Infinite Undiscovery - The Review

Yes, yes, I know, it's very late, but it took me a looooooooooooong time to motivate myself to play this game. I bought it because everybody I know told me how wonderful it was. It was hard not to believe, because it is a Tri-Ace game (can you say Star Ocean? That game still rocks my socks off), and generally, the stuff that Square Enix releases isn't crap (I blatantly ignore the fact that Dirge of Cerberus even exists). Yet, even from the opening moment, I was pretty sure the game was not to my liking (Read: crap).

The opening cinematic shows a bunch or people fighting a dude that sprouts red glowing chains. The music is epic, the cinematic graphics were shiny and artsy, and I started to feel that I wasn't going to regret this purchase. Then the mouths started moving... and there were no words. There was obviously a conversation being had between the good character (very knightly looking with ornate armor, red undergarments, red hair, and a very awkward head band) and the bad guy (gray hair, even more awkward headband, metal claws over his hand Vega-style, plus the aforementioned chains), but I could hear none of it. It turns out that only 40% or so of the dialog is voiced-over, everything else is subtitled. This opening cinematic, however, was startlingly devoid of both.

Fast forward a bit, the scene changes to a dank-looking prison with a cartoonish knight keeping guard. He is shot down by a chick with a bow and arrow, and she frees one of the inmates. This inmate - a young lad whose clothes look startlingly like the knights' undergarments from the opening scene, and whose face bears a strong resemblance to the other's as well - turns out to be our main character, Capell, The girl keeps calling him "Lord Sigmund". We find out rather quickly that Sigmund is actually the knight from the beginning and Capell is most certainly not Sigmund.

This is the premise of the story. Capell is a completely naive and innocent patsy. To put it simply, he is Luke Skywalker on Prozac. He looks exactly like this Lord Sigmund fellow, the knight-ish brute from the opening cinematic. Why do they look like each other? Why are there chains tethering the moon to the world? Those are the only two real story elements in the 35 hours of game play. By the way, the answer to the first question is given about halfway through the story if you're paying attention.

Anyway, shortly after being freed, Capell and Aya (the girl who freed him) are attacked by guards, and Capell complains that he doesn't know how to use a sword or defend himself. Yet, not 30 seconds later, he's dancing around people screaming "dancing rhapsody" and "spinning waltz" and what have you in his annoyingly high-pitched voice.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to characters. I don't know about you, but I play an RPG for two things, characters and storyline. All the gameplay elements are secondary to those two things. So, perhaps the most aggravating thing about Infinite Undiscovery was its piss-poor character development. To start off with, there is roughly 35 hours of gameplay total in the game. This includes side quests, wasting time on crafting and enchanting, etc, etc. Compare that to 18 (yes, eighteen) main characters, and it's readily apparent that character development is going to fall flat on its face. There is simply not enough time to develop 18 characters in 35 hours, just not possible. Infinite Undiscovery tries to build up all of them, but it fails.

Aside from lack of time, characters do things that otherwise seem completely out of character. Take, for instance, a scene where Capell is talking to Edward, who mentions the unblessed (the unlucky folks who are not blessed by the moon). Capell flips out, gets really, really angry, because, as it turns out, he is also unblessed. Mind you, comments similar to Edward's had been made many, many times throughout the game, and Capell doesn't say shit, doesn't hint at being angry. There is no buildup to him getting angry. Yet this one time we hear a comment about the unblessed, well, it's balls to the wall anger. It's out of place and made me feel awkward. There are moments like that sprinkled throughout the game, from the beginning all the way to the last scene.

The voice acting is abysmal. There is little emotional inflection in any of the dialog, and even then, what is there is sorely misplaced. This makes pretty much everything anyone says (assuming it's voiced over) very corny. It's so corny sometimes that it's just plain hard to sit through. Some of the animations are also out of place. One of the characters says something along the lines of "I hate him!" as she raises her arms above her head in victory(?).

All of these may seem nit-picky for those that are not quite as character-centric as I am, but for me, these things just killed the experience.

On the plus side, the combat is interesting at times. It's a fairly typical Star Ocean model, though range doesn't matter at all. Press a button for an attack, hold the button for another, stronger, MP-consuming attack (there is also no MP-kill in this game). It can get old, becasue there is very little difference in strategy when the enemies change. By the time Capell learned Grinn Valesti, I was able to do that non-stop and win every battle I was in, including the last boss... before side quests. RPGs are notorious for having pathetic final bosses, but they're only supposed to be pathetic after you've completed a ton of side quests, leveled up to a ridiculous degree, and uncovered everybody's ultimate weapons. I did none of those. I blitzed through the story, fought him, and owned his face by spamming one special move. Sad.

The music is certainly another upside to the game. It was epic where it needed to be, sad in the places that fit, and joyous at all the right moments. It's a true shame that there were times that the music felt out of place. For example, the music would be epic, and I felt the situation should be epic, but the characters sounded bored. Or sad. This has nothing to do with the music, but goes back to the inane voiceover work.

In the end, the storyline turns out to be decent, though there are enough loopholes to march the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade through, but that's beside the point. The point being that the story is actually the strong point of this game, shoddy as it may be sometimes, but that's not saying a whole hell of a lot.

Score: 4.0 / 10.0 (someday, I'll make a catchy graphic)

WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 coming up tomorrow, followed shortly by Fallout 3.