Being a fighting game, Bloody Roar 3 has the luxury of not needing to waste time on story. While there is some attempt at a plot, involving a mysterious "Beast Seal" that grants wishes, it's little more than an excuse for the artists to draw some stills that can be unlocked and looked at later. The real point of Bloody Roar 3 is to take control of one of the 14 characters (12 initially selectable and 2 hidden) and punch, kick, bite and tear the stuffing out of everyone else. And believe me, it's not hard convincing someone to try it.

The first thing that will no doubt pique curiosity is the character designs and the masterful way they're rendered. On paper, they're the gamut of your garden-variety fighter: youthful angry boxer Yugo is ostensibly the hero, and around him are perky, chirpy girls (Alice), hardened military vets (Gado), brooding ninja (Bakuryu) and even a hawaiian shirt and flip-flop wearing mad scientist (Busuzima). But on-screen and in-game, they're exceedingly well presented. Each model is built from an impressive number of polygons (let's say, oh, a couple thousand?), and they're seamlessly connected and fluidly animated. Details like hair, eyeballs, teeth, and all those things that make us guys giggle like children are present and accounted for. But the REAL "wow" comes when you transform into your beastly alter-ego.

Simply put, the designs rock. Yugo, as a wolf, carries the same visual panache that his 2-D cousin John Talbain brings to Capcom's Vampire series. Take one look at the rhino beetle Stun's heavy armor plating and translucent buzzing wings and try not to use him at least once. Ears that involuntarily flick, tails that lash, and all those things that make us guys giggle like children are (again) present and wonderfully accounted for. It's too bad then that the arenas that they fight in don't have as much personality. Don't get me wrong, they're in full 3-D, they've got breakable walls and floors, and lots of background animation, but when stacked against the environments of Dead or Alive 2 or Virtua Fighter 3, they're bland.

But while you come for the eye candy, you usually stay for the gameplay. BR3's is of the tap-tap variety, with a couple of Street Fighter-style joystick motions for fun. In an attempt to take advantage of the third dimension, there's a sidestep/circling function, but it has almost no practical value, and feels more 'gimmicky' than anything else. Blocking is handled three ways at once: passive auto-blocking, Tekken-style retreating during an attack, and the dreaded Virtua Fighter block button. While the latter two can be used interchangeably, Hudson does a pretty neat job of motivating you to use the block button by combining it with moving towards your opponent, initiating the "dodge escape" system. And topping all of this off is your beast transformation: in beast mode, existing moves become faster and do more damage, new moves (including some CRAZY desperation moves) become available, and your life meter slowly regenerates over time. In grand strokes, this combat engine works quite smoothly.

Battles are fast and wild, and while button-mashing can get some impressive results, it only works until your opponent starts to make use of the game's defensive systems. But there are a few flaws; some of the characters, thanks to the way their combos string together, have easy-to-find and easier-to-abuse juggle combos, and even some infinite-hitters. It's true that a combination of the blocking and dodge escape can sometimes break these combos, but the skill and timing required are pretty much completely out of human hands. The end result is watching the computer escape your best to juggle you back and forth across the arena, while you put your controller through the nearest wall. But as these instances are the exception rather than the rule, you'll invariably fish the controller out of the hole you made and continue playing.

Rounding out the package of Bloody Roar 3 is a standard array of stuff that is notable only with its absence. You have a variety of modes, including versus, survival and the seminal practice mode. Options include controller configuration, and independent volume control for both sound effects and music. Speaking of music and sound effects, they're reasonably well-handled, if a little unspectacular; while there's suitably meaty punches and crunches, the voices are either melodramatically Japanese or atrociously English. Music is only memorable in that it doesn't clash with stages the tracks accompany. And as for replay incentive, there's the character ending stills, which can be unlocked in a gallery, 2 hidden characters, a couple of hidden modes, and the opening and closing movies. All together, they're nice enough, but the bar is pretty high on these kind of options and extras.

Likewise with the game as a whole. It doesn't manage to raise the bar in any of the categories of the fighting genre, but it hits close to the top in every one. This overall sense of quality, its accessibility to all levels of player, and the simple, visceral thrill of using a were-lion to maul a bunny rabbit in an abandoned museum, transforms Bloody Roar 3 an animal that is more than just the sum of its parts (pun, however cryptic or stupid, intended).