Amazon Curve Bonus Round: Infinite Space

Missed out on our Amazon Curve for Infinite Space? Catch up on it here! And if you still haven’t gotten enough Amazon Japan opinions on the game, you can find more below.

The Volume of Story in this is … Amazing… (3 stars)

There’s quite a bit of volume to this story. It’d be a shame if you only finish the first part of the game. Actually, the beginning alone had so much volume that I was surprised. On the flip side, though, there was too much content, such that the charm of a story found in one single mission was washed away just like that, which surprised me.

It’s even more noticeable in a branching story.

As for the system, it’s very obvious that it’s not user-friendly. There are many parts where you won’t be able to understand anything unless you use Help G. However, Help G doesn’t know much about the special abilities of the ships either. The details about the status of the ships are hard to understand as well, and then there are abilities that don’t appear in the status (like the CT Revision Cost). I couldn’t get it at all. I also have absolutely no idea how much the characters’ abilities or skills are affecting the revision. I kind of felt they were there more to build the atmosphere than anything else.

I’m also disappointed that you can’t skip conversations when they say the same thing when you talk at the bar.

Even so, as I first described, they went full-out on the volume of the story, so it was pretty fun. I feel like the game is still going to go on.

It Could’ve Been a Little Better (3 stars)

From what the official site said, 200 characters appear and you can assign them to be anything from Vice-Captain to the Head Cook to the Nurse. Being able to assign people to such a diverse collection of jobs is really interesting. However, there are lots of old men, so it’s best not to look at this as a Character Game.

I’ve been going on about creating your own battleship, but if you attach parts to the ship that’s going to be your base based on how you want it to look, you’ll find that there are limits to the space and parts, so sometimes you can’t make it as you want it to be.

The battle scenes give a punch, for a DS game, and you’ll always need to use your head so you won’t get tired of it. However, the battles are ship squadrons fighting in real-time, so even small battles will take time. Also, based off the timing of your attack, sometimes you’ll be able to beat the enemy with no damage, and sometimes you’ll be decimated by the same troop, so it may strain the nerves a little.

The system itself is created well, and I can give the idea of using ships credit for being a novel vision for RPGs, but because of the parts that were flustering and inconvenient, I give the game 3 stars as a whole.

Experimental Game? (2 stars)

• System

Basically, you select places you’ve already visited to travel there. You can also choose to go to undiscovered planets as well.

There’s wide breadth when it comes to customizing ships and assigning jobs. You just can’t change the battleship’s color, use kanji in your names, or change the names of the people.

There are no small, detailed trades. Other than going to the planet you’re told to in the bar to get money, you can sell the parts you’ve collected in storage when you dock at a new star and automatically gain a small sum of money.

• Battle

It’s not a battle system like Age of Discovery or Metal Max. In general, you can only move forward and back. You can’t give orders to switch out ally ships. The impact of the shot is at the same time as when the shot is fired, so there’s little strategy involved. And then there’s the durability of the parts … oh wait, no, there’s only that one HP gauge.

Based off the management of the battle, even if you have only one ship and the enemy has several, it’s still just a continuation of 1 vs. 1 fights. It was a bit of a letdown after getting excited about ship army battles. Also, you get this great sense of “Tohoho!” at watching the battleships get destroyed.

The hand-to-hand combat is rock-paper-scissors. The assigned characters can control the battles to a certain extent. That being so, I feel like they may as well have just left the battle to auto.

• Controls

It’s mostly touchpen only. The only time you use buttons is to make the dialogue continue. The panels are small, though, so accuracy is harsh. When you’re not used to it, you’ll be missing with your touchpen quite a bit.

• Scenario

I still haven’t finished the game, but I feel like it’s something that people who like space opera would like. It’s kind of cute how there’s hiragana mixed in the middle of nowhere in this dense story.

Overall, I know what they’re trying to do, but I feel like they didn’t achieve what they wanted with either the technique, content, or specs. It’s not to the extent where I’d call it boring, but overall it’s rough on the edges.

I Completely Gave in to Pre-Game Hype (1 star)

It’s not being sold back anywhere yet, but I’m sure they’re lying unused somewhere. Some of the reasons are as follows:

• The game interface is unfriendly. It’s always hard to understand what you’re doing no matter what you do.

• The movie for one attack is long, but if you skip it you don’t know how much damage you’re doing.

• The dialogue is verbose. The jargon listed off in the documents to create a view to the world doesn’t even begin to feel satisfying.

• Even though space-ish difficult jargon like “High Particle Accelerator Whatchamacallit” are written in kanji, easy words like “meat” or “others” are written in hiragana, which feels really weird.

• The battle system is on the level of rock-paper-scissors. It’s monotonous, with no high-level strategizing.

• The game has frozen on me twice when I closed the DS screen.

The feeling that they tried to do too much is very apparent. If they made the game a bit more compact, the denser contents might be interesting. I thought it would be, and I tried it for 5 hours, but when it froze on me the second time I decided to sell the game back… It’s too bad I was looking forward to the game.

The assigning of crew members and customization of the ships were the focus, which looked fun, but the other parts were too imperfect, so I didn’t reach the part where the game was the best. Also, I wish they’d do something about the block noise in the opening movie.

The Famitsu ratings are definitely unfair. Games like this where there’s all this pre-release hype only to disappoint the excited users should be strongly criticized in the customer reviews, I feel.