Babel

~ BABEL ~

Laser Soft / Telenet

Super CD-ROM

1992

Poor, ill-famed Babel is best known for, of all things, having stupidly enormous towns. They're certainly larger than those you'll find in most of its contemporaries, but there's only one of truly abominable size. It's a ridiculous continent-sized metropolis split up into five sections with about a million buildings in each, and said buildings aren't arranged in neat little rows. (Heck, even the interiors of the structures are often labyrinthine.) This is a village so massive that the game comes packaged with a map of it. And you'll have to spend a lot of time wandering its streets early in the game, looking for just the right person to talk to before you can get on with things.

For a while, there seemed to be no end in sight to the roving, but that isn't the only reason I was unhappy with how the adventure was going. Some of the music is fairly good, but a lot of it really isn't. Some of the character designs are very cool, but many of them are not. Some of the towns look pretty decent, but the environments are dull for the most part. And while the cinemas aren't terrible, a lot of them are of the pint-sized Valis II variety.

That's mostly superficial stuff, though; the battles are a more serious matter, and a number of issues seem to plague them initially. Enemy designs are overutilized and mostly uninteresting. Your characters' attack animations have to be loaded up during each and every fight (the music stops and everything). And the encounter rate is way too high. It's relatively easy to flee from battles in most areas of the game, but the parts that make you buckle down and fight can be really annoying, particularly early on.

But "early on" doesn't last forever, and Babel gets better the further you get in it. Once you've done what you have to do in that big, silly town, the quest becomes much more focused; you go from one specific mission to another. And you never have to dilly-dally around earning experience points or money. In fact, the game shuns XP entirely and levels up your characters by itself at certain points, and you come across plenty of items that can be sold for wads of cash. Following a rough start, everything proceeds quickly and smoothly. And aside from some early extended periods of seemingly aimless wandering, there were no points at which I found myself stuck. There are no stupid puzzles or secret warp spots or any other such nonsense to worry about. It's just mission after mission.

Still, Babel isn't an appropriate game for novices, who'll probably never overcome the early big-town trial. RPG heavyweights, on the other hand, should be able to get through it without much grief (as long as they have this excellent Japanese guide on hand, that is). But if you're interested in acquiring the disc, I highly recommend that you obtain a copy that comes with the map sheet, which features not only a sketch of the infamous town, but also one of the entire overworld, along with an equipment guide.

I like Babel's main characters, and I like how the quest keeps moving along. I also like many of the significant story scenes. There's some good, violent, exciting material here: bad guys taking beam shots to the head, giant robots massacring villages, innocent innkeepers getting their brains blown out. Great stuff for the whole family!

There are some awkward sequences, though. The game is split up into six chapters, and the fourth features a shitload of text and a couple of cinemas with no actual gameplay. I felt like I was experiencing the second disc of Xenogears all over again. Also, the ending blows. It's such a goofy cop-out that I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

But in between the slow start and the wretched ending, there's some good fun to be had here.