nah, i think a lot of people who say BR2 is the best say it out of nostaliga, BR2 had amazing presentation with lots of great art from Naochika Morishita/CARAMEL MAMA and looked great for a PS1 game so lots of people who played it casualy will remember it but mechanicaly BR3 was signifigantly better and also better suted for more serious play.
quick rundown of the series
BR1 aka Beastorizer was the first game in the series it ran at constant 60fps which was pretty good for a game back it was released to arcade and later ps1.
The game had a fairly simple juggle combo system with both wall and ground bounce and air recovery, the game had a very strong focus on meter management and included rave mode which allowed for more complex custom combos. despite some people calling it a masher the standard ground combo chains were almost useless at higher level play due to block evade and the ground game revolved more around footsies and pokes.
**BR2 **was released 2 years later had no arcade release and was straight to ps1. They expanded on the juggle system tweaking air recovery and diminishing returns, they made canceling moves much smoother than it was in BR1 and added more cancel points to many attacks, they also added two different types of guard light and heavy and also guard breaks. They removed rave mode and instead added supers, these supers were horribly overpowered often dealing around 70% damage for such a low cost (provided you were in beast you could use them the amount of meter you had made no difference but using your super would revert you to human mode).
The game included a story mode that caused casual players to instantly jizz there pants, you played through from your chosen characters perspective and the whole story was only revealed after you played through every character, this is what most people remember about the Bloody Roar franchise and usually why BR2 is so revered.
**BR3 **the peak of the series released to arcade and later ported to ps2. Once again they greatly expanded on and refined the juggle system adding jump cancels (Air Cancels as the game calls them) and air combos, they fleshed out each of the characters expanding there move sets and reinforcing character arch types at the same time adding a lot more freedom and options to each character. They fixed the supers so the base damage reflects how much meter you have at the time so its more of a toss up between instant heavy damage or prolonged sustainability and less of a comeback mechanic as well as an overall damage nerf, a tweaked version of rave was returned called hyperbeast it allowed for very powerful custom combos but at the cost of losing your beast mode for the remainder of the match, they split guarding and evade into two separate defensive mechanics and added an 8-way run (though its slow and attacks have so much tracking its borderline useless) overall the game feels a lot more fast and fluid than its predecessor’s while retaining heavy meter management and a strong ground footsie and poke game.
Bloody Roar 3 also introduced the rather infamous debug mode, this mode let you manipulate any part of the game you could use it to look at all the hitbox and frame data, what did people use it for i here you ask? why to make crude porn of course so debug was inevitably removed from the international version of the game…
**Primal Fury/Extreme **was a spin off game released on the GC and later ported to xbox it is essentially a waterdown casualized version of BR3 with two new characters and balance changes, the characters Cronos and Ganesha are both great characters and the balance changes are good (minor tweaks to the top tiers with lots of nice buffs for the weak characters like Yugo and Stun) sadly the overall system changes and overlapping control inputs (presumably due to the GC’s controller) made the game while still fun to play casually hard to take seriously at a higher level.
**BR4 **is a [S]steaming pile of shit and a blight on the series, stay away from it at all costs[/S] budget game that was released when Konami took over Hudson it runs on a butched choppy PF engine and is prone to game breaking glitches, slowdown and bugs that cause system lock ups, the game is horribly unbalanced and removes many of the series staples such as air cancel, liedown, wake up attacks, ground bounce and the beast meter, there is no meter management and gameplay usually involves spamming your super as much as possible since its the only way to deal damage to the human bar and costs nothing to use.
