Games and Films Blog

The Xbox 360 has been screaming for quality RPGs to fill the void left since Lost Odyssey. Japanese RPG powerhouse Square Enix has had some new titles looming on the horizon for a while now, and the first of its big release, Infinite Undiscovery, has appeared to take Lost Odyssey’s baton.

Developed by tri-Ace and exclusive to the Xbox 360, Infinite Undiscovery was always a bit of a quiet one — most of us knew it existed, but nobody was really talking about it too much before release. Now it’s out and the Internet is certainly talking — mainly asking help forums where to go next.

Yes, Undiscovery may not be a word, but it’s still an incredibly fitting title, as you’ll find out when you join Colette and I in our official Destructoid review.

If you have found any problem with your xbox 360, do visit xbox 360 3 red lights repair. At that website, it provides you with full Guide & Videos to permanently repair your XBOX 360.  Here’s an idea for a game: Let’s create vast maps full of generic environmental details so that everything looks the same, then hide new areas and key locations around the map, which the player won’t see in full until they’ve traversed the whole thing. Giving our players only the vaguest hint of where they need to be, we will then throw them unprepared into this huge wasteland with very little of interest between locations, and even open up new areas of the map without ever announcing that we have done so. This is a brilliant idea.

Infinite Undiscovery is a truly prophetic name, as that’s exactly what the game is about as you wander lost around the game’s large, obscure maps. The very fact that many users of online message boards are all asking the same questions about where the Hell to go next is very telling — Infinite Undiscovery is very badly designed, throwing the player into a big and boring world before telling them to work it out.

This is Undiscovery’s biggest trespass, but it is still just one in a long line of offenses that have marred what may, at one point, have been a decent idea for an RPG.

[Red ring of death -- literally]

You play the role of Capell, a flute playing moron who has been wrongly imprisoned by The Order of Chains. The Order, being the generic evil empire that it is, has chained up the Moon and locked it in place above the world. Capell is at the mercy of these fiendish brutes because he looks identical to the man they are really after — Sigmund the Liberator, a man with the power to cut the Moon’s binding chains.

Accidentally rescued by one of Sigmund’s followers, Capell escapes to find Sigmund and his liberation force, and from there follows them on a journey to rescue the cliché world from a cliché villain while having a cliché coming-of-age story with all his cliché friends.

Ah yes, the RPG character clichés. They are all there — the annoying twins, the brooding emo, the musclebound idiot who’s a child at heart, the one that’s an animal and of course, the female lead who is madly in love with the main character but acts mean to him, yet is jealous of any woman that looks at him funny.

It wouldn’t be all that bad — Lost Odyssey had its fair share of stock characters — but I have never seen an RPG employ its leads so ham-fistedly and with such obnoxious obviousness. For example, the female lead Aya begins her worn-out love and jealousy routine almost moments after meeting Capell, as if the writers knew that we all saw it coming so dispensed with any kind of build. Why bother when we’ve seen this trite idiots-in-love bullshit a thousand times before? Characters are randomly inserted into the plot, barely fleshed out, and then almost forgotten. I was actually surprised to see at least one character in my party — he was so inconsequential I hadn’t noticed him there.

In fact, every single character — from the jealous, whining Edward to the unapologetically camp villain — is so boring or extreme in its clichés that you’d be forgiven for thinking the whole game itself is a parody — a well-observed caricature of Japanese RPGs. However, this notion falls apart when you realize that if it’s a joke, it’s not a very funny one, and things become thoroughly depressing once you see how seriously the game begins to take itself.

Category: Uncategorized by Joe Li