Customer Reviews

Infinite Space

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Infinite Space is hands down the single best RPG adventure on the Nintendo DS. It's possibly the best game to arrive on Nintendo's dual screened moneymaker.

It's got almost everything you could want in such a game. An epic, galaxy spanning plot. A huge cast of memorable characters that really grow on you as the game stretches onwards. An amazingly huge world that will have you exploring for hours on end! And the game itself is incredibly long! Expect to spend over 60 hours on the game unless you're skipping everything to race for the end.

What the game doesn't have is a decent in-game tutorial, and it shows in a lot of the reviews you read here, and even in the professional gaming media.

Lots of frustrated gamers and reviewers complaining about the game's steep difficulty, how even the random encounters on the way between planets wind up being grueling. People claiming that battles rely too much on luck, with most of their shots missing entirely. Many people don't know about the fatigue bar, individual weapon ranges, character skills, fleet formations, and everything else that the battle system is built on. Crucial information if you want to get very far in the game.

To be fair, all that information is in the instruction manual, and in tutorial trailers released by Sega prior to the game's release, but let's be honest. Most people don't read the manual, and most people who get frustrated aren't going to go looking for a YouTube tutorial video. They're just going to assume that the game is insanely difficult. The game would be receiving much higher review scores if it had a proper in-game tutorial to explain everything you need to know.

The reality is that the game actually isn't that difficult at all, once you understand the basic gameplay mechanics. If you own the game, and gave up in frustration I'd recommend searching YouTube for those tutorial trailers. If you don't own the game, and epic space adventure sounds right up your alley, then I'd highly recommend Infinite Space. Aside from the lack of a tutorial, it's the best game to land on the DS in years.

I give IS a 4 star rating because its strengths have hooked me enough to overlook its weaknesses to the point where I am having fun with the game. Make no mistake, there is plenty to both like and dislike about this game. I typically do not like JRPG games but this one is ok with me. I think the space theme connects better with me than the typical JRPG fantasy theme.

What I Like: The game is about stat building. You upgrade your ships. You buy new ships. You buy more ships. You get better technology. You get more crew. You level up your crew. All of these occur through random encounters and scripted missions. This means that if you are willing to grind (patrol the space lanes and fight random pirates) you can get ahead of the game difficulty curve. I love being able to get to the point where I can totally outclass my enemies just by milking the game design. Also, I've come to enjoy the tactical space battles. The game system seems to reward good tactical thinking to point where an enemy can be out maneuvered (or at least it feels like it). The graphics are good and the ship designs are visually interesting. The ship building process is an interesting mini puzzle game in an of itself.

What I Like/Dislike: You can free roam - to a point, only in areas which you've unlocked. The firing sequences in the tactical space battles contain breathtaking strings of techno-babble. At first I laughed, now I just skip them. When your ships are destroyed, they miraculously reconstitute at the next port as long as at least one ship survives.

What I Dislike: The melee system is terrible. As near as I can tell, it is simply a guessing game against the AI. I hate it passionately. Some of the design choices are frustrating. For example, in tactical space battles, your default target is the first enemy ship on the list - always the one that is at the back of the formation and the most difficult target to hit. Why not set the nearest enemy ship (the easiest to hit - by far) as your default target? To make matters worse, it always resets to that first ship after you kill an enemy ship. I fought many frustrating battles until I learned to always check and reset my targets. Even now, I mess up every now and then. Side quests are few and are strictly "fed ex" quests. Documentation/tutorials are useless. You learn nearly everything by trial and error.

This game does have serious flaws. Buy Infinite Space if you like the space theme, enjoy level grinding and can tolerate a bit of frustration as you learn the game. Once you learn the game's quirks, it becomes quite enjoyable.

I blame the manual for the difficulty issue. You should not always focus fire on the first ship. Thinking that this is always the proper thing to do would give one the impression that the game has thrown you into unwinnable circumstances by the time you get to the second system. All ships in the fleet contribute to overall performance including evasion. If you can hardly land any hits on the big tough ship in front, focus on any disposable peons behind it first. Then it will typically be much easier to deal with. Most early battles are all about dodging, waiting for the enemy to fire a barrage rather than a normal shot and then following up with your own and backing off until you can get dodge back up.

Anyway, I'll kick the review off with what I didn't like: Space battles are ugly. I mean real ugly. They should have gone with 2D here rather than opt for polygons since battles are quite literally one dimensional anyway. You still get that Front Mission sense of satisfaction watching your attacks initiate and seeing them smack into the enemy but focusing on 2D with a pleasing aesthetic rather than 3D on the DS would have made for a much more satisfying experience I think. Especially since the game is technically one-dimensional.

Yes, 1D. The only thing that you really control spatially is the distance between two fleets composed of up to 5 capital ships each (if you have the speed advantage). The 1D factor is actually not really a negative. It really doesn't need to be more complicated since much of the game is prep and strategy anyway. Tactics are more about when to come out of your dodge status to open fire and at what range so far (I'm not up to fighters or the need to really kill off the other guy's crew yet).

Like most ginoromous galaxy games, planets are by and large not very interesting outside of the conversations to be had at the bar and the inventory at any shops that may or may not be present. Some planets are completely pointless beyond being a place to rest your crew and repair all damage. It's more of a system-to-system game than planet-to-planet game.

I'm about 10 hours in and the story shows promise, but the itch that this game really scratches for me is the slow build to ultimate power factor. I compare it to Suikoden not just because there are 100 characters you can find (who all contribute to your fleet of up to five capital ships in various ways but also because the fleet itself is much like the castle that slowly grows and evolves in Suikoden only minus all the store conveniences and Iron Chef-style competitions.

It's like Front Mission in the sense that the battles are a fairly similar although typically less complex experience and you really spend a lot of time tweaking and configuring the ships in your fleet. You actually build out the interior with modules that serve both strategic and tactical roles and weapons, fighters and boarding actions are all possibilities.

I pretty much bought this one just looking at the box. I got the sense that it wasn't a real high-budget experience but that I was going to dig the strategy/build-your-own-fleet factor of it and I wasn't disappointed.

I enjoyed the characters(personality and artwork), aswell as the art style for all the backgrounds and ships in the game. The story was more than I even expected from it, and the gameplay even offered more than I was hoping for.

There are afew very, very minor things, but they're so minor I'm not even going to mention them because odds are you won't notice them unless they're pointed out. Overall, fun game to pick up and play for 15-30 minutes at a time, just have a little notebook to scribble down where you're supposed to go next incase you forget the next time you sit down with it.

I've been enjoying Infinite Space a lot. The story is very good and I like the anime cutscenes and drawings.

There are some in-game tutorials and a help facility, but I still found myself scratching my head. I read the manual and still had questions. The manual lists a url for an additional maunal, so I followed that and got a one-page pdf that says "dummy page." I searched [...], found the correct link, read the additional manual and still had questions, so I read online faqs and forum postings. I can't think of another game that led me on a document search like that.

The sound isn't the best. Online sources say that Sega hired a telephone answering service to do the voice acting. If true, that's a sad statement on Sega these days. I've heard worse voice acting, but if you touch the screen during the battle dialogue, you can skip over it, and I do every time. The mixing is very poor. The voices are buried under the music and sound effects. Some audio level options would be nice, but there aren't any. The overall volume is a bit low too, and some of the samples are low quality.

As you travel from planet to planet, you can visit the taverns and talk to people. Most random characters have no picture at all, so you just see the bar in the background. That's a shame.

The random and boss battles can be very time-consuming, but I have fun with them. The strategy I use is to hit Dodge when I enter battle, then Back, target the enemy ship in the front row, charge my weapons to full, hit Forward, take a hit from the enemy ship when it's in range (which is deflected by Dodge if it's a Barrage or survivable damage if it's a Normal attack,)fire my Barrage before the enemy can select his Dodge, do a triple hit on him, then hit Dodge and Back again, and if I take damage while retreating, I sit at the left of the battle gauge and use the heal skill until I'm full health, then select Dodge, recharge my meter, and repeat the process. I died many times before I figured that out, and saving at most planets you visit is a good idea.

I haven't tried much melee combat yet. It's a rock-paper-scissors sort of affair.

There is no Delete All Data option, and if someone else has beaten the game, you won't see any of the Celestial Objects as you advance through your game. This is a major goof by Sega and a big disappointment.

So, a very good, tough and flawed game with a steep-learning curve it is. Too bad Sega didn't fix the various problems. Maybe they will if they port it to another system some day.

Infinite space is a very different RPG. The combat system, which seems easy, is actually quite complicated, and relies much more on trickery and knowing what your oppentent is going to do. It forces you to think like an actual captain might have to. (minimizing losses,keeping track of fleet movements, etc) You might find that having good reactions is more integral to success than just pure numbers because battles can change very quickly. (one ship might go down in your fleet because of carelessness and suddenly a normally easy battle turns into a possilbe game over.) There are some bosses that seem impossible but there are tricks to beating them. I say try before you buy because if you hate the combat system you will hate the game as a whole. The boarding sequence are probably my biggest complaint because of how luck based they seem, though by buying more security rooms for your ships you can pretty much make sure you'll win every boarding sequence. Shipbuilding is where this game really shines because the amount of options is just astounding. Theres nothing more satisfying than spending 30 minutes making your fleet just like you want it and then kicking ass for the whole rest of the chapter. The story starts kinda slow but picks up quite a bit. I'm 33 hours in right now and it seems like the story isn't losing momentum. This game is long but good.

I'm going to be brief and to the point on this. Everything about this game just demands that you pour hours of your gaming life into it almost as soon as you start it up. It doesn't have much along the lines of backstory to set you up beforehand, but did you want to watch Luke Skywalker prior to his surprise introduction to the Empire? Did you want to see him go about his day to day life maintaining his landspeeder and the water vaporizers? No? Not your bag? Mine either. You start out with your character right when his life becomes interesting, just like in Star Wars.

What happens next? He runs into an oh-so-chummy space pirate that wants to show him the intertstellar ropes. Sound familiar? Well, you'll be in for a surprise that I'll leave you to discover. This is no Han Solo, but the character's function to the story is roughly the same. Anyway, from the get-go, this game just continues to thrust you into the meat of the goings-on, and it seems like a wonderfully drawn out space opera; Star Wars fans, Mass Effect fans, and Star Trek fans, take note!

Oh, what's in it for the Trekkers, you ask? Almost as soon as you start the game, you become captain of your own battle cruiser! That's right! You're Captain Kirk AND Luke Skywalker, all rolled up into one big ball roughly three hours into the game. You can customize your ship to your liking, and it is all reflected on screen. Its great. The combat is where it feels most like an RPG, but since you're 'in command' of a large ship, it feels less like an RPG battle, since so many delays on firing weapons and thrusters would actually take time like it is represented here.

Wow, and I wanted to be brief. I'll agree that this title could become coveted after a while, so if you want to get it before it hits the gray market at hyper-inflated prices, there would be no better time. Well, I've gotta get back to constructing my ship. See you later! :)

This game has a lot to offer if you like serious RPGs and appreciate exploration, a good story with interesting characters, and customizing a fleet of awesome spaceships.
There are some missing features that would have been nice - like a quest log, and a more exhaustive help section. But for me keeping my own quest log just made it feel that much more epic, "hard core," and "old school." :)

Wow, I really don't know what to say. There's A LOT to do in this game, I don't think anyone can even play the same game twice. If you like the Legend of the Galactic Heroes anime, you'll love this game.

You shouldn't need a walkthrough for sections of the game. That would be the one big issue with Infinite Space. There are sections which just are not explained very well. Even when you get the gist of something, sometimes you need to attempt it multiple times.

The game can also be rather punishing if you don't do things exactly the way it wants. When this happens, it also doesn't really tell you. You have to lose then redo it.

Following that, the story has it's lose moments. The beginning has the brunt of this. But as it goes, Infinite Space tends to find itself again. Characters are typical of those found in jrpgs. From the weak but loveable male lead to the amazon style female supporting character, then the overly affectionate sister character, theres nothing really remarkable. What sets this aside is the rare moments of anime cut scenes which are much better than the story art itself.

However, despite all that, the story does keep you interested. It is certainly more original than most western scifi themes. The ship building features and fun involved with those will keep your interest even when the story does not.

Moving on, graphically, its good for the DS but clearly ancient in visuals. The sound is also good for a handheld game.

The touch screen works well for most things but the sensitivity and implementation is flaky. Scrolling the variety of lists with the screen quickly becomes an exercise in patience as the sensitivity and button placement is not very accurate.

Overall, if you want an rpg game for DS that has a well over 20+hr play time, Infinite Space is a great buy. Just have a guide printed out or a laptop handy. Where this game loses a star is that factor alone. Its great that its not super easy, but some parts will require a guide if it is your first time through.