Overview

One of the things I've been a fan of since the first time I picked up that little rectangular N.E.S. control pad is RPGs – in fact, the very first game that I owned was the original Final Fantasy. I've been hooked on RPGs ever since, partly because the storylines are almost always so engrossing, and because, pound-for-pound, I've found that I get the most bang out of my buck with a good RPG. They're longer – though not as long as they used to be unfortunately – than any other type of game out there, and while some would turn up their nose at the idea of replaying an RPG, I find that it's interesting to go back through with the knowledge gained at the end of the story and see the little nods used to setup the ending. With that in mind, I decided to pick up a little game that I'd heard absolutely nothing about purely on the fact that it was an RPG, and it was released by Squaresoft... erm, SquareEnix, the same company that made one of my favorite games of all time. That game was Infinite Undiscovery.

Review

Infinite Undiscovery follows the journey of a young musician named Capell, who wakes up one day to find himself arrested, and detained in Graad Prison. His jailors have mistaken him for Sigmund, leader of the Liberation Force, a group dedicated to running around the world cutting the chains that the Order of Chains have used to bind the moon to the earth. Yes, they've quite literally CHAINED THE MOON TO THE EARTH. Everywhere that one of these chains is bolted down, monsters and demons appear and the land around dies. The nations of the world are too busy dealing with the critters and the Order to have any hope of actually assaulting the chains – and even if they did, not a single person has been able to cut them. Well, at least until Sigmund showed up and started single-handedly shredding the things. Unfortunately for poor Capell, it seems he resembles this Sigmund, and is now on a one-way trip to the headsman's axe.

It would have been an awfully short game, actually, but lucky for Capell, the word has spread that 'Lord Sigmund' has been captured, and one of the members of his group, a young woman named Aya, comes to rescue him. I should note here that before the actual start of the game, the promo cinematic shows Sigmund and his force assaulting one of the chains, at Vesplume tower, and getting their asses kicked when the Dreadknight, the leader of the Order of Chains, appears. They're scattered, which is why just Aya shows up to rescue him. That said, Aya at first mistakes Capell for Sigmund too, and is surprised when Capell protests and tells her the truth. She decides to help him escape anyway, since he'd been captured because of their group's efforts. Of course, she only gets the door open before somebody whacks her from behind, leaving Capell alone with a pair of guards and the unconscious Aya, and a convenient sword nearby...

Like most SquareEnix RPGs, there's a fairly basic cast setup in Infinite Undiscovery, but unlike most RPGs, in IU you play only as the main hero, Capell. In truth, the term for the game is more 'Action RPG', because you are always in full control of Capell in a real-time fighting system. You run around hacking, slashing, and giving orders to your AI-controlled group members. There's no such thing as time stopping, short of actually pausing the game – time always passes, even when you're in the menu. This makes things... interesting, but I'll get to that in a little bit.

Going back to the cast, there's Capell, who is the very definition of reluctant hero. He's not a coward, though he tried damned hard to be – quite literally being dragged kicking and screaming into events by Aya. That said, you pretty quickly come to realize that there's more to Capell than just a pacifist interested in not adding extra holes to his body, because once he's in the situation, he's actually pretty damn solid to act. For example, during your escape, Aya starts to get more and more worn down – we find out later it's because of a wound she received earlier. Unlike the typical RPG hero, who would have stopped and held the ground there against undefeatable odds while she recovered, Capell acts like he has a brain, picks her up, and keeps running. It's not that he's unwilling or unable to act. Quite the opposite, in fact – he's the first to step in on several occasions throughout the game when the chips are really down. He just tries as hard as he can to avoid being in the situation in the first place.

Aya, however, is having none of that. She's the epitome of the strong woman character you see throughout every single SquareEnix game. You know the kind. Celes. Tifa. Garnet. The ones that are absolutely willing to take action, no matter the personal cost. That kind of tough, overbearing at times, stubborn, occasionally bullying character that so often provides the 'Let's move forward' impetus in RPGs. You almost feel sorry for Capell, the way that she drives him – yeah, almost. Of course, this being a SquEnix game, you know that she's going to have a soft side as well. It's the oldest cliché in the book, folks, let's just leave it at that and move on.

Also in the cast of major characters is Sigmund, stoic, heroic leader of the Force, the man able to do what nobody else in the world can, cut the chains that bind the moon. He's also Capell's freaking evil twin – well, not evil, but that's beside the point. I was fudging a bit when I said that apparently Capell resembles him. Capell doesn't resemble him. Capell IS HIM. They use the same character model. They could use each other as a mirror. Are you getting the idea here, folks? I can already hear people saying that they know exactly what's going to happen. I'll come back to that later in the review. For now just know that everything Sigmund is, Capell isn't, beyond being an excellent swordsman, brave, and... well, I wouldn't want to spoil.

Lessie, highlights of the rest of the cast. The other major players include Edward, uptight Sigmund stalker, erm, 'compatriot', Eugene, planning, healing, and earth mage with secrets, and Balbagon, who is the typical 'big man with big axe' strongman. Yes, he's just that intelligent, too. Joining the cast as the game continues are Palom and Porom... whoops, I mean, 'Rico and Rucha', exceedingly annoying and excessively pointless and out of place kids that have absolutely no business what-so-ever being on this quest... I'll come back to that... There's Michelle, a healer type with a big heart, bigger breasts, and a severe need for a pair of glasses. Next up is Savio, who isn't actually a playable character in your main group, but can be used in sub-groups. He's a healer and astrologer. There's Vic, another kid that actually manages to be useful and somewhat – only somewhat, mind you – less aggravating than the twins to act as your thief. Dominica is your standard hot mercenary that shows up to kick ass, but she's like Savio – sub-group only. Along with her comes Gustav, Aya's pet bear. Yes, she has a pet bear. He might have been useful in the sense that HE'S A FREAKING BEAR, but unfortunately he takes up TWO GROUP MEMBER SLOTS, and he's just not worth losing a healer and a fighter for.

There's... y'know, honestly, there's a fair number more characters that get introduced throughout the course of the game, and you're still adding group members as you approach the end game. Actually, I think that there's a few characters too many for the length of the story, and poorly timed introductions on many of them. I could understand if most of them had been introduced within the first five hours or so of game play, leaving the rest of the game to build on their storylines, but beyond the group that I've mentioned here, the rest are purely extras there to give you a little bit of flexibility in group building and stretch the plot a little. For example, Kristopher and Seraphina are introduced right before you head into the last couple dungeons. Neither are group playable, and neither get more than token development. They're there because the king that sent them with you... sent them with you.

As long as I'm on the topic of group setup, let's take a look at the group system, shall we? As I mentioned, throughout the game you control Capell directly. There's a standard light-attack, fierce-attack setup for combat, and a parry button that only works if you sit there and wait for the enemy to attack without attacking yourself – it's impossible to parry within 2-3 seconds of attacking, and there's a similar lag after parrying before you can attack or parry again. That makes the combat system feel rather clunky, and leaves you too open to counter attack after completing a combo if you don't wanna waste MP on a special attack. While powerful, these moves can be interrupted by a single attack landing on Capell, even well into the attack, making their combat usefulness drop significantly if you have multiple enemies on you. Worse, enemies are actually fairly smart and will stun-lock you if you aren't careful.

From a game-play sense, that's actually kinda nice to see, but the sub-standard control setup makes it somewhat aggravating, because your group members tend to ignore you when you're in trouble. Healing is accomplished through using the Y button to do a 'heal request', which will make one of the other characters pause, and... well, heal. They might use items, or they might use spells – and for some stupid ass reason, the characters that have healing spells, which cost no MP to cast, will use items instead if you don't block them from doing so. For that matter, they will continue to use the weakest healing spells and items, if you don't block them from doing so, right up through the final fight!

Speaking of group members, IU features a gimmick, erm feature called 'Connect Skills'. While your group members are AI controlled, you can take temporary control over their abilities and their targeting by connecting with them. A connected character will stay close, attack what you're attacking, and you gain the ability to have them use their special abilities. These include all their MP attacks, as well as each character having a special connect skill that can only be used by you. Aya, for instance, can shoot an aimed arrow with her Ravaging Raptor attack that is useful for getting surprise attacks and making barrels go boom. These special skills vary significantly in usefulness – a lot of them require time to aim, and multiple button presses, which diverts attention required away from the real-time fighting. Also, your melee characters - Sigmund, Edward, etc, like to charge in at the first sight of an enemy, making it hard to setup for sneak attacks. Connected characters will also do all of the interaction with the world. For instance, connecting with Vic will let him unlock and un-trap treasure chests. Of course, the danger of connecting is that it blocks both your healing button, and your flute button, using them to control the other character.

There's also the ability to create items, and, folks, I have to say two things about the tradeskilling in IU. One – you can create incredibly powerful armor, weapons, and whatnot right off the bat, generate unlimited cash, and in general really screw up the flow of the game if you spend a little time on them. This is even worse if you get the 'A Voucher' download from xBox Live, which enables the ability to buy all metals and minerals from EVERY SINGLE VENDOR in the game. Two – whatever fucking asshole came up with the time delays on the tradeskilling in this game should be fired outright.

Item Creation is not a required portion of the game – beyond one specific example that gives you no fucking clue you're supposed to use it to continue, and does not require any training to do so – but it is by far the most time consuming. The shortest possible combine is about six seconds long. That's the shortest, folks. Sure, doesn't sound like much, right? The only problem is, that's six seconds minimum for each step, each of which can fail, each of which becomes harder, and the higher level combines all feature multiple sub-combines. One of the characters uses weapons that are formed on a simple basis. Each higher level requires TWO of the previous level. You do the math on a series of weapons that has about 20 separate weapons. Like I said, IC isn't a required portion... but only an idiot wouldn't take the time to do it to some extent, because it makes some of the more unbalanced encounters significantly easier.

The story of IU is a matter of contrasts. In, and of itself, the plot is pretty good, even very good at points. There's nothing groundbreaking, but it's a good, solid, well constructed plot that moves pretty smoothly from each stage to the next. However, the characters and their personalities are, often... jarring. It's hard to get a title where I find myself utterly hating better than 80% of the cast and still enjoy the storyline overall. Let's be honest here, folks, the characters nail every damn cliché and stereotype they can, and hit them so hard that there's not a single plot twist you CAN'T see coming a mile away. For instance, the inhabitants of the world in IU all get something called a lunaglyph at birth, which allows them to make use of the power of the moon. All except for the ones born on the night of a new moon, or during an eclipse, that is. So, can anybody tell me, from just that information, what three 'revelations' are going to popup during the course of the game?

Still, for as hard as the writers tried to make the game suck, the core itself is pretty good – but too damned short. IU can be played through at in an eye-blink of barely 20 hours – and 20 hours only if you stop to level once or twice. You can stretch the game a little if you stop and do some heavy IC, or if you're the paranoid type that likes to build levels, but, seriously folks, the game length is a freaking joke. It's a two disk game, bare minimum it should have been forty hours long. I think, at least in part, that's why I couldn't stand the majority of the characters either – very few of them get any development at all, and, as I said, you're still getting new characters at hours 17 and 18. Incidentally, you can beat the game pretty easy around level 55 or so – but you can grind your characters to 255, just in case you like the term 'overkill.' It's about the only real way to get play value out of this damned short game, though.

The other problem with the characters is that the voice acting – forget the dubbing, which I'll mention in a moment – was absolutely atrocious. Capell's VA is... approaching competent, and gets better throughout the game. Aya was... ok, but nothing special. Edward's was by far the best, and that's just not saying much. I seriously could not stand the vast majority of the voice acting in this game – it was horrible! Voices were flat, sounded awkward and just not into their roles. The sound production was just pathetic. Palom and Porom were off the charts on the sickeningly BAD impression of two excessively irritating kids, and Gustav is a fucking bear, folks... not a mutt with a bad case of laryngitis. His voice actor sounded like he was practicing to do a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger grunting impersonation.

Piled on top of the worthless voice acting was the sort of lip syncing I'd have expected out of a bad Godzilla translation. Never mind the English dub – how lousy must the original Japanese dub have been, to be so horridly out of sync for the English one?! Characters finish speaking without their mouths ever moving, mouths move without a single word... Come on SquEnix, this just isn't up to par. I'm not asking for perfection in any dub, but for fuck's sake, I want to see at least SOME effort go into it. If an amateur can get it right, a full-scale production company with the sort of history that SquEnix has should be able to too. An all around cluster-fuck on the voice acting and dubbing.

Luckily the rest of the soundtrack wasn't so bad. Actually, it was kinda catchy here and there, and some of the production values that should have gone into the voice acting were present here instead. Especially fun is the theme that plays in the Seraphic Gates bonus area. More importantly, it's never annoying, and in a game where there are so many aggravating voices and critters, that's exceedingly helpful. By far, this is IU's strongest point.

Graphically speaking, the world of Infinite Undiscovery is actually pretty damn nice. The settings are reasonably diverse and well-textured, with lots of high-resolution touches that were honestly wasted on my SD TV. The environments are lush and well-detailed, as I would expect from a SquEnix title, but I was kinda disappointed with the size of the world overall – that's related to just how short the game is, though. The character models are... well, let's say that they're both very good, and also kinda lousy. From a sheer setup point of view, I was impressed. They weren't on the level of, say, Mass Effect or Gears of War, but SquEnix is the king of beautifully rendered characters for a reason. The faces, though, were rather plastic looking I thought, and not in line with SquEnix's usual quality. It felt like I was looking at something in line with, say, 1997 FMV character models, rather than a modern xBox 360 in-game model. High-quality, to be sure, but not really up to modern snuff.

Let's talk for a moment about Palom and Porom, err, Rico and Rucha, shall we folks? Well, about all the characters, really, but those two especially. I don't have a problem with the general idea of kids going on the big quest to save the world in RPGs. It's far too common a theme to the entire genre, and, more importantly, usually they get involved WELL before it becomes The Quest™, at a point where it's actually believable they might come along. See child Rydia for an example. In the grand scheme of things, I can't say I mind TOO much. I do tend to avoid playing them like the plague that they are, because the vast majority of them are filler material with no real purpose to be in the main group, which is usually set within the first few hours of the game.

Now, I understand why they were sent with Capell into the shrine. I understand that Capell had (at that point) practically no ability to tell somebody no. I even understand that he really did need the help, if for a particularly contrived reason. I had a slightly harder time pressing the I Believe button when Aya decided to let them come with as they went to re-join Sigmund and the others... There is no fucking way in hell I believe for a fucking second Sigmund wouldn't have taken ONE LOOK at them and said, 'The fucking hell are you thinking, bringing a PAIR OF CHILDREN INTO A WAR?!' Because, let's face it folks – Capell might not have known better, and Aya should have known better, but there's just no way that Sigmund would have entertained for a moment bringing a couple kids into the fight, especially not a pair of retrograde mental midgets like Rico and Rucha. Rico, who thinks the entire fucking mess is a chance to play superhero, and Rucha, who's so fucking obsessed with making everybody snacks that it makes you wonder if she's been smoking weed when nobody's looking.

What's worse, after their half an hour in the spotlight, they're useless in the story – until Sigmund, in a move that actually tops letting them come along in the first place for bonehead of the year, sends them to KEEP AN EYE ON CAPELL AND AYA, while the main force moves on to an allied and walled city. At this particular stage of the game, folks, Capell is leading a group of refugees through the desert, to a town that had, until only hours before, been occupied by the Order of Chains and a chain. If you misplaced your scorecard, that means that, instead of protecting a group of defenseless people with a force of well-trained, heavily armed and armored fighters, you're sending the guy that doesn't wanna fight, an archer, and two fucking children into a desert crawling with monsters on their way back to a town which may or may not have been recaptured after you left it. By the way, the only reason Capell is leading them on? Because he threatened to leave the force outright when Sigmund refused to stop and help them, and because at that point he'd become drastically more important to the Force than anybody other than Sigmund yet realized. After this sequence, thank the gods, Palom and Porom fade back into obscurity, beyond being around to add annoyance factor to every FMV they participate in.

The game is littered with gaffs like this, and it's this sort of shit that just makes it hard to play. Capell takes a hell of a lot of abuse throughout the game, and it's one of his character points that he's willing to deal with it. At least until his Heroic BSOD, anyway, but hell, even after he still just takes it. But a great deal of it is because of the supporting cast really just never being more than their clichéd all to hell selves. I mean, like I said, Aya quite literally drags him around, more than once, and she is the one that gets him to 'join' the force. That conversation went something like this...

Sigmund: Now that we're done here, Capell, you should –
Aya: Join us!
Edward: What?!
Capell: Um, no, that's-
Aya: Quiet, you!
Edward: There's no way this coward belongs in the Force.
Capell: Yeah, I agree!
Edward: Shut up, you!
Sigmund: ...Fine
Capell: But-
All three: Quiet!

Capell abuse is a full-time job for the majority of the storyline, and actually does provide a decent amount of humor, but it went a bit over the top.

Overall

This game just isn't for everone, folks. I've ripped into it here for good reason – frankly, the game just wasn't ready. It needed a LOT more polish at the very least, and the entire English voice acting cast should have been fired and the dub started from scratch. There's a lot that really could have used a lot of work here. Still, the story, for all that it's bread-and-butter, is well executed – very well executed, actually. It's far, far too short, though, especially for having a full RPG cast to deal with. The characters are clichéd as can be, but palpable enough to play through the game with. The control system is clunky but works once you get used to it, though there should have been an allowance made for using items from your inventory on a sort of hot-belt, without having to go into the menu. Remember, folks, the game never stops, not even when you're in the menu, making it risky – at best – to open the menu up so you can hand out items yourself during a fight.

Despite all its problems, though, I still enjoyed Infinite Undiscovery for what it was – a good, solid, bread-and-butter action RPG. It has all the plot elements needed to be a great game, but unfortunately, it had too many problems to become one. Strictly a game for the devoted RPG lover, or the demented. This is a rental at best, folks, unless you really like SquEnix games. I should note that there's the slightest hint in the ending that there might be a sequel – I'd actually be interested to see how that could be pulled off, because while the game itself is remarkably well contained, there's certainly plenty of room for one.