Bloody Roar: Primal Fury is a vicious blast of fun.
The Bloody Roar series was mostly on the first two Sony PlayStation consoles from the first game on the PlayStation One to the fourth game on the PlayStation 2, but however, there was one game that did hit the Nintendo Gamecube (and later the Microsoft XBOX), and that game being Bloody Roar: Primal Fury (known as Extreme in the Japanese Gamecube release, but it was called Extreme internationally on the XBOX version).
The game opens up with a beautiful anime style opening for the Gamecube version, and it keeps the same style of animation for the endings of the characters. While the graphics seen in the gameplay look a little different, you can see that the characters still look like they did in the anime style scenes. But whether in anime format or not, the characters look quite well made with their color and detail. Bloody Roar also runs well with it's fast and smooth speed and hardly any sight of technical slowdowns.
As I said in the beginning paragraph, Primal Fury is a fighting series where your fighter can transform into a beast during gameplay, and when you have enough power in your "Beast Change" meter (which is at the bottom of the fighting screen). You can transform by a simple press of the X button, if you get more power and your "Beast Change" meter is full, you can go in a Hyper mode with your beast mode, which gives your fighter more power when he/she transforms. If you hit the Z button, you can still go in Hyper mode if your "Beast Change" meter isn't full, but because of that, some of your fighter's health, and depending on how much power you have in your "Beast Change" meter, it can take a little to a lot of your health.
During beast mode, some things will change. Like some beasts will bite as one of their moves, and some will scratch the life out of their foes. Also some beasts will be slower than their human forms, or sometimes faster. They'll even change in size too. This, I feel, adds a bit of variety during fighting.
Because of the Gamecube's button layout, it takes sometime to get used to and feels a bit cluttered up unlike the traditional button layouts when you first play it. And it really doesn't help that the Gamecube's D-Pad is smaller than Nintendo's past D-Pads. But luckily, the controls are responsive enough to look past most of that and that the analog stick runs just fine for fighting games, which also helps you perform moves a lot better than using a D-Pad. What also helps is that if you're really uncomfortable with what buttons the actions are, you can customize them in the controller configuration screen.
Although the fighting sounds great, there are other parts in the sound that are annoying. One of them being voice acting, which is only heard during gameplay. Most of them sound not suited to the characters personality, and some of them try too hard to be cool. Not to mention the music doesn't sound right in much of the arenas. In fact, a lot of the tunes in the game made me cringe, probably due to the bad guitar playing.
A strange, but minimal flaw is that the lip sync for the characters are WAY off. Sometimes when they still talk, I don't see the voices fit in right with the lip movements. They sometimes move real fast, but they don't even talk that fast. It's just really off to see and is an annoyance when it comes to audio and video.
But minus bad music and bad voice acting. Bloody Roar: Primal Fury is a great fighter to pick up for the Nintendo Gamecube with it's great looks, smooth speed and responsive controls. And like every fighting game, don't forget to fight with a friend in multiplayer vs battles.