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The plot is as nonsensical as the title
The plot is as nonsensical as the titleThe plot is as nonsensical as the title

Back to the plot, essentially Capell and co are charged with busting up the chains that are keeping the moon tethered to the planet. The only problem is each chain is guarded by a boss, which, on the whole, is rock hard to defeat. And they get harder as you progress. Some will love this, since it's classic JRPG fare, but, let's be honest, it's a bit off-putting to experience such severe difficulty spikes.

Admittedly, Infinite Undiscovery does grow on you. And it certainly does get better (frankly, it couldn't have got worse after that start). We suspect some might criticise it for being too short, be we quite liked its compact, tightly knit campaign. It was perhaps an even shorter experience for me than it will be for others, since I didn't bother with most of the side quests, gained by talking to your party members in safe towns and cities. Why? Because they're almost all laborious fetch jobs with no impact on story or character.

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As we said, the voice acting is bad. But it's also quite bemusing. Sometimes cut-scenes will shift from being fully voice-acted to having dialogue text on the bottom of the screen for no apparent reason. And then, in the same cut-scene, it will shift back to fully voice-acted. And when the cut-scenes are voice acting, they're often out of sync on a par with a dubbed seventies Hong Kong martial arts flick.

One of Infinite Undiscovery's big hooks is that you have access to a whopping big party of characters, over 15 in fact. While having a football squad-sized team of characters to play with is cool in theory, you soon get frustrated having to micromanage each one's equipment and weapons, and you'll never have enough cash to keep everyone kitted out in the most useful bling. I thought we'd grown out of that kind of thing. Clearly not. Still though, because of the way the party system works (you divide up into groups of four which go off on their own) there's moments of magic where you'll all come together to spank a sub-boss. This, for us, is perhaps Infinite Undiscovery's greatest innovation.

The combat is perhaps the best thing about the gameThe combat is perhaps the best thing about the game

Out of combat, the game suffers from an archaic lack of sign posting. Now we're not expecting tri-Ace to hold our hands and molly coddle us as if we're on a school trip, but it would be nice to know where, generally, in the world we need to go next to progress the main story. It's all down to a lack of a journal, which would help refresh your memory as to what NPCs have said. As it is you have to listen to everything that's said with such attention that you risk collapsing your brain. There were way too many wasted hours spent wandering around befuddled by invisible walls trying to find a small true gap on the map, and we only did that by hugging the wall and inching around the circumference of each area.

Weirdly, some people will love Infinite Undiscovery for all the reasons it's bad. And that's because overblown plots, Days of Our Lives voice-acting and piss-poor production value are exactly what some hardcore JRPG fans love about the genre. For some, they're actually plus points. If this is you, and you own an Xbox 360, then you should definitely give the game a punt, because you're certain to fall for its charm, and the combat, which will keep you motivated throughout the entire 30 hours or so it'll last you.

At the end of the day, though, Infinite Undiscovery is a game that will appeal to fans of tri-Ace and its games almost exclusively, which, given the hype and excitement surrounding its release, makes it a big disappointment. It's got an unforgivable opening, it looks worse than Final Fantasy XII, and that was released a year and a half ago on the PS2 and 70 per cent of the characters may as well not exist. But it does get better. And if you think of it as nothing more than a fairly simple action JRPG that tries some stuff that falls flat on its face, you'll probably end up having an OK time with it.

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