I finally started playing the game. I'm about four hours in and so far I think it's really bad.
There hasn't been much story I could comment on. Boy lost his family, wants to discover fathers true intentions or something, does space adventure and there apparently are mysterious people with unknown purposes. Not very exciting, but I'm sure something will happen.
Then there is the character/ship/fleet development and management. The ships have a shit ton of skills and each crew member has skills and abilities itself, which in turn influence the ships skills, which are also influenced by modules. Well, so far, so good...but the game is awfully great at not telling me what each skill and everything else exactly does. It's throwing all this shit at me and if I'm crazy enough to actually want to know what everything does I have to rely on a badly organized and confusing "Help" menu, which is not accessible at any time.
I honestly don't feel like I
have to know about all this stuff at this point, because the battles are not very challenging anyway, but I still
want to know. It's not very fun for me to not know what the adjustments on my fleet actually do. And even if I look this stuff up I feel like I'm not getting any indications on how it's actually influencing my fleets/ships strengths -- for all I know I could randomly assign crew members and I would be fine. Feels like I'm playing a game blindfolded and the many abbreviations certainly don't help.
It's actually very common for RPGs to not be very descriptive when it comes to such subtleties. It always annoys me, but most of the time it's not that bad, because this stuff tends to be more or less self explanatory to the point where it's acceptable to look up the one or two vague things -- but IS is really pissing me off with its obscure and unconventional skill names and functions.
So yeah....there is this extremely complex and customizable character management system on the one hand and on the other hand there is a battle system that is unchallenged in its simplicity. I played games of rock-paper-scissors that were more exciting and tactical. I almost feel like I'm missing something there, because this cannot possibly be the reward for working my way through tons of menus and status screens. I thought FFXIII was already very good at excluding the player from the actual battle event and making the game playable for retards, but IS is heartbreakingly worse.
The EXP/fame rewards also seem frustratingly negligible.
I was not super excited for Infinite Space, but I had reasonable expectations which the game is not even close to meet. I'll definitely play it some more and I hope something clicks with me, but I really don't like it so far.
