Infinity's a game that released like 5 days ago after being in the works since around the year 2000. I never really knew a thing about it until a bit more recently, so I didn't really have any prior thoughts going into it other than "the combat system looks neat."

The manual says that the level cap is 30, and I'm level 13/14 with my party, so I can probably assume I'm a little under halfway in at around 5 hours spent. Might be wrong, but that's my best current estimate.

I'm not particularly fond of the cast - they have their own stories but it's really hard for me to get too invested in any of them because none of them do a great job of making me actually care about them. The entire story's felt... okay? But also pretty exhausting. I'm not the best story analyst so it's hard to exactly pinpoint and put into thoughts *why* I feel this way.

The combat system *is* indeed interesting! It also has some major shortcomings that hold it back. It's kind of a hexagonal grid system that you can move around on and do a lot of turn based tactical stuff, which is exactly my jam. However, the random encounter rate is excessively high which makes everything feel like quite a slog when just going through dungeons and the overworld.

The battles also have a few specific layouts per area on what enemies appear where and where your characters start, so the battles start to feel really stale after a while. It'd be one thing if you had control over your starting formation, and enemies had some more randomness in how they spawned, but it really hits the point where the high encounter rates and small encounter pool turns the cool combat system into more of a chore than anything.

SP (mana) management in fights is also weird - it feels like the game expects you to use a lot of it, but it also feels really rough to actually restore it outside of stopping by inns frequently or leveling up at the right times. When you wind up on a long stretch of overworld exploration (which is really easy with how weirdly the overworld is shaped) or through one of the excessively winding dungeons, it doesn't feel great. Once again throwing out the word "exhausting," rather than some other games that make resource consumption an interesting puzzle. It sucks too, because the spells and techniques that all the characters have are really fun to use - I love the tools the characters get, but I never really feel great about my decisions to use or not use them.

I've also had a lot of moments where I'd read text that a character said, but didn't quite process it fully. The game doesn't really have much of a system for reminding you what you're up to, which further adds to a bunch of aimless exploration (and further compounds with the high encounter rates to add even more to the frustration).

I think the main reason I'm even writing this in the first place is that beneath all of this, I still find the game to be really interesting and compelling. It's just really frustrating that the shortcomings are detracting from things because I want to like this game more. :P