Infinite Dunamis Review — Pushing RPG Maker’s Potential
My opinion of Infinite Dunamis has been a bit of a roller-coaster to say the least. At first glance, this appears to be your standard generic fantasy turn based RPG, so I went in with pretty low expectations. Anticipating an indie grindfest of encounters, a generic story, and a Mary Sue protagonist, I was surprised at how quickly my expectations were subverted, and reminded of an old saying about judging books.
Infinite Dunamis is set years after the robot uprising, which forced former enemy countries Eleftheria and Valtenia to unite and overcome the threat of the machines. Although they succeeded, over a decade later they are left with a tenuous peace treaty, and rising tension between the two begins to cause political uncertainty.
Meanwhile, a young engineer by the name of Luke is scavenging for old machine parts in an abandoned cave when he comes across Estelle, a half robot, half human android, as she is being attacked by bandits. Defenseless and lying in scattered pieces, Estelle is at the mercy of these bandits when Luke steps in and sends them running, before almost walking off and leaving Estelle behind.
You see, it’s important to understand that Luke is a massive dickhead. I don’t just mean he’s careless and cold hearted, I mean this guy seems to get off on purposely acting as antagonistic and abusive as possible to the people around him at any given time. It’s like he’s actively putting in a conscious effort in to be an asshole, like an edgy 15 year old trying to emulate Rick Sanchez. I cannot stress this enough: Luke is the biggest prick you’ve ever met. Initially I wrote this off as bad writing, thinking that Luke was meant to be an edgy self insert character, but after witnessing some of the profound things said by NPCs, I realized that he was really just written to be a massive turd.
So after finding out that Estelle is a robot and proceeding to treat her like subhuman garbage, somehow she convinces Luke to escort her back to the Eleftherian royal city, where it turns out she is actually a princess as well as an android. Reluctantly and after much vocal objection, Luke is convinced to escort Estelle on a diplomatic mission to Caesius, where a mysterious traveler named Vince and the youthful Witch of Caesius named Chelsea join the group, and are tasked with investigating the attack on Estelle, which, surprise surprise, may just involve a plot of subterfuge from Valtenia.
Besides Luke, I found myself quickly becoming quite attached to these characters, especially Vince, who seems to be the butt of a lot of jokes and the subject of much ire from everyone but Estelle due to his mysterious and vague backstory. This is despite being nothing but helpful and reasonable towards the rest of the party. Honestly, this dude just puts up with so much shit from these bratty kids, especially Luke, while maintaining an unfaltering friendly demeanour. While I appreciate the interesting group dynamics and the resulting dialogue, I can’t help but feel like any reasonable group of people would have told Luke’s miserable ass to get lost several snide comments ago by this point, but I digress.
As for the combat and random encounters, there are just enough interesting mechanics involved to keep it from being totally generic, but it’s not the most groundbreaking aspect of the game in any way. New skills and spells are learned by becoming proficient with different weapons and equipment, and achieving 100% proficiency with a weapon allows your character to permanently learn the skill associated with the weapon. This encourages players to constantly be on the lookout for new equipment, as well as trying out as many of them as possible.
There actually aren’t many bad things I can say about the game that aren’t due to the limitations of the RPG Maker engine it was made in, which comes down to things like cheap looking animation quality, a lack of enemy variety, and the fact that consumables and money are never a concern due to how common they are. Sometimes the game can also get a bit bogged down with the dialogue in some scenes, which is a common mistake to make in RPGs given how a game must be able to balance sufficient exposition without dragging on.
Going in with such low expectations, I was actually pleasantly surprised with the amount of depth in Infinite Dunamis, at least in terms of the writing and lore. It’s quite easy to see that the elements of a decent RPG experience are definitely present, which makes it all the more unfortunate that the game is held back by the medium of RPG Maker. Still, it’s a promising entry for developers Exe Create Inc at it’s price point of $10 USD, and hopefully they’ll be able to afford an Unreal Engine license someday.
Originally published at The Insatiable Gamer.
