Infinite Undiscovery

It’s the Square Enix ‘All You Can Eat’ buffet!! Every time you empty your plate in the next year you can just keep going up for more. Expect to be suffering from RPG obesity very soon. Square Enix announced several up and coming games recently including a few Xbox 360 exclusives which had RPG fans fainting with excitement. Not the least of these exclusives is the completely new IP, Infinite Undiscovery. Developed by role playing luminaries tri-Ace, responsible for the brilliant Start Ocean series and the creator of the Tales Series, Yoshiharu Gotanda, the game is a brilliant mix of those two series and includes plenty of entirely fresh elements.

One of the first things you might feel when playing IU is confusion and disappointment. If there’s one thing you’d expect with any role playing game being presented to you by Square Enix it’s perfect balance. You might not like the story of a particular Square game, you may be unimpressed by a skill development system of another but a Square game will always be absolutely predictable in its game mechanics. All battles will follow strict statistical rules and you’ll be safe in the knowledge that with exactly the right combination of decisions the outcome you need will be assured. Infinite Undiscovery is not like that. Like the Star Ocean games, battling is in real time with no change to a battle screen. You’ll fight where you stand and need fast reflexes and lots of luck. More unsettling though is Infinite Undiscovery’s ‘Situation Battles’ which often require you to run away from bosses and perform complex timed tasks such as exploding flammable barrels to take care of a pursuing enemy. The controls for these tasks can be awkward. One fumble and you’re back at the start of the battle doing it all again. It’s not what RPG lovers are used to. As uncomfortable as the situation battles are, there’s a lot of depth to Infinite Undiscovery and it’s there that the magic starts to happen.

You’ll join up with a big party all working to release the chains which are holding the moon, tethered to the earth causing monsters to appear… indeed. You’ll be able to ‘connect’ with party members essentially taking control of their various special abilities, commanding them to fire arrows, talk with animals and find hidden treasures. This connecting continues into battle giving you a little control over your other party members’ AI. While you slash away at enemies and use your own special abilities with the A and B buttons, X and Y will be assigned to another of your fighter’s specials allowing you to create combos with them. It all gets pretty hectic during battles with the constant flashing lights of magic attacks and special moves creating a mess of colour on screen which is exciting but makes it hard to keep track of what’s going on. It’s a far cry from the ponderous nature of turn based RPG battling but maybe that’s a good thing. You can’t even take a break and spend time searching through your inventory for just the right potion or item, the inventory doesn’t pause the game and you’ll still be able to see continuing action around you when you go into your menus.

With a complex skill system, cooking mini-game, and stealth elements there’s a lot to master in this game. We creatures of habit fear change and IU veers very close to an action game and pulls away occasionally from its solid RPG foundations but this is a game made by the absolute giants of the genre. Trust them to guide you to a new era of RPG’ing and you’re in for a real treat.