And on to my next review of a J-RPG that I've yet to hear much about from others -- Babel.
I had some high expectations for this game, since Telenet has produced some other excellent RPGs. From what I understand, the story has quite a bit of religious tones to it (if you haven't noticed from the title). Essentially, you're in some distant planet that sorta looks like a post-apocalyptic type world. This world was created when earthlings lost control of their spaceship and landed here. They go on to teach their advanced technology to the people, and along the way, deify themselves to the people of their new planet. Few hundred years pass, and you're some rambo-type guy who rescues some girl being kidnapped by soldiers. And of course, this girl is no average girl, and you are swept into this storyline.
In the game, you use modern weapons to fight against your enemies, which I though was really cool. However, the encounter rate is on the ridiculous side -- you are caught in a fight between 2-4 seconds of walking, and what really is annoying is that you don't gain much from fighting. There is no experience system, as your characters level up only depending on where you are in the storyline. You do get money from fighting, but not much, and you're never really in need of much money anyway. In fact, towards the latter part of the game when you can easily run away (about 3/5 in to the game), I ran away from
all my peon fights. In addition, the there is pretty cool fighting animations, but it has to constantly load the animation from the CD, which is a drag.
Decent graphics & sound for an RPG. Cool enemies and characters. The overworld isn't big, but the towns are huge.
One thing -- this is NOT an import-friendly RPG. Unlike some import RPGs where you can only go to one or maybe two other spots at a time, you can go to multiple towns/places in this game, and you have to search through these huge towns & talk to the right people to advance the storyline, so if you don't know exactly where to go next, you can be wandering around aimlessly for a long, long time.
I'd guess that it took me around 17-20 hours of gameplay to complete the game.
Less loading time during battles, as well as less frequent, but a more meaningful, battle encounters could've improved this game tons. It does have a rather good storyline, but if you don't understand it, the gameplay alone may not keep import RPG players playing this game for a considerable amount of time.
Japanese faq site here ->
http://rko.jp/babel/index.html...
Moving on to my next obscure RPG -- I'm thinking about either the Nekketsu Legend Baseballer (a baseball(!) RPG), or some other wacky title.
Topic: Babel (Read 396 times)
