Review – Baroque

Baroque started well. I mean, it had a pleasant box, and the DVD slide nicely into my Wii. No problems there. Even fact, it was a great pleasure to aim my Wiimote at the "Baroque" selection on the menu screen.

However, apart from the occasional miracle, the fun ended there. Let's get nitpicking.

Nothing at the beginning of the game is explained to you. You're shown an unhelpful cut scene, and dumped into a place you will later know as "The Outer World". You may wander around for a while, picking up controls or such, until you "accidentally" wander into a cutscene, where some angel guy tells you to heal your sins at the bottom of the Neuro tower... blah blah blah... and gives you a cool looking gun called the Angelic Rifle. You are then sent off to the tower he mentioned, where you must wander around fighting random creatures called Meta-beings, and you pick up objects to use against them. Oh yeah, and while that's happening, your vitality is constantly going down, so you have to keep that up by killing enemies, because if it runs out, your health starts draining. This function never stops, not even in the Outer World. Frankly, it's just a motivation to try and keep the player to continue killing stuff. Because that's all you ever do in the game. Kill things. There's the occasional plot twist, but otherwise you kill stuff.

I'd tell you the next stupid thing, but I don't want to give the plot away - after all, it's the only vaguely redeeming feature.

Flying fish...

The fighting isn't even that good... It's just continual button mashing, and if you bother to read the manual, you might find that you can wave the Wiimote to do a stronger attack. Yipee. Oh yeah, and the awesome gun the Angel gave you? It is awesome. Kills anything in one. On the other hand, it has only 5 shots before it runs out. Of course, no one actually tells you that, you have to find out for yourself in the middle of a battle.

This game is basically Japanese anime creators trying to show that they can do plots too. Sadly, it just turns out that they should stick to making fighting games where schoolgirls beat each other to death whilst wearing less clothing than a stripper in summer.

Anyway, onto the highlights:

It was a nice idea. Did I mention the DVD went smoothly into the machine?

Nometet.com says:

+Nice box

+CD went in nicely

+Although the features were bad, I did find it wasn't boring to keep playing

-Poor graphics

-Poor gameplay

-Not even a pretence of a tutorial until after you've worked it all out

-Plot doesn't take off in the first 10 minutes

-There's a character who stores items in a bag on his head