This Week In Retro: BAROQUE (1998) (Patreon)

May 21, 1998: If it ain't BAROQUE, don't fix it

by Diamond Feit

Imagine waking up in a desolate ruin you’ve never seen before, unable to remember your past or even your name. You are not alone, strictly speaking, but no one else you meet qualifies as human. Some claim to be angels and they speak to you derisively, urging you toward a large tower that looms nearby. One of them even hands you a massive gun and tells you to use it.

Should you heed his words and enter the tower, you will find it crawling with misshapen creatures that try to kill you. That giant gun you’re carrying only has five shots, so if you want to live you’ll need to find something else to keep the monsters at bay. With a little luck, you’ll make your way to an ethereal chamber where a voice tells you that you’re about to meet…God.

The voice insists that you fire your gun at God.

What I’m describing isn’t a flash fiction challenge or a nightmare I had after binge-watching Good Omens. No, I’m summarizing the initial experience of playing BAROQUE, a dungeon-crawling RPG first released for the Sega Saturn in 1998. While other games in this genre have dabbled in deicide, few have tasked players with such a blasphemous mission in the opening minutes.

Named for the artistic movement from the 17th and 18th centuries, BAROQUE harkens back to the Portuguese roots of that term, specifically barroco meaning "distorted pearl." The game's official website and manual allude to a "great heat wave" devastating the earth, with the survivors resorting to "distorted delusions" in order to maintain their sanity and a will to keep on living. In other words, "People have BAROQUE and they live with it."

This makes BAROQUE a rather bleak and uncharacteristically dark experience as RPGs go. The biggest hits of the era tended to feature morally upstanding protagonists and cute monsters. Meanwhile, BAROQUE tells the player the world has been destroyed and asks them "what can we do to heal our sins?" before instructing them that killing God is the only hope.

The environments of BAROQUE are suitably distressed and worn down to fit its post-apocalyptic setting. Even at the start, when the protagonist wakes outside the tower, the sky has a sickly orange hue. The buildings, all cracked and worn, are conspicuously colorless. Was this a hospital? A cement factory? An arboretum? Whatever its past function, it offers nothing but gray walls and rusted metal now.

The giant tower fares a bit better—it remains intact and erect at the very least—but it looks like a steel nightmare designed by the lead architect of Silent Hill. Wire meshes and metal grates accent the flat concrete walls and floors, as each chamber leads to a narrow hallway that connects to yet another chamber. It's impossible to imagine the tower as anything but a literal dungeon to crawl through, even if it lacks any locks or chains.

Players navigate the tower in first-person using real-time 3D movement instead of turn-based or grid-based as seen in many other RPGs. In this regard, BAROQUE bears a passing resemblance to the King's Field series, especially as weapon swings travel across the screen in an arc, giving players specific information concerning their attack range. Unlike those games, however, dying in BAROQUE means starting your quest over from the beginning at level 1. The tower's layout, occupants, and loot also shifts randomly for each playthrough; the developers based this system on the popular Dragon Quest-spinoff Mystery Dungeon.

With 25 years of hindsight, we can easily classify BAROQUE as a first-person 3D roguelike, but these terms hadn't yet been codified at the time of its initial release. The official website describes BAROQUE as a "NEWTYPE 3D-RPG" and specifically warns players in the "how to play" section not to consider it an action RPG. Developer/publisher Sting Entertainment even includes an apologetic note to those looking for such an experience: "Sorry, please buy a different game." One year later, on the cover of the PlayStation port, the official genre is given as "a multi-layered expansive RPG that changes each time you play."

What I find particularly fascinating about BAROQUE is that, despite the Saturn and PlayStation versions remaining unlocalized and unreleased in other territories, the game offers a potent mix of incredibly popular features and systems seen in modern indie creations. Procedural generation allows small teams to create games with high replayability, and considering how quickly the Souls-like genre has grown in the past decade, the audience for a dark, challenging RPG is larger today than ever before. Even low-polygon graphics that resemble late-90s 3D titles have become a hot aesthetic choice in our modern, hyper-realistic gaming market.

While never achieving a reputation on par with King's Field or Mystery Dungeon, BAROQUE kicked off a mini-franchise all its own with a surprisingly long tail, one that touches a wide variety of genres, including shooters, visual novels, and even a typing game. The most recent release for smartphones is an endlessly-scrolling Frogger-like arcade experience where players try to navigate one of the smallest enemies in the game past a series of moving hazards.

10 years after its genesis, a remake of BAROQUE would come to the PlayStation 2 and Wii, the latter even including motion controls tailor-made for that console. While retaining the same core story and mechanics, it swapped the first-person perspective for a third-person view and added voice acting. Atlus localized this re-imagined title for foreign markets, offering non-Japanese speakers their first taste of BAROQUE in 2008.

If my description of BAROQUE has piqued your interest, I have good and bad news regarding its current availability. Sting Entertainment released a port of the original Saturn version for the Nintendo Switch in 2020, one that includes a quick-save option that adds a considerable degree of safety to the otherwise punishing dungeon. Sadly, it does not include any languages other than Japanese, a significant barrier of entry to anyone unable to read kanji.

Fans have stepped in to right this wrong, creating a translation patch for the 1999 PlayStation port. It won't work for the Saturn or Switch versions, but at least it's out there for anyone willing to dabble with emulation. I think that's reasonable, when you think about it, since assassinating God should require jumping through a few hoops.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts about video games, films, and dessert.