Infinite Undiscovery

"Infinitely Underwhelming?"

Overview
When it was first announced, Infinite Undiscovery was one slick looking game. On the surface, it looked fantastic: developed the Tri-Ace, the team behind the relatively popular Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile games, replete with a stunningly creative premise, an entirely new gameplay engine, and stunning next-generation graphics. The central concept of the story—that of giant chains reaching up into the sky and wrapping around the moon is intriguing both thematically and aesthetically, seemed like an excellent premise for a new RPG franchise that might one day rival the behemoth Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests of the world.

But, somewhere along the way, something went wrong. Infinite Undiscovery, a game that should not just have been good—it had the pedigree of an instant-classic—fell apart. Infinite Undiscovery is a game built around a plethora of new ideas—most of which are very good—but none of those ideas are implemented into the game very well. In fact, nearly every aspect of the game is implement poorly, almost as though Infinite Undiscovery was created as the quintessential example of what not to do in a game. If we're lucky, perhaps someday in the future developers will use it as exactly that: a beacon to keep away from the rocky waters of an infinitely underwhelming game.

Gameplay
Infinite Undiscovery boasts a fully real-time combat system that utilizes the general field locations for combat rather than transitioning the player to a separate area for battle. It sounds all well and good on paper, but, as is usually the case with boasts, it falls flat when you look at the reality of the situation.

As Capell (and only Capell, despite having a cast of 18 characters) you run around outside fighting monsters. After you defeat monsters, they will eventually respawn, although there is a substantial delay. You can sheathe and unsheathe your sword: you can't fight without your sword in your hand, and you can't interact with objects with a blade between your fingers. You have access to two basic moves, a fast attack and a heavy attack, which can be chained together for a very small number of combos. You can also play Capell's flute to use a small number of magic spells, or ask for healing. One of the principal gimmicks of Infinite Undiscovery is the large cast of characters that can join your party (eighteen, in total). Though you cannot directly control these NPCs, you can temporarily assume control of their special abilities. For example, you can take over control of one character to shoot an arrow at an exploding barrel, or mind-control a monster.

Sound fun? It's not. The controls are pretty clunky. That arrow you want to shoot at that barrel (which, of course, will explode, damaging any nearby enemies) requires you to manually aim the arrow. By the time you turn the character around to even seen the barrel--and the character turns very, very slowly--most of the enemies will no longer be at the barrel. They will be right next to you. Attacking. Ouch. But what about the mind control ability? That sounds fun, too, doesn't it? It's not. Nine times out of ten one of your allies (which, as I've mentioned, you cannot control) will kill the enemy monster before you can mind-control it. And when you do succeed in mentally dominating the beast, you'd best be careful, because it will wear off very quickly and you'll have to be fast (and lucky) if you want to re-cast mind-control before your allies kill the beast. This can be particularly infuriating when the game forces you to use these special abilities to proceed with the story. All of the characters have multiple abilities, and none of them are implemented well. To be blunt, it's a complete mess.

I realize I'm focusing on the negative here--it's important to mention that the game is actually pretty damn fun to play. It's just kind of hard to get at what makes the game fun when there's a glaring flaw staring you right in the eye. Infinite Undiscovery is a perfect example of a game where the negative aspects, though not necessarily more numerous than the positive, are certainly far more obtrusive and obvious. Of course, even with all of it's flaws, Infinite Undiscovery can still be a lot of fun to play, and that ought to say something in its favor.

An important thing to mention is that the AI for your allies isn't bad--they'll heal you frequently and fight the enemy on their own, and I've yet to see any major pathfinding issues. The is particularly heartening considering how the artifical intelligences used in games can sometimes seem to be devolving proportionately to the evolution of gaming graphics and visual effects. Running into a group of giant, angry cobras and swinging your sword around wildly can be a lot of fun. The controls, though a bit laggy, are sufficiently responsive that when mixed with the above-average combat animation and visual effects draw the player into a rather visceral combat experience. You can really have a lot of fun just going around fighting weaker enemies. I say weaker with a bit of a bite, you see, as fighting enemies that are stronger than you is not can be pretty damn irritating, which brings me to the single greatest flaw in the recipe that is Infinite Undiscovery:

If you want to use an item in combat--say to heal yourself, replenish your magician's mana, or cure a status ailment--you're sorely out of luck. The game does not pause for the menu. Well, that's not entirely true. When you open the menu, Capell stops--he simply stops fighting and stands still--but the enemy doesn't. Oh, and there's also a bit of a lag when opening up the menu. If it doesn't sound like much fun, it's because it's not. Yes, your allies will still be running around fighting, but quite often they'll be just at content to stand around doing nothing, or attack a boulder instead of a monster. In the end, you really have to get used to fighting and winning all of your battles without using any items, and doing most of the work yourself. This, coupled with the myriad of other flaws in Infinite Undiscovery, makes me think that Tri-Ace either never bothered with the playtesting phase of development, or simply ignored the comments their testers made. It's rather inexcusable for Infinite Undiscovery to be lacking such a simple feature.

Beyond combat, Infinite Undiscovery plays pretty much like every other RPG in the history of gaming. There is no world map, but you run around from town to town grilling NPCs for information and side-quests, and looking for hidden goodies. The areas are humongous, all of the battles are in real-time, and loading times are fast enough to be completely beneath your notice--yes, there are some framerate hiccups, and yes they're rather frequent, but you'll never find yourself confronted with a sufficient amount of slowdown to be distracted by it.

In addition to the basic mechanics most of us are intimately familiar with, you can also use Capell's flute, (he is a musician, after all--he has to earn his bread somehow) for instance, to scan for hidden items or areas or inflict different status effects on enemies or allies. Supposedly, these are "discoveries" and there are an infinite number of them, hence the title. They're really just mundane little extras--an extra item, or a second path to an area you've already visited--and trust me, they are exceptionally finite in quantity. After you beat the game once, you'll be able to play again on a new, "hard," difficulty, which is the only way to experience the "whole" story (more on that in the next section) but you'll have to start all over from scratch. There is no new game plus. After you beat the game on normal, you'll be prompted to save. This gives you clear data that doesn't really do much of anything, other than let you fight the final boss as often as you wish and grant access to a new dungeon. Personally, I find a compelling narrative to be the central motivating factor behind playing an RPG, so halfhearted little extras like that don't really do a whole lot for me. Infinite Undiscovery seems to be a game that wants players to play through it multiple times, so the lack of a new game plus is a bit hard to swallow.

Rating: 16/20

Story
The true shame of Infinite Undiscovery is that the story had quite a bit of potential. It could have been a truly epic game—a modern myth for the contemporary gamer. A villain shackles the moon, and it's up to the player to unfetter the barren satellite. Ah, but here's a twist, you play not as the brilliant, beloved hero, but rather as a look-alike, forced to fight against the forces of evil involuntarily due to a case of mistaken identity. Yeah, there's a hell of a lot of potential there.

Character-wise, there are only four or five people you'll meet that are at all interesting. For the most part, everyone in the game is content to be an irritating cliche. For the most part the 18 other characters in your party play minor, forgettable roles in the story--but our effeminate protagonist, Capell, really stands out from the rest as the single most incorrigibly whiny gaming protagonist I can think of. He whines and complains almost incessantly. Capell does gete some development--and he can even be likable at times--but every time he gets hit in battle, you'll hear him say, "Cut it out!" in a high-pitched, whiny voice. It's grating, to say the least. Every once in a while Capell will say something very reasonable and normal (just like a real human being) but, naturally, no one bothers to pay any attention to Capell unless he's whining nonsensically or acting like a small child, so I guess he can't help it. Depending on how tolerable you are of the archetypal idiot protagonists, you may get a laugh or two out of Capell's antics, but for the most part his character seems solely designed to irritate the player.

The writing (or perhaps just the localization/translation) is pretty bad. I should mention here that I'm literate--yeah, I'm one of those nasty little blokes trotting around with a book all the time--so my standards of writing may be a tad higher than the average joe. Writing in games tends to be fairly bad on average, and Infinite Undiscovery falls far, far below the mean. If you're looking for an intersting premise and don't care for much else, you'll get exactly what you want with Infinite Undiscovery. But if you're fond of compelling, coherent narrative, well-developed characters, or even just likable or realistic characters, you will be sorely, sorely disappointed. It seems like Infinite Undiscovery tries to break every conventional rule of the story it can: you've got characters aware of situations they should NOT be aware of, you've got people exchanging information without speaking to each other.

Worst of all, Infinite Undiscovery suffers from some of the absolute worst, most terrible pacing I have ever seen. The story could very well have been epic, but the scenes are directed and paced as such that it feels exceedingly amateurish. By the time you've finished the first disc, you'll have only just become familiar with four of the characters--all protagonists, you won't really have ~any~ antagonists to speak of at that stage--feeling as though you've just completed the prologue, or first chapter of the game. But, no, it's the halfway point. Infinite Undiscovery has a lot of potential, and it feels as though the development team went out of their way to ignore the greater part of it.

Apparently the lack of narrative cohesion was intentional on the part of the developers. Each difficulty mode in the game allows players to see different content. Easy mode will give you the least amount of exposition, hard mode will give you the most amount of exposition. Naturally, though, you have to beat the game on easy or normal to unlock hard mode, and thus play through the game with a complete narrative. So far as bad ideas go, this one's pretty bad. If you do manage to stomach one entire playthrough with a gimped script, odds are you won't be too motivated for another attempt. I think the best way to see this aspect of the game for what it is is to describe it simply as unlocking extra bonus content. Sure, extras can be really cool to have in a game, and give players lots of incentive to play the game more--but players should never be forced to unlock an integral part of the game itself.

The narrative is completely devoid of tension or suspense, the characters are uninteresting and shallow. Though the moon-chaining premise is, indeed, cool, it's executed horridly. It's shoddy storytelling, which is a real shame, because the story itself could have been kind of cool. Sure, it's nothing new or groundbreaking, mind you, but it's just different enough that, coupled with the game's atmosphere, you could have a lot of fun watching it all unfold. With a sufficient amount of exposition, a better attempt at characterization and some better direction, the story could have been a classic--the kind of story we'd remember sadly for years to come.

But such is not the reality of the situation. Idle hopes and dreams do not amount to much. I sincerely doubt that anyone who is well versed in any kind of storytelling medium will want to dedicate very much of his or her memory to Infinite Undiscovery.

Rating: 7/20

Audio
A wise man once told me: “Excessive verbosity obfuscates; concision elucidates.” Therefore, in the spirit of brevity, I will begin by saying, simply, that the voice-acting is below average, the dialog itself is atrocious, and the only saving grace Infinite Undiscovery has lie in the audio effects and music—the latter of which, while rather unmemorable, manages to fit the mood of each individual scene moderately well. The music is perfectly serviceable. The dialog is not.

The acting, when there is acting (more on that later) is bland. Mostly devoid of emotion, though certain characters stick out as being well-acted (Aya, the heroine, has a particularly competent voice actress) most are extremely bland and forgettable. Though, I should admit, some of the poor acting could be attributed to the voice actors being forced to read some very tedious and insipid dialog.

Have you ever watched television with either a very young child or an asinine adult? The kind of fellow creature that would sit down with you right when your favorite show started, take the remote from you discretely, and proceed to mute the television at random intervals for random lengths of time? Playing Infinite Undiscovery is roughly analogous. There are many cutscenes in the game. Many of them have voiced dialog. Many more do not. Most cut-scenes do not have voices--only subtitles. I can only imagine that the Japanese version is fully voiced, because the lip-syncing in these non-voiced scenes is rather well-done. The characters certainly look like they should be being very articulate... only they're not.

And, of course, there's a random element. Scenes with moving lips can have no voices, yet scenes with static lips can be fully voiced. It's a shot in the dark. Personally, I would rather see either every cinematic scene voiced, or no voiced dialog at all. A smidgen of consistency can go an awful long way. Yes, most of the important scenes are voiced, but the unimportant scenes are far more numerous, and really force the player outside of the story, ruining any suspension of disbelief they might have had.

But the audio's not all bad. In addition to the handful of decent voice actors, Infinite Undiscovery also boasts a fine sound track. The generic battle music and travel music is, well, generic, but the tracks that play during certain key events or scenes can really get you excited, complementing the art design perfectly to create a marvelous fantasy ambiance that you really can't find in any other contemporary games.

Rating: 12/20

Graphics & Presentation
Infinite Undiscovery is one nice looking game. Well, for the most part. The first few areas you'll find yourself in (a dungeon and a forest) are surprisingly hideous. The dungeon is extremely bland and the forest is absurdly dark and narrow, and both are nearly unnavigable. Fortunately things start to look better--much better--once you step out into the light of day.

The lighting effects are superb. Human animations can be a bit clunky for most NPCs, but the primary characters have some of the best body-animation I've seen. Early on in the game Capell is forced to carry Aya (the heroine I mentioned briefly, earlier) through a large area. Aya is held in Capell's arms, and her body and hair sways and moves with a very realistic weight to it. It looks fantastic. The textures and visual effects are really cool to watch--especially when running in and out of shadows. For the most part, Infinite Undiscovery is one nice-looking game--but the quality is, again, inconsistent. While Capell and Aya may have excellent animations, many NPCs are horrendously awkward when moving about, and will gesticulate wildly at the slightest provocation. It's a rather disconcerting discrepancy, and does a lot to pull the player out of the game's world.

The areas that you'll be exploring are big. Really, really big, ranging from labyrinthine forests to great plains and deserts and mountains. Exploring all of these areas can be a lot of fun, though some of the wider areas you'll be in can be a tad dull. Though the areas are quite big (far larger than in any other JRPG to date) many of the textures are fairly bland. The first major area you'll be exploring (grasslands) has got a lot of cool stuff: steep cliffs, columns, rocks, a ruined road, etc., and most of it looks great... except for the grass itself, which is extremely crude, and looks like something out of the previous console generation.

The art design is absolutely stunning--particularly the attention payed to massive, grandiose architecture. The massive tower seen in the opening cinematic, for instance, was one of the single most impressive designs I'd eve seen in a game. Buildings, towns, and cities are incredibly imaginative and instill a sense of true wonder--coupled with the poignant imagery of the fettered moon, Infinite Undiscovery evokes a strong sense of the fantastical; it feels like a fairy tale. Most of the fun I've had in the game stemmed simply from walking around the world and looking. The areas are well-crafted, and I almost felt like a little kid once more, eagerly exploring an unknown realm that exceeded the bounds of my imagination. Sadly, you'll have to search out a lot of the cooler scenes and images in the game, as most of the cutscenes suffer from rather dull direction, often cutting off the camera right before you can catch a glimpse of something truly epic or fantastical. It's a shame that the scene directors didn't choose to show off more of the wonderful environments in the game.

Rating: 16/20

Final Comments
The biggest question any gamer should have about Infinite Undiscovery is fairly simple. By now, you surely understand that it's not a great game, it's not even a good game--but, in the end, is it a game worth playing?

Believe it or not, yes, Infinite Undiscovery is most-definitely worth playing. Yes, it's flawed. Yes, the flaws are too numerous to list. But that's okay--Infinite Undiscovery is an ambitious game with a giant scope, it's rare for a game developer to attempt to build a game on so grand a scale, and as gamers we have something of a duty to recognize that audacity for what it is: our last, best hope for a rapidly over-commercialized and shallow industry. Infinite Undiscovery is not a spectacular title, but it could have been, and you'll constantly be reminded of that as you play. If you can forgive the myriad faults with the games storytelling, I'm certain you'll be able to derive a significant amount of enjoyment from it.

In the end, Infinite Undiscovery is a tragic mess of terrible ideas implemented perfectly, and great ideas falling limp. For every glimmer of promise, there are three heart-wrenching flaws. By all means, Infinite Undiscovery should have been a spectacular title. In fact, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of that spectacular possibility while you play, but it constantly falls short—it perpetually disappoints. In the end, it's little more than a decent game with a lot of promise, but very little realized potential. It can be fun, it can be annoying, it can be downright painful--but it can also be entertaining and, at times, downright fun.

Rating: 11/20

Final Rating: 62/100

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/04/08, Updated 09/11/08

Game Release: Infinite Undiscovery (US, 09/02/08)