Baroque: Needs Fixing

Apr. 30 9:00 AM by Alicia Ashby

Oh, Baroque. Why you gotta break my heart. Why you gotta be so PlayStation on my Wii.

It's not that Baroque is a bad game, really. It's just that it's not a good game in any modern sense of the world. Sting appears to have made no effort to make Baroque feel like a modern game while working on the Wii port. It's probably slightly more playable than its Saturn ancestors, but I would be willing to bet lots of money that the overall feel is the same.

A more significant problem, at least for me, is that Baroque is startlingly easy. You really have to jack the difficulty up to high to get any sort of resistance if you don't just suck at playing it. This kind of undoes the gimmick of having a game whose storyline grows as you die. Instead, you'll figure out everything pretty quickly with uninterrupted Tower runs. There's bonus dungeons, but... meh.

Anyway, it should be no surprise that Baroque's sitting at a 52% Metacritic rating after all this. Roguelikes always suffer in reviews, and Baroque is no Shiren the Wanderer when you get right down to it. Still, let's have a laugh and see what the critics had to say.

Unsurprisingly, the high score comes from RPG Fan, a site that gives decent scores to roguelikes from time to time, and has a sense of history when it comes to appreciating lost but important niche titles like Baroque. Granted, the 78% out of 100% score feels a little too generous to me, and reviewer Dennis Rubinshteyn seems to be in the camp that thinks the game is really hard for some reason. This is still probably the best of the Baroque reviews in terms of figuring out if you, personally, would get anything out of playing it.

The story isn't simply presented to you when the time is right. You have to find ways to trigger the major plot points, but the game simply does not tell you how. This is something players have to discover through various clues and interests. Most of the story background comes from the various people you talk to in and out of the tower. They share some insight on the world, what is going on, and some reveal bits of information on the main character's past, though in a vague manner. Some parts of the story or new characters only reveal themselves when you die outside the tower. Simply clearing the tower isn't enough; players would have to figure out when is a good time to die. It adds some dynamics to the story. The plot remains confusing overall, but putting the pieces together, there are a number of interesting revelations, and some weird twists that involve the protagonist's past.

IGN's review is more negative, awarding the game a 5.4 out of 10, but honestly isn't bad. Reviewer Daemon Hatfield seems to basically understand where the game is coming from, and just didn't find it excusable on modern hardware. That's an opinion that's easy to disagree with, but is hard to find in itself stupid or inexplicable.

In all fairness, Baroque is not as terrible as it initially appears to be. During my first hour of play, I intensely hated this game. But the idea is, as you die and restart your descent into the tower, details about your situation and the game world are slowly revealed to you. It's actually an experiment in very non-traditional game design, where the player's path isn't carefully plotted out for them by the developers. I commend developer Sting for trying something new, but in practice it doesn't make for a very enjoyable experience. What's worse, when you do start to realize your character's destiny you'll likely be underwhelmed.

From here it's all downhill. Take the G4 Tech TV review, which awarded the game two out of five stars. Reviewer Jake Gaskill somehow found it completely acceptable to compare Baroque to Persona 3, even though they're completely different RPG types with completely different developers that were designed about ten years apart. Yes, Persona 3 had randomly generated dungeons, but that doesn't make it even close to a roguelike in gameplay style or spirit, you stupid stupid man.

Repetitive, monotonous and, you guessed it, tedious gameplay do not an enjoyable game make. In this respect, Baroque stands as a shining example. Unlike Persona 3, (another roguish title from Atlus Games) which broke up the endless dungeon-crawling by incorporating a high-school-student element that allowed players to explore several different environments (school grounds, different parts of a city, etc.) and build relationships with fellow students, Baroque relishes in repetitious grinding and limited environmental variation. While the tower levels do change after each death, they are still basically the same rooms and hallways over and over. This might be good news for the hardest of the hardcore gamers out there, but its not such good news for people looking to test the waters of this brutal and unforgiving genre.

The low score was a 3 out of 10 awarded by Nintendo Power, in what might be the worst thing the magazine has published since I started reading it (which was basically... uh, when I started this blog). Reviewer Tom Holoien manages the Herculean task of writing something even more clueless, feckless, and useless than Nintendo Power's Endless Ocean review. I can only imagine the sort of effort that took!

You may not have heard of it until now, but the Baroque series has been around for lamost a decade in Japan. And while we usually envy Japanese gamers for getting games we don't, in this case we woudl have been better off without it.

You know what's awesome about that paragraph? Baroque isn't a series of games at all, just one oft-ported game with a lot of spinoffs. You can use the magic of the internet to find this out in about five minutes. Just imagine how awesome the rest of the review is!

The big thing that I took from my time with Baroque was the realization that roguelikes really seem to work better when you give them the advantage of a top-down view for the action and turn-based rules to keep things precise. Part of what makes Baroque way too easy is how the action gameplay lets you just pile a bunch of enemies on top of each other and kill them all by flog, flog, flogging the attack button. Not even in Izuna, which is otherwise Baby's First Roguelike, can you get away with shenanigans like that.