Infinite Undiscovery

[DroopyA]

Square Enix sucks. I was never that huge of a fan of the Final Fantasy games but I'll admit that I had my favorites (X, VII)... but this game, this game is a new low in shit.

It's about as badly sterotypical as you can get... lame teenager with no self esteem joins up with a group of wondering warriors containing a super hot broad that runs around in a skirt all day giving you the sex eyes in badly rendered CGI films that happen to occure about every 15 steps in order to save the world from an evil villian bent on becoming a monster to take over the world.

Every time you enter a new map, you get a cutscene. Every time you go to a new town, you meet new people. I swear, the only thought that went behind this game was "lots of cutscenes where homosexual males in bad costumes meet and greet other homosexual males in bad costumes"

It's 2 disks but I swear there isn't 15 minutes of gameplay... it's just bullshit cutscene after cutscene. And worse yet, they're not even interesting... the dialog is terrible and everybody always repeats what everybody else says. Example:

He's not sick.
He's not?
No, He's getting stronger.
Stronger?
Yes, stronger?
GASP! How can that be
Let me explain
Yes, please explain
It's the magic spell
the magic spell?
Yes, the magic spell.

Most of these are voiced with terrible voice actors whos dialog doesn't match up with the mouths of the characters. Strangly, other, more improtant scenes, don't have any sound to them at all... the cutscenes with sound, are terribly boring. Nothing happens, they just stand in one spot and talk... and usually it has very little information inside. It's usually followed by lame gags and slapstick comedy... usually involving the lead character and his awkword shyness when dealing with hot girls that keep offering to do "anything" for Lord Sigmond. If it sounds funny, it's not. If it doesn't sound funny, it's worse then you can imagine.

You can't save whenever and save points are always hard to find. Every section of the game has a huge map that looks wonderful but contains nothing. Ocassionaly you find a chest but it has junk it in... some food or a potion. Most of the rooms are empty or containg NPCs that have zero information to offer.

It's easy to forget what's going on or where you're suppose to be going, especially if you're like me and turn the game off and don't get to turn it on for days. Unfortunitly there's no hints or directions to be found... if you forget, you're fucked. The start menu has a little one sentance summary but it's rarely helpful. One example is "The team needs to return to Edward and give him the medice". Helpful... only if you know where Edward is. I didn't... thank God for walkthroughs. It makes me wonder why this just simply didn't read "The team needs to return to [town] and give Edward his medicine"... or something like that.

The battle system blows. It's all in real time so that's cool but every tap of the button is two or three swings and so far there doesn't seem to be a lot of combo options. mayber there are and I just don't know because the menu system is complete shit and better left untouched. Regardless, you're team is pretty good at fighting and ecah memeber has a special ability but it's pointless to care about these things as their descriptions are meaningless and the moves are too hard to pull off with very little reward.

I don't know any real names off the top of my head, but they all say things liek "Dancing Rapcity"... that could be a million things... whats wrong with "Triplle combo" or "flying jump kick"?

I'm 20 hours in, on disk 2, hate every second of the game.

.5/10... death to the JRPG!

[Blaze-Heatnix]

At 3/30/09 10:22 PM, DroopyA wrote: Square Enix sucks. I was never that huge of a fan of the Final Fantasy games

death to the JRPG!

Then why did you review this? If you don't really like JRPGs, should you really be entitled to a review?

[DroopyA]

At 3/30/09 10:53 PM, Blaze-Heatnix wrote: Then why did you review this? If you don't really like JRPGs, should you really be entitled to a review?

Everybody is entitled to an opinion... just because my opinion differs from yours doesn't mean it's any more or less valuable.

Besides, I liked FFVII, and FFX is one of my favorite games. FFVIII and FFIX where OK... I bought and beat both of them. They weren't anything spectacular, but they weren't bad either. FFX-2, on the other hand, was God awful.

I hadn't played an RPG on the 360 yet and the Square games seem to be pretty good on average so I figured I'd give it a try.

The problem is, it's not just bad, it's terrible. It's the epidomy of what JRPG haters think of when they think of a JRPG game. It's so sterotypical it destroys itself in the first few minutes. Everybody is 14 years old, even the villans... the lead character is shy and has some dibilitating condition that makes him an outcast to society but somehow ends up on a trip with the hottest girl in the land who develops a crush on him and he's too shy to make a move... everybody hates him but he's the only one that can save the world so they tolerate him... that is, until he saves a team members life and becomes the leader of the crew. There are cut scenes every 15 steps to give it a long epic feel, and everytime you go to a new town you get a collection of new team mates who all have terrible backstories and even dumber costumes then before. I litteraly just picked up a guy 30 hours in on the second disk who wears a plastic bunny mask when he fights. Is this neccessary?

And don't even get me started on the story or dialog again. It sounds like it was written by a fith grader... it's like Square had a 'make your own RPG contest in the back of Nintendo power one month and this was the winner". It's not that I hate games with a lot of story... it's that this one is just done horribly.

We need to go to Halgata
Halgata?
Yes, Halgata
Why Halgata
Because that's where the chain is
There's a chain in Halgata
Yes

Why couldn't they just shorten that down to:

There's a chain Halgata that must be cut! Quickly, we must hurry!

It takes them 3 loading sequences and 7 moves to tell me one sentance worth of facts. And there's hours of this shit. And worse yet, usually the scenes that tell you where you need to go don't come with a soundtrack... why not? Why are only 80% of the cut scenes voiced? And why are the non-voiced scenes the most important? What, did the staff quit half way through the recording process?

Besides that, the game is pretty bland. New equiment doesn't show up on the character model, there's nothing to collect or find, the maps are huge and vastly empty requireing a lot of needless runing for unnecessary amounts of time, and the game has a bad tendancy of forcing you to fight the same group of monsters over and over and over again. The story is shallow and predictable, and the game itself (outside of the cutscenes) appears to be realativly short. It seriously feels like I've played barly an hour... and I'm at the end of disk two... the other 19 hours where me watching bad movies YOU CAN'T SKIP.

And if you die, you have to re-watch them... all of them. So, don't die... ever.

JRPGs could be cool... but this one isn't. ANd it's overuse of lame sterotypes is a clear sign to me that the people behind the genra aren't even trying anymore and it would be better off if they just let the genra die all together. If all JRPGs from here on out are going to be this lame and predictable, why even make them? It's reached the point where if you've played one, you've played them all... so lets save everybody some time and just stop making them.

It's like Rap after Rap got to it's "I'm rich in the club" phase... complely pointless and just downright insulting to intelligent people and other artists of the same craft who take more pride in the work.

[Oliver]

At 3/30/09 10:53 PM, Blaze-Heatnix wrote:

Then why did you review this? If you don't really like JRPGs, should you really be entitled to a review?

Are you retarded?

If you ask a fanboy to review his favorite series, all you'll get is favorable bullshit out of every possible orifice.

Whereas if you ask a cynical asshole to review the same, you'll get some half decent criticism.

[xscoot]

It was only published by Square, it was developed by Tri-Ace.

So, hate Tri-Ace.

[possum2]

I'm 20 hours in, on disk 2, hate every second of the game.

If your 20 hours in on disc 2 then you must not hate it toooo bad!

[possum2]

DroopyA dont know wen to shut up!

[McZero]

At 3/31/09 04:00 PM, possum2 wrote: DroopyA dont know wen to shut up!

You are so fucking stupid.

[possum2]

At 3/31/09 04:11 PM, McZero wrote:

At 3/31/09 04:00 PM, possum2 wrote: DroopyA dont know wen to shut up!

You are so fucking stupid.

OooooOOoo sorry Princess i didnt meeeen to dis ur boyfreind.

[malachi117]

At 3/31/09 04:17 PM, possum2 wrote:

At 3/31/09 04:11 PM, McZero wrote:

At 3/31/09 04:00 PM, possum2 wrote: DroopyA dont know wen to shut up!

You are so fucking stupid.

OooooOOoo sorry Princess i didnt meeeen to dis ur boyfreind.

Way to prove his point.

[possum2]

At 3/31/09 04:24 PM, malachi117 wrote:

At 3/31/09 04:17 PM, possum2 wrote:

At 3/31/09 04:11 PM, McZero wrote:

At 3/31/09 04:00 PM, possum2 wrote: DroopyA dont know wen to shut up!

You are so fucking stupid.

OooooOOoo sorry Princess i didnt meeeen to dis ur boyfreind.

Way to prove his point.

HAIL HITLER!!!!!!!!!!!!

[DeathNoteetoNhtaeD]

Yeah, I got to the chase through the forest about 15 minutes in, and thought to myself, "this is terrible". It suffered from poor lighting, poor controls, awkward battle system, bad VA, and just plain questionable game design. I know it was really quick to judge, but if I'm hating every second of it 15 minutes in, is it really worth my time?

[Blaze-Heatnix]

At 3/31/09 02:13 PM, Lagamuffin wrote: If you ask a fanboy to review his favorite series, all you'll get is favorable bullshit out of every possible orifice.

Whereas if you ask a cynical asshole to review the same, you'll get some half decent criticism.

Yeah, but I wasn't expecting him to be a fanboy or anything, he said he didn't like JRPGs, so there really is no reason why he plays them. If he doesn't like RPGs, then we can assume a review he makes will call it mediocre, so there's no point.

[DroopyA]

At 3/31/09 03:59 PM, possum2 wrote: If your 20 hours in on disc 2 then you must not hate it toooo bad!

I beat every game I play... even if it sucks. I like to experiance the story of a game just like people like to see the end of a movie of read an entire book. People sit through bad movies all the time so why is it so odd one would sit through a bad game? There are more to video games then sniper riffles and online death matches you know.

If you really want to know, Gamefly sent it to me on March 10th. It's taken me 21 days to clock 20 hours... that's how much this game sucks.

At 3/31/09 04:49 PM, DeathNoteetoNhtaeD wrote: Yeah, I got to the chase through the forest about 15 minutes in, and thought to myself, "this is terrible". It suffered from poor lighting, poor controls, awkward battle system, bad VA, and just plain questionable game design. I know it was really quick to judge, but if I'm hating every second of it 15 minutes in, is it really worth my time?

The only thing that changes, is the lighting... but only because after that, you don't travel at night any more. Everything else stays the same.. or gets worse. They force you to do a lot of unfun things like that chase... like save a child from a bear, or escort villagers through the desert. My favorite... traveling through the swap... a map that contains 'warp points' that jump you all over the place with no marker on the map to tell you where these things are at and no in-game key to help you learn how to navigate them.

It's pretty bad... if this is any indiciation of what Square-Enix does these days, I expect them to file for bankrupcy shortly after the new FF comes out. I mean, X-2 was complete and utter shit... this is equally as bad, just not as gay.