BABEL
This JRPG starts super strong. You get animation of your boy-girl duo seeing a kidnapped woman and using a rocket launcher to blow up an airplane and rescue her. Turns out she runs an orphanage for one of the two religious powers in town and was almost kidnapped by the warrior priests of one. You escort her back to the multi-sector capital city.
The male hero is a womanizer in a surprisingly delightful way in that he just tries to smooth talk them. It’s kept PG, while the female hero rolls her eyes and calls bullshit on everything. He keeps doing things out of the goodness of his heart and she keeps berating him because they need money.
At this point the greater story lost me because I play these games casually before sleep not to study Japanese. There seems to be quite a few moving parts in the story. A bomb goes off in a nearby sector killing…someone. The male hero feels beatup you could not rescue this person. You’re then given a job to deliver parts to a nearby town and here is the beginning of some of the problems.
Babel mixes up stuff a lot. For one not being a Dragon Quest rippoff but an original story in JRPGs on the PC Engine. Another it does not have experience. You get stronger after story events. There are still the standard amount of random battles but quickly become very monotonous because they are only ever attrition of your resources and time-playing and have almost no reward for you (maybe a healing supply or a pitiful amount of money.)
Also you have guns. Each character has three weapon slots (that can also be healing like a C-Ration). The guns have a finite amount of ammo. Once the gun runs out it is useless. I couldn’t find the weapon shops most of the time. But incredibly for 1992, you get an in game explanation for every item! Holy crap! But not exactly stats for the weapons, or what that means. Or which characters can equip what weapons.
The towns are huge. Monsterous. Even the ones that don’t even have an inn to heal in. They are many many screens big and do very little to establish pathways or which buildings have shops. I spent about 10 minutes trying to find the Library in Sector B, then had to go back and forgot what it looked like and had to keep entering a dozen unmarked buildings to find it again. There has to be 20 NPCs at least in every town. Who knows which one is important for your quest or how you recognize them.
It’s really trying to set up a world with a system of government and a catholic/protestant conflict and how that is laid out in the various areas and how that affects their world of life. “Just once I’d like to wear a beautiful dress.” Says a person in the lawless slum district. It’s neat but also you can’t find anything or anyone. I had to get the thankful extant Japanese online guide up to even follow the random NPCs that the plot required.
You can’t save during the game only between chapters so they expect you to play each chapter in one sitting. The reviews were not kind to this game. Turns out you can go to the rich district and pay an exorbitant fee to save.
So fun part the overworld battles are just against regular normal iguanas and quails that run away after one turn because they are just animals. Bad part to get to the plot required town meant I had to cross two screens worth of world and run into 6 random battles that don’t mean anything except my time. And then crossing between that town and the major city multiple times adds up to more than enough pointless battles where the iguana beautifully runs away. Funny the first two times, miserable the 60th. The music cuts out for a second 80% of the time you do do an attack which also becomes grating.
You do eventually get your motorcycle fixed, which is slower than walking on the overworld, has more random battles if that was possible, and lets you fire a machine gun (9 times) to kill all the iguanas and sandworms you find every 3 steps. I had to start running away from every overworld battle (by selecting do nothing on every character).
The story for Chapter 1, following the fire that killed someone involved finding a Scientist who was doing something. Meanwhile one of the churches and bounty hunters are also trying to find him. You team up with a Clint Eastwood -knockoff that looks delightfully amateurish (a lot of the key art has this feeling) who is of course going to betray you to the military? He also has a mall katana and a bolt action rifle.
Following the guide because what you do seems completely random (at one point you give hashish you got from a priest to a soldier in exchange for information. it is impossible to say whether this game is good or not.) you end up in some ancient ruins that are strongly implied to be our society (post-apocalypse baby) where the scientist has been making clones of his daughter. He has failed though because none of them have the soul of his daughter. He harvested this technology from the ruins. He had also activated a murder-golem that you fought and had killed everyone else trying to track him down. He talks, “Without my daughter, I could not begin to think of memories of tomorrow.” He dies surrounded by lifeless autondoms of his Frankenstein failures. The ruins for some reason then blow up?
The girl partner says “He was still trying to find his daughter, even in her death. Isn’t that ironic? Wasn’t that the tomorrow’s memory he was trying to form?” The guy, “whatever.”
It’s super ambitious. Trying to wrap my head around the battle system and the plot feels like it is out of my reach and if I am already using a guide in chapter 1 just to navigate the world AND every time I got in a battle I went “ugh.” Yet also this is something trying to do a Final Fantasy level thing on the PC Engine. It’s got character and world building. I’d also have to be willing to pull out a dictionary and my kanji app at 9pm in the day to actually follow the plot. And we all know when a game starts trying to give me fake politics my brain actively rejects it.