Actually, this game is old. I have very fond memories playing it on my Saturn. At the time, the >HACK series did not even exist, and Shin Megami Tensei was still a very young series itself (I think there was only one or two games in that series by this point). I do remember liking Baroque better than anything in Shin Megami Tensei.

Of course a lot of time has come and gone between then and now and I really thing the big question is, besides the graphical update, how much of Baroque has Atlus changed vs. it's original code by Sting; if any changes at all? If no changes, then how well does a game that old work in today's world? And if there have been changes, then were they for better or worse?

Yeah, I know, a convoluted tree of questions, but you have to remember, when it came out, Sting was one of Japan's best development houses and Baroque was one of the best jRPGs of it's day. The game is a true classic that very few outside of Japan ever got to play, which is likely why Atlus has bothered to port it - a decade later. No doubt some things could stand with a change. How much change for it to still remain true to itself, yet fresh enough for today's gamers?

Well if they added bald vilains, it's fine.

MegaTen was very young in 1998? (i believe when Baroque first came out)

a series that was 11 years old, started in '87, and had a good what... ~20 titles in the whole umbrella of MegaTen games (by that time that is, there're more now)?

I'm sorry. I was thinking about MegaTen's Western release. Prior to those, I had never heard of the series. Of course, prior to Gen 3 (PS1, Saturn, N64), I had never bothered with importing or even keeping up too much with the import scene.

Previous gens had seen plenty of the best games make the rounds in the West, with only a few critical standouts not making the jump across the Pacific. It was simple enough to just ignore a lot of what was going on in Asia, that was not going on here. It wasn't like there was not plenty enough good titles to actually play to worry about spending $100 to import a SNES/Genny cart.

Of course Saturn changed all that. SOA boobhead Tom Kalinski, felt for some reason that the best games in Japan were unwanted by American gamers. So while every other JP game console at the time (or since) enjoyed a healthy dose of JP gaming goodness, Saturn for the US got crapped all over - and they wonder why they got their butts kicked by the Playstation with it's tons of AAA Japanese titles. So import gaming became an essential thing for the Saturn owner. Consequently as a result, the gaming import business really took off and became a legitimate force in the West. Import gaming retailers were springing up everywhere, and imported games were being purchased in the hundreds of thousands of copies - helping to drive down the cost of importing them bu quite a bit. I only paid $60 for Baroque and Grandia and Thunder Force V and the tons of other games I imported for Saturn. Where just a few years before, when I looked into importing Far East of Eden for SNES, import retailers were charging $100 per copy.

It was really a magical time to be alive. Got to play a lot of great games that most people here have never heard of, and in the process learned to read a whole new language. And then of course you know how it is, if you import a lot, you start winding up with tons of new friends who do so too. And at the time the commercial form of the internet was beginning to take off, so you have this entire social dynamic that was never really possible before added to the mix. It was really just a fantastic time. It's hard to believe that it was all just a little over a decade ago. Most of those old import retailers have all since gone out of business. None of the amateur gaming sites that had sprung up everywhere at the time, even exist any more - well a few like GameFAQs is still around. But they got bought out ages ago when big media started taking over the interwebs. I remember when NeoGAF was just GAF, and was actually a pleasant place to visit . . . for a time. I actually knew the guys that started SEGA Sages . . . later named Game Sages and eventually ought out by IGN and is just simply now, nothing more than a sub-domain on their servers guides.ign.com

Sitting here thinking about all this, is just making a guy feel old. I'll probably pick up Baroque for no other reason than nostalgia's sake.

That's a lotta text! Anyway I'm very excited for this one. Sounds morbidly unique. Didn't want to get the Wii version, but seeing as it supports 480p and widescreen I'm forced to.