Re-release this: Infinite Space
Re-release this: Infinite Space
There is no reason for this early Platinum game to be stuck on the DS, generations back.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
You’ve probably played a game developed by Platinum before. Chances are very good that it was all about speed, sharpening your reflexes, honing your instincts, brutal action, visceral combat, etc. Bayonetta, NieR: Automata, Vanquish, Astral Chain, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, MadWorld… these are the kinds of thrilling action games that Platinum built their reputation on.
Their second game, though, was not like anything else they’ve developed. Infinite Space was a naval space tactical RPG released for the Nintendo DS, with space opera storytelling and stylus controls. There’s still plenty of action in it, since the tactical nature of the game is still real-time, but you’re going to spend a lot of time checking gauges and meters and strategizing in the middle of battle, instead of figuring out the best time to unleash a combo after dodging or parrying a Biblically accurate angel or whatever. There still are opportunities to dodge, because even if this is a tactical space warfare RPG played through menus, it is a game made by Platinum, but yeah. It’s truly unlike anything else they’ve made. Which is a shame, not because the rest of Platinum’s oeuvre is lacking — it is not — but because they were also great at their one shot at making something very different.
It’s an extremely menu-heavy game: loads of dialogue with a very visual novel bent, travel performed through menu selections, battles played out in a menu, very old-school RPG elements in the “towns” and space ports — it all would have felt very at home in one of the Atlus DS RPGs of the day. Which, considering Platinum’s first independent effort was the extremely stylized and over-the-top violent MadWorld — a black-and-white and red action game that featured the sports commentating of Greg Proops and John DiMaggio as a kill-or-be-killed game show where you scored more points for more inventive brutality played out in front of them —was a shock then, never mind now after the studio has built up the library they have.
Here’s the basic premise: your protagonist (who you can name) wants to travel through space, as the captain of his own ship. It turns out that his personal dream is going to intersect with the fate of the galaxy itself, but hey, that’s good, otherwise you might not have the appropriate level of space opera drama you need out of a game that will take you 50 hours or so on your first play. There’s a time jump that will see your captain go from optimistic and plucky young captain to a grizzled, eye-patched veteran known across the galaxy for his bravery and capability, and in between these events, you’ll have to earn yourself that reputation by building up a fleet worthy of your goals.
You’ll fly around the galaxy, finding allies, seeking out tips, acting on those hints, buying and modifying ships so that you’re better equipped to handle the variety of battle situations you’ll find yourself in, filling out your roster with specialists in communication, artillery, leadership, and so on. You need a balanced fleet, both in your ships and in terms of who is on board the ships themselves, so significant time is devoted to getting this right, in the same way you would balance a party of mages and warriors and such if this were a fantasy RPG instead of one focused on space naval warfare.
All of that is obviously taking place in menus, and combat does, too, but that specific menu is a lot more active. The game really does have action elements, because of how battles work. You have a gauge that will slowly fill up — faster or slower depending on how your ships are outfitted — and that allows you to perform various attacks and to dodge foes. While you wait for the gauge to fill, you’re constantly repositioning your ships, to either be out of firing range as an opposing fleet or ship approaches yours, or to chase down your enemies as they attempt to escape. Maybe you’re standing by, maybe you’re utilizing the game’s dodge tactics in order to cause your foes to waste a powerful barrage on you while your own gauge builds up for a powerful counter attack — you’re going to spend this time acting and reacting, menu-based combat or no.
The complexity of combat isn’t quite obvious at first. As you start to get your ass kicked a bit, though, against tougher ships that will make you pay in a real hurry whenever you make a tactical mistake, you’ll see just how much goes into getting one of these encounters right. At first, it’s just dealing with being outnumbered — bringing on new ships is an expensive endeavor — then it’s about being outgunned, and then it’s about opponents successfully deploying countermeasures you need to account for, like space fighters that can harass and damage your fleet, or anti-air guns that serve to take down your own fighters. You can also board enemy vessels in certain situations, and those infantry battles play out in a rock/paper/scissors style, where you both need to be prepared for anything but also pretty lucky with your guesses of which of those three elements your opponent will play.
Combat really opens up when you have your own fleet, instead of being outnumbered two or three or four to one with your starter ship. This is especially true when you consider that the only thing that matters is that your flagship survives — the others can be destroyed and later repaired at docks around the galaxy, but you’ll fall in battle — and lose your progress — if your personal ship goes down. There’s a strategic element to this, too, balancing just how strong your flagship needs to be in order to survive, while recognizing that it might be the other ships in your fleet that you want attention drawn to, or enlisted for the more hazardous and high-risk maneuvers you might make in combat.
As weapons become more varied and the various firing ranges of your ships begin to significantly differ — it turns out there are a lot of subtle differences when you have 100 ships to choose from, even before modding them — you have even more reason to pay attention both in battle and in preparation for it, to ensure that you are both balanced and setting yourself up to deliver max payloads — all while avoiding taking damage yourself. Which is not just important in individual battles, but while taking long journeys across whatever sector of the galaxy you find yourself in: there are battles you can run from and those you cannot, and you don’t want to be low on fuel and armor when you get stuck in one of the difficult “event” battles that are tied to the story or a side quest.
The narrative of the game is genuinely interesting — it does not shy away from politics at all, and even manages to deftly handle the extremely political nature of the universe within — and plays out in just little bits at a time given how much of what you end up doing involves strategy and battle. The cast does end up a little unwieldy, in terms of giving space to all of them, but this isn’t Mass Effect — you have up to 200 crew members, not a dozen. It’s bound to work like this, even if it can be a little disappointing when someone you liked and spent a bit of time with earlier kind of vanishes as the game goes on. It’s worse when plot threads themselves are kind of dismissed or wrapped up in a rush to serve the larger central narrative, but it’s the kind of thing that knocks the game down in quality without even coming close to ruining it. It’s a great (and still fairly unique) game that could have been an even better one, basically, but given how there was talk on both the development and publishing side about how stuffing this game onto a DS cartridge was tough enough as is, maybe that just wasn’t possible at the time.
There are secrets to the universe to be uncovered, though, and the path you take to go from fresh-faced captain to extremely known quantity who is both respected and feared across the galaxy is an entertaining one. The game is also full of choices to make: there are over 200 potential crew to be recruited into your fleet, and you’re going to need pay attention to what people are saying in taverns across the galaxy in order to find any of them. Some crew can become enemies if you miss out on recruiting them, and others will see their own paths change significantly based on the choices you make throughout the story. It’s not a game you need a guide to complete, by any means, but if you want to get as much of Infinite Space wrapped up in one go as possible, then yes, a guide will be helpful. It’s meant to be played multiple times with you taking different paths and recruiting different crew members, though, so if you just want to go with the flow and see what you see, that’s perfectly fine, too.
PlatinumGames didn’t develop Infinite Space on their own — it was co-developed by Nude Maker, who co-developed Steel Battalion with Capcom for the Xbox back in 2002. Nude Maker is made up of quite a few former Human Entertainment developers, the studio responsible for Clock Tower, Fire Pro Wrestling, F1 Pole Position, and a slew of others. Hifumi Kono, director of the first two Clock Tower titles, wanted to make an expansive space epic, and when Platinum reached out to work with him once again — remember, many of Platinum’s employees were ex-Capcom, so some of them had worked with Nude Maker in the past — Infinite Space was born.
Platinum was still in their initial publishing deal with Sega at this point, and the budget given to them wasn’t going to work for a console game, so the two studios decided the DS was the place to put the game. The game maybe being a little too big in scope for a handheld, even one as powerful as the DS, was something Sega would use in their marketing campaign for Infinite Space at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show, though, they didn’t throw nearly enough support behind it. Yes, it was a little niche, but also treating it that way from the start ensures that will be self-fulfilling prophecy.
In 2012, Platinum’s Atsushi Anaba told Edge magazine that Sega undershipped the game in its opening week, which ended up harming the long-term sales: Infinite Space sold 40,000 copies in its opening week in Japan, and did worse than that in North America. In the end, it sold around 200,000 copies, which sounds pretty good for a niche game, yeah, but you have to remember that the DS had sold 125 million handhelds by the end of 2009, and would wrap at 154 million sold: the second-most of any system ever, next to the Playstation 2. Suddenly, 200,000 units doesn’t sound as impressive, even for a tactical space warfare RPG that’s menu-based. Especially not given its warm critical reception, and with Sega being the publisher — this wasn’t some random JRPG published by Ignition. No offense to the fine folks at Ignition, but their whole deal was publishing more obscure titles no one else was bringing over to North America — catering to a niche audience was the goal. Sega is Sega, and games they publish can be more popular simply because they have attached themselves (and their considerable resources and cache) to them.
Hell, Sega bought Atlus, which had made a serious name for itself (outside of its own development, of course) internationally publishing games literally no one else was going to bother with. A little more was expected from the mothership, but Sega never seemed to truly appreciate what they had in their exclusivity deal with Platinum, either, so none of this is a surprise.
Anyway, Sega still has the rights to Infinite Space, if the fact that they still get credited for new Bayonetta games even though those are Nintendo property now is any indication. And they’ve done nothing with it since. It wasn’t a huge seller, but Platinum continues to be a known quantity, one that works with the likes of Nintendo, yes, as well as Square Enix — resurfacing the games again, as has been done with Bayonetta and Vanquish already for 10th anniversary remasters, makes a lot of sense. Infinite Space might have been a stylus-based DS game that utilized the dual-screen nature of the device to its fullest, but there is also no real reason it couldn’t be ported to modern consoles, either. There’s enough room on the televisions of today for what was once a top-and-bottom display to now be side-to-side, and if developers can make games like Civilization and Crusader Kings work on consoles, then something like Infinite Space is going to be comparatively simple to nail.
And it should be ported, remastered, whatever, because there’s a real jewel of a game here, and one that, maybe more than anything else Platinum has done, is likely to be lost to time as the industry shifts further and further away from what it was during the era something like the DS could even exist. As is, you can’t find a legitimate copy on Ebay without forking over much more than its original price, meaning you’re stuck either modding a system that could play its ROM or crossing your fingers for a reproduction cartridge. It’s amazing how quickly games can be lost to time, isn’t it? Infinite Space was a 2009 release from a vaunted developer and with a huge publisher backing it, and if you don’t still have a copy from back in the day and the system it was made for, it’s like the thing never existed in the first place. A port, remaster, whatever could change all of that, though. And should.
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