Nintendo Wii Fanboy

OMG Nintendo interviewed the Baroque localization team at Atlus USA about the challenges of making a super-hardcore dungeon RPG on the Wii. And don't worry -- this isn't being loaded with minigames or billed as Dungeon Training or anything. The team is fully aware of who the audience for Baroque is, and it's not the casual crowd. There are varying degrees of casual-to-hardcore, and "crazy dungeon RPG" is well beyond the hardcore side. Said Atlus's Aram Jabbari: "Baroque is a pure hardcore RPG experience and doesn't apologize for being so. With its dark subject matter and eerie characters, it definitely offers a change of pace from the Wii's usual light fare."

As is pointed out in the interview, Atlus has been doing surprisingly well on the Wii with the Trauma Center games. Atlus's Clayton S. Chan sees the success as a result of good designers being paired with new possibilities: "Honestly, I think what the industry really needs is some (pun definitely intended) New Blood. An influx of good designers who are given more control would undoubtedly yield more unique titles that took better advantage of what the Wii offers." Of course, that doesn't apply to Baroque, which is a Wii port of a PS2 remake of a Saturn game.

Purple fog has never been so effective. With its eerie atmosphere and simply-rendered (and formally-dressed) monsters, Baroque seems set to creep us the hell out as it batters us with tough-as-nails dungeon crawling. And thanks to the Wii version's added first-person camera angle (as seen previously on the Saturn, but in no other version) you can get all up ons and therefore even more creeped out.

As happens occasionally, this latest Famitsu update contains a bunch of screens we've already seen, but includes a bunch of new ones as well. We invite you to browse the rogues' gallery of whatever all those things are that populate the dungeon, including Too Many Antlers Girl and Emo Mummy.