Infinite Undiscovery

I really didn't want to jump on the hate-bandwagon for this game.  I really didn't.  I wanted this game to be good, I really did.  That's why I bought it.  However, it just didn't click with me.   There was a few things that I enjoyed, I loved mapping out the world, I liked the music alot, and the battle system was ok enough.  However, the bad out weighted the good by a ton.  I hated the characters, the cutscenes bored me, the art style was bland.  The voice acting was terrible, the controls were complicated.  There was just so many small frustrating elements too.  I could rant all day, but I won't.  I don't like the pacing at all.  

This game can also be played like a collect-o-thon.  There are a ton of things to collection, however, there are also a TON of things you can skip too.  The way the story is paced, you can easily skip things at any moment, so this gave me little reason to care about every chest or no reason to re-play it.

RANT:
One of the more annoying moments in the game was the lack of direction at times.  You could finish a dungeon or visit a new town and they give you no clue on what to do next.  The most annoying moment I can think of was when I first visited this one town.  You are treated with a crappy cutscene about a woman that lost her friends pet bear.  She says it escaped the castle and you must find it.  So I run around town, looking all over for a bear.  I talk to all the NPCs, and they give me hints.  A couple characters say they saw the bear run outside of the town.  So I take their word for it, and run through out the gigantic field that surrounded the town.  I looked ALL over for a bear, I checked everything, nothing.  So I got frustrated, ran back to that town to talk to all the NPCs.  I even finally talked to the original woman again, and THIS triggers the bear.  Now I have to go back outside to find the bear again.  This time the bear is right near the entrance of the town.  So this was a total waste of time.  

This is not the end of this stupid quest either.  I talk to the woman and give her the bear back.  She thanks me, walks away, and there is NO hint on what to do next.  So I run around town, talking to all the NPCs, I run into the castle, I talk to all the NPCs.  Nothing happens.  Then the last place I decided to check, the Inn, is where the storyline trigger finally clicks.  This process happens in nearly all the towns.  It's stupid, directionless fetch questing that annoys me.

----------Battle System----------
Infinite Undiscovery is a team based Action RPG.  You control Cappel only, but you can give commands to the other characters on the battle field with the R button.  You do this by "Connecting" with a character.  You can set each non-playable character with 2 Connect skills.  You can then use them anytime in battle or even off battle if you want.  It's actually a frustrating button combination that annoyed me more than anything really.  

Another frustrating moment in the game is the menu and item names.  When you open your menu, your character completely stops, and sometimes he sits down.  This can be frustrating while in battle and you need to quickly open a menu map to use a healing item.  One of my peeves in this game is the stupid item names of everything.  What's so wrong with simple terms like "Heal" or "Cure"? Every healing item has a long, exaggerated name and I have to read the description before I use them.  This can be annoying when you're getting attacked in the back.

You can set your characters AI while in or out of battle on the fly.  This is kinda cool actually.  If you press up or down, then you quickly change their AI.  However, one frustrating moment is the way you use your "Flute".  Capell is a flutest by trade.  He can use his flute to effect the field, however, I only found one flute command to be important.  There are chests and sometimes enemies that are invisible until you play a certain Flute song.  I think the songs are poorly worded, I can never remember which song does what.  

The actual battle system is kinda simple though.  You attack low with the A button and attack hard with the B button.  It's as simple and buttonmashy as that.  You can do various combos to pull off moves, or you can hold down the A or B button to perform special moves.  Bam, it's simple and easy enough to jump into, however the rest of the game seems overly complicated.  To attack monsters, you first have to unsheathe your weapon.  That was one complaint I read about alot, but it wasn't a big deal for me.  Another complaint was breaking Treasure Chests on accident, and I never did that at all.  Most battles are far from chests.

You gain experience and gold after each kill, and luckily even your overstocked party members gain experience and level up as well.  You gain new spells after so many levels, and you can even make new skills for some characters.  One thing I love about this game is the loot.  You gain loot from treasure chests, you can buy it in towns and enemies drop it.  You can turn this random loot into various items from synthesizing.  You can make a variety of things though, and each character has their specialty.  This can be kinda annoying though.  One character might be able to make swords and axes and metal armor, but another character can make robs and leather armor.  One character can make food items, while another character can make healing items.  Another synthesis trick is to "Enchant", every character can do this actually.  This allows you to turn loot into status boosts.  I like this idea alot.  My only problem is how slow it is to make these items.  When I get going, I could be sitting around synthesizing for an hour at times.

While I don't think this game is hard, however you can die really easy in this game.  After dying they take you right to the main screen too, which can be frustrating.  You can easily die for a few reasons, the worst is when you get stunned or paralyzed and you can't do ANYTHING about it.  You can't order your other characters to heal you or nothing.  They often run around and continue fighting and don't even think to heal you or revive you.  It's so annoying.

You can't team up with all characters though.  Some characters are called "Secondary" characters.  This means, when you go into a dungeon, your team might separate into groups.  You need these "Secondary" characters to make the 2nd and 3rd groups.  While you might not ever team up with them, you still need to equip their weapons, armor and accessories, which is annoying.  


----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Capell, you're a faceless nobody that was locked up  in prison for no given reason.  You're rescued by Aya, a faceless woman, thinking Capell was the King Sigmund.  As they make their escape, they run into the real King Sigmund, and Capell is forced to join their rebellion group.  King Sigmund and his group are on a mission to free the world from the Moon, that is chained to Earth.  They must defeat "The Order" and break all 9 chains that bind the two worlds.  

Ok, the plot isn't BAD per say.  You'll run into a few (predictable) plot twists, and some kinda surprising (if you even care) plot twists, but the story as a whole didn't grab me.  I just didn't care for any of the characters.  I hated Capell, they gave him NO backstory or purpose.  Aya was a completely generic female lead.  Sigmund had a good plot twist, but otherwise forgettable.  The rest of the characters were just generic, annoying, or combination of both.  The only sub character I enjoyed was Vic, who was a little girl that dressed as a boy to act tough after her brother died.  They didn't flesh out her story enough, but they had an interesting thing going.  

One of the biggest problems is they gave you WAY to many characters.  This was the same problem I had with Eternal Sonata and Chrono Cross.  I liked the option I had playing with the characters, it's just a shame that ruined any story or connection you would get with them.  

Another problem I have with the characters are the bad guys.  You don't meet any of the bad guys until you actually fight them.  There are only two bad characters that have reoccurring roles, however, the rest are thrown at you in one shot moments.  The worst part is they try to make them seem important, but why should I care?

The most annoying thing about the this game is the poor dialog,  poor voice acting and terrible art direction.  It's a combination of all three of those things that bored me to tears during cutscenes.  


----------Graphics----------
The graphics are a bit inconsistent for me.  For one, I like the battle animations, but they're so over the top, you can easily lose focus on your attacks.  The character animations are super stiff.. they look like action figures.  They try to make the this game look "Next gen" by spamming a ton of annoying light effects into everything.  

The fields, dungeons and towns aren't great looking.  They're actually kinda generic.  Final Fantasy XII looks better than the fields found in Infinite Undiscovery.  Everything is real... "Samey".  You'll run around a dark brown forest, or a light brown desert or a grey castle.  There's no flair in this game.

The characters are painfully boring to look at.  Aya looks like a low rent Final Fantasy female lead (you can use any since 7).  Capell is just a faceless loser who has no right being the lead character.  I guarantee that I'll forget all the characters of this game within a week of playing it.

Just like Lost Odyssey, there is an annoy white dotted line that appears randomly across the cutscenes.  

----------Sound----------
I really loved the music to Infinite Undiscovery.  The music was one of the best things about it, sadly.  I especially loved the battle theme music, which reminds me of the same violin driven battle music from Baten Kaitos and Eternal Sonata.  I doubt it's from the same composers, but they are similar.

I despise the voice work in this game though.  There is not a single good actor in the game.  Everyone talks like creepy robots.  One more annoying thing are the battle cries.  I love when games use battle cries, for example Tales of Symphonia.  When a character uses a special move, they will usually scream out the name of that move, it's usually sparse when the move is used though.  In Infinite Undiscovery, you use special moves ALOT, and there are 4 characters spamming their special moves, so it's a constant barrage of your characters yelling.  It's a little over the top.


----------World Map----------
The map is just a bunch of connecting areas, fields and towns, much like Final Fantasy XII but not nearly as big.  One thing I love about the map is how everything is completely blacked and, and as you walk across it, you slowly uncover everything.  This reminds me of alot of Western style RPGs, or even the original Warcraft.  Final Fantasy XII and Star Ocean III used it too, so they're also excellent references.  I love crawling through the map, uncovering everything, even if I didn't need to do it.

On the maps are a ton of enemies, and a few treasure chests.  That's really about it.  Some chests are hidden behind rocks or cliffs, and require special skills to reach them.  Some chests are locked and require a special character to unlock them for you.  You can smash a treasure chest, and it will sometimes give you whats inside, but it's a risk.  You can see enemies before attacking then, you can even sneak up behind and attack them first, which gives you bonus stats.  Enemies reappear if you walk a small distance, so if you are back tracking alot, then you'll fight a ton of enemies.

There isn't a final transportation device.  You have to run on foot the entire game.  This is kinda lame if you want to backtrack, but they give you little reason to do so.  



----------Time to Complete Game----------
26:25:25

After you beat the game, you are treated with a fairly long cutscene (probably the best in the game).  They sum up the characters lives 2 years after the final events, which is probably the most character they given most of the people in the game too.  After beating the game you unlock Hard mode, which unlocks new areas of the game.