by: Dameon White

January 01, 2009

One thing about the combat that I did quite enjoy is that your traditional RPG elements such as magic and MP aren’t grossly overused. In fact, that’s almost no magic practically at all. In its place, Capell has a magic flute of sorts (remember that he’s a musician). Playing certain notes will reveal hidden items and open up new things for you to obtain or explore. It’s a pretty interesting addition to a genre that’s normally pretty much of the same and the idea isn’t too unfamiliar to that of Eternal Sonata. The flute is underused quite a bit, though. Which is a shame considering that it could have added quite a bit more depth to what is ultimately a pretty straight forward affair.

As you progress through the rather linear storyline, you will come across new friends that you can add to your party. tri-Ace went a little overboard here in that you come across a few too many friends to add to your party. In total, you will add some 18 cast members to your party. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it wasn’t for the fact that the game is pretty short (should be able to complete it in about 18 hours or less) and that you have to manage each character’s attributes and inventory individually. This literally leads to what feels like you being nothing more than a giant inventory management specialist, spending more time in the menus than in the actual game. Would it have been so difficult to have a recommended inventory button based on what’s in your inventory or for characters to automatically equip the most powerful weapon in their possession?

To its credit, despite feature a large cast, you can create teams and assign them to complete various other tasks on the mission that you’re on. For the most part, the AI is pretty smart and will complete the tasks assigned to them and those that are in your party are aptly useful and will attack properly and constantly heal you, which is a huge help given that you’ll constantly find yourself in extreme situations that make it almost impossible to heal yourself thanks to stuttering framerates, bad camera angles and a menu system that takes too long to navigate through when having to deal with hordes of enemies at once. The only flaw with the AI raises its ugly head when they are injured. They don’t seem to like healing themselves as much as you, which forces you to have to try to heal them before they die.

The world of Infinite Undiscovery is pretty linear and although there’s a pretty decent helping of sidequests they don’t add much to the game and mostly consist of ‘save my XXX’ or ‘find XXX’ type missions. The towns themselves range pretty well in size and the locales at times are worth seeing if not at least for their artistic values.

In terms of visual flare, the CG cinemas overall are executed well, but lack the eye candy as found in Square’s AAA games. Don’t expect any wow moments in this game, but it’s certainly not bad to look at. What it lacks is the attention to detail that one would not only expect from a game under the Square umbrella, but also in regards to being produced on the 360 in general. If it wasn’t for the framerate drops the score here would have been a little bit higher.