Infinite Undiscovery Review

The most disappointing thing about this tri-Ace developed Xbox 360 exclusive is that it’s just a bit, well, meh. The story is as nonsensical as the game’s ridiculous title, the characters as generic as a 7/10 FPS and the graphics are way below what we’ve come to expect from the Xbox 360. What were we expecting? Quite a lot, actually. It’s made by the developer behind Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile, two JRPG series held in high regard by aficionados.

Underwhelming is the best word to describe the Infinite Undiscovery experience. There are some genuinely good moments in there, as well as some God awful moments, too. That’s fine – it’s incredibly hard to make a JRPG of about 30 hours in length consistently entertaining all the way through. But it’s a crying shame that the game should reek of generic role-playing cliché when it clearly could have been so much more.

We’re used to cringe-worthy plots from JRPGs, as well as ‘so bad they’re, well, still bad’ voice-acting (why can’t we at least have an original Japanese with English subtitles option, developers?). And Infinite Undiscovery is no exception. The moon, known as the throne of gods, had rested peacefully in the heavens, with man enjoying lovely prosperity by harnessing its power. But the bliss was blasted into oblivion when the Order of Chains, er, chained the moon to the planet (yes, with actual chains) and started bleeding the life out of the earth, transforming previously gorgeous environments into barren wastelands and generally making everyone very sad.

The game begins with a jail break. 16-year-old Tifa rip-off Aya busts 17-year-old ‘I never wanted any of this!’ Capell from behind bars for the simple reason that he’s a dead ringer for Sigmund the Liberator, the leader of the resistance. Aya soon realises she’s made a mistake, but by then it’s too late. Capell’s in too deep and they both need to work together to escape.

It’s astonishing how incredibly boring this jail break opening to the game is. It feels as if tri-Ace is deliberately trying to stop you sticking with its own game. This sequence, complete with a race to get away from a troll that chases you up what feels like a never-ending stairwell, has about as much dramatic oomph as a sleeping turtle. Outside the jail things get worse. It’s night and you’re in a forest – you have to creep up on guards and take them out without signalling the alarm – a nigh-on impossible task since you have absolutely no idea where you’re going because the mini-map is jammed. After that there’s an excruciating escort quest and some funny business with farm animals This lot will take you about two hours to get through – two of the slowest, most boring opening hours to a game we’ve ever experienced. It’s all the more shocking that this off-putting antipasti has been served up by a developer that knows how to cook up a quality JRPG.

The combat is perhaps the best thing about the game. The battle-system is real-time, bucking the turn-based JRPG trend, and there are no random battles (it actually feels similar to Final Fantasy XII’s real-time, almost MMO group combat, which for me is a good thing). You simply have to walk up to an enemy to ‘agro’ it, and then a fight kicks off. Capell’s got a few core sword-slicing combos that you’ll use over and over again throughout pretty much the entire game, which doesn’t help in the ‘keep things fresh’ stakes (you’ll soon tire of hearing the teenage angst-ridden flute player scream SPINNING WALTZ! every two seconds, that’s for sure). Because he’s a melee-based class, it’s essential that you have a healer in your party to sort him out when he starts taking a beating, otherwise you’ll have to dip into the menu via the Back button, which doesn’t pause the action, to heal yourself with expensive potions (it didn’t work in Alone in the Dark and it doesn’t work here).

Luckily, you can ‘Connect’ with your party mates in order to dish out commands, like firing arrows from Aya’s bow, or calling for a heal, which helps make you feel more like you’re managing a group of freedom fighters rather than one.

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.

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.

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.