Baroque is a great game for those who are in love with anime art. For those in love with gameplay or RPGs in general: I’m sad to report that this game sucks. In fact, it plays so badly that a thousand tiny voices cry out every time the game is turned on. Or that could just be my neurons suffocating from the lack of stimuli. Flash! Bang! Boom! The game starts like a 60’s Batman episode with anime characters. And then a split second later, the excitement is over.
What happened Baroque? Why are you such a piece of crap? So promising, and yet, such a disappointment.
Your character in Baroque awakens to a world shrouded in mystery. You meet an angel with red eyes who gives you a gun and then tells you to explore the Neuro Tower in search for your true mission. You, a boy with brown hair, are r-tarded. Not only are you mute, uninteresting, and have no personality, but you can’t remember a damn thing, and people point out your r-tardedness consistently to your face. They might as well have made the main character a frickin’ carrot.
A Dark Twisted Fantasy
The world of Baroque is one inhabited by twisted people. Meta-Beings, Angels, the Order of Malkuth, and the “Neuro Tower” are all tangled threads of the warped tapestry that is Baroque.
A World That Changes Every Time You Play
The protagonist must head to the lowest floor of the Neuro Tower and fight through the foul denizens of the world. The Neuro Tower itself is also constantly distorting, and hence, the protagonist will be introduced to a new labyrinth every time he sets foot inside.
Battles with Meta Beings
Strange and twisted Meta-Beings will impede your progress through the Neuro Tower. You will need to use your purification abilities as well as a vast assortment of weapons, armor, and even parasites.
The people left over on your planet are split into two groups: the Baroques and the Meta-beings. Baroques are people who fight with their inner-selves but remain human. Meta-beings are those who have lost control of their selfish wants and needs and have changed to represent them. Basically the story doesn’t matter, because the gameplay is so bad you won’t be playing very long to find out anyway.
It couldn’t be any more obvious that the Wii version of this game is a PS2 port. There are absolutely no functions of the Wii controllers sensors that are utilized in Baroque. Not to mention, the PS2 controls transfer terribly to the Wii remote and nunchuk. The controls are not intuitive and are extremely hard to manage. To give Baroque some credit though, I’m sure the controls work fine and dandy on the PS2 controller. I’m disappointed that Baroque isn’t a better game for the Wii, but insulted that Baroque was ported to the Wii without any configuration changes.
The gameplay would be okay if not for the wretched control scheme. The selection screens are hard to navigate which makes access to weapons almost impossible.
Baroque enemies function like those in Final Fantasy XII, meaning that they run up to you and follow your character around until you kill them. Unlike FFXII, your character has more to lose if you ignore the baddies. Your character has two different life meters. One is for regular hit points, and the other is for vitality points. As long as your character has vitality points, your hp will regenerate. The trick is that vitality points decrease automatically while running around, and once those vitality points run out your hit points begin to decrease as well.The key to obtaining vitality points is to kill those demons. Eating their hearts and flesh restore your vitality and hit points. No potions or health packs this time, unfortunately.
Sound is pretty good for Baroque. The soundtrack is great, with the tiny exception of the lame sounds that exit my Wiimote. Think Zelda: Twilight Princess, but much, much worse. One saving grace for Baroque is the addition of voice acting, which is a major achievement for a PS2 game considering FFXII and Dragon Quest don’t have it.
The graphics are also hit and miss. The cut scenes are great, but the real-time graphics are “eh”. The environments are drab and the colors are never vivid or inviting. However, for the majority of the time the characters look great (if you like anime).
Just as a side note: I realize that I am being extremely harsh on this game, but I recognize that the PS2 version may be worthwhile. I would have to pick up the PS2 version to do a real comparison, but for Wii players, this RPG is not worth the frustration.
After many hours of pure frustration, I finally put down Baroque. For the die hard anime fans, this game may be worth it. But then again, you could go pick up several other anime titles that would be worth your time. Maybe for a PS2 owner this RPG would be decent, but even then, I fear that even a rental may be considered too much of a waste.
| Title | Baroque |
| Publisher | Atlus |
| Developer | Sting |
| Release Date | April 8th, 2008 |
| Genre | Role Playing Game (RPG) |
| Platform | Wii, PS2 |
| Rating | Teen |
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