RPGs have a place in my heart, so it makes me happy that the Xbox 360 is trying to steal some of the Playstation 3’s RPG domination and actually release some of its own. Infinite Undiscovery was released in September of 2008 by the most well known role-playing game publisher, Square Enix, and developer tri-Ace, who if you recall, also released Star Ocean: The Last Hope, 5 months later. Well, Infinite Undiscovery didn’t get very high scores from other reviewers, so I wanted to check it out and see what all of the fuss was about. After playing through the game, I have very different opinions from most of the big-name review magazines. So here we go, lets check out Infinite Undiscovery.
The main storyline to Infinite Undiscovery is that the Order of Chains, or the bad guys if you will, has begun tethering moon to the planet with a series of huge chains. Whenever a new chain is tethered, monsters and disease plague the land surrounding the area where it is connected. Lord Sigmund and his party of liberation fighters are traveling the world on a mission to destroy these chains and free the world of the monsters that have been terrorizing it’s people.
While that all sounds very interesting, the game follows Capell, an effeminate wussy flute player who doesn’t want anything do with dangerous combat or a meaningful life. In the beginning, we find Capell in a prison cell, having been recently captured and mistakenly believed to be the great Lord Sigmund, liberator and world-renowned hero. Faithful to her lord, Aya, a beautiful bow-wielding young woman, rescues Capell, as she believes, like everyone else, that you are actually Sigmund. “You aren’t Sigmund? Wow, you look just like the Liberator!” Get used to this dialect, as you’ll hear that a lot throughout the game! The relationship between Capell and Sigmund is very interesting as you discover why the two look so similar.
Capell and Aya then meet up with the actual Sigmund and his force of troops on their way to sever another chain. You are conned into joining the liberation force and the game really takes off from here. Like most RPGs, you’ll get to control a series of characters in your party, but Infinite Undiscovery goes far and beyond giving you something like 18 different characters in your party!
The first hour or so of the game is really slow and not interesting at all. But once you meet up with Sigmund everything gets a lot more fun! I couldn’t put this game down once the ball got rolling!
The game length is pretty decent for an RPG. Playing through the 2 discs without doing any of the side quests or maxing out my characters or backtracking to find all of the extra content, I finished the game somewhere between 20 and 30 hours. Once you beat the game on the normal difficulty, an extra challenge dungeon is unlocked with lots of new monsters and powerful gear, giving you extra stuff to do besides replaying the game. If you tackle this and all of the things that I skipped, I imagine you’ll pull another 10-15 hours out of the game.
Infinite Undiscovery is a single player, but I think it really could have worked out quite nicely as a multiplayer game. It could easily have supported even up to a 4-player co-op over Xbox Live because as I said earlier, there are a TON of characters that you have in your party.
All of the classic RPG elements are intact. As you kill monsters, you gain experience and level up, unlocking new abilities and combos to utilize in combat. There is a really nice item creation system where each character can create different types of items or enchant them, and all of the equipment maintenance you are familiar with is there. Like Star Ocean, something that annoyed me was when you equip new weapons, their graphics are reflected in the game, but new armor does not modify your characters looks.
Like Star Ocean, Infinite Undiscovery is a real-time combat, action role-playing game. I actually enjoyed the combat more in this game, as there was no separate combat screen. You can actually see the monsters coming at you and you fight them on the same screen that you run around the world in. If you are going to do an action role-playing game, this is the way to do it. The combat is intense and very entertaining.
Besides the great story, the combat is really the star of the show. There is a combo system in the game so that you can chain attacks together to create really cool and powerful moves. Unlike nearly every other role playing game, you only control Capell in Infinicte Undiscovery. That said, the AI of your party members is actually very good, as you find they always do what you would want them to be doing. You can even give commands to tell them to wait, conserve mana, fight freely, and even focus on your target.
To ensure you don’t get bored by playing only Capell, there is a connect system which links you to one of your party members allowing you to direct them to use certain abilities. A single press of the Y button commands all party members to attempt to heal the wounded, which is imperative to spam in the later parts of the game.
Another cool feature is that you have multiple parties at once fighting together. You can set up 3 parties of 4 and they will all act together in certain dungeons and encounters, where sometimes they will take different paths throughout the dungeon, completing different tasks that help you reach the end.
Like most games by tri-Ace and Square Enix, the graphics in Infinite Undiscovery are very pretty, but there are actually some frame rate issues in combat when you are executing some combos. That combined with the slow first hour of the game, I actually didn’t think I was going to enjoy this one, but I eventually got used to it and really got hooked. Something uncommon in most role-playing games that was done very well here is the fast or non-existent loading times. In towns, when you go into a building, there is no loading time, you open the door and go right in. When you leave the town and enter the open field, or enter a dungeon, the loading times are usually less than a second. This is a huge step in the right direction for role playing games and I feel that game developers could really learn something from Infinite Undiscovery.
Or course the cut-scenes look great, and that is very important because nearly 30% of the game is lengthy cut-scenes. Luckily, you can pause the game in the middle of a cut-scene in case you need to walk away, without skipping it entirely.
The music in the game is fully orchestrated and great, as you would expect, but the voice acting, as I mentioned in Star Ocean has another full cast of terrible actors. Don’t get me wrong, lots of the actors actually are pretty good, but you can tell that tri-Ace reuses lots of its crappy actors, as you can tell right away that Capell is voiced by the same actor who plays Faize in Star Ocean, who I found annoying and pansy-like in both games. You get used to this though, because eventually I just couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.
There really is a lot more that I could have said about this game, I simply loved it. The characters were hilarious and varied. Now, I’m not sure most of the characters were supposed to be funny, but their voice acting was so terrible that I couldn’t help but love them and laugh at them. The story is very involved once you get into it; the real time action combat is super fun. The graphics are pretty and the environments and dungeons are varied and even pretty challenging most of the time. All of the classic RPG elements are represented here and there is a lot of content, especially for only 20 bucks. If you like RPGs, especially those by Square, and can get over a few frame rate
issues, you’ll love Infinite Undiscovery!
