Last time out, we started our look into XBox 360 action RPG Infinite Undiscovery, covering its story and characters. You should go back and take a look at part 1, whether its on the blog or the pod. But to summarize, IU was, to put it nicely, not great in those categories. Did the gameplay fair any better?
Well, I guess I would answer that question with an emphatic "kind of." It may have had a nonsense story with lame characters, but IU definitely has a few bright spots in the gameplay department. A lot more of the experimentation hit here, though there were still plenty of mechanics that could have stood to be cut. Interestingly enough, many IU's gameplay pitfalls were caused by the same mindset as the story's problem. If I could use two words to describe the narrative, they would be "nonsensical" and "bloated." Fortunately, only the latter applied to the gameplay.
But before I talk about the bad, I will give IU credit for a few things it did well. First and foremost, the game looks absolutely amazing. The graphics were as good as any I've seen from this era and the art style hit a perfect blend of the two bigger RPG series its creators were known for. This truly looked like the best of both worlds of Final Fantasy and Star Ocean, which stood out even more on a console as western as the 360. It's towns and dungeons look like actual, living breathing locations and the world feels very lived in. The characters aren't extremely expressive, but the models were still well above average for the era. The sound was alright as well, though it did present one major issue that we will get to later.
The other positive here was the combat, it isn't exceptional but it was good, clean, well designed action RPG fighting done well. While you have tons of characters at your disposal, you will only ever play as Capell in battle. That's kind of disappointing, but at least the control is fluid and responsive. Capell can equip a variety of moves and string them together to perform combos. He will get extra bonuses for hitting enemies under certain conditions. Juggle the enemy with an air combo and you will gain extra experience. Hit an enemy you have knocked to the ground and you will recover some HP. It still gets a little button mash-y, but at least there was an attempt to provide some strategy and your move set gives you options to actually try and pull these things off.
While you cannot control the other characters directly, they will enter battle with you. You can have three additional characters with you at any time and set their AI to attack directly, provide support or stay back with the touch of a button. Their AI is actually okay, it isn't the best but they usually do follow their prompts fairly well, they won't magically just decide to start burning through their MP unless you tell them to. They aren't very good at knowing when to heal you, but the game mitigates this by having a request healing button that can be pressed at any time. This will work unless you are absolutely just straight up out of healing items, though I wish it wasn't so delayed. Capell can also link up to the AI characters to have them use a requested skill. Sometimes, this can even lead to special team up attacks. This is nice in theory, though battles are often so frantic and enemies hit so hard that you won't have the time to select a character, move and target before you get hit. I wish this could have been more useful, but I don't think the system is inherently flawed. I did have a slight issue with the whole "if the main character dies its game over" mechanic, though it makes more sense here as you can only control Capell. It is annoying that you have to wait, like, two minutes to get a game over, but not game breaking. Overall, the combat is well above average and definitely provides the kind of action you would expect from a game like this.
While it did get the biggest part of the core gameplay right, IU just does so many little things wrong that it was impossible to ignore. Great as combat was, I feel like there was the potential to do something more. You will occasionally enter dungeons or areas where you are asked to make multiple parties. This is a cool idea in theory and really makes some of these places feel grandiose in scope. Unfortunately, this basically just means you will have a bunch AI controlled characters running around the map outside your field of vision battling enemies you will never actually run into (though at least they gain experience for doing this, so its not a total waste). Speaking of the maps, they are all entirely too large, confusing and empty, which really slows the pace of the game. This is made even worse because the battles are so fast paced that you will get into one, have a minute or two of excitement, then immediately go back to wandering around an empty open space. These areas may look interesting aesthetically, but they are as bland as can be in terms of layout and execution. Getting lost for hours can sometimes be okay in an open world game with a lot to see, but it shouldn't happen in a game like this. It makes exploring an absolute nightmare.
Ah yes, the exploration. You would think that a game with such a huge and wide open world would eventually provide you with some level of quick transportation. This was before fast travel was a part of literally every game, but you would think you would at least get an airship or vehicle of some sort. It takes hours to get back to previous areas, which is the absolute death of this game's pacing. That's why it takes around 30 hours to beat the main story and over 100 for completion (full disclosure, I did NOT play this to completion). Most of the sidequests, and even a portion of the main quests, have you traveling back and forth for long distances through areas that provide little interest or challenge. This might have been the biggest issue I had with IU and its what caused me to get bored as quickly as I did. I should also mention that you can't switch party members at save points or in any of the transitional areas. That means that if someone dies and you can't revive them, you are stuck until you get back to a town. You also can't switch party members out to gain experience as you see fit, which is aggravating and unnecessary.
The dungeons are similarly long, though it does work a little better here. It's problematic in less important dungeons, but it does actually help some of the more story critical ones feel imposing and epic. Enemies do respawn, which can make the dungeons a little monotonous, though this usually isn't a problem if you keep going. That's not hard to do, there isn't much to explore and most of the dungeon layouts are incredibly linear, but I still think its an issue. There are so few save points that dying to a boss will set you back what feels like hours, especially if you die more than once. Remember, this is an action RPG, so a lot of the bosses can erase your life bar quickly if you don't have times to learn their patterns. The dungeons aren't the worst, but most of them are bland and uninspired. I have heard a lot of good things about the optional dungeon here, which ends with a boss fight with Valkyrie Profile's Lenneth, but I was totally done with the game by that point.
There are a lot of mechanics here that were nice ideas in theory, but either detrimental or outright useless in practice. All of your party members will inherit certain traits as they level up or complete certain actions, which I think is pretty cool. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell what, if any, impact this had on the actual game. Capell can play music for certain boosts in battle or on the map, but this was useful maybe once or twice throughout the game. The same was true of the crafting, which should have just been cut entirely. Only certain characters can craft and they can only craft certain things, which isn't really ideal. For one, it being so hard to switch characters made this far more trouble than it was worth. But you can only ever craft items you already have, which kind of defeats the purpose. Isn't the whole point of crafting the ability to get equipment that's better than what you have? And you can't learn additional crafting skills either, this isn't like Star Ocean where you can eventually learn different skills. You are locked into what you have at the beginning of the game and what you have isn't particularly good.
My last complaint is with the voice acting, which I alluded to a little bit before. You see, IU is partially voice acted, something that wasn't necessarily uncommon at the time. You would have voices in cutscenes but just text during gameplay, stuff like that. But that isn't the case here. Some sections have voice acting and others do, which seemed to kind of be at random at first. That was before I realized that the characters' mouths' were animated the same way whether there were VOs or not. That's when it hit me, there were one of two things going on here. Either they A) straight up forgot to add the voiceovers or B) ran out of time/money and had to push the game out the door essentially unfinished. I am going to go with the latter, these weren't rookie developers that would just not do QA and straight up forget half of the voice acting in a game. But I can definitely see Square just pushing the game out to meet some sort of deadline or just making the most of what they had because they were over budget. It's what they did with Xenogears, right? At any rate, this was massively immersion breaking and made the game feel a bit cheap, especially considering it looked so well done graphically.
So, where does that leave us? Incredibly disappointed, for one. I was really looking forward to IU and was dismayed to find such a middling title. Despite its great graphics and competent combat, IU failed to capture my attention for longer that short bursts, a rarity for games from the likes of Tri Ace and Square. It's nonsense story could have been overlooked, this is an action RPG after all. Hell, I could have reframed it in my mind as a sort of parody of late 90's/early 00's JRPGs and I probably would have had a great time with it. But its boring world, bland design and bloated mechanics were too overt to ignore. I know it feels like I'm saying the game is awful and it really isn't. I have certainly played far, far worse and there is a certain audience for games like IU. It also tried a few things that I think might have gone really well if they were further refined in a sequel. But I had high, high hopes for this game and it most certainly did not meet my expectations. Not an absolute stay away, but there are far, far more excellent RPGs that you should check out before you spend your time on this one.
5.25/10
Well, I guess I would answer that question with an emphatic "kind of." It may have had a nonsense story with lame characters, but IU definitely has a few bright spots in the gameplay department. A lot more of the experimentation hit here, though there were still plenty of mechanics that could have stood to be cut. Interestingly enough, many IU's gameplay pitfalls were caused by the same mindset as the story's problem. If I could use two words to describe the narrative, they would be "nonsensical" and "bloated." Fortunately, only the latter applied to the gameplay.
But before I talk about the bad, I will give IU credit for a few things it did well. First and foremost, the game looks absolutely amazing. The graphics were as good as any I've seen from this era and the art style hit a perfect blend of the two bigger RPG series its creators were known for. This truly looked like the best of both worlds of Final Fantasy and Star Ocean, which stood out even more on a console as western as the 360. It's towns and dungeons look like actual, living breathing locations and the world feels very lived in. The characters aren't extremely expressive, but the models were still well above average for the era. The sound was alright as well, though it did present one major issue that we will get to later.
The other positive here was the combat, it isn't exceptional but it was good, clean, well designed action RPG fighting done well. While you have tons of characters at your disposal, you will only ever play as Capell in battle. That's kind of disappointing, but at least the control is fluid and responsive. Capell can equip a variety of moves and string them together to perform combos. He will get extra bonuses for hitting enemies under certain conditions. Juggle the enemy with an air combo and you will gain extra experience. Hit an enemy you have knocked to the ground and you will recover some HP. It still gets a little button mash-y, but at least there was an attempt to provide some strategy and your move set gives you options to actually try and pull these things off.
While you cannot control the other characters directly, they will enter battle with you. You can have three additional characters with you at any time and set their AI to attack directly, provide support or stay back with the touch of a button. Their AI is actually okay, it isn't the best but they usually do follow their prompts fairly well, they won't magically just decide to start burning through their MP unless you tell them to. They aren't very good at knowing when to heal you, but the game mitigates this by having a request healing button that can be pressed at any time. This will work unless you are absolutely just straight up out of healing items, though I wish it wasn't so delayed. Capell can also link up to the AI characters to have them use a requested skill. Sometimes, this can even lead to special team up attacks. This is nice in theory, though battles are often so frantic and enemies hit so hard that you won't have the time to select a character, move and target before you get hit. I wish this could have been more useful, but I don't think the system is inherently flawed. I did have a slight issue with the whole "if the main character dies its game over" mechanic, though it makes more sense here as you can only control Capell. It is annoying that you have to wait, like, two minutes to get a game over, but not game breaking. Overall, the combat is well above average and definitely provides the kind of action you would expect from a game like this.
While it did get the biggest part of the core gameplay right, IU just does so many little things wrong that it was impossible to ignore. Great as combat was, I feel like there was the potential to do something more. You will occasionally enter dungeons or areas where you are asked to make multiple parties. This is a cool idea in theory and really makes some of these places feel grandiose in scope. Unfortunately, this basically just means you will have a bunch AI controlled characters running around the map outside your field of vision battling enemies you will never actually run into (though at least they gain experience for doing this, so its not a total waste). Speaking of the maps, they are all entirely too large, confusing and empty, which really slows the pace of the game. This is made even worse because the battles are so fast paced that you will get into one, have a minute or two of excitement, then immediately go back to wandering around an empty open space. These areas may look interesting aesthetically, but they are as bland as can be in terms of layout and execution. Getting lost for hours can sometimes be okay in an open world game with a lot to see, but it shouldn't happen in a game like this. It makes exploring an absolute nightmare.
Ah yes, the exploration. You would think that a game with such a huge and wide open world would eventually provide you with some level of quick transportation. This was before fast travel was a part of literally every game, but you would think you would at least get an airship or vehicle of some sort. It takes hours to get back to previous areas, which is the absolute death of this game's pacing. That's why it takes around 30 hours to beat the main story and over 100 for completion (full disclosure, I did NOT play this to completion). Most of the sidequests, and even a portion of the main quests, have you traveling back and forth for long distances through areas that provide little interest or challenge. This might have been the biggest issue I had with IU and its what caused me to get bored as quickly as I did. I should also mention that you can't switch party members at save points or in any of the transitional areas. That means that if someone dies and you can't revive them, you are stuck until you get back to a town. You also can't switch party members out to gain experience as you see fit, which is aggravating and unnecessary.
The dungeons are similarly long, though it does work a little better here. It's problematic in less important dungeons, but it does actually help some of the more story critical ones feel imposing and epic. Enemies do respawn, which can make the dungeons a little monotonous, though this usually isn't a problem if you keep going. That's not hard to do, there isn't much to explore and most of the dungeon layouts are incredibly linear, but I still think its an issue. There are so few save points that dying to a boss will set you back what feels like hours, especially if you die more than once. Remember, this is an action RPG, so a lot of the bosses can erase your life bar quickly if you don't have times to learn their patterns. The dungeons aren't the worst, but most of them are bland and uninspired. I have heard a lot of good things about the optional dungeon here, which ends with a boss fight with Valkyrie Profile's Lenneth, but I was totally done with the game by that point.
There are a lot of mechanics here that were nice ideas in theory, but either detrimental or outright useless in practice. All of your party members will inherit certain traits as they level up or complete certain actions, which I think is pretty cool. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell what, if any, impact this had on the actual game. Capell can play music for certain boosts in battle or on the map, but this was useful maybe once or twice throughout the game. The same was true of the crafting, which should have just been cut entirely. Only certain characters can craft and they can only craft certain things, which isn't really ideal. For one, it being so hard to switch characters made this far more trouble than it was worth. But you can only ever craft items you already have, which kind of defeats the purpose. Isn't the whole point of crafting the ability to get equipment that's better than what you have? And you can't learn additional crafting skills either, this isn't like Star Ocean where you can eventually learn different skills. You are locked into what you have at the beginning of the game and what you have isn't particularly good.
My last complaint is with the voice acting, which I alluded to a little bit before. You see, IU is partially voice acted, something that wasn't necessarily uncommon at the time. You would have voices in cutscenes but just text during gameplay, stuff like that. But that isn't the case here. Some sections have voice acting and others do, which seemed to kind of be at random at first. That was before I realized that the characters' mouths' were animated the same way whether there were VOs or not. That's when it hit me, there were one of two things going on here. Either they A) straight up forgot to add the voiceovers or B) ran out of time/money and had to push the game out the door essentially unfinished. I am going to go with the latter, these weren't rookie developers that would just not do QA and straight up forget half of the voice acting in a game. But I can definitely see Square just pushing the game out to meet some sort of deadline or just making the most of what they had because they were over budget. It's what they did with Xenogears, right? At any rate, this was massively immersion breaking and made the game feel a bit cheap, especially considering it looked so well done graphically.
So, where does that leave us? Incredibly disappointed, for one. I was really looking forward to IU and was dismayed to find such a middling title. Despite its great graphics and competent combat, IU failed to capture my attention for longer that short bursts, a rarity for games from the likes of Tri Ace and Square. It's nonsense story could have been overlooked, this is an action RPG after all. Hell, I could have reframed it in my mind as a sort of parody of late 90's/early 00's JRPGs and I probably would have had a great time with it. But its boring world, bland design and bloated mechanics were too overt to ignore. I know it feels like I'm saying the game is awful and it really isn't. I have certainly played far, far worse and there is a certain audience for games like IU. It also tried a few things that I think might have gone really well if they were further refined in a sequel. But I had high, high hopes for this game and it most certainly did not meet my expectations. Not an absolute stay away, but there are far, far more excellent RPGs that you should check out before you spend your time on this one.
5.25/10
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