Totally NOT Another Hyper Beast Duel: No Next Bloody Roar

Here’s some
unexpected news no one saw coming: a new Bloody
Roar game is nearly upon us! If your average fighting game fan was to make
a list about what dormant franchise in the genre they would like to see
rebooted (if it hasn’t already), Bloody Roar would definitely not make list. But the fact that this
game is coming is nonetheless an interesting turn of events. It’s planned for release
on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 sometime in 2012.

 

The Bloody
Roar franchise was an obscure one compared to the heavy hitters that glutted
the market in the late ’90s and early ’00s. It made a nice amount of fans
because it combined good gameplay with an distinct gimmick, the latter of which
involved its combatants, known as “zoanthropes,” having the ability to
transform into beasts. It wasn’t the deepest fighter around, but it was a fun
game to play with friends. The franchise was popular enough to receive four
games, three of which were exclusive to Sony consoles. Heck, you could argue four of them were. Bloody Roar: Primal Fury and Bloody
Roar Xtreme for Gamecube and Xbox, respectively, were updated versions of Bloody Roar 3 gameplay-wise, but had a
different story. Bloody Roar 4 is
commonly regarded as the worst game in the franchise due to many changes made
to the gameplay system. It was also plagued with terrible performance issues.
It put the franchise to sleep for a good while, but someone at Hudson thought now
was the time to bring it back.

 

Actually,
this announcement isn’t completely
out of left field. Right before Hudson Entertainment (Hudson Soft’s North American
division) shuttered, its brand manager Morgan Haro said there was a new Bloody
Roar title in development. They didn’t think there was much of a chance for it
to succeed on the retail market, so the game was being developed for Xbox Live
Arcade and Playstation Network. It was canceled after it couldn’t get off the
ground fully, and developer Hudson Soft — well, co-developer in this particular
case, as Eighting handled most of the work in the older games — was expected
to focus on casual and social games after being subsumed by Konami. It appears
those plans have changed.

 

In fact,
Hudson Soft has been implying over their Twitter account that this
might be a retail release. It
apparently doesn’t have an official name yet, considering they’ve been using
the hashtags “Bloody Roar 5” and “Bloody Roar Project 2012” to accompany their
tweets — they’re saying this game will qualify as a reboot. In terms of
characters, it appears that everyone from the original will be returning. That
includes Hans, Mitsuko, and Greg, who haven’t been seen since the first game. Also,
they’re using the second Bakuryu (the young ninja Kenji Ogami) instead of the
old one. Uranus and Xion from the third game will also be in, but Ganesha and Cronos
have been disconfirmed. Peculiarly, they wouldn’t answer whether Shina would
make it in, so file her under the “maybe” category.

 

Hudson Soft
has only announced the game at the moment, meaning there are no concrete details
about the gameplay. We don’t know who’s developing it either, but cross your
fingers and hope it’s Eighting again. Ultimate
Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is nearing completion, and it doesn’t look like they’ve
done much other than that, so hopefully they’ve been working on this in secret.
Hudson hopes to unveil the game sometime before January 2012.

Edit: And they sure as hell won’t be unveiling it, because this has all been one big troll. I’m ashamed at this news, mainly because I wasted space on the blog for this. Apparently that Twitter account is fake, and the real one was shut down shortly after Hudson was absorbed by Konami. It wouldn’t be farfetched to assume that the franchise’s dedicated fans will want to enact “bloody roar” against whoever this person is!

In any case, I apologize for wasting your time.