The combat system of Infinite Undiscovery is probably its best feature.
I’m little over ten hours into this Japanese RPG game and it’s actually not horrible. I remember how it got slammed in the reviews, but I figured that these days, most Japanese RPG games get poorly reviewed because they aren’t innovative enough or have enough marketing behind them. And I was kind of right about the reviews being overly harsh. Some of the things I heard were definitely negatives, but at the end of the day, it still had a certain appeal to me.
Infinite Undiscovery actually plays a little like a single player World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XII. While I feel that Final Fantasy XII is much better game due to its game mechanics, its storyline was terrible and I wasn’t able to finish it because I just didn’t care enough about the characters to see how it concluded. Infinite Undiscovery doesn’t have the gameplay depth or length of Final Fantasy XII, but it makes up for it a bit by having a more interesting storyline and enjoyable characters.
I have to make it clear from the get-go: for the most part, I like Japanese RPGs. I’ve been playing them since the original Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior on the NES, and while I don’t always enjoy all of them, I do appreciate them. For some reason I could not get into Xenogears. Maybe I was too young when it first came out? Who knows. And then there’s the fan-loved Skies of Arcadia on the Dreamcast or Namco’s Tales series. I can’t help it, but I just cannot get into the Tales games. Something about them just has me falling asleep – maybe the characters are boring, there’s too much dialogue of stuff I don’t care about, etc. I have no idea. Then there’s games like Enchanted Arms and Blue Dragon that I enjoyed, while in general the rest of the gaming community didn’t quite like. What I’ve noticed, is perhaps games like Blue Dragon were enjoyable to me because they kept the tried and true Japanese RPG game mechanics that I enjoyed: leveling up, learning abilities, managing party members, finding treasures, etc. while also giving me an engaging storyline without boring me. I guess since I tend to enjoy watching anime, I’m also more open to the idea of cartoony and angsty protagonists.
Here are a couple things that I liked most so far:
An Engaging Combat System
Infinite Undiscovery is not a turn-based RPG, but rather, a real-time based MMORPG style game similar to Final Fantasy XII. If you haven’t played it, Final Fantasy XII is set up like an MMORPG but instead of playing solo, you are accompanied by two other AI characters. What makes the whole AI party work in FFXII is that Gambit system. Using Gambits, you can actually set specific constraints for each AI partner to do at a pretty detailed level. For example, you could set it so one AI partner would attack with her most damaging spell as long as her MP was greater than 75%. And then you could set another Gambit so that if any party member had less 50% health, she would cast heal on them. You could also set the healing to be higher priority than attacking, etc. This would dictate how she would act in every battle. So you could really customize how you wanted each character to be, and I thought it was pretty revolutionary for controlling AI partners.
Unfortunately, Infinite Undiscovery has no such thing as a Gambit system so you don’t have the AI down to that level of control, but what’s in place works. In Infinite Undiscovery you are able to travel with 3 other AI partners of your choice, and you can set up which special moves each character can use. Instead of specific conditions to set up for each AI partner, you have a choice of about six different party settings that you can switch to on the fly with your d-pad. You can choose from Focus, Spread, Wait, Conserve MP, Free and Combo. Each of those settings allows your three AI partners to act accordingly, whether it’s to focus on your target, don’t use any MP, do what they want, etc. There’s a seperate button you can hit at any time to ask the AI partners to heal the party whether through magic spells or item uce. It works for the most part.
The combat system also has certain similarities to combo systems in fighting games. It’s obviously not as deep or developed, but a combo system is there for air juggles, ground combos, and downed combos. As you level you learn new special moves with different animations/combos. Many of them can lift the enemy into the air, and you and your party can continue to attack the enemy in the air to juggle him until he dies. Ground and downed combos are the same way. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s not the grind-fest of a turn based RPG either.
Large Party Management
Infinite Undiscovery is the first time where I’ve played a Japanese RPG that actually made pretty good use of your entire roster. I think there’s about 15 or so different characters total that can join the team. You can only travel with four at a time usually, and the ones sitting on the bench will still automatically gain half the experience that you get in the field. Pretty standard Japanese RPG stuff except in Infinite Undiscovery, there’s a lot of set pieces that require two or three parties.
Certain levels that require multiple parties means you’ll be controlling the primary party with three other characters of your choosing, while setting up the other parties with four more characters each. Those parties end up being controlled by the AI completely, but it’s definitely pretty cool to see twelve of your party members all out in the field and hacking/slashing their way to the goal. All pickups and experience are shared when multiple parties are in play, so there’s no worry there but to just be sort of awestruck by this “raid group” that you’re a part of. It can get pretty chaotic with so many of your characters running around, but I thought it was pretty neat.
And here are some of the things I didn’t like:
Length Seems Pretty Short
I’m already on the second of the two discs and it’s only been ten hours? Does this mean the game is pretty much beatable in twenty hours? That’s pretty short for a Japanese RPG. The closest game I can compare this to, Final Fantasy XII, I ended up playing for over 70 hours and I was still only about three quarters through.
It seems like there’s only a handful of towns in this game separated by zones. I’m annoyed that you can’t exactly warp from one town to another – instead you have to run through the hostile zone(s) back and forth. It even feels like some quests require you to go through the same zones more than once. Kind of annoying. It actually seemed like it would have a large scope but the developers probably really wimped out because there’s maybe only 5-6 towns and 7-8 enemy zones in the game and you have to keep returning to the same ones.
Missing Vocals?
For maybe 80% of the cutscenes in the game, there is spoken dialogue between the characters. The voice acting is in English only, and it’s not horrible. While I would have loved a Japanese language with English subtitles option, that seems to be a premium these days. Anyway, the weird thing about the other 20% of the cutscenes is that there’s just no spoken dialogue or any sound effects whatsoever. Subtitles will show, but there’s no audio of any sort so you’ll see the characters’ mouths move along with accompanying subtitles, but they won’t speak. And these are main characters too, who were just speaking in the previous cutscene.
What I suspect is that the developers decided to cram the entire game into two DVDs, and maybe they were a bit over. So to get onto the DVDs, they went through and arbitrarily cut out the audio on certain cutscenes instead of just going for a 3-disc release. It’s definitely cost-efficient, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that they would sacrifice the quality of the game to just save a few bucks.
Lack of Quest Management
While the main questline is pretty straightforward, there’s actually a ton of random sidequests that you can accidentally come upon. You may talk to some kid who thinks he saw something somewhere, but that’s all that you get. In any MMORPG if you spoke to an NPC and there was a quest associated with it, your journal would note that optional sidequest and what you should do next. There isn’t any of that in Infinite Undiscovery. You can be juggling 5-10 different small sidequests at a time, and by the time you’re completing one of them you may not even know you completed it. You may not have even known it was a sidequest to begin with! An example of this may be you just entered a new town and spoke to one of the NPCs and she’s like, “Oh you met my brother? He’s alive thank god! Please, take this for your troubles.” Huh? Lady, I don’t even remember your brother! There’s nothing that even lets you know you took a sidequest and I was somewhat annoyed with that. (And most of the rewards suck too.)
Parting Thoughts
At my current rate I’ll probably end up beating it soon, but if I want all of the Achievements I’ll have to play it through three times. I have to admit though, that some of these later cutscenes and enemy zones are really boring. I almost want to skip the cutscenes (which you can), but feel I should just force myself to listen through the story. The game seems to have started interestingly enough but lags a bit due to the “dinky” quality of the acting/cutscenes. Maybe the 20 hour length ain’t such a bad thing then if I already am getting a little bored.
It’s hard to recommend at this point, as it’s not exactly the most non-JRPG friendly game even if it is more action based. Most of the stuff is still very classic JRPG design like checking for treasures in people’s homes, upgrading your weapons at every new town, etc. If you’re a fan of JRPGs, then Infinite Undiscovery might not be too bad for you, but for all others, I’d say skip it. If you’re a 360 owner and not sure whether you like JRPGs or not, start with Lost Odyssey first and slowly expand from there.
