Blog #2: The Chopin Conundrum
I bought this game (cheaply) on the premise that Frederic Chopin and his music would feature heavily in it.
That isn't the case. Chopin is a playable game character, but he's a stereotypically Japanese character loosely tied to the real world Frederic Chopin. I can understand that the designers have taken an artistic license out on his life (or dying dreams, I guess), as a 39 year old Polish musical genius bed-ridden with tuberculosis is perhaps a little hard to design a game around. But to then extrapolate his dreams into a typical JRPG plot is a bit of a waste. They could have put anyone in the game instead of Chopin and it wouldn't have made much difference. His compositions don't even feature heavily - only a few well-known pieces are included in cutscenes involving what seem like someone's holiday snaps of Europe and highly imaginative explanation of what each piece might have meant to the composer.
I had expected this game to include a soundtrack gleaned from his best works, and perhaps an RPG involving the quest for Polish independence for the gameplay, but I was sadly disappointed. Perhaps I should have read the wiki entry on Giant Bomb first.
On the plus side, I enjoyed this game to the point where I now feel I can tackle Infinite Undiscovery (seriously, what is up with Japan and game titles?). I'm still not a big fan of JRPGs, but I can't not play a game if I have it in my collection.
Other Stuff
Anyway, I recently gave the following games a go, but they will fall by the wayside as I finish up my Eternal Sonata experience, and hopefully sink a lot of time into Red Dead Redemption when it comes out shortly afterwards.
Super Street Fighter IV
Red Faction Guerilla
Ninja Gaiden II
P.B. Winterbottom
In non-gaming related matters, I have been putting off booking any plane tickets to the US for too long now. I should get on to it or I will never make it to San Diego (or get a decent cowboy hat) in September. Also, now I don't know when I should convert currency. I thought the Aussie dollar would climb against the US dollar later this year, but what do I know? It just lost 2 whole cents recently. That's a lot. At the rate I'm going I will end up holidaying in New Zealand (which isn't a bad second option).
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