them as Domingo wards off their mass assault with various takedowns, slams, and counterstrikes, all the while resisting the urge to metamorphosize into his beast form despite his furious desire for justice. Eventually, he finishes off his final aggressor with a solid powerbomb that leaves the thug flat on his back, and as Domingo walks away from his groaning, exhausted attackers, he strolls on over to the suited man to see how well he’s been faring.
The stranger graciously shakes Domingo’s hand as he helps him up to his feet, then promptly dusts himself off and asks him if he knows—or, at the very least, knows of—the great luchadore Trueno Rodante. Frowning at reluctance at the prospect of giving away the ring name he was hoping to walk away from, Domingo admits that he knows Trueno quite well and decides to leave it at that. The stranger smiles almost knowingly and hands him a slip of paper, which he tells Domingo to give to Trueno the next time he sees him and proceeds to explain the nature of it even as Domingo reads the thing for himself and sees that it’s an invitation to participate in the inaugural Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament, which is soon to take place in the Kingdom of Zoanthropes. Judging by what the man has witnessed from Domingo, he encourages him to come along as well and perhaps even sign up himself, should he feel the desire to test his combat skills against the greatest zoanthrope fighters the world has to offer—assuming, of course, that Domingo happens to be a zoanthrope himself. The man then nods and says his goodbyes before walking towards the front of the building, leaving Domingo to think about the man’s offer. On one hand, the notion of redeeming himself—and, for that matter, the name by which he intended to wrestle under throughout his wrestling career, which he’d sworn only moments ago was dead in the water—did sound promising, even if the very notion sounded like one big pipe dream. On the other hand, he was in the FBI’s care for a reason, and he knew deep inside his gut that they wouldn’t take kindly to his trapsing off to put his name out there for potential hunters to hear about so that they could track him down and put a bullet in his skull for reason X, Y, and/or Z. Besides, the whole thing with the suit and the goons attacking him right outside his apartment door seemed all too coincidental—almost as if it was a setup, in fact. That in mind, he decided to take the invitation with him to the Bureau to see what advice they had for him in how to respond to this conundrum, and if there was any chance that they would allow—or, perhaps he should say, instruct—him to take on his old in-ring persona after all and enter the UZFT, then so be it. After all, aren’t we all destined to face the beast within us sooner or later in life?
The Unlockable Twenty
Dr. Howard P. Jermyn
Home Country: England/Great Britain
Age: 45
Fighting Style: Hóu Quán (Monkey Fist Kung Fu)
Beast Form: Monkey
Original Backstory: None. Howard is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR PF/E.
Reboot Story: Having been a longtime medical researcher for the Tylon Corporation, Howard P. Jermyn had lent his time-honored knowledge of endocrinology to the rest of the staff of Tylon’s South American facility until its bombing, focusing his research on the X-Genome Code and how its numerous mutations provide “Coded” zoanthropes with abilities that transcend well beyond those of regular zoanthropes. Since the South American compound’s collapse, however, he’s escaped with several other survivors to the Kingdom of Zoanthropes, where he’s carried on his research within the KoZ’s secret lab, studying his fellow escapees’ strands of the XGC to determine how they function and under what circumstances as well as how and why the various mutations in the Code exist. It is he specifically who is responsible for determining how Prince Cronos’s strand of the Code has affected his body and mind, and it is he who has taken every possible precaution to either “silence” the Code within King Orion’s son or, at the very least, make his strand easier for him to control. Alas, despite the rest of his efforts as a member of the Kingdom’s research team proving to be successful, he has yet to help Cronos master his control over the XGC within him. He’d even had the prince’s Lycaonian gland reengineered with special regulatory nodes to make it secrete Factor B in such a way that it would stimulate his DNA to mimic that of a penguin rather than that of an eagle, his original beast form, to further prevent him from beastorizing further into his deadly phoenix form and awakening its pyrogenetic tendencies. Unfortunately, the prince’s strand has proven to be too powerful for even a measure of that nature to hamper it, for when activated, the Code overrides Jermyn’s reprogramming and reconfigures the hormone to manipulate Cronos’s DNA as it had before. Worse yet, much to Jermyn’s further frustration, the prince still suffers from the same dissociative identity disorder that used to plague him before when he happened to take on his phoenix form, judging from His Majesty’s inability to recall certain pieces of information for which normal forgetfulness cannot attest. Jermyn has thus been at a loss for what he can do to completely override the XGC, and on top of suffering additional stress from his and the others’ years-long isolation from everything but his research year in, year out, he was about ready to throw in the towel on the whole operation.
That was, of course, until he learned from the private conversations that he’d had with quite a few of his fellow researchers that he wasn’t alone in wanting to escape their unintentional prison. Granted, it may have ultimately been true that their faceless savior had wanted to protect them all from a cruel, judgmental, and often violently hyperreactive outside world that had yet to understand and accept biological zoanthropy and those who’d possessed it as well as those who were responsible (i.e., them) for creating a corrupt multinational enterprise’s trump card in conquering the planet. On the other hand, for “Qílín” and his followers to keep them secluded on a remote island away from all that they once knew was barely, if at all, any better than the conditions they’d had to endure while they were on Tylon’s payroll. After all, even if the Tylon Corporation had been planning to use the scientists’ research for such selfish and destructive means as world domination, at least the white-collar bigwigs who were breathing down their necks at the time were paying them for their time and allowing them to send the money they’d earned back to their families. Even Dr. Nezumi Nonomura, as benevolent a lab leader as he was and as noble as his goals were in creating treatments for the X-Genome Code and its side effects, had to have concerned himself too thoroughly with the achievement of his own ambitions to fully understand their homesickness. That in mind, then, they all came up with a plan and decided to work late within the lab one night and jury rig some of the lab’s electrical equipment so that they could send out a distress signal to anyone who would listen to come rescue them from their occupational confinement. Luckily for them, someone did receive their call and promised to send help right away, much to their relief. Alas, that “help” came in the form of the Zoanthrope Liberation Front, whose members showed no hesitation in hijacking the facility upon their arrival and forcing the entire team to abandon its medical research and focus its efforts on creating for them the ultimate zoanthrope army. Those who have refused to participate—specifically Dr. Nonomura, whose leadership over the compound the Front had stripped him of—have since undergone brainwashing as per the request of the ZLF’s leader, the oddly familiar-looking Shenlong, and been reassigned as spies and troubleshooters to take out anyone who might discover the facility and liberate it from the Front’s control while those who remain have no choice but to toil under their new captors’ totalitarian supervision. The Front has furthermore appointed Jermyn to serve as the face for the newly directed laboratory and entrusted him with the responsibility of reporting the lab’s progress to King Orion and his cabinet. Such a position has made him only more uncomfortable with the results of the stunt he and his colleagues have pulled, for now he must lie on behalf of the Front to keep his coworkers alive at the risk of having Orion and those immediately under him see through his bluffs and punish him even more harshly upon discovering his treachery. That is, of course, unless he can muster up enough courage within himself to come clean about his wrongdoing and find a way to rescue his fellow researchers from the ZLF’s iron-clawed grasp before it further subjects them to perform any further deeds on behalf of its own perverse mission.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Yugo.
Dr. Arata Tsukagami
Home Country: Japan
Age: 48
Fighting Style: Wing Chun
Beast Form: Dolphin
Original Backstory: None. Arata is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR PF/E.
Reboot Story: Once a researcher for the multinational Tylon Corporation’s Pharmaceutical Research Department, accomplished pharmacologist Dr. Arata Tsukigami had lost his wife Matilda to complications she’d suffered from the overstimulation of her strand of the X-Genome Code. Worried that his daughter Alice might have inherited Matilda’s zoanthropy and in turn be an XGC carrier herself, he consulted one of his colleagues over at the Japanese Tylon facility where he worked on what he should do to find out about Alice’s condition and how to keep her safe from the same ailments that’d claimed his wife. Promptly, his colleagues had examined Alice to discover that she was indeed a zoanthrope, albeit one who’d yet to have her Lycaonian gland stimulated, and as such, they awakened her inner beast and began running tests on her to discover how capable she was of adjusting to her newly unlocked zoanthropy. However, as per the orders of their superiors at Tylon’s main office, they relocated Alice to their South American facility and withheld from Arata every bit of information about what they were doing with his daughter, which was training her for Tylon’s zoanthrope army. Naturally, then, Arata’s curiosity had gotten the better of him, and as he left for South America himself to find out directly what Tylon was up to, the compound’s security immediately abducted him and turned him over to the laboratory’s scientists, who subjected him at once to a series of experiments that transformed him into a dolphin zoanthrope. They subsequently trained him as well to join the ranks of their military, and after seeing just how much promise he showed as a hand-to-hand combatant despite his lack of official martial arts training, they additionally took from him a sample of his newly mutated zoanthrope blood for future experiments of theirs.
Before the scientists had the chance to brainwash him to serve in Tylon’s army, however, the compound fell under attack and promptly began crumbling to the ground, leaving prisoner and staff alike to flee the building before it reduced to rubble all around them and buried them alive. Alas, while Arata was able to escape the facility’s demolition, he’d failed to cross paths with Alice at all during his decampment, and the group of people with whom he was able to join following the breakout had happened to become detached from the refugees whom Qílín’s subordinates had happened to come across and relocate to the site where the Kingdom of Zoanthropes now stands, no matter how incomplete. The survivors nonetheless made the most out of their recovery over the six to seven years that had passed since then, uniting under the guidance of a Buddhist monk named Rao “Ryoho” Mamurasaki to find their own way away from the wreckage, carve out a life for themselves and each other off the lands over which they made their journey, and live harmoniously within their surroundings. They eventually took to Gaianism as a method of spiritual/holistic philosophy and, around it, developed a system of belief that accepted the teachings of all the world’s major religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, etc.) as well as modern science (specifically that which concerned the phenomena of zoanthropy and all that the condition concerned), yet held as their primary guiding force the principle of Gaia hypothesis—a supreme entity to whom all life forms shared a connection. They henceforth called themselves the Curators of Gaia and vowed to spread their message of worldwide peace and unity with all who were willing to listen to it.
Recently, the Curators have heard of a “promised land” where zoanthropes rule and live in peace with humanity. Considering such a place to be ideal for him and his followers to live the rest of their lives, Ryoho naturally wants to believe these rumors and has initiated a pilgrimage to this “Kingdom of Zoanthropes,” as he’s known it to be called, to discover the truth. Having risen through the ranks of the Curators to become one of Ryoho’s most trusted disciples since their escape from Tylon’s South American research facility, Arata has received the honor of leading the pilgrimage and has accepted the responsibility earnestly. Hoping with all his heart that this journey will reunite him with his long-lost daughter Alice, he likewise knows all too well that he’s based such a hope more on blind anticipation than on hard logic. At any rate, he vows to enter the Kingdom’s inaugural Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament to find out the reality of the situation, whether it be favorable or not.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Alice.
Ethwasa Masondo
Home Country: England/Great Britain (via South Africa)
Age: 30
Fighting Style: Shequan (Snake Style Kung Fu)
Beast Form: Mamba
Original Backstory: None. Ethwasa is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR 2.
Reboot Backstory: During the year she spent in jail for her role in the ZLF’s campaign to overthrow zoanthropekind’s genetically inferior oppressors, former war medic turned “terrorist” Ethwasa Masondo couldn’t help but fume at the notion that she and her compatriots had fallen prey to a glorified ruse. Indeed, she loathed the very idea that the Zoanthrope Liberation Front—an organization that was supposedly dedicated to elevating her species within a global society that was prejudiced against it—was little more than a façade for the allegedly defunct Tylon Corporation to continue experimenting on her kind and further promote the belief that zoanthropes were monsters among humanity. In fact, the more she found herself dwelling on the revelation, the more she came to rue the day she even thought about joining the European Security Corps during the whole panic over the revelation of zoanthropes’ existence and learning the truth about what the ESC thought about them. True, that small militia of beast hunters among her battalion was going to be court-martialed before she assassinated them on the night that she went AWOL, but the fact that that hypocrite Captain Gado and his inattentive, cowardly underlings had allowed such genocide to go on for as long as they had before any of them did anything about it made her come to distrust them, to put things quite mildly. That in mind, when the time came for her prison break, she gladly escaped and made sure to locate the likes of her fellow former ZLF lieutenants, Nikolai Medved and Gláucia Duarte, and reunite with them under the ZLF banner. They then set out for the headquarters of the Sicyonian Society, a beast hunting militia whose members had been making headlines in the news for specifically targeting zoanthropes who carried the X-Genome Code, for the sake of at least eliminating a powerful rival and keeping them from foiling their dream of reviving the Front under the cause for which it always should have stood. The discovery of the Society being yet another “front,” so to speak, for the Tylon Corporation only made the deal even sweeter, as far as Ethwasa was concerned, for if nothing else, at least it was a blow against the corrupt comnglomerate for exploiting her fellow zoanthropes and creating this whole unnecessary rift between them and baseline humanity in the first place. The bonus of being able to infiltrate yet another Tylon project, however, in the so-called Kingdom of Zoanthropes—no doubt another act of mundane human patronage against zoanthropekind and another excuse to further divide the two species—was simply the icing on the cake in her mind.
Then again, as much as she knows she should look forward to establishing a new base of operations for the ZLF, she can’t help but feel a sense of distrust towards the man who has taken charge of the mission. It’s one thing that he physically resembles Dr. Busuzima’s puppet leader for his version of the Front to a T, but the fact that he even shares his very name, “Shenlong,” only makes the coincidence evermore alarming, as was the fact that he insisted on leading the team’s excursion. Could it be that this is yet another setup and that she and the others were bound once again to find themselves on the receiving end of the Tylon Corporation’s treachery? It can’t be anything else, as far as she was concerned. Shenlong, Busuzima, the promise of zoanthropekind’s ascension to greatness over those who subjugated them…the warning signs are just too many for Ethwasa to ignore. That in mind, then, she silently vows to stay alert during the undertaking and keep an eye and an ear out for even the slightest slip, knowing within the pit of her stomach that Busuzima and Shenlong are sure to play her and the others for fools again, should they let their guard down and their emotions get the better of them even once.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Gado.
Xion (a.k.a. Johan Rosenberg)
Home Country: Sweden
Age: 22
Fighting Style: Savate
Beast Form: Cockroach (originally “Unborn”)
Original Backstory: Xion awakens to realize that he’d done something terrible—something that’d led him to soil his hands with blood, yet something that he swears he had no control over despite the deep, sorrowful regret he has for doing what he’d done. Though he can’t absolve himself of the guilt he bears for the crimes he’s committed, even if he was under the control of a dark presence that’d taken him over at the time, he could compensate, and he had to at least try doing just that, so long as he lived. His quest hence leads him to the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament and the Kingdom of Zoanthropes, where he seeks redemption for his grisly misdeeds during the X-Genome Code crisis.
Reboot Story: With Dr. Maxwell having metamorphosized him into the world’s first successfully bred insect zoanthrope and made a puppet out of him by drafting him to serve in the Sicyonian Society’s beast hunts, Xion—the creature formerly known as Johan Rosenberg—has found himself alienated from the world he once knew and hence without any sanctuary to return to following the crimes he’d committed on behalf of those who controlled him. He has therefore joined forces with his fellow former Sicyonian pawns Shenlong and Reiji to reestablish the ZLF with the renegade scientist Busuzima and his fellow fugitives Nikolai, Ethwasa, and Gláucia. The Front’s first order of business: Hijack the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ underground laboratory that they made Maxwell spill the beans about before they helped him meet his maker. Then, with the lab’s resources, the ZLF plans to create the ultimate zoanthrope army with which they can conquer the world and establish the Kingdom as its personal hub of power and zoanthropekind as Earth’s ruling species. On the surface, Xion agrees to this plan, for if nothing else, at least it’d be a way for him to make it up to zoanthropes the world over for the numerous murders he’d committed on behalf of the radical human supremacy faction that’d made him into one of them, only to turn him against them immediately afterwards. Secretly, however, Xion can’t help but hear a nagging sensation echoing inside his brain as he lends his support to the Front’s mission of zoanthrope supremacy—a notion that, at its most basic level, tells him that what he’s doing alongside his fellow ZLF operatives is no better than what he did as a servitor of the Sicyonian Society. Granted, Maxwell had brainwashed him to serve the Society’s agenda, but now here he is with a clear mind—his own mind—and yet, what he is about to help the Front accomplish is no different from what he did on behalf of the Society, albeit against his fellow humans…or, rather, his former fellow humans. For the time being, Xion can only sigh in frustration at the decision that lays before him: Should he stay true to his word and help his newfound family—and, as far as he’s concerned, his only family—establish their reign over a world that already fears and loathes their kind, or should he fight to preserve the world to which he once belonged, albeit if doing so means supporting zoanthropekind’s genetically inferior “oppressors”?
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Long.
Gláucia Duarte
Home Country: Brazil
Age: 24
Fighting Style: Vale Tudo
Beast Form: Shark
Original Backstory: None. Gláucia is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR 2.
Reboot Backstory: After having served the Zoanthrope Liberation Front until its collapse, former ecoterrorist turned “zoanthropes’ rights activist” Gláucia Duarte found herself in the one place where, ironically enough, the ZLF had first rescued her: jail. The difference this second time, however, was that the security to her cell was far stronger than it had been before—all the better to keep her in place, of course, although not solely to make up for when she’d escaped the first time a while back. Rather, her jailers had accounted for the enhanced physical strength and speed and the natural weaponry of the beast form that the ZLF had bestowed her with upon her joining their ranks. Ironically enough, her time in the slammer made her come to despise her beast form for the trouble it’d gotten her into and wish with each day she spent within the walls of her new home that she could earn back her humanity one way or another. Sadly, doing so wasn’t exactly destined to be in the form of serving her sentence and working her way back into society, as two of her old comrades from the Front, Nikolai Medved and Ethwasa Masondo, had brought it upon themselves to break her out of jail and recruit her back into their fold. Their objective, simply put, was to revive the Front underneath the banner that it always should have carried and not serve as the cover-up that it had been for some zealous scientist who was working for an allegedly dead multinational corporation with aspirations of world domination. At first, she showed resistance, knowing deep inside her gut that it wasn’t what she ultimately wanted. Then again, after reviewing the past that she had made for herself, first with Gaia’s Battalion and eventually the original ZLF, she capitulated to her despair and agreed to aide Ethwasa and Nikolai in their quest. Next thing she knew, she was helping them track down the headquarters of the Sicyonian Society, and it was upon learning about them hunting zoanthropes and either abducting or killing them for whatever strand of the X-Genome Code they carried that she found her inner activist awakened and her desire to punish the Society and their “Lodge Keeper,” Tylon scientist Dr. Grant Maxwell, for their crimes against zoanthropekind. Eventually, the trio managed to get their claws on Maxwell, reunite with former ZLF leader Shenlong along the way, and extract from Maxwell some rather helpful information on yet another project that Tylon was apparently responsible for: the Kingdom of Zoanthropes, which they’d built around a laboratory within which they were conducting yet another round of zoanthropy-related experiments. The next thing Gláucia knew, Shenlong had brought it upon himself to end Maxwell’s miserable life and take charge of the newly reformed ZLF’s latest mission: infiltrating the KoZ, taking over its hidden lab, and with its resources establish the ultimate zoanthrope army so that the Front may better take over the world.
As the Front’s operation officially gets underway, however, Gláucia finds herself conflicted. On one hand, the very thought of being a part of a successful operation that would change the world had always struck her fancy ever since she’d first become a member of her mother’s environmental protection agency, the Global Initiative for Wildlife Protection, only to inadvertently ruin its otherwise noble name by helping to form Gaia’s Battalion with her fellow radical GIWP members. Not only that, but she can’t deny how much she appreciates the camaraderie she has with Ethwasa and Nikolai, what with their vision of what the ZLF should be, nor can she resist her desire to have the last laugh against a global population whose members refuse to let go of their narcissism long enough to acknowledge the rest of Mother Earth’s creatures and consider their wellbeing on a far more regular basis than they do. In contrast, her ties to an organization that the worldwide public has outright branded a terrorist cabal remind her all too much of Gaia’s Battalion and the trouble she’d both caused and ended up in on account of her joining it, which directly conflict with her desire to once more fit in with the very society she’d come to spurn. That, and while her beast form had its perks, she still could easily live without its drawbacks in a big way. Oh, well…from what she understands, at least this “Kingdom of Zoanthropes” is supposedly going to host a fighting tournament of sorts to celebrate its recognition by the United Nations, and if it was bound to be even half as legitimate as it sounded it would be, what with the winner of the whole thing earning a major cash prize, then maybe it was worth looking into to see if she could enter the thing and win that money. Maybe then she would be able to make up her mind about where she is in her life and what she wanted to make of it from the present forward.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Bakuryu.
Lanhua Xu
Home Country: China
Age: 16
Fighting Style: Baihequan (White Crane Style Kung Fu)
Beast Form: Crane
Original Backstory: Not much of one. In a nutshell, Lanhua—better known as “Lanfa” on account of a translation error–is the daughter of the old man with whom Long had stayed between the events of BRs 2 and 3. It was at the beginning of Bloody Roar 3 that she fell ill in reaction to her strand of the X-Genome Code manifesting within her body, and because she reminds Long so much of his own late sister Lin Li, he feels that the least he could do to atone for having inadvertently killed Lin Li long ago when he lost control of his own beast form is to venture out and get to the bottom of the XGC crisis in hopes that doing so would lead him to a cure for Lanhua’s condition. She fully recovers at the end of Long’s playthrough in BR 3, thankfully, but alas, she makes no additional appearances in the series afterwards. As such, despite clearly being a zoanthrope on account of her carrying the XGC in BR 3, her beast form has never been officially disclosed.
Reboot Story: Like many zoanthropes her age, Lanhua discovered her inner beast around the time she hit puberty and learned in private how to master her extraordinary gift with the help of her father, who trained her in the art of baihequan as a means of teaching her how to maintain control over her mind and body so that she could better refrain from beastorizing at ill-suited moments. Even so, all her training wasn’t enough to keep her from succumbing to the strain of the X-Genome Code she ended up possessing, which manifested itself one day when she escaped the wrath of a posse of beast hunters whom she’d come across while on her way home from school. Though she arrived safely, she nonetheless fell sick soon afterwards and had to lie down for quite a while before she could recover her full strength. Even Long Shin, a drifting Xing Yi Quan practitioner who’d come to train alongside and live with her and her father for a spell, could do little to help her directly, hence his own personal mission to discover for himself the truth about the Code as a whole and find a cure for its debilitating side effects. Luckily for her, then, Long managed to return from his quest with a small booklet of information from the headquarters of the Sicyonian Society prior to its eventual destruction that went into great detail about the Code, its side effects, and what little of a cure there existed for it at the moment. It may not have been a direct solution to Lanhua’s condition, but it was still more than enough to educate Lanhua, her father, and Long about the XGC in general, and with its guidance on top of a little rest and relaxation, Lanhua’s healing process went smoothly, and she’d managed to fully recover the strength she’d lost when her complications ceased to take her body over.
Now as healthy as she ever was, Lanhua has continued her training in baihequan with Long as her mentor and under his guidance has learned some fundamentals to kung fu that have helped her improve as a combatant. Naturally, then, when her “sifu”/“big brother” receives an invitation to the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ inaugural Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament, she cannot resist wanting to join Long in participating. Indeed, such a grand event would prove to be the ultimate test for the skills she’s garnered since recovering from her XGC complications so many months ago. Long can’t help but have his suspicions regarding the whole affair, however, particularly in concern to how the brain trust of such a newly formed nation as the KoZ was able to find the address to his current residence when he himself had never had a permanent home since leaving his family residence to work for the Tylon Corporation so many years ago. Regardless, he cannot bring himself to ignore or deny his “sister’s” desire to test her abilities against her fellow zoanthropes and thus allows her to accompany him on his journey, hoping for the best for them both as they decide to enter the tournament together to determine how they both have grown as both practitioners in their respective fighting styles and masters of their respective beast forms.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Uriko.
Captain Hayagriva (a.k.a. Kidlat Matapang)
Home Country: Kingdom of Zoanthropes (via the Philippines)
Age: 35
Fighting Style: Filipino Martial Arts (Suntukan, Sikaran, and Dumog)
Beast Form: Horse
Original Backstory: None. Captain Hayagriva is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR PF/E.
Reboot Story: Once a stalwart zoanthrope mercenary whose unit lost in battle to a rival zoanthrope battalion whose members were under the control of the Tylon Corporation, Captain Kidlat Matapang soon found the power-mad global enterprise taking him and those of his regimen who’d survived the encounter hostage to their South American compound. From there, the resident scientists, upon orders from their HQ overseers, brainwashed them all to serve the conglomerate as shock troops and mobilized them against Tylon’s most dangerous corporate rivals in many a successful sting operation until the demolition of their South American facility occurred. Immediately once the bombing took place, Kidlat was able to overcome his brainwashing and join several of his fellow mercenaries—including the commanding officer of his unit, General Hru-Amen Mansour—in their escape from the ruined laboratory alongside several Tylon personnel and other test subjects. He considered himself quite thankful for his escape, too, and only thanked his lucky stars even more when he and his fellow escapees eventually received rescue aide from the mysterious Qílín, who graciously brought them to the deserted island that they would later shape over the next several years into their new refuge. The task may not have been an easy one to complete, what with the limited resources with which Qílín and his hirelings were able to provide them and the tensions that remained between the various refugees, even as they tried to set their differences aside. All the same, the promise of building a new future for themselves and leaving their tumultuous collective past behind them had proven to be motivation enough for them to have pulled themselves together over the six to seven years that had transpired since their escape from the wreckage that once housed them all for so long, no matter in what capacity. That said, then, the Kingdom of Zoanthropes had become a reality in the end, and though the infant nation still had a long way to go to fully develop and live up to its promise as a haven for zoanthropekind, the fact that it was starting to become just that was enough to put hope in Kidlat’s heart. So much faith did he have in his new home country at the time, too, that he proudly became an officer in the KoZ’s royal army and took on his new codename of Hayagriva after the horse-headed avatar of Vishnu the Preserver whom followers of Hinduism have also worshipped over the years as a god of knowledge and wisdom.
Fast forward to the present, and word has reached Captain Hayagriva’s ears of the rumors concerning a band of terrorists calling themselves the Zoanthrope Liberation Front planning on hijacking the secret laboratory around which he and his fellow refugees had founded the Kingdom. Though he’s not directly familiar with the Front himself, he has nevertheless learned enough about its history and cause to understand the alarm that the public has in its revival and the accomplishment of its ultimate mission and has thus brought these rumors to the attention of General Sobek. Much to his frustration, however, his superior officer has little concern, if any, of any potential takeover based on what one of the lab’s operators—a Dr. Howard P. Jermyn, so he’s told—has informed the general of the scientists’ latest project: the development of the ultimate zoanthrope army. Apparently, as Dr. Jermyn has informed Sobek, the scientists’ medical research has come to a standstill, and they’ve agreed to apply what they’ve discovered about the X-Genome Code towards the development of a new serum that will allow those currently serving in the Kingdom’s military to be stronger, faster, keener of their surroundings, and more physically and mentally resilient than they already are. They’ve also begun the production of a new synthetic variety of soldier that possesses these very qualities that would make them excellent buffer troops against the ZLF’s reported potential takeover as well as mercenaries for the KoZ to rent out to its fellow UN member states during times of need, thus earning the Kingdom itself further prestige amongst its allies. Hayagriva therefore has nothing to worry about, Sobek assures him, and owes it to himself to focus on maintaining the KoZ’s security for the sake of the participants, officials, and spectators of the upcoming UZFT. Ah, but Hayagriva refuses to buy into such a story or the overall nonchalance with which his general has relayed it to him. Another could call it paranoia on top of childish fancy all he or she wants to, but he’s known the general long enough, brainwashed and free-thinking, to know better than believe that he would buy into the same words that he was allowing to pour out of his mouth regarding the Kingdom’s security. That, and his own desire to see the Kingdom and the dream upon which he and his fellow refugees had built it thrive and prosper won’t allow him to buy into the notion of letting anyone or anything slip through the cracks and desecrate the one thing that represents his species’ hope for the future for not only their own sake, but the sake of the entire world for generations to come. He’d be damned, then, to see all his and his fellow settlers’ hard work go to waste for the sake of some self-righteous hatemongers as the ZLF have been said to be, and with or without General Sobek’s support, he will find the weak link in the nation’s security and drive out anyone who dares to defile what he and his fellow survivors had bled, sweated, and cried for to establish.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Shina.
Stun (a.k.a. Steven Goldberg)
Home Country: United States of America
Age: 36
Fighting Style: Professional Wrestling
Beast Form: Beetle (originally just “Insect”)
Original Backstory: Stun awakens to the sound of voices, confused by his surroundings and with his memories a complete blur. As he takes note of where he is, he realizes that the voices are recognizing him waking up and reporting that they’ve successfully restored his lost cell tissue, though they doubt that any of his memories have been saved, as seventy percent of his cells—including his brain cells—had already taken damage prior to his capture. His current body is stable, however, unlike his previous one. This includes some tissues from within his brain that they collectively call “the black box” and had failed to remove for the purpose of eliminating Stun’s memory recall. The closer Stun listens to the voices, the more he realizes that they belong to a pair of scientists who plan to mass produce zoanthropes and that he will be one of the specimens they’ll be using for data collection, which makes him laugh despite his current predicament.
Reboot Story: This is another backstory that will remain the same, save for a few minor tweaks. In a nutshell, Stun’s resurrection involves the Zoanthrope Liberation Front reforming almost immediately following the defeat of the Sicyonian Society. Before they go about destroying the Tylon-funded beast hunter society’s lodge in one final celebratory blow against them, however, Busuzima takes the time to use the lodge’s lab’s equipment to speed up the processes that had been responsible for decomposing Stun’s body. His doing so reduces Stun’s freshly exhausted corpse to an inanimate pool of cellular tissue that’s not too dissimilar to what Ryuzo Kato, the original Bakuryu, had melted down into at the end of BR 1, which Busuzima then pours into a sterilized flask that he and the rest of the newly reformed ZLF eventually bring with them to the Kingdom of Zoanthropes. The Front then commands the KoZ’s scientists to restore the cellular ooze to its original form, and luckily, they’re able to reproduce Stun’s body with little to no issue, which—unlike the physical form he’d had when he was alive—is completely stable. His brain, on the other hand, is a much different matter, for while the scientists were able to reproduce his basic mental faculties well enough, they had trouble reproducing his hippocampus, and as such, his memories have been reduced to almost nothing. As per the orders of the Front, the scientists removed his memories entirely so that Stun’s brain could be a blank slate, thus making it easier for them to program the clones they plan to make from him into the kind of shock troops that the ZLF wants for its zoanthrope army. Thankfully, one of the Kingdom’s scientists has safely saved what little has remained of Stun’s memories onto a flash drive that he can easily insert into any computer, which he can then hook up to Stun’s cranium and use to transfer his memories back into his brain, should he ever get the chance to do just that. Sadly, considering just how fearful the KoZ’s scientists have become of turning on their overseers and setting things right again, it will take quite a bit to persuade them to do the humane thing and fully restore his yet-warped mentality.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Jenny.
Dr. Nezumi Nonomura
Home Country: Japan
Age: 41
Fighting Style: Tenjin Shinyo-Ryu Jujutsu
Beast Form: Rat
Original Backstory: Once upon a time, Mitsuko Nonomura had a husband, and Uriko had a father. That’s it. No official documentation about “Mr. Nonomura” exists, as I’d already shared in my first article in this series, outside of some bonus concept art that the player could unlock in Bloody Roar 1’s art gallery and a picture used in Uriko’s entry in the V-Jump book for BR 2 of him and Mitsuko sitting together in the distance on some beach while Uriko and Alice head for the water. Other than that, Hudson never bothered to include him in any storyline, save for a passing reference here or there in Uriko and Alice’s backstories for certain installments of the BR line.
Reboot Story: Several years ago, pharmacist Dr. Nezumi Nonomura operated a small pharmacy as part of the shop that he and his wife Mitsuko had managed together and earned quite a reputation for himself across Japan for his homespun medicine made primarily of native herbs and other natural ingredients. So successful was he, in fact, that his efforts caught the attention of the multinational Tylon Corporation, who offered him a position within its Pharmaceutical Research Division that came complete with benefits, a salary that was ten times greater than what he was presently earning for himself, and the assurance of his time-honored remedies being able to reach a worldwide consumer base as opposed to the same localized group of customers to whom he’d been selling them. True as it was that Nezumi was already earning a solid enough income for himself and Mitsuko, the promise of more money with which to help take care of their daughter sounded promising enough, hence leading to him ultimately taking the job. As such, Mitsuko was left to tend to the family shop by herself, and though it took her only as much a while to get used to her husband’s absence as it did for him to adjust to his new job with Tylon, they both managed…until, of course, the day came when Nezumi learned of the conglomerate’s true motives: the application of his and his fellow scientists’ research in the creation of a zoanthrope army with which they could take over the world. Granted, the idea sounded more like the plot of a science fiction film at first, but when one of his associates let slip some information about a “Project X” that he refused to divulge any further details about, Nezumi took leave from his research for a moment and ended up coming across a project in which a small handful of his fellow scientists were transforming young children directly into animals. Alarmed by the sight of something so bizarre and cruel, Nezumi immediately tried to escape the premises and report his findings to someone who would listen. Unfortunately, Tylon security was swift to intercept him and turn him over to the Project X team, who subjected him to some tests as well and discovered that he had a dormant Lycaonian gland. Next thing he knew, his former colleagues activated his L-gland, subsequently transformed him into a rat zoanthrope, and ran him through a few performance tests. Before they could brainwash him to become one of the conglomerate’s zoanthrope soldiers, however, the facility fell under attack from unknown saboteurs and began to collapse. Thankfully, Nezumi was able to escape with several other Tylon scientists and test subjects, but he had never come across any of the children upon whom the Project X team had been transforming into that new breed of zoanthrope. Hopefully, someone had been able to lead them to safety elsewhere in the world and away from Tylon’s clutches, as he himself could only begin to fathom the grief that he and Mitsuko would endure, had they lost Uriko only for her capturers to experiment on her in a similar manner and left to die beneath several tons of rubble of the very ruined lab where she would have been held prisoner.
Fast forward to the arrival of his and his party’s rescuers and their relocation to what would eventually become the Kingdom of Zoanthropes. The colony’s financial founder Qílín had elected him to be its head scientist, given his success with medicine and his keen habit of keeping thorough notes of every lab experiment with which he was remotely familiar. Under his guidance, the lab’s operators dedicated themselves to unravelling the X-Genome Code and understanding its affects upon its hosts by examining many a refugee’s body and mind not only during its most neutral state, but also during and shortly after the subject in question had endured the activation of his or her strand of the XGC. By equipping “Coded” subjects with special sensors laced within their clothing to measure their heartrate, breathing, brain activity, and so forth, the scientists were able to record the symptoms that each patient was suffering from overstimulation of his or her strand of the Code and just how severe those symptoms were. Additionally, from the data they received, they were able to find one way or another by which most of their patients could “tame” the Code within themselves and better avoid suffering the debilitating side effects from the overstimulation of their specific strands. In some cases, the subject in question could easily overcome his or her XGC overstimulation with simple rest and recuperation. In others, the researchers would have to venture into the wilderness of their island refuge to scrounge up various native herbs with which to formulate special tablets that their patients would have to ingest to make their side effects subside, either as a single dose or in multiple doses over a given length of time. Oftentimes, they would alter their recipe for these tablets to include smaller or larger measurements for each of the herbs they used to account for specific ailments that the intended recipient suffered and even rely on synthetic chemicals whenever necessary to address the direr effects of the Code upon the recipient’s mind and body. As for the most severe cases, the scientists would resort to neurosurgery and directly “fix” the subject’s Lycaonian gland so that it would produce less Factor B when stimulated and thus make the patient less likely to have his or her XGC strand activated when he or she beastorized. Very few have been the cases thus far that have failed to respond to any of these treatments, though Nezumi has managed to document them alongside the more successful ones as a means of helping his team crack down further on XGC overstimulation and otherwise comprehend the nature of the X-Genome Code. On a similar note, he’d also hoped to gather as much information from these studies as he could about the Code and its carriers’ genealogy so that he could determine its source of origin in the hope of more thoroughly ascertaining how it operates, which would in turn further expand the global public’s knowledge not only about the Code specifically, but also about biological zoanthropy in general. Granted, it would have been a while yet, even at that time, for him to report his findings in full, but he nevertheless had every intention of educating the masses about his and his colleagues’ discoveries so that mundane humans could better understand their more genetically enhanced brethren and realize precisely what it is that separates zoanthropes from them.
Unfortunately, such progress has recently come to an abrupt halt, what with the Zoanthrope Liberation Front having located and hijacked the Kingdom’s secret laboratory. How it was able to do so remains a mystery among most of the research team, who have sworn that Qílín had promised that its location would have remained a secret to the outside world under the circumstances he himself had established. More pressing still, however, is the question of how the team will fare on account of its abandonment of its medical research as per the ZLF’s command in exchange for the creation of the ultimate zoanthrope army with which the Front can conquer the world. Nezumi, for instance, considering his dedication in leading the team in its efforts to crack the X-Genome Code, had refused to bow down to the Front’s demands for a research shift, deciding instead to stand up to his fellow scientists’ captors and insisting that they stay the course they’d followed for the past several years. Alas, few were the colleagues who had the courage to stand by him, thus leading to the ZLF forcing the team to subject its hapless former leader and anyone with his mindset to a brainwashing and, if necessary, a very decisive human-to-zoanthrope operation. Now Nezumi has been reduced to a vicious spy and assassin for the ZLF, slinking around every corner of the Kingdom to gather intelligence on those who dare infiltrate the lab he once presided over and, if necessary, rub them out before they can interfere in the Front’s dream of global domination.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Mitsuko.
Reiji Takigawa
Home Country: Japan
Age: 18
Fighting Style: Kyokushin Karate (otherwise listed as Ninjitsu)
Beast Form: Crow
Original Backstory: As I’d mentioned in my last article in this series, Reiji didn’t debut canonically until Bloody Roar 4. To summarize for convenience’s sake what I’d already said about him at the time, however, I’ll just say that the unearthing of the Tabula of a Thousand Beasts at the beginning of BR 3 had awakened the XGC inside him and fueled his destructive tendencies to the point where he ended up killing his father prior to his coming-of-age ceremony as per the custom of his clan, the Yatagarasu. He has since fled the Yatagarasu’s temple and, while on the run from his former clan, is now looking for strong opponents against whom to test his martial might.
Reboot Story: Having fled his former clan the Yatagarasu in pursuit of testing his own martial supremacy over his fellow zoanthropes, Reiji happened to rush right into a plot that allowed him to do just that and prove his superiority over many a powerful foe. Much to his dismay, though, Dr. Grant Maxwell, his employer at the time, was quick in turning the tables on him and making him a target for his fellow beast hunters simply because he happened to be a zoanthrope himself—a dangerous one at that, too, considering his performance on the battlefield. Well, guess what: Maxwell paid the price in the end, what with how his beloved “Sicyonian Society” had fallen all around him and how his precious corpse was now at the disposal of Reiji’s newfound acquaintances, the newly reborn Zoanthrope Liberation Front, for them to do whatever it was they want with it. Now he and his new comrades are on their way to infiltrate some secret lab that lay beneath some zoanthrope colony off the coast of Greece that Reiji has only just now heard about and take said lab over so that they can use it to create their own zoanthrope army with which they can take the world over from those puny, pathetic humans. Apparently, this “Kingdom of Zoanthropes,” as Maxwell called it, is also going to host some fighting tournament that promised a handsome cash prize to the zoanthrope who proved himself or herself to be the best combatant. The news certainly tickles Reiji’s fancy, as it sounds like the perfect opportunity for him to showcase his own prowess and once again sink his talons into the flesh of the feeble and weed them from the earth’s zoanthrope population. Sure, that cash prize sounds like a nice little cherry atop the sundae, so to speak, but to Reiji, the real treat is that the tournament promises to satisfy—even if only for a little bit—his appetite for destruction.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Hans.
Dr. Hajime Busuzima
Home Country: Japan
Age: 36
Fighting Style: Zuì Quán, a.k.a. Drunken Boxing (“Deception”)
Beast Form: Chameleon
Original Backstory: Busuzima’s “Ultimate Life Object” project has come to an abrupt halt on account of his discovery of a counterreaction that shortens the subject’s life rather than prolongs it. He thinks back to his ex-friend Dr. Steven Goldberg, who was an expert in this specific area of biology prior to him transforming the man into the world’s first insect zoanthrope, which in turn led to Stun pursuing him during the X-Genome Code crisis and dying before he could finally get revenge against Busuzima for what he’d done to him. Cursing Steven for foolishly wasting his talent as a scientific researcher and not utilizing it toward the transformation of humanity into something greater than what they already were, Busuzima suddenly receives a visit from Jenny, who arrives at and enters his lab unannounced—for which he scolds her and threatens to turn her into his latest experiment—and apologizes for setting Stun on him during the XGC panic. She then informs him that his former colleague has come back to life within the Kingdom of Zoanthropes and shall be participating in the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament. This bit of information is music to Busuzima’s ears, and he at once sets off for the Kingdom to cross paths with Stun once more and show him up.
Reboot Story: I can certainly see where Hudson was going with this original hook for Busuzima, frustrated as he is with his inability to discover immortality on his own, yet managing to stare at the very personification of it—the very “Ultimate Life Object” he’s been trying to recreate himself—square in the face as she barges into his laboratory to tell him about Stun’s rebirth within the Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ hidden facility. The threat he makes towards her, too, about experimenting on her body only to have her deflect his intentions towards his newly revived ex-friend only adds further delicious irony to his whole situation. Unfortunately, this storyline also happens to illustrate a pattern that Busuzima had fallen into in the original BR canon from BR 3 onward: He starts off trying to figure out the secret element that would make his ULO project work, only to get sidetracked—usually by some wild-hair idea of what that missing element might be—and venture out in an attempt to fulfill his destiny only to return to square one in the end and repeat his cycle of failure all over again in the next installment. The intentionally comical nature by which he suffers his comeuppance time and again likewise only furthers his ne’er-do-well reputation as one of the franchise’s few true villains and does nothing of merit to solidify him as a force with which the heroes must reckon. Thankfully, at the risk of sounding like a braggart, I’ve been able to conduct this proposed reboot of mine in such a way that will help Busuzima avoid falling into this nasty loophole of character assassination and give BR fans more of a reason to take him seriously as a threat to the coexistence between zoanthropes and regular humanity with this specific hook of his being no exception to the rule.
Shortly after escaping prison some odd months ago, Busuzima met up with an old colleague of his from the Tylon Corporation, Dr. Grant Maxwell, who’d promised him the opportunity to carry on with his “Ultimate Life Object” project within the Sicyonian Society’s “lodge” laboratory while he himself collected samples of the X-Genome Code from the Sicyonians’ victims to create the latest version of Project Uranus. Little did Busuzima know, however, that his old “friend” was merely setting him up to take the fall for the Society’s activities while he made a quick getaway with the findings of his own research to satisfy Tylon’s needs. Luckily for him, Maxwell suffered a much-deserved twist of fate when three of his “hirelings” found out the truth about his whole operation and turned on him, seeking revenge for his abuse of their abilities to support his cause. Three of Busuzima’s old acquaintances from the Front—Nikolai Medved, Ethwasa Masondo, and Gláucia Duarte—likewise showed up, confronted the backstabbing Tylon researcher, and helped Busuzima and the others extract from him some rather promising information that they could use to revive the ZLF’s name and mission and make a mark in the Front’s name once again upon the world, albeit in their own image rather than Tylon’s. The notion of taking over a secret lab within an infant nation such as the Kingdom of Zoanthropes certainly sounds promising to Busuzima, to say the very least, especially if the lab happens to have the equipment and testing materials that he needs to finally discover the secret of immortality. However, one of Maxwell’s three ex-puppets—one who interestingly shares the same likeness and namesake of someone whom he created to be the puppet leader of his ZLF—insists on keeping a close eye on him to make sure he doesn’t try anything that would compromise the nature of their upcoming operation. Seething with resentment, Busuzima agrees to Shenlong’s warning, only to silently promise himself to usurp control from his “master’s” paws the first chance he gets and fulfill his dream at any cost.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Greg.
Nikolai Medved
Home Country: Russia
Age: 37
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 whose story I’m continuing in my reboot of BR 2.
Reboot Backstory: Nikolai’s fury at the Tylon Corporation for taking advantage of his fellow zoanthropes and at humanity at large for the deaths of his wife and children and the ruination of his family farm had spurred him on to join the Zoanthrope Liberation Front over a year ago, hoping that supporting its efforts to elevate zoanthrope citizenship worldwide would give him the solace he needed to more forward from so grave a personal tragedy. Even if his allegiance to the ZLF meant resorting to violence against zoanthropekind’s oppressors such as the ESC-supported beast hunters who’d killed his family and would have slain him as well, at least his doing so would show the global public that he wasn’t going to simply lie down and die in the face of those who would’ve rather seen him and his kind extinct. After all, though even he could admit that ignorance of his former employers’ ambitions was a poor excuse at best on his part, it still wasn’t his fault that his former employers at Tylon decided one day to mobilize his species against the world’s populace to gain dominion over the planet. Sadly, the ZLF had fallen at the hands of a loosely affiliated band of peace-loving zoanthropes, and for a full year, Nikolai had paid the price for affiliating himself with the organization by spending it behind bars like a caged zoo animal. That was, of course, until a riot at the prison to which the authorities had assigned him broke out and allowed him to escape and, soon afterwards, cross paths once again with his former ZLF comrades Ethwasa and Gláucia. Once the three of them had reunited, they agreed to reform the ZLF and, as their first order of business, track down and storm the headquarters of the Sicyonian Society, a coalition of beast hunters who’d gained notoriety in the past several months for tracking down and either abducting or executing zoanthropes who were carriers of the X-Genome Code. One thing led to another soon after that, what with the trio coming across the Society’s “lodge,” intercepting its chief monitor Dr. Grant Maxwell in mid-escape from his own stronghold, and having a chance reunion with Shenlong and Busuzima as they and two of Shenlong’s fellow former Sicyonian draftees joined them to interrogate the Tylon scientist of whatever other plans his employers had up their sleeves to exploit zoanthropekind. Next thing they all knew, the Zoanthrope Liberation Front was reborn under its own banner and a new primary objective to celebrate its reformation and reclaim the grip it had once had on mundane humanity.
However, even as Nikolai carries on his pledge to the newly reestablished ZLF, he still can’t help but feel a bit unnerved at the very notion of Shenlong’s desire to lead the team’s current mission. After all, he, Ethwasa, and Gláucia had already agreed between the three of them to revive the Front before that arrogant loudmouth had even stepped back into the picture to take control of their ambition. Besides, didn’t the Front fall in the first place under his leadership? Why would he thus want to command the coalition again? Out of sheer ego? Why not let someone with a stronger drive and broader intentions take charge of the operation? Also, what about those other two zoanthropes whom Shenlong had brought into the fold? How could Nikolai trust them to serve the ZLF’s goal and not Shenlong’s specifically? The same goes for Busuzima, as far as Nikolai was concerned—especially considering the rumor he’d heard about Busuzima having created the Front initially as a veil for his personal experiments and not to support zoanthropekind’s struggle against its genetically inferior subjugators. Such are rumors that Nikolai doesn’t want to believe even now, for he knows deep down in his soul what the ZLF always should have been, and if he had his way, it will stand for just that once he and the others take control of the Kingdom’s secret laboratory and bring humanity under the Front’s thumb where it belongs. The next move Shenlong makes, therefore, had better stay true to what he says he believes, according to Nikolai. Otherwise, it could very well be his last.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Wanahton.
Latigazo (a.k.a. Ignacio “Íñigo” Guerrero)
Home Country: Mexico
Age: 20
Fighting Style: Lucha Libre
Beast Form: Iguana
Original Backstory: None. Latigazo is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR PF/E.
Reboot Backstory: As a naturally born zoanthrope who hails from a long lineage of proud, accomplished luchadores, Ignacio Guerrero had always been athletically gifted and looked forward to the day when he could put his talents to the test inside the squared circle as the latest Guerrero to carry on the family trade. His father Eugenio, however, insisted that he focus on his academics first and earn his way out of high school at the very least before even thinking about registering at the family’s wrestling academy. Besides, the X-Genome Code panic had been afoot long enough for Eugenio to become aware of its existence and how it affected those who carried it, and though he had yet to have Íñigo tested at the time to find out if he was “Coded” or not, he still feared whether his youngest son would end up triggering his strand of the Code, should he have indeed had one, while in the ring. At first, Íñigo accepted his father’s wishes with a reluctant sigh and kept his nose to the grindstone when it came to his schoolwork. When the night came, though, for his older brother Óscar to make his in-ring debut for the largest lucha libre promotion in all of Mexico, he was quick to learn just why his dad was as concerned as he was for his wellbeing. Such was the evening, after all, of the promotion’s biggest event of the year, and it was in the second match on the card in which Óscar, as his in-ring persona Latigazo (“Whiplash”), made his in-ring debut for the company. Íñigo made sure to tune in that night, too, and root his brother on as he took on another up-and-comer, Trueno Rodante (“Rollling Thunder”). The match had been going on fine, too, despite Óscar getting a little carried away with his rudo (heel or “bad guy”) schtick by getting some admittedly stiff—borderline injurious, in fact—shots in against his opponent. Then came Rodante’s retaliation, which came as quite a shock to Íñigo in that with his very eyes, he saw his brother’s opponent beastorize into an anthropomorphic armadillo, leather body armor and all, with an eerie, flickering yellow light illuminating his otherwise brown hide. Óscar appeared to be terrified himself upon witnessing Rodante’s transformation, but before he could snap out of his awe-stricken terror, Rodante proceeded to thrash him wildly with his claws, covering him with many a crimson laceration before launching him high into the air with an uppercut from his mighty right forepaw. He then leapt up after Óscar, caught him in midair, somersaulted several times over on the way down while holding on tightly to Óscar’s unconscious body, and crashed him down hard onto the canvas with a vicious sit-out powerbomb that looked as though he’d slammed Óscar down hard upon his lower neck and shoulders, effectively snapping his neck and quite possibly killing him. Stunned by what he’d just seen, Íñigo could do nothing but sit there on the family couch with a slackened jaw and horror-widened eyes until his father gently clasped his shoulder blade and led him away from the television and the tragedy he and his parents had just witnessed.
Íñigo has since tried to focus on his college studies, but the vision of his brother’s manslaughter has proven to be too severe for him to think about anything but avenging Óscar. On that note, then, and admittedly against his better judgment, Eugenio has agreed to teach his son everything he can about lucha libre in the hope of at least giving him something else with which to occupy himself. Íñigo proves to be a quick study, too, learning everything his father teaches him in little to no time at all and meanwhile finding out about an upcoming combat competition called the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament, which the newly founded Kingdom of Zoanthropes plans on hosting within a matter of months. He informs his father about it, but Eugenio has his suspicions about his son’s interest in such an event. On one hand is the idea that Íñigo wants to participate in it in hopes of crossing paths with and defeating Trueno Rodante—a dangerous mentality, for one thing, since he doesn’t want his son to see any merit in revenge or, for that matter, find out the hard way that vengeance ultimately offers nothing to those who seek and achieve it. Besides, Eugenio highly doubts that Rodante would dare show his face in public, period, much less at so highly publicized an affair as the UZFT, after what he’d done to Óscar that baleful night. In addition is the notion that a good number of those attending the competition might scoff at the idea of a “sports entertainer” daring to step toe to toe against any trained practitioner of a full-fledged fighting art, much less defeating said practitioner fair and square in personal combat. Then again, the idea of Íñigo doing just that could surely bring some prestige to the family academy, and that cash prize would undoubtedly come in handy to further fund the school…or, better yet, Íñigo’s college education. Plus, if Eugenio’s son had his heart in the right place, his participation in the UZFT could make for a fitting tribute to Óscar in a way. All things considered, then, father continues to train son in the way of the luchador with the goal of young Íñigo honoring his late older brother and keeping the otherwise short-lived legend of the masked mauler named Latigazo alive for all to know for generations to come.
How to Unlock: Beat Story Mode with Trueno Rodante.
Proteus (a.k.a. Proteus Alpha/Ryuzo Kato)
Home Country: Japan
Age: 71
Fighting Style: Ninjitsu (Kato School)
Beast Form: Amoeba
Original Backstory: Not much of one. Fundamentally, Proteus is the liquefied remains of Ryuzo Kato after his untimely death at the end of the first Bloody Roar whom Dr. Grant Maxwell, in my version of BR 3, had “programmed” to serve as his doppelganger so that he could better make his escape from the Sicyonian Society’s headquarters when its operations went awry. It is also the substance from which Yun Chi Manufacturing, Inc.’s robotics department retrieved the battle data for Kohryu.
Reboot Story: Having lost the battle against the infiltrators of the Sicyonian Society’s “lodge,” Proteus now finds itself at the mercy of its master’s murderers, the newly reformed Zoanthrope Liberation Front, who have brought it with them to the secret laboratory of the Kingdom of Zoanthropes. Upon the orders of the ZLF, the KoZ’s scientists have wiped out whatever remained of Proteus’s memory while leaving its skill set intact, cloned the remaining product, and programmed each clone with a specific personality to present unto its—or, rather, the Front’s—intended targets. The end result: an entire brigade of zoanthrope infiltrators, each trained in the art of sabotage, assassination, and verbal duplicity meant to test the skills of each of the ZLF’s intended “invitees,” lure each victim to the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament so that the Front can analyze and record his or her combat data from the secrecy of the Kingdom’s secret lab, and—if necessary—take out weak and/or suspecting targets before they can interfere in the Front’s plans.
Alternately, there’s a version of Proteus that takes on the likeness and fighting style of whomever else on the active roster it’s supposed to represent that operates very much like Mokujin, Tetsujin, Combot, Kinjin, and Super Combot DX from the Tekken franchise. I’d plan to have it appear during certain non-ZLF characters’ runs in Story Mode and, in essence, appear to be just like the character it’s mimicking, albeit with a green tinge to its flesh, hair, and garments. When not mimicking any specific member of the active roster, it fights using Ryzuo Kato’s battle data, as I’ve already indicated above, and would appear as any of the UZFT representatives whose forms it took on when delivering invitations to such characters (e.g., Yugo, Hans, and Trueno Rodante).
How to Unlock: Win 10,000 Z-Points in Tournament Mode.
General Sobek (a.k.a. Hru-Amen Mansour)
Home Country: Kingdom of Zoanthropes (via Egypt)
Age: 49
Fighting Style: Egyptian Combat Wrestling (Combination amateur/folk wrestling with close-quarters striking based on ancient pictorial renderings of Egyptian combat sports)
Beast Form: Crocodile
Original Backstory: None. General Sobek is an entirely original character I personally created for my reboot of BR PF/E.
Reboot Story: Shortly after his honorable discharge from the Egyptian Army in which he’d served as an officer for several years, General Hru-Amen Mansour succumbed to an abduction attempt by Tylon agents who brought him to their employer’s headquarters in South America, where the staff of scientists on hand brainwashed him to serve the enterprise as the leader of one of its small battalions of zoanthrope soldiers. He’d managed to serve the corporation well while under its control, too, leading the troops to whom it’d assigned him to victory in many a sting operation against Tylon’s most dangerous corporate rivals. Following the eventual destruction of the conglomerate’s South American facility, however, Mansour soon broke free from its mind control and, though at last of his own mind, found himself without any soldiers to lead into battle, thus leaving him as lost as he could ever imagine. Luckily, his fortune changed for the better as he and the rest of the survivors of the laboratory’s collapse had managed to escape to a remote island off the coast of Greece, thanks to the aid they’d received from the agents of a faceless patron who called himself Qílín. It was under Qílín’s patronage that the refugees were able to establish for themselves a small yet self-sufficient colony that eventually became the foundation of the Kingdom of Zoanthropes—a foundling nation dedicated to giving zoanthropes a space of their own to live and grow while they worked toward establishing peaceful relationships with baseline humanity. It was likewise via election by his fellow refugees that Mansour received the honor of being the general of the Kingdom’s military, most of whom had been former Tylon security officers and, like him, test subjects. He took on the title of “General Sobek” upon accepting this office, naming himself after the ancient Egyptian crocodilian god of war, fertility, and the Nile River in hopes that the very name would grant him the strength and guidance he would need to protect those under his care and lead his army to success in times of conflict as he had time and again before.
Recently, rumors have spread across the planet about the Zoanthrope Liberation Front returning to power and hijacking the Kingdom’s secret laboratory. To quell the paranoid gossip, Sobek has stepped forth as the leader of the nation’s military and assured the public that the Kingdom’s security is as strong as it could ever be—especially with the upcoming Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament in mind—and if the Front has indeed revived and is planning to take over the Kingdom as the rumors have said, its operatives would have one hell of a fight on their hands at the very least. Besides, as Dr. Howard P. Jermyn from the lab has assured him, he and his fellow scientists have come to a standstill in their medical research concerning the X-Genome Code and have decided to apply what they’ve discovered about the XGC towards the creation of a serum that’s designed to make the soldiers who are already on the Kingdom’s payroll develop greater strength, reflexes, sensory perception, and physical and mental hardiness than they already have. A second project the team has been working on concerns a new type of synthetic soldier who already possesses above-normal physical and psychological attributes that would thus help it prove to be a solid hand against the ZLF’s reported potential coup as well as the ideal type of mercenary to rent out to the Kingdom’s future fellow UN member states, thereby earning the nation additional prestige among its allies. Granted, both projects would indeed take time for the researchers to perfect before they were completely ready, and even then, Sobek would have to send someone down to the lab to inspect the researchers’ work. Even so, if he could trust the lot of them over the past six to seven years since Qílín and his crew had rescued them and brought them all to this as-yet evolving colony, then surely, he could trust them for whatever more time before their projects were complete. Besides, as much as he wanted to believe in King Orion’s dream of peace between zoanthropes and baseline humans, Sobek knew all too well deep down in his heart that there will always be distrust in one fashion or another between the two species. It wasn’t just his experience on the battlefield as both a soldier for the Egyptian Army and a glorified war slave for the Tylon Corporation that taught him such a lesson, either. It was life in general from which he’s learned that people will always fight with one another over anything, no matter how petty or immutable. Why else, after all, would such organizations as the ZLF exist in the first place? The Kingdom therefore needs to stay on its toes at all costs as far as security measures are concerned, especially considering how new it is yet and how distrustful the world has proven to be of zoanthropes. Even Qílín himself had warned them all when they first arrived on the island all those years ago that the world wasn’t ready to accept zoanthropekind amongst the global public. Not only that, but the fact that Sobek and all his fellow refugees were able to cooperate with one another for as long as they have couldn’t have possibly been anything other than a fluke—a fortunate coincidence that took place under the direst of circumstances among people whom chance had forced to accept a common condition and work together to mutually survive it. What was the likelihood that the rest of the world would behave in such a fashion?
No…Sobek could not bring himself to interfere in the scientists’ latest round of experiments…not until there was at least more evidence that they were up to the same tricks that they used to perform while under Tylon’s corporate watch. Until then, let them continue their research in hopes that it would give the Kingdom the edge it needed to thwart whatever enemies it would undoubtedly receive following its evolution into a full-fledged world power.
How to Unlock: Win 20,000 Z-Points in Tournament Mode.
Ganesha (a.k.a. Golan Draphan)
Home Country: Kingdom of Zoanthropes (via Scotland, originally ungiven)
Age: 56
Fighting Style: Sumo
Beast Form: Elephant
Original Backstory: Ganesha had won all the local tournaments and had thus qualified for the national competition. He knew, too, that once he’d defeated all the guest contenders, he’d have the right to face off against King Orion’s son, to whom he’d become a bodyguard. He knows that he cannot lose this chance, as visions of the past swirl inside his head and remind him of that day when his village was set ablaze. The burning houses, the people fleeing left and right, the unconscious child growing cold in his arms, the monster standing among the flames…the visions were all too potent yet. He’d expected such senseless havoc from humans, but no…it was that monster that was responsible for this mess. He had to do it for his people. He had to avenge them for what they’d suffered from…Prince Cronos.
Reboot Story: Born the son of a Scottish mercenary and an Israeli war refugee, Golan Draphan lived a youth where travel was the norm, friendships came and went with the wind, and no one place ever became “home” to him. Naturally, then, he found himself all too readily drawn to mercenary life himself during his adulthood, where if there ever was one constant, it was the conflict and chaos he and his compatriots regularly endured. All too often would his squadron have to put down the cruel and selfish actions of one human brigade or another, and with each additional wrong he and his fellow soldiers had to make right via their field work, he felt himself grow more and more disenchanted with humanity and the evil they’d proven to be capable of. True, he’d made many a close friend amongst his squadron and cherished the friendships he’d made with each of his brave comrades, but with every ally of his who’d fallen prey to hostile gunfire or enemy explosive came even further mental detachment from those whom he saw as the force that was responsible for the world’s many ills.
One specific instance that has left him wracked concerned a remote village in France and the small clan of Romani whose members had set up their encampment on its border. It was on that fateful day when his superiors had stationed him and the rest of his brigade near there that out of nowhere, a majestic yet destructive creature of great speed and fiery aura streaked through the village and set it ablaze, initiating a hellish inferno that engulfed many a building and sent people scurrying left and right to avoid the raging flames. Amidst the blaze, Golan had discovered a small child lying unconscious upon the ground and, despite the walls of fire that surrounded them both, she felt cold to the touch. Immediately, then, he scooped her into his arms and handed her off to one of the men from his platoon before blindly rushing in after the pyromaniacal creature in a vain effort to find and punish it for its inhumane crime against these hapless, humble citizens. Alas, he fell short in his pursuit, as the creature had disappeared every bit as suddenly as it had appeared, and all Golan was left with for his troubles was a pair of aching lungs from his mad charge through the fire that was now behind him and the village that it continued to devour.
Years later, Golan and his platoonmates found themselves skirmishing against the Tylon Corporation’s zoanthrope army and losing to them with Tylon taking in the survivors, him included, and brainwashing them all to serve the conglomerate as additional troops within its military. Eventually, however, he had managed to overcome the effects of his conversion and escape with several other Tylon test subjects to seek refuge within Qílín’s zoanthrope colony. Having served as one of the future Kingdom of Zoanthropes’ security officers, he quickly learned to appreciate the notion of zoanthropes working together to establish a better collective life for each other, even if he did initially mistrust the group’s scientists for their original role in pursuing Tylon’s quest to conquer the world. Still, he and the rest of the colony cooperated with one another to establish their new homeland, and it wasn’t long at all before Timbo Orma—upon becoming King Orion, the Kingdom’s first monarch—handpicked Golan specifically to serve as the chief security officer for him and his son Django. Golan naturally took the honor seriously as well as the codename His Majesty had bestowed upon him: Ganesha, the very name of the Hindu pantheon’s elephant-headed Remover of Obstacles and god of wisdom, success, and new beginnings. Ganesha also quickly became accustomed to the royal family, who treated him with kindness for his protection. However, the longer he spent serving Orion and his son, the longer he became aware of Django’s—or, rather, Prince Cronos’s—perturbed mental state. One minute, the young prince would be his usual smiling, polite, happy-go-lucky self only to become sullenly quiet the next. Naturally, then, Ganesha allowed his curiosity in the prince’s depression and concern for his wellbeing to get the better of him one day when he chanced to come upon the Kingdom’s underground laboratory and take note of Cronos undergoing a test of sorts in which he chanced to metamorphosize into a form that Ganesha had all too quickly recalled from his days as a mercenary. He didn’t want to admit it, but the golden, rainbow-tipped plumage of Cronos’s slender avian form and the flames that eventually enwreathed him were unmistakable. Could it be that Prince Cronos, the same young man he was supposed to be protecting, happened to be the very same monster who’d burned down that village that he and his former comrades had been stationed near all those years ago? He dreaded the very thought, but if there was any chance that he was right, he promised himself that he would avenge all those people who’d lost their lives in that tragedy and punish the prince for his crimes against those villagers as well as the scientists for their role in transforming him into such a creature of destruction.
How to Unlock: Win 40,000 Z-Points in Tournament Mode.
Shenlong
Home Country: None (predecessor from China)
Age: 32
Fighting Style: Bajiquan/Kenpo
Beast Form: Tiger
Original Backstory: As Shenlong sits alone at a table in a small dive bar, a woman in a black suit and dark glasses invites him to the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament, only to have him flatly refuse and insist that he doesn’t do “rich man hobbies.” The UZFT rep departs disappointedly, leaving Shenlong to engage himself in idle conversation with a waitress who tells him that she plans to quit working at the bar at the end of the month and marry her rich fiancé, then a second conversation with the waitress’s young brother, who informs him that his sister doesn’t want to quit working because her doing so will lead to the bar going bankrupt. The boy likewise wishes that he could grow up quicker so that he can work harder, to which Shenlong says things aren’t as simple as that before he stands up from the table, places his money on it, and sets out to distract himself with some strong opponents.
Reboot Story: As explained in my last article in this series, my post-BR 2 version of Shenlong isn’t the same Shenlong whom Busuzima had replicated from Long’s DNA and employed as the puppet leader of the original Zoanthrope Liberation Front, but rather a second clone of Long whom Dr. Grant Maxwell had created to serve the Sicyonian Society as one of its beast hunters. On that note, this Shenlong started off having no knowledge of the ZLF and only learned about it through his interactions with the other cast members of my version of BR 3. Nevertheless, he begins to feel a sense of dissatisfaction with his role within Maxwell’s organization along the way, feeling that the zoanthrope prey his creator has instructed him to either kill or capture is of a generally inferior caste to what he’s proven himself to be. Indeed, he finds it almost impossible to fathom his targets’ refusal to unleash their inner beasts unless unavoidably necessary, even with the threat of death from the prolonged stimulation of their strands of the X-Genome Code, rather than fully embrace their genetic gifts and try to tear into him with the primal ferocity that the evolutionary forces of the world have given them. This holds especially true for those adversaries of his who find themselves facing down the Sicyonians’ human operatives and the advanced technology of their cyberthrope suits, which more times than not prove to be a match for—if not, in fact, more so than—the very zoanthropes they hunt on the Society’s behalf. Eventually, then, each kill he makes and each clue he learns about his past from his victims prompt him to put the pieces together, find out his ultimate purpose and value within the Sicyonian Society, and grow a severe enough distaste for his being a tool for a cowardly human who could very well vanquish his own quarry if only he had the courage and cunning to don his own cyberthrope suit, step out into the field, and do his own dirty work.
Alas, once Shenlong finally turns on and kills Maxwell in what seems to be the final confrontation between slave and master, he discovers all too late that he’d only finished off Proteus, the cellular remains of Ryuzo Kato, which had taken on the scientist’s likeness to divert Shenlong and other potential assassins and captors so that the real Maxwell could escape the premises with his life. Luckily for Shenlong, though, the duplicitous Tylon researcher’s getaway comes to a screeching halt when Nikolai, Ethwasa, and Gláucia all happen to arrive at the “lodge” in unison and intercept him, leading to them and Shenlong interrogating him about what other projects of Tylon’s they can disrupt and take over in the name of vengeance for all zoanthropekind. Maxwell reluctantly spills the beans about the Kingdom of Zoanthropes—or, at the very least, what he knows about it—and with an evil smile, Shenlong thanks his former “recruiter” before mercifully snapping the man’s neck and enlisting the aid of his three newly reintroduced subordinates, who all accept him at face value as their leader once more. They likewise accept Shenlong’s fellow Sicyonian pawns Reiji and Xion into the fold as well as former Front founder Busuzima, who—whether any of them would like to admit it or not—has been just as much of a victim of Maxwell’s perfidy as Xion, Shenlong, and Reiji all have, and together, they vow to conquer the Kingdom of Zoanthropes and, in turn, the world in the hope of establishing a new order in which those gifted with the power of the beast at long last rule over their genetically handicapped subjugators.
How to Unlock: Win 60,000 Z-Points in Tournament Mode.
King Orion (a.k.a. Timbo Orma)
Home Country: Kingdom of Zoanthropes (via France, originally ungiven)
Age: 45
Fighting Style: Baguazhang
Beast Form: Rooster/Cockatrice
Original Backstory: Hudson Soft hadn’t initially given all that much background information on King Orion other than the fact that he and his son Prince Cronos rule over the Kingdom of Zoanthropes and that he openly uses his power and resources to establish a peaceful world between zoanthropekind and mundane humanity. He also instituted the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament to bring the nation together to support the national dream of interracial peace and to show off his son’s power as a combatant. Despite this show of nobility, however, Orion seems to have a shadier side, particularly when it comes to the scientific experiments he’s funding behind the scenes of the UZFT. After all, Hudson had never made it clear what purpose these experiments were meant to fulfill, but they’re obviously controversial enough for Cronos to oppose them to the point of threatening to end his own life to stop them—especially with the evidence provided on his character page at The-Bloody-Roar.Fandom.com about him being one of the test subjects. Also, Gado’s ending, which showcases the treaty signing between him and Orion, features an anonymous man watching the proceedings and smiling evilly as they conclude. This man’s identity also remains a mystery, but I, at least, wouldn’t blame speculators for linking him to the experiments one way or another. No doubt he was the man who convinced Orion that they were a good idea, deliberately hiding the full truth from him in the meantime about what they would achieve and the use of the information they would provide.
Also, Hudson had never given Orion an official beast form, even though his kingdom and his own son both strongly suggest that he has one.
Reboot Story: As a naturally born zoanthrope who once lived amongst his fellow Manouche Roma in an encampment on the outskirts of a small French village, former carpenter Timbo “Etienne” Orma is no stranger to prejudice, particularly following the event that changed his family’s—and his people’s—lives forever. When his son Django was merely eight years old and accompanying his mother (Timbo’s wife Daiana) on a shopping excursion to said village, he met up with his nine-year-old friend Jeanne to play some games with her.* One such game was a friendly race in which he accidentally beastorized into an eagle and spontaneously combusted, which in turn set the entire village ablaze. How he happened to transform into such a creature at such a tender age was a mystery in and of itself at the time, considering that the average zoanthrope’s Lycaonian gland usually doesn’t activate until he/she reaches puberty, and young Django’s spontaneous combustion proved to be even more of a shock to those who happened to experience it. At any rate, the fire that emanated from his small body was powerful enough to ignite practically every building within a fifty-foot radius of him and spread like mad, causing just enough chaos and destruction to claim the lives of countless people and animals within the village, including his own mother’s and (presumably) young Jeanne’s. Django, however, merely passed out from the exhaustion of the inferno he’d unwittingly caused and remained silent and still while residents from a neighboring village—including Timbo himself, who’d been working there on assignment from a client—and even a small band of zoanthrope mercenaries who’d been stationed in said village arrived and did what they could to extinguish the blaze. Once the final flame dispersed into a wisp of smoke, the rescuers found his body and Timbo managed to revive his son via mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, only for one of the survivors to crawl out from hiding from amongst the ashes and rubble and point out that it was the young boy who’d caused the fire. She thoroughly described the event the whole while, too, and despite Timbo’s best efforts to defend his young son of any wrongdoing, intentional or otherwise, the paranoid villagers nevertheless blamed him and Django for destroying their homes via their “devilish” “Gypsy magic” and ran them and their fellow Roma out of the area to relocate their encampment.
*Please read Cronos’s rebooted backstory in this article to see why I’ve advanced his age from three to eight by this point in the narrative.
It wasn’t long after Timbo, Django, and their people were off to find a new area within which to live that they suddenly fell prey to an attack from Tylon mercenaries who captured the entire clan and brought them to the corporation’s headquarters, where the conglomerate’s supervisors separated them and shipped them off to various research facilities across the world. While serving time in these laboratories, the Romani underwent various experiments that either a) transformed them into zoanthropes or b) awakened the inner beasts that they already had within them. Tylon’s researchers then brainwashed their newly bred creations and set them forth on their individual paths of death and destruction until they either met their match at the hands of beast hunters or rival zoanthropes or were rescued from their curse via one series of circumstances or another. Timbo and Django were two of the more fortunate subjects of such experiments, having reunited following a battle that Tylon’s less scrupulous scientists had staged between them to see whose DNA was worthier of using for their latest supersoldier. Having lost full control of his own beast form, Django surprisingly enough lost the fight to Timbo, who still had his mental faculties in place and managed to outwit his rampaging, brainwashed son into reverting into his human form towards the end of the clash. Timbo then landed a sharp blow that snaped his son back into reality, and though the security officers who’d been overseeing the duel made sure to withdraw father and son and effectively cut their reunion short, the duo managed to stand by one another days later when an explosion rocked the compound. Not knowing what had caused the explosion, Timbo, Django, and their fellow captives nonetheless escaped the premises at once and, along with several of Tylon’s own scientists and security guards, fled into the wilderness. It wasn’t long after they did, either, when they eventually crossed paths with a rescue team who eventually brought them to the site where the rescue team’s leader, Qílín, would direct them in establishing their new home, the Kingdom of Zoanthropes.
Six, seven years have passed since that escape, and even now, Timbo—having chosen to go by the name King Orion upon becoming the upstart country’s first official ruler—has yet to bring himself to tell his curious son the truth behind all the tests he’s commanded the kingdom’s scientists to perform on him. Come to think of it, learning to trust the scientists themselves was chancy enough of an endeavor in and of itself, considering that they were initially the ones who turned him, Django, and the rest of their fellow captives into mindless soldiers for the Tylon Corporation’s cause, even if they only did so under the orders of their power-hungry white-collar leaders. Regardless, Orion knows all too well that trust has been the thing that has kept him and his people together since the Kingdom was a mere colony of refugees, and he intends on keeping it that way. He thus vows that the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament will be the final test that Django—or, rather, Prince Cronos—will have to undergo to prove that he has at long last come to master his control over his beast form and the extranormal powers it possesses. After all, if Cronos can come to terms with the chaotic nature of his original beast form and its propensity to project fire (as well as his more recently edited intermediary penguin beast form and its ability to project subzero vapors), then the Kingdom, by way of its scientific council, will have taken one step closer to achieving an understanding of how zoanthropy operates and as such one more step towards harmony between zoanthropes and baseline humans.
How to Unlock: Win 100,000 Z-Points in Tournament Mode.
Prince Cronos (a.k.a. Django Orma, originally Cronos Orma)
Home Country: Kingdom of Zoanthropes (via France, originally ungiven)
Age: 19
Fighting Style: Ballet-inspired Huaquan
Beast Form: Penguin/Phoenix
Original Backstory: Cronos’s story begins with him suiting up in his default in-game attire while standing in front of a mirror—a uniform that he’s worn for quite some time by this point and originally hated wearing, even though he’s gotten used to donning it nowadays. Made of a foreign cloth with which he’s otherwise unfamiliar, the suit comes equipped with sensors in his arms and legs, among other places, to measure certain aspects of his body when he transforms into either of his two beast forms. He admits that wearing the suit makes him feel like a glorified lab animal, but his father King Orion has sworn to him that the data that the suit collects will benefit not only him, but all zoanthropekind. It is upon reminding himself of this that Cronos additionally recalls many of the other unanswered questions he wants to ask about his father, such as those concerning the deaths of his mother and his childhood friend Jeanne. What was the catastrophe that’d claimed their lives? Was it the result of a war? If so, over what? Whatever the case is, he’s come to believe that his participation in the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament will lead him to the truth.
Reboot Story: This backstory isn’t too bad…just not as thoroughly fleshed out as I think it could have been. Sure, we know the dilemma from Cronos’s past (i.e., the accident that claimed his mother’s life and allegedly Shina’s as well), but I think it would have been interesting if Hudson had elaborated on it a little more, especially in his ending. Clearly, King Orion wants his son to undergo more experiments, but the writers never let on why he does aside from his claim that such tests would help bring about peace between humans and zoanthropes in some way. If I were to venture a guess, however, I would say that it has something to do with Cronos’s strand of the X-Genome Code, as Cronos clearly doesn’t remember the event that had led to his mother’s death and especially the fact that he’d caused it, even if only inadvertently. There’s also the torching of Ganesha’s village, which ended every bit as tragically and has prompted the man formerly named Golan Draphan to plot his revenge against the young heir to Orion’s throne, among surely further instances in which Cronos had lost control of his phoenix form. If nothing else, this at least falls in line with how I’ve reimagined how the XGC operates based on Long unwittingly killing his mother and sister prior to the events of BR 1.
On a similar note, to reference the asterisk-marked note I’d made in King Orion’s backstory, I’m aware that Gado had rescued Shina from the ruins of her village when she was four rather than nine in the original Bloody Roar canon. I’d decided to advance the situation by five years, though, to allow more time for Cronos and Shina to know each other during their childhoods for a while longer and in turn their friendship to be much stronger than originally planned, thus making Cronos’s haphazard torching of his own village even more tragic for them both. The extra half-decade would also allow for Cronos and Shina’s respective Lycaonian glands to be more developed around the point of the tragedy, which would make even more sense for Cronos’s sudden beastorization, considering how Uriko prior to and in the original BR 1 had begun to show early signs of zoanthropy by age nine, hence Tylon having her kidnapped and transforming her into Uranus Alpha. This would thus make Cronos eight around the time his disaster occurred rather than three, making him only one year younger than Uriko was when Tylon’s executives had sent Hans to abduct her on their behalf—still early for a developing zoanthrope, yet not quite the toddler he would have been in the original continuity. Similarly, all of this would still take place five or so years before the events of BR 1 and at least five years after the scientific community had rejected Long’s father’s discovery of biological zoanthropy according to The-Bloody-Roar.Fandom.com. As for Shina, she would still have time (i.e., four years) in her post-adoption life to train beneath her foster father Gado in the ways of armed and unarmed combat and grow to become a powerful mercenary in her own right, seeing as the year in which she’d take down an entire platoon of soldiers by herself with her bare hands (age thirteen) would take place roughly a year before the events of the first BR.
Then again, though I’ve already touched upon this next point in Jermyn’s backstory from earlier, I’m also curious as to how Cronos’s two beast forms work in the original version of BR PF/E, both individually and in relation to one another. Sure, penguin (mundane Antarctic waterfowl) versus phoenix (raptor-based firebird of myth), ice versus fire, but aside from elemental affiliation, how did Cronos go about receiving a penguin beast form? Did the scientists responsible for operating on him tweak his Lycaonian glad in such a way so that the Factor B flowing through his system rearranged his DNA to mimic that of a penguin? If so, what were they hoping to accomplish by doing that? Preventing him from having to metamorphosize into the pyromaniacal monster that his phoenix beast form was—and, more likely than not, still is—by giving him a seemingly much less hazardous primary beast form from which his secondary phoenix form had to transition? Because their plan backfired, in that case, seeing as zoanthropes in Primal Fury/Extreme can enter Hyperbeast Mode straight out of their human forms without issue, save for (as I’ve mentioned earlier) having to sacrifice health in the process, should they not have enough Factor B flowing through their bloodstreams to properly fuel such a change (i.e., their beast gauges not be one hundred percent full). Was a penguin simply the animal that was most compatible with the young prince’s DNA that the scientists could contrive for whatever else they’d planned to do for the young prince? If so, what further experiments await him following the tournament and the final “taming” (if any) of his phoenix form? I’d additionally be interested to discover exactly how Cronos’s cryogenetic and pyrogenetic powers work when he’s in his respective beast forms. What processes, precisely, take place within his body to produce the ice effects he manifests when he’s in his penguin form and, for that matter, the fire effects he uses when he’s in his phoenix form? After all, if Sega could explain how Luke Custer’s beast forms manifest their own elemental powers in the Beast Data and Enemy Data modes of Project Altered Beast—a decidedly BR-esque take from 2005 on their late-1980s arcade classic Altered Beast—then so can any of the Bloody Roar games themselves describe how the X-Genome Code provides “Coded” zoanthropes with whatever superpowers they possess beyond those that their regular beast forms already give them. The esophagus of Luke’s Minotaur form particularly is said to have mucus membranes that emit highly volatile substances that erupt into flames when they mingle with oxygen, which would explain the Minotaur’s own pyrotechnics. Likewise, the lungs of Luke’s “Wendigo” (translation: Yeti) form boast a lattice of cells that act in a way not too dissimilar to a refrigerator’s cooling mechanism and in turn allow him to exhale sub-zero air, hence its cryotechnic abilities. I can imagine that Cronos’s phoenix and penguin forms, respectively, operate in similar fashions, and if that’s the case, then maybe—just maybe—the secret to eliminating the phoenix’s pyromania lies within the stunting the very source of such processes. That is, of course, unless Cronos’s strand of the Code is simply too strong for the scientists who are trying to treat him to override. Come to think of it, though, I further wonder if it is indeed the rewriting of the X-Genome Code that the Kingdom’s scientists are trying to discover in the original PF/E. If it is, then hey—that’d be even more reason for Hudson Soft to have allowed the Code to stand on its own two feet as part of the Bloody Roar story in BR 3 and not automatically tie it in with the Tabula of a Thousand Beasts and the Unborn and therefore transform it into something wholly supernatural! That, and it’d be even more reason to focus on the Code as a plot device for more than just one game.
How to Unlock: Win 140,000 Z-Points in Tournament Mode.
Uranus (a.k.a. Uranus Gamma/Eva Rosenberg)
Home Country: Sweden
Age: 25
Fighting Style: Superpowered Hybrid
Beast Form: Chimera
Original Backstory: Nothing new since Bloody Roar 3.
Reboot Story: After having succumbed to the experiments that her captor Dr. Grant Maxwell had performed on her as well as a test run in which Maxwell had set her upon a federal agent who’d managed to infiltrate the Sicyonian Society’s lodge, Eva Rosenberg found herself at a loss for what to do or where to go. Not only had she lost contact with her brother Joel on top of losing her home and parents, but now she’d become someone—nay…something—that she no longer recognized: a bloodthirsty force of destruction that couldn’t contain the energy that was wreaking havoc upon her mind and body. Luckily for her, the federal agent’s partner—a tall, broad-shouldered man named Farland—had knocked her back to her senses and rescued her from the Society’s headquarters before the building itself collapsed. Agent Farland had likewise managed to pull some strings with his agency to see to it that she received the protection she needed from any of the late Dr. Maxwell’s former colleagues at the Tylon Corporation, which had apparently survived closure after all following the exposure of their zoanthrope experiments, as well as anyone else who’d be out for her blood for one reason or another. All that he and the rest of his agency required her to do was to testify against the Sicyonians for their crimes and keep a low profile afterwards until the sensitivities from the XHC crisis and the Society’s involvement in it finally died down. That, and they expected her to show up regularly at a secret testing facility that the agency had specifically designed for zoanthropy experiment survivors like her so that federal scientists could test her beastorization process, learn how her body functioned since she’d become a zoanthrope, and at least try to help her “tame” her “inner beast,” if not completely “cure” her of her condition. Though the very idea of labs and tests made Eva’s stomach churn, her desire to be rid of the curse that Maxwell had placed upon her and take one more step to leading an ordinary life was strong enough to make her agree to the agency’s conditions, and for quite some time, she was able to adhere to their guidelines quite easily.
After a matter of months, however, Eva receives in the mail an odd slip of paper addressed to her that, upon reading it, she realizes is an invitation to participate in a fighting tournament for zoanthropes in the newly established Kingdom of Zoanthropes—the Ultimate Zoanthrope Fighting Tournament, as it’s called. At first, she cannot understand how anyone outside of the FBI was able to find out where she’s been staying, so she naturally calls up Agent Farland, who arrives at her apartment shortly, takes a close look at the invitation himself, and apparently feels a sense of suspicion as well. He then proposes to contact his senior partner and the rest of the Bureau to alert them of this turn of events, then accompany her to the tournament personally so that he can directly look into the matter and find out who was behind sending her the invitation, what the concerned party wants with Eva, and—should those plans be of ill intent—what it is that he and the rest of the Bureau must do to thwart them.
How to Unlock: Win 200,000 Z-Points in Tournament Mode.
As a bonus, I would also include the characters of Bloody Roar: The Fang as Easter eggs to whom players could gain access upon beating the game in a different mode such as Time Attack, Team Battle, or Survival with a given preestablished character. Once a player unlocks one of these characters, he or she can then press the Start button while selecting the preestablished character with whom he or she had unlocked said bonus character, who then serves as a fourth costume (as opposed to the usual three costumes per character) to said preestablished character—complete with his or her own move set—that the player can access in any mode except for Story, which I would strictly reserve for the preestablished roster (Yugo, Alice, Gado, etc.). The list for these characters and the preestablished character with whom players must unlock them is as follows with minor (i.e., unnamed) characters form the manga also possible:
Yuga “Fang” Tsukigami: Unlock with Yugo.
Mashiro Toba: Unlock with Alice.
Akino Hayawaka: Unlock with Uriko.
Dr. Kreus/Kreuz “Lion-Head” Leon: Unlock with Gado.
Shirakumo: Unlock with Long.
Namaniki & Momo: Unlock with Jermyn. Namaniki would be selectable with the Start button while Momo would be selectable with the Select button.
Shuou of Suzaku: Unlock with Cronos.
Kou Kou the Bird: Unlock with Reiji.
Yato of Seiryu: Unlock with Latigazo.
Aoi the Mermaid: Unlock with Gláucia.
Hashiba/Oagito no Magami: Unlock with Uranus.
This hereby concludes my reboot of Bloody Roar Primal Fury/BR Extreme. 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 don’t forget to subscribe to this blog for more content, if you haven’t done so already, as my fifth installment in my revised Bloody Roar reboot won’t be too far away. Until then, here’s to a happy 2023! Hopefully, this coming year will prove to be more peaceful and propitious for us all than what I’ve been reading it’ll be. Aside from that, thank you for your support, and I look forward to the next time we meet.
Regards,
Dustin M. Weber
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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 1: Bloody Roar: The Beast Within
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 5: Bloody Roar 5: Predestined Evolution
AuthorDustinWeber 
