Great Game, So-So Execution
Infinite Undiscovery was released for the Xbox 360 early September by Square Enix, most famous for the Final Fantasy series (if you didn't know that). The game puts you in the place of Capell, a young warrior who must lead a group of rebels to large monoliths called chains, which are holding the moon to the world.
Design & Detail:
When it comes to the design of an RPG, especially one released by Square Enix, then it has to meet certain standards that the public views as a normal RPG. The graphics in this game are of a typical Square game, with your standard textures and coloring you would see in any Final Fantasy, so nothing really special. The characters faces seem to all be the same, but with some variations based on gender and age. The detail of the game's environments is pretty neutral as well, with forests looking like forests, and deserts looking like deserts, so still nothing special.
Sound & Audio
The sound and audio part of the game is usually what pulls everyone in to the game itself. When you get into a battle, you have your battle theme, which is always the same until it comes to a boss battle, where it's a little more dramatic. Voice work is pretty much down the drain. The game, since it was made first for the Japanese market, the characters mouth move along with the original Japanese voices. Too bad you couldn't put it on Japanese vocals and English subtitles… only if… But, the vocal work of the American artists is really well done, with no skipping or stuttering to notice, yet it still does not fit in with the mouth movement.
Gameplay
As we have seen with the Final Fantasy series, the way to enter a battle is just walk into a certain spot on the floor, and then the screen spirals into a battle. That's not the case with this game. Enemy's are of course abundant in the game, but the fight system is more set up as a target and slash system, or as most of the gamers know it, a hack-and-slash. If you still don't understand, play Kingdom Hearts or Kingdom Hearts 2, and then you'll get it. The lackluster part of the entire thing is the targeting system, which never locks onto a single enemy. The target jumps from one enemy to the other, so trying to beat a boss with seven smaller enemies around is a challenge on its own, targeting wise of course. One great thing with this game though is the ability to control your party with the simple push of a button. Once the function is available, you can use any party member's ability to your advantage. Plus healing is added as a hotkey to your controller, so no digging through your bag to find that last potion. With your menu options as well, they seem scattered more than they should be. Plus with the addition of combining objects to create better objects, the menu becomes worse.
Final Thought
Role Playing Games have amazed us, disappointed us, and bored us to death in the past, yet this game takes all three and rolls it into a program and burns it onto two discs. Infinite Undiscovery has the potential to be a better RPG, but for the sake of us, it's not a good one to play if you're used to playing the classic way we see with Final Fantasy. I would suggest this to a beginner RPG player, or someone that wants to kill about 20-25 hours of downtime, but avoid this game if you're looking for a more classic-oriented RPG.
Sherman's HUD Rating: 3.5 out of 5