Eternal Sonata

There are tons of reviews and product descriptions so I'm only going to go into things that I praise or dislike.  I won't dwell on specifics about the story or game play mechanics, since you’ve likely read about them over and over again, unless its exceptionally good or bad.  This review will also be 100% spoiler free.

The Story...  The story in this game is actually pretty interesting.  It incorporates themes like war, environmentalism and even corporations vs small businesses.  My issue however is that the game assumes that you are a complete idiot and could never figure out these things on your own.  The game harps on them constantly and beats you over the head trying to explain the symbolism over and over again, just in case you didn't catch it the first 50 times it spelled it out for you.  If you don't mind that, the story is pretty good.

The characters...Some of them are mildly interesting and do some key events in the story, but only two out of about 12 characters are fleshed out at all.  I can usually get attached to characters pretty easily, but I only became remotely attached to the people I fought with.  Sadly they weren't the ones who were fleshed out nor did they do anything particularly interesting in the story.  Which was upsetting because one of them was mildly involved in an interesting side story that never got any resolution and ended in a way that seemed like the developers forgot that they had introduced her as a part of it.

The gameplay (non-combat)... The game is incredibly linear.  Every town has one entrance and one exit.  There aren't really any side quests or anything to explore.  Part of the lack of exploration is due to the invisible walls that keep you on a very narrow walking path for the bulk of the game.  The only times you can really explore an area are when you are in a huge open field with nothing to discover.

With no exploration, the game often feels like you are walking from one cut scene to the next, broken up with mazes (there is one ungodly maze that will probably make you pull your hair out, but is somewhat welcomed because everything else in the game is so easy) and combat.  This wouldn't be so bad, but there are serious issues with the combat.

The combat...The combat in this game is its most disappointing aspect.  It is overtly easy and simplistic despite seeming fairly complex and in-depth if you simply read a description of it.

For example, let’s look at the light/dark elements.  This would be a very strategic part of battle if there were certain types of moves that could only be done in the light and others that could only be done in the dark.  However, it’s nothing like that.  You can do heals and super attacks, regardless of where you are.  Not only that, but you can assign a large number of moves to be your light or dark attack.  What’s the difference between doing Dark Super Attack 1 or Light Super Attack 1?  Well, nothing.  At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter where you are because you can pull off a super attack of your choice regardless.

And it’s not just for the Light/Dark.  Practically every aspect of combat suffers from seeming strategic/complex/tactical on paper but actually being overly easy in execution.  The party system is another good example.  As your party levels up, it introduces restrictions that, on paper, would make the combat more difficult and require the player to really pay attention to what’s going on.  One of these is the time you get to plan out your move.  However, you never need to plan your moves out.  As stated above, it doesn’t matter where you are; you can pull off super attacks or super heals regardless of being in the light or dark.  So this reduction of planning time never pans out to an increase in difficulty.  All you need to do is be in attack range for your character and then button mash.

Yes, I said “button mash”.  I read numerous reviews that describe the combat as "strategic" (Gamespot) and "tactical" (IGN).  This couldn't be farther from the truth.  Button mashing is the Holy Grail for this game.  I’m no expert and JRPG combat and I usually die often and have to use items to revive characters.  Especially on boss fights.  In this game I never lost a single battle, I never had a character lose more than 1/3 of their health during a battle and I never had to use a single item during combat.

Another sour spot about the party level system is that once you reach a certain point, it actually makes the game easier by allowing to chain up to 3 super moves back to back all in one turn.  And its not just attacks.  If you have a character with a healing super move, you can usually pull off it off somewhere in the sequence.  For me that broke the game at a time where I was hoping that it would finally become as “strategic” and “tactical” as other reviewers described it.

I’ve made a video example of how the combat works, available here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPme6gbsmGw

The graphics…While there are a lot of jaggies, the graphics in this game are top notch outside of that.  The saving grace for combat is that the super moves look so damn cool, especially when you do the super powered versions of them.  You get a little 2-4 second cut scene with a close up of your character saying something in an epic voice then totally unloading a barrage of attacks on the opponent with particles and light flashes flying all over the place. The environments are well drawn and look gorgeous.  Sadly, this only exacerbates the annoyance of the invisible walls that prevent from exploring them.

The sound… The music is good.  I didn’t find it to be as great as other have, but then again I listen to a good deal of classical music so this was more “the norm” for me than something that was just mind-blowingly amazing.  I give the composer of the original music credit though: his songs don’t sound out of place or poor quality when played next to Chopin.

The recommendation… Well, it’s hard for me to recommend this game.  Most of the redeeming aspects of the game have nothing to do with gameplay and the poorly done aspects are basically everything about the gameplay. The two pros are its graphics and music.  If you can find a youtube compilation of the all the cutscenes and a soundtrack to the game, you’d really be experiencing all the good aspects of the game without having to suffer through actually playing it.  This is a title I can only recommend to people who love JRPGs to the point that they’d enjoy a bad one.

The metaphor… A beautiful layer of icing on an intricately sculpted cake… that’s rotten, maggot infested and totally unfit for eating unless you think food poisoning is awesome.