On the flip side...

Most RPGs have a "decompression chamber" at the end of the game where you can go to deal with the tiny bubbles boiling out of your bloodstream and make you fit for normal human interaction again. Typically, what happens is, a master dungeon opens up after you've beaten the game, and grinding your way through the superfluous post-game level 3000 zombie chickens eventually gets boring, at which point you quit. Or that's the idea. I suppose a few otaku get oppressed by all the left-overs; they haul out their +12 sonic screwdrivers and dive in for three or four more months of gratuitous Grondheimlichkeit.

Not entirely so, Infinite Space — Extra Mode is too dumb to qualify as Hyperbaric Therapy, while New Game+ simply lets you to replay the game and take all your less-travelled paths in the original gameplay. You find yourself recruiting new characters, missing others, going to Enemonzo instead of Zenito, making friends where you found enemies, recruiting Radimir and once again failing to get Rufina, drawing blanks that were lively the last go-round, and so on. It's not, in other words, remotely like winding down. You wind up playing a new game sort of like the one you just finished, with a handful of additional blueprints. Just as addictive. Just as appealing. Every bit as annoying, although you've climbed the learning curve and all you need to do is grind it out. Again.

You have to take yourself by the scruff of the neck, come the wee small hours o' the morning, and put it down. Put it down. Done.

Game Cleared!

Cleared the game with my timer pegged at 99:59:59. It's been that way for a couple of weeks.

Recommendation, none. If you've ever smoked two packs a day, you know what I mean.

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Where's HELP(Girl)?

Infinite Space has its moments*. If you start up CTA, then go to Help, and ask the helpbot about several (maybe about 10?) topics of possibly mild or only placeholder interest, then Exit Help, you'll get a BOOM! and crew will coming running to ascertain what is amiss. The old Help robot has broken down, it seems, and is now operating at 17% efficiency. Sadly, nothing can be done.

You DEPART for your next destination in the "sea of stars," Star Ocean having copyrighted the universe aeons ago, but before you get under weigh, Professor Minas shanghais Yuri into a closet and reveals the new helpbot, now feminine (the kind that gets your game a "mildly suggestive" rating).

Her name is HELP(Girl), with laser eyes, 7000 volt thermic cutter hands, Medic Level 2 (like Kira, she can heal ships damaged in running battles) and she's a hell-on-wheels battle android during MELEE, in other words, just your average NERD(Toy).

She's also a standard JPRG trope (based on Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Mercy), like the fairy ponds in Ocarina of Time or the "comfort girls" in Japanese-occupied Korea in WWII†, or less overtly, like Belldandy in Oh My Goddess, Nia Lochlain in Part I of the present game, or Gidget in old surfer movies.

Heavy ludological social history aside, those of us who never RTFM will never find this little joke unaided. Lurking in cheat forums turns up a ton of references to HELP(Girl), usually with a snidely smug tone of voice that jeers, NERD(Boy) style, "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Heh." At least the music for this incident is light and whimsical.

Here's how.

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*My game clock was pinned at 99:59:59 for days before I noticed HELP(Girl), but I gather you can find her anytime after Minas joins your crew.

†Speaking of WWIII, have you noticed that Hollywood hates Muslims? Egyptians and Persians galore, yes. Bloodthirsty hashish-addled natives on Arabian sands, yes. Semitic merchant stereotypes in caftans and turbans, yes. Muslims? No. The Middle East is kosher, so far as Hollywood is concerned: Throat slit, heels hung and bloodless, all the Islam poured out and sluiced away into the local watershed with extra salt. It looks like wartime propaganda from here.

O tempora, O mores!

The infantile relationships^† between men and women in this game are no idle happenstance. Nude Maker — the Japanese hentai videogame company whose corporate culture is evangelically libertarian (at best) — may be good at sexploiting eye candy, but they obviously need help covering imbecilic ineptitude at decent space opera or even playable^‡ games.

There's just enough "and then..." in this Yakuza bottle rocket to keep you trying to move forward, but you'll be stymied in places by long, unnecessary delays. This is also the first videogame I've played in which the protagonist murders someone as sequel to a difference of opinion. Also, when the female lead, Nia Lochlain, dies at the end of Part I, the scene is treated romantically. Oh sure, it may seem like gratuitous sadomasochism, but her death is explicitly "noble*," with a genuine seppuku slash across the middle. Watering down the moment, the stroke is a coup de grace supplied by a smiling villain with oddly cultural overtones.

^†"Infantile," as in, women come in two sizes, Real Women or Virgins, and men come in two sizes as well, Boys and Real Men. Draw a little 2x2 table enumerating the possibilities, and watch the eyes glaze over as the gently boiling Nerd Mode kicks in...

^‡E.g., how "playable" is the battle with Rubriko? The one that comes after Jordeno, where the word "insane" re-enters your head for the first time since arriving in the LMC. You can't go back and level up your fleet, you must engage with what you've got, you haven't saved at major forks in the storyline(s), you can't back up unless you start THE WHOLE GAME OVER, and the odds are at least ten to one in favor of your eventual annihilation. The music is ethereal, like the incessant slow-motion flapping of damned angel's wings at the very apex of their eternal Fall. Oh, yeah... Almost forgot. After that, you get to fight the exact same battle four more times! Conjugating Russian verbs is a real game by comparison.

*Later on, Yuri lets Glorinda go rather than take her hostage, when she threatens to kill herself. Such terrible responsibility, he explains (possibly thinking of Nia Lochlain), is the awesome price of nobility.

Sly Fry

^{(Missing video?)}

Instead of that... Escondido? Guadalajara?! (Apparently, the Russian influence was just an accident of future history. There's also German and Old New Mexican...)

Indefinite Spaceout

Is a game good because it's insanely difficult, or just annoying? Go and chess are almost impossible, in my case, probably because I find them both abstract and duller than dishwater. If you lose every single time, your inclination will be to harvest a few sour grapes and move along. Whether you rise or sink, you will find your level, and you may decide that your forte more properly lies in high adrenaline junk sports like paintball pinochle or shark wrestling.

Infinite Space begins with a kid's fantasy of unlikely masculine prowess (think Axe commercials), in which an older (but still early 20's) girl gives you your very own spaceship for no even remotely plausible reason (she's a Launcher, and it's her job!?? From each according to her abilities? Is she a Commie or a philanthropist?) and so invites you to inherit the Universe.

Cool. You grab the opportunity and get out of Dodge. What follows is a tediously lengthy, labyrinthine space opera which severely tests the notion of accomplishment plot, since all your goals are blocked by bad guys even after you've levelled up enough to take them out: There's always a trick you know about, but won't connect to the tenuous reality of the game. But the next level is not impossible — after 58 hours of play, I've arrived at Chapter Five, where the absurd difficulty level takes a huge step up.

Apparently, a lot of people don't like this game. Most of the time you're travelling through space and listening to music that got old after the first four minutes. It's still playing. You can't change the tune. You'd chew off your own left arm to change it, but you can't.

On the other hand, great literature must inform as well as entertain, according to all the best Victorian style manuals, so of course Infinite Space does introduce the bright young boy to the mysterious opposite sex and all the ways in which The Direct Approach and The Casually Witty Remark are doomed to fail. Maybe a little like Archie and Veronica, in this regard, although I never delved very deeply into the dewy depths of those slender tomes.

For all that, the anime portrait art is pretty good. You'd like to meet Nia Lochlain yourself, and the minor members of the ensemble, like Torlo, Poplo, Gadina and Valantin (the dude with the MaxiPads™ on his shoulders) are drawn with broad strokes, some depth and some character. A few of my personal favorites, besides Yuri and Nia, are Nadja Musin, Nerissa Roubis, Brava Soneto, Celina Sioufas, and the slob Leo Folias. There are many more.

All the place names, in fact all the proper nouns (so far), are Russian. (Personal names are localized, though.) Go figure. If this game had been designed by a People's Junior Entertainment Commisariat in the old Soviet Union, I'd believe it. Has it got the red C.C.C.P. decal anywhere? Apparently not, but the incongruously square-cornered "battleships," "destroyers," "cruisers" and "aircraft carriers" (and here you must imagine Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, spinning in his grave) look and feel about as clunky as a second-hand Zaporozhets. Nia's unclassifiable custom ship, the Daisy, has a few nice lines. The rest of the fleets look like they were stamped out of tin for Christmas at Western Auto circa 1950.

It should be pointed out that this game has received far more than its share of official hype, and even game-ruining official spoilers, apparently released as carrots to entice the reluctant, the skeptical and the frankly pissed-off to later stages of the game. If Kira turns out to be an android, and Nia Lochlain plans to commit suicide [Wikipedia], I'm not sure I give a damn about the rest of it.

Here's one of the rare walkthroughs. And another.

So what IMHO is a "good, hard game?" Don't sprain yourself, here's a hint: