An ultimately enjoyable, if light, jRPG
It's hard to find a place to start when talking about Eternal Sonata. On one hand, it leaves a great first impression by offering an aesthetically and musically brilliant world to fall into, yet on the other, the unique combat system takes a quite a while to gel. Interlacing the two you have a very linear progression, and a story that at times can feel more like a vehicle for its often preachy morals.
The game takes place inside the mind of renowned composer Frederic Francois Chopin, who is on his death bed and caught in a dream between this world and the next. It's an interesting premise, but it often takes backstage to the real story going on here, which is the conflict between the kingdoms of Forte and Baroque. Like any jRPG, there are many interlacing storylines between each of the main characters of the game, although many are not fleshed out too much. The game makes a very big point of injecting alot of morals into the story, so much so that it often feels like the story itself is more a vehicle to present these morals, which makes the characters often feel like they are soulless and only around to utter some words of sage advice or pose a hypothetical. It's not to say that Eternal Sonata has nothing interesting to say, it just feels clinical and poorly paced at times, and remains fairly vague about where the story is headed right up to the games conclusion, which seems less important than what the characters have to say about life, love, the state of the world and human conditions. Even the historically relevant stories about the real-world Chopins life seem a little tacked on.
The game itself takes a little while to grab you, as well.
Eternal Sonata's battle system is a unique one, and I confess that I really ended up liking its streamlined yet tactile and flashy system. The game is turn-based, but the turns themselves are acted out in real time. While it is your characters turn, you have a certain amount of time (4-5 seconds) in which to complete actions before your turn ends. Movement is free-roaming and moving up next to an enemy and wailing on it by mashing the A button is your initial way of combating foes. The game does a pretty good job of auto-targeting, although an option to choose a target for ranged characters would have been nice, since they will always attack the nearest enemy within their firing arc, which leads to you having to move the character and turn them to attack creatures further away, which eats up some precious time for their turn. It isn't usually a major issue however, and just a minor little gripe.
The way skills work is a small stroke of genius. You have two main types of skills, Light and Dark, and they can only be used if you are in the light or in the shade on the battlefield. This leads you to moving healing characters into the light alot (since heals are predominantly light spells) for example. You can also use enemy and friendly characters' shadows to count as you standing in the shade of dark spells, which is really clever. You eventually have four slots for skills, two light and two dark, and tapping Y unleashes the first, while holding down Y for second and releasing it when the skill name changes will unleash the second. The way the game is streamlined into single button presses for pretty much every action is really cool, and removes the need for clunky menus. More advanced techniques include echo bonuses, which build up as you score combos with basic attacks and skills (using a skill with exhaust all your echoes in return for increased damage), and harmony chains, which are series' of linked skills you can only unleash when you have an echo score of 24 or more. The system is really streamlined, accessable, unique and eventually becomes pretty fun.
It is a shame, however, that the game presents you with the entire battle system piecemeal throughout the game, rather than offering you the choice of using the final and complete system from the get-go. As you reach points in the story, your "party level" increases and new functionality is opened up in the battle system. It is designed to ease you into the combat system, which starts off very lenient and gradually becomes more complicated as you progress. The problem with the way Eternal Sonata does this is that the party levels are spread very thin over the course of the game, the final party level only becoming unlocked when you have nothing but the final boss and final optional dungeon to complete.
The game itself is also not very challenging. It is painfully linear, and if you stop and fight every creature on the often only given path, you will have generally overleveled the boss of the area before you reach it, giving you a pretty distinct advantage. If you are any good at blocking attacks, most encounters will not even pose a threat to any experienced jRPG fan. Some bosses can throw a spanner in your works if you cannot block to save yourself, though, but those are few and far between. The second playthrough on 'Encore' mode raises the difficulty considerably by raising the enemy HP values by 100% and their attack values by 50%, but of course that requires you to have completed the ~25 hour game (not including final dungeon) first.
The visuals and sounds of Eternal Sonata are its biggest asset. The game is bright and colourful, the environments and genuinely beautiful, the battle animations are great and the skills look really flashy. There are some points where you will encounter some slowdown in framerate (like when the battle camera pans a little too close to some of the more flashy skills, and in certain story sequences), but for the most part Eternal Sonata is a very aesthetically pleasing game. The music does its job of setting the mood of the game, and is footnoted by the works of Chopin himself. The voice acting isn't terrible, although you can change the vocal tracks to Japanese if you really wanted to. I prefered the English voices myself.
Eternal Sonata is one of those games that tries its hand at freshening up the genre, but ultimately falls short on a few levels. Nonetheless, it is a light, breezy game that looks and sounds amazing.
