Reviews// Infinite Undiscovery

There is a wonderful Geek T-Shirt that says, "There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't." In which case there are 10 kinds of people in the SPOnG office. One who bums Japanese Fantasy RPGs and nine who don't. I am the former.

So, it was without ceremony that soon after Infinite Undiscovery hit the doormat of the SPOnG underwater castle, it found its way onto my desk. This is a shame because the Japanese love a bit of ceremony. Take drinking tea for instance, we just shove a Tetley's bag in a cup, swill some water around and neck it. The Japanese, on the other hand, do something much more complex and impenetrable to us lazy fat milky westerners.

Intimate Fundiscovery is a milestone in the RPG genre, in that it is the first Xbox 360 exclusive game from Square Enix, a company that not only sits astride the JRPG genre like a elephant on a mini-moped but has also been famously associated with PlayStation exclusives. That is, ever after it was famously associated with Nintendo exclusives.

Now, whether this leads you to infer that Square is like a $20 crack whore, selling its ass wherever the easiest money is available, or not is down to you. The fact is that its games command a sizeable and fanatical audience. So, it is as much in Microsoft's interests to have a few Square Enix exclusives to wave around as it is in Squenix's interest not to hitch its wagon to a single train.

So, while we can all stand and stare in wonder as Square releases a platform exclusive title, we can also bet safely that it's not going to be its strongest property of the year.

The 360 has traditionally not been a big unit shifter in Japan where Squenix's games are most popular. So, committing a strong property to the platform just wasn't going to happen, not unless Microsoft had compensated the publisher for the vast financial losses this could have resulted in. But Squenix is no shovelware shop, so even a second rate Squenix game will often knock the spots off its rivals.

So, Infinite Undiscovery, what's it all about eh? Well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure, the review copy I received was without an instruction manual, so I was spared the back story. But essentially, our hero - played by you in the form of Capell awakes to find himself in a dungeon with little memory of how he got there. When he banters good-naturedly with the guard about his hunger - the guard reacts violently.

Enter Aya, a pretty but feisty minx in a short skirt who dispatches the guard with little ado and then springs Capell from his cell. From that point on, Ultimate Indiscovery turns into the kind of game you've seen a thousand times before.

There's some kind of flimsy plot about the moon being anchored to the earth by chains, and there is a clandestine organisation committed to breaking these chains. The reasons for this are not well explained but may have something to do with Gaia or perhaps dolphins. In reality it's pretty irrelevant, and merely serves as a pretext on which to hand a series of tasks that you must perform to progress through the game.

Once the cut scenes are over, the characters immediately stop talking to one another to save on disk space, voice acting and localisation costs, and we move instead to subtitles rather than voice-overs in hokey American accents. Why do publishers do that?

The people who buy these games do so because of an overwhelming fascination with all things Japanese - but then publishers dub the voices. And, instead of using cute and exotic Japlish, they use voice actors who sound like they come from a second rate Seventies action movie.