Infinite Space And Its Infinite Inaccessibility

 

Take the customization for instance. The main draw of Infinite Space is acquiring starships and steadily upgrading them using the "Tetris" system. As in Valkyria Chronicles, there's only so much space on a given starship, and the parts tend to look like Tetris blocks. So the challenge is squeezing in as many blocks as possible, all while keeping an eye on the price tag for installing each part. That can result in a bit of grinding early on as you try to scrounge the money for parts, but it's worth it when your tricked out destroyer rolls off the assembly line.

Half the fun though is micromanaging all the associated stats, and Infinite Space does an incredibly poor job of explaining what they all mean, even as it introduces head-scratching stats like "Livability" and "Med Tech." Given how much you can do in this game, these stats really aren't self-explanatory. Instead, you have to go into the Help menu to discover that Livability helps lower fatigue from long cruises, which is a cumbersome solution at best.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg though. There are all kinds of little interface issues, from the lack of a journal to keep track of missions (it's so easy to forget where to go in this game) to the inability to see how ship stats are affected as you attach different parts (you have to back out a menu to see how much a given stat has grown). And those issues don't begin to match the fact that Infinite Space basically throws you into the deep end of the pool from the outset.

Most people I know who played this game got stuck in Chapter 3, and with good reason. There are some pretty tough ship-to-ship battles in that section, and the melee battles will absolutely ruin those who forget to put someone in the security chief position. This sort of punishment would normally be fine, but once again, the info you need is buried in the Help menu. There's no indication whatsoever of what the security chief (or cook, or accountant, or ship surgeon) positions actually do without opening the in-game manual.

That goes double for the crew member abilities, which only kind of make sense after hours of play. At one point during Chapter 3, you have to engage several enemy fleets while only shooting down certain ships. Some of them lurk in the back row though, which means that your shots will always miss; so what's a captain to do? Apparently you have to drop the character you just recruited into the first officer position and activate his special ability.When I first played, I had no idea those abilities were active rather than passive, much less that I was supposed to use it for that particular instance.

Like I said, poorly documented, at least for those who don't have the wherewithal to sit down and read the entire Help section. In other words, 90 percent of the people who will play this game. Nobody likes a tutorial.

There are other issues, like the combat, but the prior ones that I listed are the big ones. And yet, I can’t help but evangelize the heck out of this game. I find the customization utterly engrossing, I like having my own crew, and I feel completely engaged in the space adventure element. The flaws didn’t take me out of the experience by any means, but they did point to the need for RPGs to be as transparent as possible when it comes to stats.

Being a genre that puts so much emphasis on numbers and other mechanics, the stats should really be as self-explanatory as possible. I once spent quite a long time trying to figure out how "Special" was different from "Attack" in Poke’mon, but that's nothing compared to puzzling out what mechanics are affected by "Livability." Granted, it's all right there in the in-game manual, but a text box describing what each ship position and stat affects would have been preferable. As it is, it's pretty inaccessible, and it makes me sad to think that people might just give up and walk away because they don't "get it."

Is that their loss? Oh yeah, sure, particularly if they like starship or science fiction in any way. But it does suggest that the designers were so focused on the big picture of squeezing a space adventure onto the Nintendo DS that they neglected some of the mechanics, to the game's detriment. That said, I found Infinite Space to be quite engrossing the first time I played it.Maybe you will too, just remember to read the help menu.

PSA: Hironobu Sakaguchi’s The Last Story was just announced for a European release on February 24^th, 2012.Words cannot describe my excitement!

 

 

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