by: Dameon White

January 01, 2009

Some people say that beauty is only skin deep. Others would say that’s just something that ugly people say. Unfortunately, this aptly describes tri-Ace’s latest entry, Infinite Undiscovery, that despite looking quite appealing from the outside in that it features a pretty decent story and comes from the house that has built a name for itself in the RPG space, fails to truly capture the essence of what truly makes a great RPG by fumbling the experience with an overabundance of unnecessary party characters and wonky combat system.

I wanted to like Infinite Undiscovery, I really did. It had all of the right ingredients – development team behind Star Ocean 3, an seemingly interesting real-time action-RPG based combat system, Cosplay dressed kids and the parent company behind the most famous RPG franchise in history, Final Fantasy. Unfortunately, it’s poorly executed, rather short, and has major flaws in the combat system that do nothing but chip away from what could have been a pretty good RPG experience.

Infinite Undiscovery is not unlike many RPG’s in regards to its story. You’re a somewhat lovable, whiny and sometimes obnoxious sounding man-child who’s destiny you find out is to save the world – meeting friends who enter your party to aid you in your quest to set the world right again along the way. You play as Capell, a starving musician who in a weird twist of fate looks remarkably identical to the world’s greatest hero, Sigmund. Unfortunately for you, you’re mistaken to be Sigmund by fellow heroes and are dragged into the battle to stop an organization not-so-ingeniously named as The Order (when will this end?) who have somehow managed to daisy chain the moon and siphon its power. Don’t ask us how you put a physical chain around the moon, but apparently someone figured it out and you – acting as fake Sigmund – are a chain cutter who…well, cuts chains. It is your job to cut the chains that are in bondage. Trust me, the story actually does get a bit better than it sounds.

What doesn’t get better is the combat. In Infinite Undiscovery you are mistreated to a real-time action combat system. There are no turns or sequences. Commands need to be performed an acted out similar to how you’d find in a normal action game. Enemies will move around the same time as you and can attack at any time just as you can attack them. On paper, this should be pretty simple and it’s not new or unique, as it’s been done plenty of times and has been executed in the past very well (Kingdom Hearts as a good example). What doesn’t work so well here is that there can at times be a ton of enemies on the screen at once and the game slows down almost to a complete crawl when this happens. Further adding to the frustration is that there is no block button – only a counter. You add in dozens upon dozens of enemies on the screen that block your view most of the time and the fact that the game will inch to a crawl very often and you have what equates to an almost completely unplayable experience and a very big oversight at that.