There are 13 immediately playable characters in Roar 4, and five unlockables, judging by the character-select screen. The three new cast members are Reiji the Crow, whose very Goth character design is presumably inspired by The Crow; a double-team, Ryoho and Mana, the former a goateed monk and the latter a little girl who transforms into an adorable baby fox; and Nagi the Spurious, who wears tube-tops not much wider than dental floss, and whose "animal" form is a kind of reptilian creature with a giant sword on her right arm. (Incidentally, I don't see a listing for "spurious" in my National Geographic Book of Mammals, nor have I ever seen one on the Discovery Channel, so I'm assuming that Hudson made it up.)

Roar 4 has eight modes of play. Arcade is standard stuff, with a few real-time rendered cutscenes for each character; these scenes are littered with incomprehensible "Engrish" in the preview build, but will presumably make sense in the final. The remaining modes, time attack, versus, training, sparring, survival, and COM battle (PS2-controlled characters fighting each other) are also just as they sound.

And then we have career, the game's in-depth one-player mode, which is set up in an unusual way. First, you choose any of the game's characters; you can store up to eight careers on a memory card, and use career characters in any other mode of play. You then guide the character through a series of "missions" by moving a glowing cursor around a giant "map" of circles and lines. Each circle represents a one-round battle against a random character, and in a random arena. Some fights are harder than others, but the game doesn't introduce any unusual rules or twists to the action (unlike, say, the one-player quests in Soul Calibur II.) I hope the final version includes specific fights along with the randomized ones, and alters the map overview to indicate which missions you've already beaten.

As you defeat missions, you unlock more of the map, along with special abilities and DNA points. The abilities are divided into a baker's dozen of categories: attack, stiffness, amplify, guard break, et al. While you can earn several dozen abilities, you can only enable up to 15 of them at once, and each one requires a certain number of DNA points. "Heavy Block Always On" is a mere 1,000 DNA points; "Defense Bonus" is a steep 5,000 DNA points. You can even equip beast abilities, and while it isn't the "create-an-animal" mode that I've been dying to see, at least Hudson is starting to move in that direction.

Was it as good for you as it was for me?
Roar 4's 11 arenas are lovely, but mostly familiar locales, from an underground parking garage to a picturesque mountaintop dojo to the top of a skyscraper -- nothing you haven't seen in a fighting game before. Contrary to what's been reported elsewhere, the arenas have neither bi-level layouts nor background interaction; instead, the game uses the tired conceit of "force fields" to contain the action within a surprisingly small area. In a surprising inclusion for a Japanese-developed fighting game, Roar 4 adds blood to the visual mix, and in a pleasantly restrained way; crimson showers are triggered only during certain extreme throws and combos.

Bloody Roar 4 ships in November, and it deserves to be a success. We'll see if Hudson can give it the marketing push that neither SCEA nor Activision were able to manage.