i loved babylons fall, like, a lot, i platnumed it, i beat all the patch content, finished every side mission and even went back to beat it a second time. this, i feel, puts me in a position as one of the few people really qualified to give this kind of sendoff, i was there for the final months of the games existance through nearly and now fully dead servers, impossible to find lobbies and buggy netplay, i bought the game the day the announcement came. originally i wasn't super enthusiastic on playing it pre-launch just because it was a live service and those are gross, but i took a chance on it because i did vibe with how the gameplay looked and i liked the ps360 graphical style the game had and i am so glad i took this chance, the game kept me company in the stressful run-up to an operation (that got delayed anyway) and it ended up leading to a final night that was one of the most fun experiances i ever had with a game.

the night in question was a stream wherein we had played the game, from start to finish, with two fresh characters and my level 250 carry, we rushed through all the basegame content and finished the game with litterally 6 minuites to spare, with the sounds of into free and my way sending the game off in the only way it deserved to be. there were screams of hype in the chat, laughs, tears, many screamings of the final bosses name and in the end we posed on the pier as the game died mid sentance. it helped put into perspective the game as a whole, seeing it in rapid succession, the varied sights, fun gameplay and hype story, even the music stuck with me more this time around, it also highlighted more of the games flaws, the lobby issues, server woes and the error codes (which may have been because it was dying in a few hours) as well as the issues with pacing and an awful first few hours, especially if you go into it with co op in mind, but when the game gets good and you really meet it on its own terms, none of that matters and it makes for an experiance that i won't ever forget.

as part of this wake i would like to give my fellow players a chance to say their piece on the game "It took me a while to understand this game and meet it where it wanted to be met. Babylon's Fall didn't shine for me for the vast majority of it's life but in these final moments it all clicked. I learned to love Babylon's Fall in it's last hours. I learned to love it's beautiful sights, it's satisfying gameplay and it's weird ass story. I'm sad my time with it was as limited as it was, planting seeds in a garden that we'll never see grown. What did grow was beautiful though, that last hour is gonna be one of my strongest memories of any game. It went out with not a whimper but a bang." - armuta_ . "bemus"- bunnit . "all those environments, sky boxes, those amazing fish models that they copypasted across the game, all gone. square enix moment : (" -thorhighheels ."Babylons Fall is a reminder that everything in life is fleeting. Born into this world less than a year ago and set to die in a harsh world stuffed to the birm with competition. From minute one it had an uphill battle and most people never even deemed it to be worth a fair shot, most people never even cared to look in its general direction, but I'm glad I did. Babylons Fall is not the best game of 2022, it's not a game that most people would even think holds much value I'm sure, but this temporary world in a temporary medium will now go on to only be a memory, a story passed down by those that played it. I'll look back fondly on this experience in the years to come, a story about a false reality that it's characters exist within and wish to escape, a tormented cycle that has no end for them until today. You can rest easy now Babylons fall, your job is done. You tried your entire life to fly and pierce the heavens. Unfortunately it took your death for that to finally come."- demenza

the one final thing i would like to mention is that i do not believe that the reception to this game was fair at all, while some issues as i mentioned were very fair, much of it was bad faith, a few (the same kind of bad actors that usually end up doing this kind of thing) people thought the game looked bad, went in trying to find things to dislike, never bothered to get very far and then released their videos which sent the public, who also did not play it, into a negativity spiral that the game did not deserve, it happens all the time, games like balan and most sonic games, which are hated purely because of a few bad actors that never wanted to give it a real chance on its own terms, and i think this game is the first real major casualty of that, a game that is, in part because of that, now dead and lost as art possibly forever, and i think this should be a real wakeup call for what that kind of hate brigading can cause. this game was not awful, it was not even bad, the art style was unique and the gameplay was a lot of fun, any accusations that it was "one of the worst games ever made" or "worst of the year" are absurd and are takes i refuse to even acknowledge as legitimate when a lot of the sources that give these claims give many good games these same reputations anyway because it does not fit their narrow, western-centric, standards of quality.