Baroque: (Game Review)

Baroque (Wii)

So I'm making my way through a backlog of games that in some cases I've owned for 15 years and never played. The system I am now using to play through them is to go alphabetically starting with the A's and playing a game from each system I own. Right now I'm in the B's. I played and finished Battlefield: Bad Company on the Xbox 360 a week or two ago and this was my next B game.

I bought this game used in November 2008 and I know this because the price tag is still on it.

In Baroque, a worldwide disaster called "The Blaze" devastated the Earth in 2032. In order to survive in this apocalyptic environment, people had to develop "Baroques", or distorted fantasies, fantasies which not only distorted their minds but also their bodies.

You have no memories (a familiar anime trope) but everyone keeps telling you you've committed some great sin and that you will only be forgiven when you heal the world. How do you do that? Enter the Neuro Tower and kill all the monsters you find there.

You're kinda just thrown into this game with what initially seems like no guidance. I just figured things out on my own but it took me a couple of hours. Problem is, after I figured the game out, I instantly said it was a waste of time,

A huge tip if you're going to try this game. There is a practice dungeon in the Outer World section of the game which is a tutorial. It has a fixed design and number of levels and one of the NPCs guides you through it and gives you tips. It changes each time you die in the Neuro Tower. Also, definitely read the manual.

The best thing to me about the game is its story. I only played a couple of hours before I quit but what little I did reveal was very intriguing. I wouldn't mind finding just the cutscenes on YouTube and watching those.

The actual gameplay is AWFUL. Yeah, it's a hack and slash but there is really no variety in your attacks. You don't learn any new moves or abilities. You just swing your sword around and pretty slowly. The bad thing is, the most powerful sword I was able to find made your animations even SLOWER. It felt VERY clunky.

The enemies I encountered were also just variations on a theme. And they have a tendency to swarm you in some areas. It's nothing a little button mashing won't get you out of, but I never felt like I was using any skill.

Your goal is to make it to the bottom of the Neuro Tower and I did once or twice. Problem is, if you DO reach the bottom OR die in the process, you appear back in the outer world, back to level one and every single thing you collected is gone. I read there are items you can use to keep parts of your inventory but I never got to that. Yes, you do reveal a short cutscene when you die or leave the tower, but is that worth it to me? Not really.

And I never really understood like how many levels I had to go down to get to the bottom, or if the game was never ending. I mean, I got to the bottom those two times. Was what I saw considered an "ending"?

It was interesting when I was figuring out how to play the game. When I had my eureka moment I instantly thought "is this it?", "more of THIS?". And I turned off the WiiU.

Interesting story. Clunky repetitive combat.

Oh, I almost forgot the most annoying aspect of the game. No, it's not the fact that you lose all your levels and items over and over again. To me, it was "Vitality". In this game you are ALWAYS losing "Vitality" unless you are in a menu screen. If your Vitality gets down to 0, you start to lose HP. As long as you HAVE Vitality, your HP gradually regenerates. So I felt like I was constantly running around with an poison status effect. It does make you rush a bit more and you usually find plenty of items to restore vitality and even to upgrade your maximum amount. But it just seemed like a gimmick to me. Like the developers were trying to make the game different but forgot it also needed to be fun.

This is a bad game.

There is also a PS2 version.

My Grade: F