Gaming in the Baroque Era

Warning: really long post.

Sting somewhat recently gave Atlus the rights to an interesting game; Baroque. What is Baroque?
I have no Idea. I just got a copy of the game, and it's incredibly strange. There is some sort of storyline, but it is definitely nonlinear. There is two pervasive clues to what Baroque is: it's a world of 'twisted pearls' and your goal is to 'absolve your sins'.

OK, let's pop in the disc!
That's actually a misunderstanding, as I actually transferred it to my new HDD and played it from there. More on that later. Maybe.
Instantly, one is assaulted with a pretty damn amazing hand-drawn animation of epilepsy-inducing random scenes distorted in various ways. Seriously, it is impressive. But still, it gives no hint of what the story is, goddamnit.
OK then, let's start a new game.
Opening cutscene. It's short, and makes no sense.
Without any form of notifying you, you are thrown into gameplay. Kinda - you're on the surface. you can talk to people and stuff, goddamnit. And there's this goddamn character who keeps cursing.
I don't know exactly why, but I really like the pervasive dissolved fading effect. It looks like you're playing a demented film from hell. I'm not kidding, it's awesome. Some people say it makes the game look terrible because they think that their TV is going bad. They are idiots. It's obviously good graphical design.
Back to the gameplay, as you try to get to the oddly-named Neuro Tower, a strange (yet sexy) angel stops you, comments on your defects (so you know that you're not getting a date, unfortunately), gives you a gigantic gun that 'has meaning in you using it', and sends you on your way.
Now you're in the neuro tower. There are more angels there. They're kinda fun. You start at level 1, of course, and weaponless. Happily, you can get weaponry and armory around the tower, if you would just look. Of course, nobody explained what you're supposed to do. Supposedly, doing this dungeon run is supposed to be what tells you what you're supposed to do. They don't even tell you the simple things, like attacking from the sides and back gives more damage, or that you can throw things for damage, and bones have special effects. There is a tutorial dungeon where they'll tell you some of these things, but there are several things that nobody will ever tell you EVER.
It doesn't really matter if you actually finish the first run or die from it. The same result happens either way.
The things that they do or do not tell you can really piss you off. I know it does for me. It really is extremely confusing. They tell you confusing things that you won't understand nearly always, or they'll tell you how to get those odd idea sephirahs [sic] and baroques that litter your understanding of the world. But you won't know when they're doing that because they sound EXACTLY like the nonsense they spew out all the time. Now here's the weird part: you find out later on that they were actually making scene, and they were giving either foreshadowing or storyline elements that you don't understand.
And this brings us to the idea of time. You know that it isn't exactly straightforward because you die and go back to the beginning, and yet things change based on what you did. At best guess, it's awash, or maybe concurrent. Or does time exist at all?
Since dungeons are the bulk of the game, we should really focus on that. It's hack and slash - and throw. Throwing is the major twist in gameplay. Throwing usually gives out a great deal more damage then straight out slashing, plus they have special effects, especially the bones. There's bones that explode, bones that make the effected sweat, bones that makes you sleepy, and bones that make the effected invincible. Notice that instead of saying 'you' or 'them'. This is because items can effect either yourself or enemies (meta-beings, which you kill by purification... Yeah, it's weird.) Then there are weirder items, like the summon torturer which summons every monster on the floor to the room that you're in. That sounds like a terrible item to have, but then you find that there's a half torturer, which kills every monster in the room. Use the experience bone, and you'll get major experience for it. Awesomesauce. And you get to do it to this excellent atmospheric music while doing it.
But then you get your AT. I don't quite remember what exactly it is. It's your vitality, but it's also been described as your soul. It constantly goes down, so you have to fight meta-beings in hopes that they'll drop a crystal which will give you an incredibly small number of AT points. The good thing about AT, however, is that while you have it, your HP will gradually increase. But when you don't have any, your HP will drop. This effectively forces you to move into the next floor quickly and keeps the action flowing.
Another weird thing is death. Death is not the end. In fact, you kinda need to die. It's the only way to get out of a dungeon if you can't finish it. This is just weird. But it doesn't matter anyway. Either way, you start off at the same spot again, and at level one.

OK, this game is weird (duh). But after playing it long enough, the WTF layer goes away and it starts to make scene. Oh god. Saying that makes me feel sick / partly insane. Like baroques: they're for the people to tolerate their world (or something like that). And then the game becomes reviewable, which is where I am right now.
Since this only happened recently, I can't say what's going to happen, especially because the game is so fucked up in so many ways. I think that the overabundance of christian symbolism could possibly add up to a very good story, if it works out. But I have no idea where it's going because of the extremely nonstandard storytelling techniques.
But working through the game through the first 'real' run through the neuro tower really explains a lot and makes the story make scene. Having an amnesiac persona is cliched, but Baroque pulls if off in a good way. Its out-of-order storytelling techniques makes amnesia a requirement. Oddly enough, the storytelling method concretes the overall theme of a broken, twisted world, while keeping it interesting. In fact, if it was presented from the beginning in order, it would be extremely boring. To think that someone said that Baroque would be better as a book or manga. The fool, I had to create a gamespot account just to chide him.

Baroque completely destroys JRPG stereotypes. Since the story actually glides past you as you're playing instead of interrupting it, it plays much more smoothly then probably any other game. Like Evolution (another STING dungeon crawl), it innovates and modernizes the rogue-like dungeon crawler genre while creating a great involving game.
In a scale with ten being the highest score, I give Baroque a rating of 9. Surprised? I know, it seems weird, but this is a distorted world, isn't it? The only real problem about this game is its cliff-like learning curve. People have said that the graphics suck, but that is so far out of the park that the team got three points. This is one of the few games where the actual gameplay models look exactly like the final character designs. It's like the drawings have come alive, it's so good.
It's been a long time since a random dungeon crawl has been so creatively and originally executed. For this alone, this game is worth a buy. But be wary; I've heard that the Wii version of the game suffers from bad controls. But luckally, the PS2 version of the game is sexelent.