Others say...

"Baroque Indeed"
I don't know exactly what the creators of this game were trying to accomplish. The Baroque period started in Italy in the early 17th century and is known for extravagantly ornate, florid, and convoluted styles. This game is certainly convoluted.

You start the game; an angel appears and you are told you have to atone for your sins. What sins, you ask? Well, I'm still asking. After that the game just becomes one big old mess. Your character doesn't speak. (REVIEWER'S NOTE: It might speak; I didn't stick around to find out). And you just do a lot of wandering and running around the lower level of...SOMETHING.

If ever a guide should have been written for a game, this is it. Not fun and quite dull[...].


"Baroque Sounds An Awful Lot Like "Broke" Doesn't It?"
Have you ever seen that movie Groundhog Day? That's the one about the guy who gets stuck in a time loop and has to repeat the same day over and over again. Well, Baroque is the video game equivalent of Groundhog Dog.

Baroque takes place in a post-apocalyptical world where the few remaining survivors have been twisted into strange forms, are haunted by guilt and madness, and remember only confusing fragments of what happened to them. It is this world that your silent avatar is plopped down into and told by the leader of the survivors, the Archangel, to lug a bulky rifle down to the bottom of Neuro Tower, a gargantuan structure that towers over the ruined landscape, and use it to purify the creature held captive down there.

That is pretty much all the direction you are going to get. Baroque is all about letting the player discover things for themselves. Normally, this would be a good thing. However, progression is made as unintuitive as possible. For example, triggering certain events causes Neuro Tower to expand and contract. In RPG's, the traditional way to do this is to hide clues in the things NPC's say. Now imagine a game where say very bizarre things and its only after you talk to them about fifty-odd times that a method to their madness becomes clear. Also imagine the one key clue only has random chance of being revealed after you've gone on the same fool's errand about ten times.

This is really what makes Baroque so frustrating. In most games, the point is to complete a task without dying. In Baroque, dying is a key component of game play. You have to walk into Nuero Tower multiple times and either clear the dungeon or die trying just to get the story to move along ever so slightly so you can figure it out without a walkthrough guide.

Every time I managed to piece together a puzzle, the payoff was meager. I was just handed a new puzzle (or at least I think I was. The game is mean enough to throw something completely pointless at you.) and no or limited new information. In a way, Baroque is lot like assembling a jigsaw puzzle without any reference to what its supposed to look like when complete and all the pieces are buried in an Olympic pool-sized sandbox.

Baroque is game played trapped in a time warp. Each time you clear the tower or die, you are transported right back outside into the town at level one with your inventory stripped from you. You have to go right back into the tower and start everything all over again. As I said before, dying has no real penalty. In fact, it is a necessity for making progress. You could say that players don't lose at Baroque, they only stall. Or you could also say that players don't win at Baroque either, since, win or die, the outcome is the same.

But still, as frustratingly random as I found the game, I did make it to the end. The story starts as confusing clap-trap, but it does clear some of itself up by the end. However, if you have ever played Digital Devil Saga, you have already heard this plot and heard it better with superior characterization, presentation, and cohension.

Baroque is an action RPG. The mute protagonist must enter the tower bare handed and search for weapons, tools, and the NPC's that dwell there while fighting swarms of monsters. In Baroque's favor, combat is not terrible just simplistic. Customization is the key to victory as there are all sorts of accessories and items to collect to boost strength. Essentially there are two health meters, the HP gauge, that decreases as monster injury you, and the vitality gauge which steadily decreases over time and must be refilled with the crystals dropped by slain monsters. The addition of the vitality gauge makes it necessary to search the levels quickly yet thoroughly.

Baroque also boasts lots of tools but most of the thing you come across of marked as 'unidentified' meaning you either have to use them on faith and hope you didn't just inject yourself with a lose a level potion or throw an invincibility item at an enemy or find an appraisal parasite to reveal what the item is. However, the appraisal parasites are few and far between and one use only, so you will be lugging around a bunch of unidentified items in your limited inventory. Items also have lots of other nasty tricks such as armor that doesn't come off or armor that unequips itself every time an enemy comes near.

If I had to pick one really good thing about Baroque is that it has an excellent atmosphere and it really gets you to identify with the characters as they live through their repetitious Purgatory-like world. After traversing the tower for the tenth time, I felt like the poor tormented creature trapped in the basement of the dungeon, repeating "Don't go crazy" over and over again.

Baroque is ATLUS's yearly turkey, that one title they seem to put every year that tries to be innovative and off-the-cuff without considering if the end result is a fun game. This is not a hardcore RPG in the sense that the term usually means, which is to say difficult (It's really easy) and one that you must put some real effort into. This is a game that will only appeal to people who can love repetition like the most obsessive compulsive personality. Not recommended.


"Something a Little Different"
*WARNING*: One of the fun things about this game is discovering it's intricacies yourself. It's a hard one to review without giving stuff away (although I'll avoid plot spoilers). Odds are, however, if you're reading this, you're not the kind of person who enjoys going in blind. Read ahead with care.

This game is a port of a PS1/Saturn game, so I'll be the first to admit it's not a graphical masterpiece for the system. It does have it's moments where the atmosphere shines through, but in general it looks stiff and blurry. That, combined with a combat system that seems to use only one or two buttons and a simple dialogue system make this game seem on the surface to be the sub-par action-RPG that we've seen seen plenty of times already.

It's not for everyone, surely, but if you spend some time digging around in the game, you'll find something that is quite rare - there are layers upon layers of deliberately obscure mysteries buried within the characters and combat system. This is probably my favorite part of the game - finding out how things work (or worked). How many games have been made where you're in a completely alien environment but everything conveniently operates in the same way as the normal world. The game doesn't hold you're hand at all, dropping you into the middle of "what the hell is going on" right from the beginning. You're left to discover that the combat system isn't about the attack button, but about how you use and combine various items at the perfect time for maximum effectiveness. Combined with the ability to throw any item, there are many ways to combine and juggle items to beat the creatures you'll find in the game's main dungeon. The dialogue system is also tied to item management - instead of picking choices from a dialogue tree, you interact by giving characters objects. Almost everything is randomized in the game, so you can oftentimes find yourself fighting against the number generator more than actual enemies. You'll find yourself constantly dying or "beating the game", and you'll be left with nothing and starting from square one. Except you won't be. The goal of the game isn't to make it to the bottom of the tower, but to interact in the tower in ways that will effect it and the outer world for your next life.

Pros:
- random item drops will keep certain types of people coming back over and over again for more (you know who you are, Diablo fans...).
- the combat system opens up once you begin combining, using, and throwing items instead of hoarding them for later. This isn't Final Fantasy.
- the atmosphere is superb.
- the systems and story are left for you to work for, not given to you (maybe a con for some people).

Cons:
- see the last bullet in Pros.
- graphically dated, can be blurry and grainy sometimes (although I feel this sometimes helps the atmosphere)
- hard to tell when you're making progress, or what you did to cause such progress. The disconnect can be frustrating.

In summary, you are told at the beginning of the game to atone for your sins and it's up to you to discover what those sins are and what you can do about them now in the wake of a destroyed world. I honestly loved the fact that this is a world that isn't handed to me in the instruction manual or in main intro. It's not for everyone, but I hope more people will give it a chance.

"Nothing special in the least"
If Baroque appears to be a generic looking, run of the mill RPG to you, you're pretty much spot on. Boasting generic characters and a boring, amnesiac-based storyline, Baroque does what RPG's tend to usually do: pit you in maze-like dungeons and face-off against hordes of enemies. The game's combat system is simple enough to get into, but that's really because there isn't a whole lot to it. On the presentation side, Baroque looks pretty decent for a late in life PS2 RPG, although there are some glitches and blurry moments. The music sounds great and there is actually some decent voice acting to be heard in Baroque as well, but that is pretty much where the good points of the game come to an end. There really isn't a whole lot else to say about Baroque, other than there is a certain degree of charm to the game that makes it worth a look for hardcore RPG fans, but for the rest of us, Baroque is best left on the shelf; especially when there are better recent and upcoming RPG's to be found on the PS2.