Infinite Undiscovery

"Liberate yourself from the chains of this game"

Infinite Undiscovery – the first game from tri-Ace to be developed for the current hi-def gaming era – shares a lot of similarities to the other games from its maker. The gameplay is much more action-orientated than your standard fare RPG, and it makes a few attempts to do something entirely new. In the end, however, it comes off as much more commonplace and unoriginal now that action RPGs are becoming more of the norm with games like Tales, Star Ocean, and Kingdom Hearts now as prevalent as turn-based RPGs once were. This feeling of been-there-done-that is one of a series of problems that plagues the game.

Battling

After an unusually brief opening cutscene for an RPG and a brief tutorial, the game shoves the player straight into the action. Even with the tutorial, it's hard to get a handle on the clunky controls in the beginning. One of the few easy aspects of the game is attacking. As such, attacking is one of the only things the player will end up doing in battle. Attacking is mapped to two buttons. By pressing the buttons in a certain order the player can execute a quick MP-free combo; by holding one of the buttons down, the player can execute a more powerful but MP-consuming skill. However, only new skills can be unlocked while the combos stay the same throughout the game. What this means is the character will shout and perform mostly the same attacks all throughout the game. It's a good thing the game is so short, so it really only starts to get really annoying towards the end.

Of course, one of the other important things to do in battle is heal. Unlike many other action RPGs where the AI is completely clueless and never heals or does anything vaguely useless, Infinite Undiscovery boasts some of the best AI for allies I have ever seen, personally. The AI will do a reasonably good job of keeping your team healthy on their own, but just in case they fall short, the Y button causes the character to instantly call for aid, getting the team to work healing those in need. These competent companions really give off the sense of waging war alongside seasoned warriors and sometimes make the battles much more entertaining than the button-mashing tedium they usually are. But that's about where the good stuff ends.

For starters, since the main character won't parry until he's executed whatever attacks he's using, parrying is nigh useless in the fast-paced battles of the game where the player will want to be attacking at all times. While it's easy enough to make it through the game without ever parrying, it remains irritating that it's there and yet so useless while other similar games have rather successfully integrated dodging/rolling/blocking buttons.

Then there is the menu system. In an attempt to make the game seem more alive and action-orientated, the developers decided to make the game continue while the player accesses the menu. What this means is that while it's possible to equip characters and forge new items and gear anywhere, the trade off is that using items in battle is akin to suicide for the untrained player. Though this isn't much of an issue for a good portion of the game since the AI will do most of the healing, towards the end of the game it falls on the player to do the healing much more often and it becomes painfully obvious how silly it is to have the game keep on going while the menu's up.

One of the last things to note about the combat system is the Connect System. Instead of allowing the player to switch control to characters other than the main character, the game instead allows the main character to connect to his comrades and utilize up to two of their skills at a time. However, the interface for this system is so clunky that it is just as useless as parrying during battle, if not even more so. For instance, aiming when connected with the archer is always unnecessarily limited to a very small targeting area. Why the archer can't aim in more than a tiny circle at any time is beyond me. In the end, the player is left wondering why this garbled system was implemented rather than simply allowing direct control of the teammates.

So all-in-all, there's a number of hideously useless mechanics to combat owing to a number of poor interface choices, but nearly all of them are ignorable. What's left is a sometimes entertaining button-mashing fest.

Exploration

Outside of combat, the game is a bit more playable, but it still manages to suffer from a few odd decisions. For instance, the draw/sheathe sword command. This whole action is pretty needless and ends up causing more fuss than add fun or value to the game. Basically, to fight, having the sword out to whack monsters is the best idea. Otherwise, the sword needs to be put away to open doors, open chests, perform item creation, and a whole slew of other things. It's just a hassle, and there really isn't a reason to make the player go through the motions of sheathing and unsheathing every minute or so when other games allow the player to perform all those options easily and seamlessly.

The other big complaint here is that the game really likes forcing you to travel all over. On the way to a new town? The game will give some vague idea of where to go. And by vague I mean something like “go north.” Too bad there are about ten paths heading north, so get used to spending a while wandering around aimlessly hoping to stumble into the right path just to advance in the game. Afterwards, when revisiting an area, to get from one town to another the player is constantly forced to wade through the same enemy-infested areas over and over again. A simple teleport from town to town ability or an overworld map the player could traverse quickly would have done the job and made things so much easier.

This idea of making the player wander about aimlessly to artificially increase the time it takes to get through the game is one of a few cheap jabs at the player. It falls next to leaving out some of the items and optional dungeons (but thankfully not storyline) from some of the difficulty levels, forcing the player to play the game multiple times to unlock the hardest difficulty where everything is available. Also, though the game tries to hype up Situational Battles as more than the average fight, there really is nothing interesting about them. Every now and then the game will force the player to herd some helpless character from one place to the next or fight while a natural disaster will occasionally try to hurt the team, but in essence nothing really changes about the battles. The battles will still be extremely focused on taking out the monsters to the point that these situational battles are almost always indistinguishable from normal ones. Even Resident Evil 4 managed to put in more interaction with the environment with actual consequences to such actions.

Graphics/Audio/Presentation

Visually and audibly, the game is usually quite pleasing. Just check out a few screenshots and notice how clean a lot of the pictures look. While there is a bit of slowdown every now and then when too many special effects and characters flood the screen, it really isn't an issue. In addition, the soundtrack serves its purpose quite well, though there are few if any memorable songs.

What really needs to be said here is about the cutscenes. For starters, some scenes which look like they should have voice acting, often placed right between two other very similar cutscenes which do have voice acting, mysteriously do not. This in conjunction with the terrible lip synching makes the game appear rather unpolished at times. What really pushes this over the edge is the extremely grating voice acting. Though most of the handful of central characters have decent voice actors, expect almost everyone else to shout their lines and scream unnecessarily. The usual fix to bad voice acting – switching over to the Japanese audio – isn't available here, so the best option is just to keep the remote handy and get ready to mute whenever a few annoying characters start screeching.

Story

It's a shame that the characters tend to be just as enjoyable as their voice actors. Though there are eighteen characters that will eventually be recruited into the character's party, only a small few of those will ever receive more than an introductory backstory and maybe one more scene if they are lucky. This is a real shame considering how well the main character and his love interest develop throughout the game. But as it stands, the plot is mostly a tired patch of cliches and trite stereotypical characters (the annoying, magic-casting twins, the big guy who looks tough but has a gentle heart, the scantily clad and naive woman who giggles and flirts) that is only made enjoyable by the few times the main character does something more than whine or get dragged around. In the end, it really doesn't hold up to other RPG storylines which simulate an epic adventure through the massive journey they offer simply because it's so short.

Conclusion

So really, what can be said about Infinite Undiscovery is that it takes a bunch of old ideas – both in its plot and in its battles – and executes them passably or poorly, then tacks on a bunch of good ideas but in such a terrible way that they turn into bad ideas. If you put up with the game long enough, if you can grow accustomed to the poor interface and the cookie-cutter supporting cast, then there is some fun in the simplistic combat and the traditional save-the-world story that will likely manage to make you play to the end of this roughly twenty hour game. But why would you want to? When faced with the dozens of other RPGs in the same vein that actually achieve something memorable, why settle for something bland and forgettable like this game?

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/08

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