Twisted Memories: A "Baroque" review (PS2/Wii)
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I'm sorry dotdotdotdotdotdot but your voice is not suited to reading reviews. The video was boring and dragged on and on and on. A review needs to captivate the reader but you didn't do that.
Ahh, yes, Atlus. Dearest, dearest Atlus. Over the years this game company has risen higher and higher up my favorites list, and in 2007 I believe they were in the late teens for the top 20 video game publishers that year. Atlus has always been out there for the little guys, y?know, the hardcore gamers and RPG/anime crowd. It?s a company that?s managed to keep its soul throughout the market trends and even though every game they release may not be a gem, I have yet to see them license something that didn?t at least get credit for having some fun and/or originality to it. They?re my kind of people, really. They know exactly what loyal niche of fans they?re there for and they?re very good at catering to that group. My praise for them is enhanced by the fact that the niche they serve is one I belong to, y?know, the kind of gamer who still enjoys a good sprite and values things like charm and uniqueness in a game, rather than just the river of shat-out sequels and follow-the-leader that?s been creeping over today?s game market, and I see Atlus as one of the few who?s still willing to fight the seemingly increasingly uphill battle to spray some febreeze into the staling air of the industry. I also owe them considerable thanks for being the ones to bring over numerous excellent game series that probably never would have made it to America without them: Guilty Gear, Disgaea, Puyo Puyo, Shin Megami Tensei, Odin Sphere, the list goes on. But anyway, my topic this time (if I can stay on it), is one of the several new American releases from Atlus Co., that being the action RPG game ?Baroque? for the PS2 and Wii, which I have the PS2 version of.
Now the original word ?Baroque? comes from a term meaning ?distorted pearl?, and is primarily used to refer to a period in the artistic renaissance that emphasized sharp contrast and exaggerated colors, which more or less fits the game because if I were to describe it?s theme in a single word it would be ?twisted?. The game has a very dark and dreary feel to it and the art style reminds me of Persona 3. The premise goes that on May 14th, 2032 (mark your calendars), some kind of huge catastrophe called ?The Blaze? happened, and basically fucked over the world. Everything in it has been reduced to a desolate wasteland, and not only was the physical world screwed, but so is reality itself, and the only way that people have been able to survive in this post-apocalyptic hellhole is to cling to their own delusions or ?Baroques? until their bodies actually start to deform to suit it. This is embodied by a lot of the NPC?s resembling tarot cards with examples like ?The Horned Girl?, who was a girl that always just went along with what everyone else said to avoid conflict, and who now has a bunch of branchlike horns coming out of her head, with her having no mind of her own anymore and simply sits in a chair saying everything that other people are thinking. The game starts out with you as ?the protagonist?, who is suddenly just plunked down into all this mess. He wakes up to find that he cannot speak, has the usual fit of main-character-amnesia, and feels really bad about something. You walk forward a bit before being confronted by a wing?ed character called the ?Archangel?, who hands you the screwiest-looking rifle you?ve ever seen and says ?Hey, you. Look around. Ya? see all this? Yeah, this is YOUR FAULT. Now you see that tower over there? Meet me at the bottom floor so we can fix this. Bye.? And there you go, from the moment you start playing, the game pretty much just hands itself to you and says ?Here, you figure it out.?
Now before I go any further I probably should have told you sooner that Baroque isn?t actually a new game. It?s a re-release of a Japan-only game that was out on the PS1 and Sega Saturn somewhere around 10 years ago. And if you look at it through that filter a lot of its quirks become much more understandable, like the graphics which are either really good 32-bit or below par 128-bit, but since I?m not a graphic whore I won?t complain about it. Back on topic, though, the big twist of this game?s play is that you?re SUPPOSED to die, because every time you die or more preferably reach the bottom of the tower, you respawn back at square one again (which is part of the story), only this time something is different, and you?re supposed to use that slight difference to figure out what to do the next time around. This idea is double-edged because while it does make you think a bit more than usual to figure things out, the game?s hints are few, far between, quite vague and offer such extremely little guidance that while you can beat the game in only 4 runs of the tower, if you don?t already know exactly what you?re doing you?ll spend many more runs than that being frustrated and confused and adding to the mountain of GameFAQS posts asking ?what the hell am I supposed to do now?!?. Oh, and note that when I said ?square one? I mean level 1, items gone, all of it. Though there is a character that will save items for you if you throw them into certain orbs in the tower, which is vital.
As for the actual gameplay, it?s a total dungeon crawler. The ?Neuro Tower? as it?s called, is composed of an increasing number of randomly generated floors which feature lots of rooms full of traps and large enemies that are connected by narrow hallways, and you?re supposed to have the right item to show to the right NPC that appears on a certain floor to unlock the next cutscene so you can piece together the puzzle of the obscure storyline. You have HP as well as Vitality, which will cause your HP to slowly regen until you run out, at which point your HP will slowly degen. There is also an odd quirk about leveling up, since while you do get stronger, it doesn?t show the stat increases on your status menu, just the ones from your equipment, which have a very low ratio (40 attack is enormous), so how powerful you are is more assumed than it is known. Constant item usage is heavily emphasized, since you find stuff all over the place and can only hold twenty items, and keeps with the game?s dark theme, having you gnawing on bones and eating hearts to restore HP and latching parasites onto yourself for stat boosts. Your equipment consists of swords (which look less like swords and more like clubbing enemies to death with your computer keyboard), a coat for armor, and a mess of accessories, including wings, brands and the parasites. There are no spells in the game, instead replaced by trap items called ?torturers? which do area damage upon use, and ?discs? which must be stepped on and have a ?heads? and ?tails? side with reverse effects, like gaining or losing HP. There is also the option to throw any item you hold as an attack or just to get rid of it, and this actually makes a very nice feature since whatever effect the item does will happen to the enemy when you throw it at them. So you can take the teleport bone and chuck it at a strong enemy to randomly warp them somewhere else, and in combination with the dungeon?s traps you can perform the clever trick of placing a heart on a fire trap, waiting for it go off, picking up the now burnt heart, which restores Vitality but halves HP, and tossing it at an enemy to cut their HP in half. Nifty, huh?
Now when it comes to the actual combat of fighting with those enemies, the battle system is?..well it?s??..okay, it sucks. The battle system sucks. You have a very limited set of normal attacks that involve extremely slow and clumsy animations and that?s ALL you can do. No jump, no block, no roll, just awkward blind hacking. Even for a game from a decade ago this could have been much better, especially since the circle button goes completely unused through the entire game except to zoom the camera when talking to somebody. This is also highly frustrating because a sad little back-and-forth is all you can do with enemies, who will relentlessly follow you through the dungeon as soon as they see you (and sometimes even without seeing you), and if you get ganged up on or hit with a status ailment in battle you can?t cure, you?re just plain done. This combined with the unreliable item healing means until you?re lucky enough to find a really good sword, you?ll be spending most of your time just running like hell from the monsters trying to get to the exit and go to the next floor, and makes the biggest ?oh, shit? moment in the game when you run into a dead end and turn around to find an army of bad guys taking up every inch of the hallway you came through, at which point you should just reset right then. This also makes you glad that at the bottom of tower you have a choice rather than a boss, since fighting a boss like this would surely cost some people controller casualties. So while we all know the meat and potatoes of any action RPG is the action, in this case the item-using spuds are some lovely baked russets with generous butter and cheese, while the more important combat steak is a cheap cut of gristly beef that was overcooked and the dink who served it cut along the grain rendering it to shoe leather. And if you?ve heard me before and noticed the food metaphors, get used to it because Alton brown is a deity.
With the extremely dull combat and frustrating lack of hints in the game, it?s clear that this is one of those Atlus games that isn?t a gem, but since unique storyline gets me wet I kept plowing through anyway just to see what happened, which led me to another big disappointment in the game that while the story starts out well it totally doesn?t fill itself out at all. The ending explains nothing, offers no closure and leaves countless gaping plot holes, like ?what exactly is the dabar fusion?, ?how did you meet much less fall for the multiple personality maiden? and the big fat one of ?how the hell is this my fault again?? because the biggest douche in the story is clearly the archangel. Overall this is a game that I wish they had remade instead of re-released. Improve the combat, finish the story and give some more guidance to the player and this could have been a sweet game, but instead it?s ultimately a game that I really wanted to like, but can?t ignore the flaws that make it only mediocre overall. So if you?re like me and love story, Baroque might still warrant a try, but most people are going to find it too strange and confusing to bother with. But, I still commend Atlus for the effort.
Now the original word ?Baroque? comes from a term meaning ?distorted pearl?, and is primarily used to refer to a period in the artistic renaissance that emphasized sharp contrast and exaggerated colors, which more or less fits the game because if I were to describe it?s theme in a single word it would be ?twisted?. The game has a very dark and dreary feel to it and the art style reminds me of Persona 3. The premise goes that on May 14th, 2032 (mark your calendars), some kind of huge catastrophe called ?The Blaze? happened, and basically fucked over the world. Everything in it has been reduced to a desolate wasteland, and not only was the physical world screwed, but so is reality itself, and the only way that people have been able to survive in this post-apocalyptic hellhole is to cling to their own delusions or ?Baroques? until their bodies actually start to deform to suit it. This is embodied by a lot of the NPC?s resembling tarot cards with examples like ?The Horned Girl?, who was a girl that always just went along with what everyone else said to avoid conflict, and who now has a bunch of branchlike horns coming out of her head, with her having no mind of her own anymore and simply sits in a chair saying everything that other people are thinking. The game starts out with you as ?the protagonist?, who is suddenly just plunked down into all this mess. He wakes up to find that he cannot speak, has the usual fit of main-character-amnesia, and feels really bad about something. You walk forward a bit before being confronted by a wing?ed character called the ?Archangel?, who hands you the screwiest-looking rifle you?ve ever seen and says ?Hey, you. Look around. Ya? see all this? Yeah, this is YOUR FAULT. Now you see that tower over there? Meet me at the bottom floor so we can fix this. Bye.? And there you go, from the moment you start playing, the game pretty much just hands itself to you and says ?Here, you figure it out.?
Now before I go any further I probably should have told you sooner that Baroque isn?t actually a new game. It?s a re-release of a Japan-only game that was out on the PS1 and Sega Saturn somewhere around 10 years ago. And if you look at it through that filter a lot of its quirks become much more understandable, like the graphics which are either really good 32-bit or below par 128-bit, but since I?m not a graphic whore I won?t complain about it. Back on topic, though, the big twist of this game?s play is that you?re SUPPOSED to die, because every time you die or more preferably reach the bottom of the tower, you respawn back at square one again (which is part of the story), only this time something is different, and you?re supposed to use that slight difference to figure out what to do the next time around. This idea is double-edged because while it does make you think a bit more than usual to figure things out, the game?s hints are few, far between, quite vague and offer such extremely little guidance that while you can beat the game in only 4 runs of the tower, if you don?t already know exactly what you?re doing you?ll spend many more runs than that being frustrated and confused and adding to the mountain of GameFAQS posts asking ?what the hell am I supposed to do now?!?. Oh, and note that when I said ?square one? I mean level 1, items gone, all of it. Though there is a character that will save items for you if you throw them into certain orbs in the tower, which is vital.
As for the actual gameplay, it?s a total dungeon crawler. The ?Neuro Tower? as it?s called, is composed of an increasing number of randomly generated floors which feature lots of rooms full of traps and large enemies that are connected by narrow hallways, and you?re supposed to have the right item to show to the right NPC that appears on a certain floor to unlock the next cutscene so you can piece together the puzzle of the obscure storyline. You have HP as well as Vitality, which will cause your HP to slowly regen until you run out, at which point your HP will slowly degen. There is also an odd quirk about leveling up, since while you do get stronger, it doesn?t show the stat increases on your status menu, just the ones from your equipment, which have a very low ratio (40 attack is enormous), so how powerful you are is more assumed than it is known. Constant item usage is heavily emphasized, since you find stuff all over the place and can only hold twenty items, and keeps with the game?s dark theme, having you gnawing on bones and eating hearts to restore HP and latching parasites onto yourself for stat boosts. Your equipment consists of swords (which look less like swords and more like clubbing enemies to death with your computer keyboard), a coat for armor, and a mess of accessories, including wings, brands and the parasites. There are no spells in the game, instead replaced by trap items called ?torturers? which do area damage upon use, and ?discs? which must be stepped on and have a ?heads? and ?tails? side with reverse effects, like gaining or losing HP. There is also the option to throw any item you hold as an attack or just to get rid of it, and this actually makes a very nice feature since whatever effect the item does will happen to the enemy when you throw it at them. So you can take the teleport bone and chuck it at a strong enemy to randomly warp them somewhere else, and in combination with the dungeon?s traps you can perform the clever trick of placing a heart on a fire trap, waiting for it go off, picking up the now burnt heart, which restores Vitality but halves HP, and tossing it at an enemy to cut their HP in half. Nifty, huh?
Now when it comes to the actual combat of fighting with those enemies, the battle system is?..well it?s??..okay, it sucks. The battle system sucks. You have a very limited set of normal attacks that involve extremely slow and clumsy animations and that?s ALL you can do. No jump, no block, no roll, just awkward blind hacking. Even for a game from a decade ago this could have been much better, especially since the circle button goes completely unused through the entire game except to zoom the camera when talking to somebody. This is also highly frustrating because a sad little back-and-forth is all you can do with enemies, who will relentlessly follow you through the dungeon as soon as they see you (and sometimes even without seeing you), and if you get ganged up on or hit with a status ailment in battle you can?t cure, you?re just plain done. This combined with the unreliable item healing means until you?re lucky enough to find a really good sword, you?ll be spending most of your time just running like hell from the monsters trying to get to the exit and go to the next floor, and makes the biggest ?oh, shit? moment in the game when you run into a dead end and turn around to find an army of bad guys taking up every inch of the hallway you came through, at which point you should just reset right then. This also makes you glad that at the bottom of tower you have a choice rather than a boss, since fighting a boss like this would surely cost some people controller casualties. So while we all know the meat and potatoes of any action RPG is the action, in this case the item-using spuds are some lovely baked russets with generous butter and cheese, while the more important combat steak is a cheap cut of gristly beef that was overcooked and the dink who served it cut along the grain rendering it to shoe leather. And if you?ve heard me before and noticed the food metaphors, get used to it because Alton brown is a deity.
With the extremely dull combat and frustrating lack of hints in the game, it?s clear that this is one of those Atlus games that isn?t a gem, but since unique storyline gets me wet I kept plowing through anyway just to see what happened, which led me to another big disappointment in the game that while the story starts out well it totally doesn?t fill itself out at all. The ending explains nothing, offers no closure and leaves countless gaping plot holes, like ?what exactly is the dabar fusion?, ?how did you meet much less fall for the multiple personality maiden? and the big fat one of ?how the hell is this my fault again?? because the biggest douche in the story is clearly the archangel. Overall this is a game that I wish they had remade instead of re-released. Improve the combat, finish the story and give some more guidance to the player and this could have been a sweet game, but instead it?s ultimately a game that I really wanted to like, but can?t ignore the flaws that make it only mediocre overall. So if you?re like me and love story, Baroque might still warrant a try, but most people are going to find it too strange and confusing to bother with. But, I still commend Atlus for the effort.
Sorry, ............, but I don't know how to put this nicely. In order to do an audio review, you'll need a lot more personality than that. You obviously put a lot of effort into the review, which is why I hate to criticize it so destructively, but I can't make it through such a dry read. At the moment your style is far more suited to written form, which you are actually quite good at.