Although the game is incredibly linear, they never give you much indication as to where to head next. You often get the name of the area you need to head to, with the general direction if you are lucky, but nothing is marked on the map for locations you have not visited yet. The winding mazes that make up the levels do not appear on your map until you cross through them, making exploration a chore. Too often, they will allow you to head through an entire area or two in the complete opposite direction, before finally preventing you from continuing forward, half an hour into your trek. You will frequently wander aimlessly in the hopes of triggering the next cut-scene to move the story forward. Since there is no fast-travel system, it makes for a very frustrating experience that will add at least a couple of hours to your gameplay. While traveling, you will find that enemies do put up a decent fight, especially when in swarms. Disregarding a nearby enemy will cause them to chase you down, until you either outrun or fight them, so ignoring too many enemies can be disastrous. Still, the game does not really challenge your abilities much until the second disc, where the boss battles become increasingly more difficult.
The game does get some of the small things right. There is not much here in the way of grinding to level your party, which is a definite upgrade over most RPG titles. Locked chests are no longer a major annoyance, as you have the option to smash them open. The risk is that you might smash the contents while breaking it open, which makes sense. There are other options for locked chests, though. Outside of finding the key, you also have the option to use Capel's flute skills. Each song you find in the game has its own special ability, with one unlocking chests and doors and other revealing hidden objects not otherwise visible. The hidden objects are too obvious though, with a wavy sound and visual queue that takes any challenge out of it. Still, the bits it gets right fail to make up for the shallow battle mechanics and slowly moving story.
The cut-scene lip-synching is atrocious, though much of the voice acting is not much better. The major players in the game are competent enough, but the supporting characters are typically horrible. The combination of strange art style, overly childish tone, and bad lip-synching makes the creepy-as-hell twins in your party seem even more horrifying. The game does not have much personality to it, with rather dry, stock characters and a non-descript art design. It is a mediocre visual effort, mostly due to the oddly dark color scheme and the hit and miss character models. It performs well enough, given the amount of action on-screen with three parties, with the occasional slow-down in battles with multiple enemies.
In the end, Infinite Undiscovery is in the minority when it comes to providing real-time battles in an RPG setting, but that stand-out feature does not cure the game's far too many mistakes. The shallow battle system and slow story, combined with the awkward graphical system make it one game that many will tire of long before the conclusion.
