Moved over to the component CRT last night and played a bit more; I found out you can actually play in first person on the Wii-S-2 version, which adds to the atmosphere and also makes it harder to see the smaller enemies.
I don’t think the new OST is bad necessarily, but I think lower-key dark ambient would be more fitting (something like the classic: https://youtu.be/GV5UnANIj3c?si=DUzBRskPaCBlWswK)
Immediately after reading this post I booted the game up the other night and Neck Thing recited that poem to me. Thanks for the context!
It struck me that Baroque is a game that is simultaneously 15 years before its time and yet could only have been made when it was.
First-person roguelites – procedural generation; permadeath; reasonably short runs – would only begin to see time in the sun in the mid-2010s:[1] Paranautical Activity; Tower of Guns; Heavy Bullets… This goes for roguelites at large – surely there are other examples, but Baroque is the only ’90s roguelite that comes to mind. Their popularity wouldn’t burgeon until the early 2010s. Of course, Baroque is an antecedent but not an ancestor – its similarity to those later works is purely a result of convergent evolution and a shared roguelike origin. A prime case of “before its time”.
However, had Baroque been made much earlier or later than it was, it would not have been what it is. I think it’s uncontroversial to say that its two main gameplay inspirations are blindingly apparent: Mystery Dungeon and King’s Field. On a gameplay level, that’s all it is – a combination of Mystery Dungeon’s roguelike elements (down to some specific quirks, even) and King’s Field’s first-person hacking and slashing. Far from a coincidence, both of these were very much “in the water” at the time – Mystery Dungeon was and would practically remain the only source of roguelike influence in Japan for decades, and the entire original King’s Field trilogy had just been completed and made waves in its home country.
Mystery Dungeon would truck on into the oughts, but its status as a tastemaker would somewhat dwindle – in the wake of Torneko and Shiren, Japan had perhaps not a flood, but certainly a respectable stream of inspired roguelikes from other companies.[2] Come the new millennium, these apers would drop off, and Spike Chunsoft would essentially carry the Japanese roguelike torch alone.[3]
King’s Field, similarly, was revolutionary when it came out, but the first-person hack-and-slash genre never quite took root in Japan, and its identity in the West (which had up until then been reasonably similar, if much crunchier by virtue of making its home on PCs) would change drastically with The Elder Scrolls Ⅲ: Morrowind in 2002. Japan famously never quite got into the first-person shooter in the way the West did, and FromSoftware themselves would abandon the first-person perspective over the first half of the ’00s.
Using, then, (somewhat arbitrarily) the release dates of King’s Field Ⅱ and King’s Field Ⅳ as the start and end dates for when one might have reasonably been given the impulse (and the green light) to make a first-person hack-and-slash game (Mystery Dungeon’s potential influence can reasonably be argued to have stretched across that entire span and beyond), Baroque could only have been made between 1995 and 2001. Realistically, the window is narrower yet – it’s a highly specific zeitgeist that Baroque sprang from.
It’s the sort of game that confirms to me the necessity to dive into the past if one wishes to enjoy all video games as a medium have to offer.
Even then, it’s never really taken off – it’s a subgenre limited to indie games, and none that are particularly famous – but they are somewhat numerous. ↩︎
Azure Dreams, Spectral Tower, Doraemon 3: Makai no Dungeon, Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon, Hunter × Hunter: Maboroshi no Greed Island… ↩︎
Bar the odd example like Success’s Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. ↩︎
The more I hear about the fan translation, the more I squint in its general direction…! Is “Neck Thing” what he’s called in the fan translation? Should that be the case, it’s a classic mistranslation – his name is Kubi no Mono, but the kanji for mono isn’t 物 (thing), but 者 (person). Reasonably, he might be called “He with the Neck”, “Neck Man”, or even “The Neck One”. Not that it’s a big deal™ in the grand scheme of things – it’s just one of those things that raise a li’l flag.
The remake opted for “Longneck”, which I think is nice – English doesn’t have an obvious construction directly equivalent in both meaning and tone to […] no mono,[1] but “Longneck” has the same somewhat disquieting, ominous feeling, as if it isn’t quite a name, yet isn’t quite not.
Not to completely discount the fan translation, of course – I’m sure it’d be acceptable for most people – but, you know, occupational injury! I do really quite like the voice(s) of the Japanese script – I wonder how the translation compares.
I personally think “He with the Neck” is, but I’m just one translator, and that’s the thing about translation: Give a hundred translators the same text; get a hundred different translations back. The set of possible “good” translations of any text is infinite. (Which I’d imagine most anyone on this forum knows, but I say it because it’s sometimes easy for people to assume that alternate translations are a form of criticism!)
As an utter side note and fun fact, I learned that the remake translates the Taiekibone – the Bodily Fluid Bone – as “Sweat Bone”, which seems to be a funny bit of censorship? The original name combined with the fact that it leaves a red stain and its description’s use of the word moreru (“leak”) definitely implies that it’s a bone that makes you pee blood (and if you throw it, it makes you TELE-PEE!), hahah. ↩︎
Would love to know more of what was in the water at that time to make this particular aesthetic. You got the “desolate industrial landscape ravaged by an advanced technology” flavor in things like Wachenröder and Panzer Dragoon.
And then you have literally Moebius contributing concept art. I gotta imagine every art director at that time has stacks of Metal Hurlant lying around. Plus all the early Jean-Pierre Jeunet movies were co-created with Marc Caro, who was the editor (and a contributor?) for many years.
What else. Maybe Shin Megami Tensei? Wizardry? You can see a bit of all the influences people have mentioned above, but it’s only a bit.
Wasn’t able to make it to the end within the month but loved what I played so far. Will be chipping away at it, in the dark on my crt, over the next few months.
Not sure if anyone else feels the same, but I found the game weirdly relaxing? Maybe it’s just because movement is slow and methodical.
On the topic of oddly calming aesthetic/atmosphere I finally remembered the name of what Baroque reminded me of.
If you’re still in the Baroque/Halloween spirit please check out Mad God.
