Whispered Shadows

This review is one that I posted over on GameFly.

I’m not sure exactly why this game received such poor reviews. The only thing I can think of is that people came to this game expecting a Final Fantasy system and got a Kingdom Hearts clone. What do I mean by that? Let me try to explain.

For starters, everyone knows there is a major shortage of good RPG games on the Xbox 360. Infinite Undiscovery was, I’m sure, in most people’s mind a good stop over until the release of the next Final Fantasy game. People who have played any of the recent FF games are aware of the complex system of skills that the games have all had in the past handful of games.  Skill trees, classes, combos, and whatnot. Infinite Undiscovery has none of those. Combat is simply two attacks with possible ‘connect’ combos with one of your party members. Very much like Kingdom Hearts. Leveling up means the possibility of unlocking new skills, but you don’t have a choice in them. What skills you do have are leveled up by use. This includes both combat skills/abilities as well as the crafting skills. This can be a pain since the only way to ‘rest to full heal’ is to buy a room at the inn. I think perhaps there might be later food items you can craft that will do this, but i have yet to find a vendor that sells enough of the food items to seriously grind the low level cooking skills. There are two free game addons through Xbox Live that allow you to buy the materials you need for armor and (most) weapons from -any- vendor. Crafted items are exactly the same you can buy from the vendors, in fact most the time I found myself with better equipment through crafting than buying.

The best thing I found about the game was the story itself. Since I rented the game through GameFly I didn’t possess the booklet so I had no real idea what the game was about at all. It was disorienting at first, but I found it immensely fun because I was able to learn the story along with the main character. And what a story it was. I really loved it. Give this game a chance.