Baroque for Beginners

[The Elite MYT]

So, I´m just delving into the weird world of Baroque. It´s great exploring and discovering stuff, but I´m pretty sure I´m not quite playing it right as I never do particularly well and I´m not even sure I´m confident that I know what the buttons all do.

From what I gather, X is the item menu, A is attack, and B is the map. You have HP and VT. VT seems to be gained from the orbs some enemies drop, but it restores very little compared to what you lose. Going into the blue circles are what advances the stages (choosing the second option...), and I can´t work out whether saving / loading is possible. That is about the extent of what I can work out.

Can anyone with this game give me some general pointers please? Especially the controls and the general gist of the game. It would be a great help!

[martiniii]

Oh man. About ten years ago I really got in deep with Baroque and worked out quite a bit of how the gameplay works, but sadly I can remember very little of it off the top of my head. Here's what little I can offer you (and at over two months late, it probably doesn't even matter):

VT is restored by the orbs as you noticed, but the main way of restoring it is by using items.

You can only save outside the Neuro Tower. The Wii/PlayStation 2 remake allows you to save between levels but that was not an option in the original game.

Some items that you pick up are "mystery items" and can only be identified by using certain other items on them... or just trying them to see what it does, while crossing your fingers that it doesn't completely debilitate you.

Finally, don't be ashamed of not doing particularly well; Baroque is a very hard game. It can reasonably be argued that it's brokenly hard, though that doesn't stop it from being enjoyable. In all my time with it I managed to complete the first run of the Neuro Tower and that's about it. Even with the Wii version, I only managed to complete the game by using walkthroughs and abusing between-level saves to avoid combat.