Who Made Baroque?

Kazunari Yonemitsu conceived Baroque, directed it, co-designed it, and wrote its text. He was a Sting founder who had come from Compile, where he wrote Madou Monogatari and managed the first Puyo Puyo; Baroque was the dark work he had been prevented from making for years. He built it from tarot, from the psychiatry of Bin Kimura, whose books Time and Self and Abnormal Structures the Baroque Report materials name as influences, and from European film.

The characters were designed by Hyoju Mu. The game's 3D and CGI were led by Eisaku Kito, who also designed the enemies: the Grotesques. Production reality shaped the art in a famous way. The models were so elaborate that only about twenty enemies were affordable, marketing feared the small roster would hurt sales, and Yonemitsu argued his way out by declaring the Grotesques were modeled on the 22 cards of the tarot's Major Arcana, a justification invented on the spot that then became real design doctrine. Kito gave the tower's interior a recurring "uterus" aesthetic, its monsters designed as microorganisms infecting a womb.

The CGI itself was produced with Inertia Pictures, an American studio Yonemitsu hired for a look no Japanese house had, across time zones and languages. For the remake a decade later, the faces were redrawn by Kenjiro Suzuki. Any account that credits Baroque's faces to another game's artist is confusing it with a different Sting-adjacent production: the 1998 designs are Mu's, the models and films Kito's.