I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 38 was Infinite Undiscovery. This game is a Japanese Action RPG from SquareEnix. You take control of Capell as he travels on a journey to free the moon from a set of chains that has locked it in place above the Earth. Along the way, you will meet a large (too large) cast of characters who will help Capell on his journey.

The story of this game is somewhere between amazing and an absolute mess. Capell’s character arc is great. He starts out as a loser who is stuck in prison and needs to be broken out by a strange girl he has never met before: Aya. Aya becomes the main love interest of the story and we hear that the only reason she saved him was because he looks exactly the same as a knight she serves, named Sigmund. It is actually Sigmund who wants to destroy all the chains and Capell gets accidentally forced into joining his team. Tons of stuff happens and eventually Capell is strong, confident, and cool by the end of the story.

While a few characters actually get great character arcs (Capell was just 1 example), most of the characters are completely undeveloped. New people are entering your party throughout the whole game. I think the last people to join get there just 2 dungeons before the end of the game… That is a little too late for me. These characters don’t get enough time to really make me invested in them.

Another issue with the story is that the villains have essentially zero time on screen other than battle. I don’t really feel like they were developed more than just “crazy zealots.”

About halfway through the story, it starts to also become a huge commentary on societal class divisions. This world has three distinct classes of people and there are a lot of political conversations and story beats that discuss the intricacies of these classes and what life is like for each. I thought that this stuff was extremely interesting and really built up the world of Infinite Undiscovery. Discussion around these classes, their motivations, and the historical lore of how they came to be are very good.

That was a lot of story discussion… How about the gameplay? Weeeeeelllllll… it's just okay. Combat has the player take on a party of 4 characters as they move across the world and through dungeons. The issue is that you only get to control Capell. The only thing you can do for the other characters is change how their AI acts. Come on developers! Has nobody learned from FF12? We want to control our whole party! It would have been nice if I could have swapped characters in order to take advantage of different situations.

To exacerbate this, fighting with Capell is boring. You will quickly discover a combo that you like and use this as your main attack 90% of the time. The only thing that you really need to do is focus on who to attack and position yourself. Yeah, I get that positioning can be a really fun mechanic in fights… but not ones where you have 75% of your party being controlled by AI. The AI gets constantly stuck in AOE attacks and will get absolutely pummeled. This leads to another problem: Rucha. While you get 3 party slots to fill with your vast library of characters; one of those characters better be Rucha. She is the best healer and you will need her. I just didn’t feel like there was enough diversity in combat and it got really boring after about 10-12 hours.

Capell announces every attack he makes as if he is a Dragon Ball character. I don’t think I need to explain how annoying this gets throughout a dungeon or a longer boss battle.

This game seems to have a really extensive post-game. I have seen a lot of online discourse on this and people seem to love it. I didn’t continue into the post game… but it may be a drawing factor to any prospective players.

Overall, Infinite Undiscovery has some really strong points, but is pulled massively down by its weaknesses. Some players feel like they were written by extremely talented writers and others feel like sea manatees randomly selected balls with story bits written on them (I love you if you got that reference). The combat is okay at best… but is extremely repetitive and gets boring into the later half of the story. Idk… I would recommend this game to hardcore JRPG fans, but everyone else should probably skip it in favor of other things. (6/10)

I spent 21 hours and 58 minutes playing Infinite Undiscovery.

I have spent a total of 398 hours and 24 minutes on the Road to 360 challenge so far.

Next game: Bullet Witch