(Read my review of Baroque here)

Within the subterranean walls of the Neuro Tower are distorted souls that have become “Meta-Beings.” A cataclysm known as The Blaze brought forth the dystopian landscape and sparked these rapid changes. It all started because one man - the Archangel - sought to give God herself (roll with it) a human vessel (the unnamed protagonist). He also desired to take control of her Idea Sephira - a magic pearl that distills the existence of all souls in Baroque.

For an optional quest, you need to harvest Idea Sephiras and basically complete a Pokédex for the Baroquemonger. Unfortunately, that takes a lot of grinding and luck, and while I like Baroque, it isn’t that amazing that I’d want to pump 400 hours of gameplay. But I exist in the age of GameFAQs, where I can just read a guide listing all the data entries anyways!

A huge shout out to TheArchVillain for compiling these entries, as well as helping me understand this game in general.

For this article, I went through and recorded footage of (almost) every Meta-Being to get a feel for their personalities. I’ll also include screenshots of their alternate color palettes.

BUT FIRST:

I have to immediately go on a small tangent for an important character, because she’s most likely the one referenced in the Meta-Beings’ data entries.

This lady is seriously amazing design wise, and it’s not just because she owns two parrots. Her tall hat is cool. The muted blue and brown palette for her clothes blend nicely together. Her unnaturally long arms are striking and tie into the game’s themes of people becoming distorted.

This concept is taken to the next level with Angelicus, because the devs exclusively made her voice insanely crunched and… well, distorted! It’s a fantastic pun, though unintentionally comedic. It’s like she’s talking into a late 2000’s headset with the microphone way too close to her mouth while sitting in a Call of Duty lobby.

Her parrots are actually angel wings. In Baroque, wings are a status symbol, with higher-ranking individuals donning larger wings. After The Blaze hit, they corrupted alongside the rest of her body.

If I followed the story correctly, Angelicus was the lead scientist for the Archangel. Data entries for every single Meta-Being suggest that she was responsible for the horrendous experiments that warped them, a lot of them explicitly children (more girls than boys). My guess is that it’s a metaphor for indoctrination, since the Archangel wanted to force his vision for the world. Who better to mold into your toxic plans than the youth?

Angelicus is forever haunted by her sins, and thankfully she sets out to correct things by helping the protagonist end all the madness that the facility created.

The first enemy you’ll see in every Neuro Tower run. I like the cool silver body, blade fins, and multiple pairs of eyes on this grouchy carnivorous fish.

Moon was once a girl believed to be a divine prophet. Her alleged wisdom moved people to build cults around her. Their fanaticism caused them to interpret everything, even annoyed sighs, as gospel.

Whipped up in such a fervor, the cultists eventually drowned out the voices of Moon with their own delusions.

The girl’s untimely demises involve drowning, though it’s not clear if it was murder or suicide. She most likely turned into a fish after the lake became her resting spot.

What’s interesting with Moon is that it’s the only one with a gold palette swap. I wonder if it’s a reference to the cultists having a false idol?

As an aside, Moon looks slightly different in the original PS1 release of Baroque. Mysterious lumps are amassed at the top of its body. Are they eggs, or perhaps a cancerous growth? Whatever it is, it adds extra flair to the monster’s design that’s admittedly lacking in the PS2/Wii version.

These tiny creatures have featureless blob bodies with four spindly insectoid legs, which taper off into even smaller hands. I think it has wings underneath, but they could also be egg sacs or some other unknown organs.

Glues are always aggressive, practically sticking to the player like… well, glue! Much like any bug, a single hopping Glue won’t cause much harm, but as a swarm they can easily chew through the player’s health. However, they have no defenses to speak of. Simply stepping on them resolves a conflict.

Curiously, Glues have the most data entries of all other Meta-Beings. A whopping 28 of them, instead of the normal 8. Someone must’ve had a lot of fun writing them.

Glues represent the nightmare of every blue collar worker. Overworked, underpaid, and undervalued as another cog in the machine of a big corporate building. They feel like and quite literally turned into tiny insignificant insects, who are easily squashed under the boots of their apathetic bosses.

The irony of the protagonist stepping on one is a bit unfortunate.

At one point, the spirit of the Idea Sephirah gives up caring about the simple pleasures in life. One of his data entries state, “Aren't sunny days-- and et cetera.”

The lore behind this rotund farting humanoid is a lot more serious than I expected.

Bulger’s data entries suggest she was overweight (or physically deformed) even as a regular human. Her history of rejection and insecurities led to desperation, and she sought out unproven treatments to become beautiful. Of course, if they had been successful, she wouldn’t have become a Meta-Being.

The sickly green skin on a normal Bulger is a good fit with her lore, and even her blue palette swap can be interpreted as her life support finally giving out. Actually, is her inhaler even connected to anything?

I get fertility idol vibes from this monster design, and I wonder if that was intentional. After all, her singular goal in life was to be desirable to others.

Bulger is another Meta-Being that got a slight facelift for the PS2/Wii version. Originally, she didn’t give a rat’s ass about any dress code.

This design isn’t shy to display every wrinkle of fat on her body. Since 3D polygon counts and textures were still limited in the late 2000’s, Bulger had to be smoothed out for the remake. I think the new outfit is decent compensation and looks nice.

I want to say the phallic heads of this spinning turtle hydra were intentional, but the game’s data entries neither confirm nor deny it. It makes for an interesting first impression when flashed by one of these Meta-Beings.

Sometimes, Kato will fall to its side and walk on all its heads. It looks goofy, and that’s what makes it amazing.

It wasn’t until grabbing footage that I learned “turtle form” Kato spits out Glues! I don’t know if Kato is the originator of them, but it’s one of the few Meta-Beings that can spawn other entities like that.

Kato is actually multiple beings fused into one. A tragic mysterious accident caused them to die all at once (and presumably next to each other). The Baroquemonger mentions a “wriggling group of grey,” so I think that means their bodies were somehow crushed into one mass.

I like how Jerryrom’s head is loosely tethered to its body with puppet strings, but it’s otherwise a filler design to me. His lore is a bit more interesting.

As a Meta-Being, Jerryrom can be short-tempered and is prone to igniting himself for a suicidal bomb attack. As a human, this ties into his reckless lifestyle, with a favorite pastime involving fireworks and other explosives.

Jerryrom’s biggest curse is that his past life was defined entirely through the lens of a television. It’s likely that he was subjected to endless hours of propaganda, but whatever the screen really showed, it eroded his understanding of fantasy versus reality.

His Meta form likely has his eyes and mouth shut because he can no longer see or speak of the real world for himself. Jerryrom is nothing more than a puppet, with an explosive fuse being the only sense of agency he has left.

The only aspect of Jerryrom I’m confused by is his unprompted Super Sentai-tier pose that he likes to flash. To be fair, the dance literally induces Confusion on anyone staring directly at it. Maybe it’s a hint at his favorite TV shows, or it’s nonsensical by design.

While these Meta-Beings are a pain in the ass to deal with in the early game, they’re still cool monsters. Seventeen flip-flops between a passive attitude and charging “headfirst” (if you can call that awkward cylinder a head) at the player. Her wheel shoots like a tommy gun and absolutely ravages your health bar without proper defenses.

Seventeen’s upper half has a vaguely humanlike outline, but her real head is closer to the wheel. Her spindly arms crank the wheel for shooting, while the fatter back legs can kick or brace like a tripod.

True to her behaviors as a Meta-Being, Seventeen was an emotionally erratic girl, swinging between cool and composed to fearful. I think she could tell people were speaking sweet nothings to her, and so she constantly tried to escape the secret labs. Eventually, she gave up the fight for a blue sky and accepted her fate.

Seventeen’s name is explicitly referencing the 17th Major Arcana, The Star (which is also her Idea Sephira’s name). I think her name is a pun on having “split” personalities, as The Star has a woman pouring two sources of water (splitting them into separate rivers).

This toothy, chunky, four-armed dufus is awesome. Gliro eagerly hops towards the player on his curled tail. His goofy unsettling grin never changes, and his vacant eyes stare unblinking.

Gliro is a kleptomaniac both before and after becoming a Meta-Being. He can easily steal an item from the player if they aren’t careful, at which point he bounces around faster in a cartoonish escape. The item can be retrieved, but it requires force, as he’d rather chuck and destroy the treasure in your face before relinquishing it.

What’s fascinating is that Gliro’s own eyes turned into a Consciousness Orb, a structure that appears elsewhere in the game. An Orb is kind of like a pocket dimension for memories as well as physical items. Gliro is so obsessed with collecting, that his own body became a storage vessel.

This tidbit of lore is adorable in that it over explains a simple game mechanic. You don’t get to physically see the item Gliro is pickpocketing (it’s only visible when thrown). A cloud of dust appears, the game alerts you that “___ was stolen,” and that’s it. The item was instantaneously transferred to his Consciousness Orb!

This amount of detail wasn’t necessary, but it’s cool how much dedication the writers had for it anyways.

I like that there’s more to this Beta-Being than simply being a scary clown. Soconpo’s body melts into a large glaring eye on his belly. He has to clunkily hop around on a comically small piston, since he lacks proper feet. The lanky metal arms are capped with weighted spheres, which he’ll twirl around when attacking the player.

I don’t really know what’s going on with the frog heads. But at least for the clown half of the design, it has a straightforward connection to his backstory.

During his life as a human, Soconpo begrudgingly worked as a traveling entertainer, unable to settle down and enjoy the simple pleasures of his surroundings. However, his popularity and the expectations of his audiences slowly ate away at him. People clamored for the clown, but not the man behind the mask. Eventually, he experienced ego death and truly became the clown as a Meta-Being. The weighted arms may be a physical manifestation of the “weight” of his audience’s expectations.

As for the frogs, I have a feeling there’s some sort of pun in Japanese that’s lost for overseas players. Symbolically, my guess is that Soconpo likened the endless droning of his audience to the nighttime song of said amphibians. In-game, the heads can spit acid, so perhaps Soconpo dealt with a lot of jeering from his onlookers? Maybe it’s because of how harsh he was to himself?

This mannequin-sea slug hybrid looks super cool. I especially like her long sickle arms.

Liars will spam gasses that inflict either Lethargy or Lust, the latter of which is an amazing joke status condition. Everything - even items on the ground - turn into pretty ladies. I ran into a character calling the protagonist a weirdo pervert while under its effects.

For her days before existing as a Meta-Being, Liars were yet more lonely girls consumed with an intense desire to be loved. Unlike Bulgers, Liars took out the pain via cutting themselves (hence the long sickles as a Meta-Being). Data entries suggest that it kept escalating, until she left herself weakened from too much blood loss.

The Baroquemonger talks about Liars having their bodies turned inside out, though I’m not sure if it’s to be taken literally. The mysterious pink flesh at her abdomen may be confirmation of such. After all, some sea life - including starfish and sea cucumbers - can spit their insides out (it would make Liar a combination of multiple aquatic creatures).

If the innards thing is a figure of speech, it may represent how she took her pent up lament out onto her physical body.

Another clear-cut Meta-Being, Death is a sentient murderous casket. Unfortunately, it was an empty burial; not even the Baroquemonger knows the fate of the body.

I like how Death’s scythe looks more like a giant saw, and the exaggerated stone-carved skeleton hand.

Sometimes, the casket opens up and sucks the player in, with a few vaguely humanoid heads visible inside. Perhaps Death is harvesting bodies to fill the void and fulfill his purpose as a coffin?

This thing was seared into my memory when I first played Baroque all those years ago. Bubugel’s backside camouflages as just another wall in the Neuro Tower, only for him to ambush the player by rapidly spinning and flashing his hideous, grimacing, melted baby face. If you don’t have the minimap visible to hint at his presence, he makes for an effective jump scare.

Bubugels are extra annoying to deal with, because they have insanely high defenses for an early game enemy. Once they’re slain, they fall flat on the ground, which is naturally difficult to dodge because its body is the height of an entire wall.

In addition to having bulk, Bubugel also spits out balls of electricity that - once again - are overwhelming to low-level equipment. There are multiple layers of obnoxiousness with this monster.

The one silver lining is that activating a switch in the Neuro Tower floods certain floors, specifically where Bubugels spawn. It’s possible to remove them indefinitely in a playthrough.

Similar to Jerryrom, Bubugel was somewhat of a hermit with a distorted understanding of the world. Shut away in his room, his world was like a mirror reflecting in on itself, limiting what he could see.

By the time he noticed this facsimile, the apocalypse had already begun. His Meta-Being’s framed face may represent him trying to escape the window, but he’s forever trapped in his sliver of a “room.”

There isn’t much lore behind this otherwise awesome Meta-Being. Hungones is in a lot of pain, which seems like a “no duh” statement to me; every Meta-Being in the Tower is suffering. His Idea Sephirah is The Hanged Man, and I like that his design strays away from the expected noose around the neck.

Hungones had a simple wish to see the open sky. He used false wings in hopes of flying to freedom, but much like Icarus, he fell back to the earth. His bandaged limbs are likely due to those injuries.

His dream also explains why he clings to the ceiling with his clawed foot. It’s the closest he can touch the sky he yearns for.

Hungones’s long tubular fingers can spit out gasses for several of the game’s status conditions, but I don’t know where he gained this ability.

There’s a head grafted to his body, but the lore doesn’t explain if it’s his or someone else’s. A couple NPCs in the game also have this situation, with one whose heads are both conscious and have their personalities intact.

Another Meta-Being that’s a hollow shell. Its upper half looks like a torture cage, while its lower half is loosely a mage robe. That’s fitting, since it casts electric orbs at the player. The data entries don’t confirm it, but I reckon Or-huganous is a fusion of an electrified cage and the spirit of the victim who sat inside it.

On a side note, one of its palette swaps has a purple “robe,” which is objectively the coolest color scheme it can have.

Sin-monis is an okay design. There are other blob monsters I find more appealing (in their own ugly blobby ways).

This is one of the few Meta-Beings whose name can be easily translated, because it’s in plain Latin! Sin-monis is “Without Warning,” which fits in with the whole apocalypse that descended on the world.

Her name may also be in reference to her degraded memory. It’s not stated exactly what she was afflicted with, just that “colorful memories” suddenly turned monochrome. This carried over to her Meta-Being form being physically melted along with her psyche.

The whole dementia angle might explain why Sin-monis will sometimes scuttle in place, as if spacing out. I have a feeling it’s just the AI acting up, but what if it isn’t? This is the perfect Meta-Being to have a quirk like that.

In combat, Sin-monis is somewhat annoying to deal with. Her long mouth (proboscis?) saps out either health or VT from the player, which is exacerbated when more than one are clamoring for a cut of the pie. In the bonus dungeons, their palette swaps do a shocking amount of damage even with upgraded equipment. Like any other enemy in Baroque, however, they’re not that difficult to deal with; at worst, the floor has to be reset from too much HP/VT loss.