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.
