Tri-Crescendo / Namco-Bandai
Lauren:
All I had to see was the box artwork and a couple of screenshots for Eternal Sonata to be convinced that it was another good reason to eventually buy a PS3. Its graphics are vibrant, its music is gorgeous, and its story is a unique idea. But the gameplay suffered from some design flaws, and the story's execution wasn't what it seemed it would be, so the experience ended up as less than amazing.
One especially appealing element of Eternal Sonata is the artwork. It's nice to see the PS3 hardware pushed in a different direction than brown hyper-realism. It's an extremely colourful game, in terms of both character designs and environments. What surprised me most about exploring in ES was seeing just how far the details of the backgrounds go. Every area is intricately designed, and they even made the typical RPG sewer dungeon look gorgeous. It's a refreshingly vibrant anime-style RPG.
As you might expect from a game revolving around the life of a famous composer, the music in Eternal Sonata is wonderful. Throughout the game, we are treated to several of the real Chopin's works, complementing an excellent original soundtrack by Motoi Sakuraba. Simply beautiful.
The voice acting is fairly well-done, for the most part. Most characters are believable in the delivery of their lines, though some of the younger characters' voices can get a bit grating after a while. I could have done with a few less soliloquies, though.
The idea behind the plot is an intriguing one. Eternal Sonata's story takes place within the dream world of Frederic Chopin, the famous composer, as he lies on his deathbed. It's a wonderful idea to combine our world with that of the usual colourful fantasy world commonly found in RPGs. We're also treated to interesting bits of story from Chopin's real life throughout the game. This is something that really drew me to Eternal Sonata, but unfortunately, the bulk of the "dream" story ended up being very simplistic with almost childishly clear-cut good and evil. One scene in particular was so melodramatic that I can't decide if it was more unintentionally hilarious or just downright painful. It's unfortunate, but props to them still for implementing an overall unique idea.
The battle system starts out simply enough - run around and hit enemies like any other action RPG. You can also choose to use a special ability or an item. In the beginning, you have infinite time to choose your actions, and a certain amount of time in order to perform your actions. As the game progresses, however, the battles become more challenging. The time you have to act is reduced, and the time you have to decide your moves becomes limited. And if you stick with the game long enough, the last evolution results in button commands randomly reassigning themselves during battle. Yes, really. This sort of thing tends to feel more like an annoyance than a real challenge. There are benefits that go along with these handicaps, but they generally aren't worth the corresponding losses. For example, you can gain the ability to use counterattacks later on, but not only do you lose something along with this, but the chance to counterattack seems to come up completely randomly (we did not see any correlation with positioning, despite hearing otherwise), and requires you to hit a different button when you should be preparing to hit Guard at a moment's notice. Overall, the battle system starts out very easy and ends up somewhat irritating.
Part of that irritation comes from the camera system. You can choose one of three angles during a fight, rather than having full control or an auto-following view. The problem is that no angle really covers what you need to see. So, once the time limits set in, you'll often end up having to run around blindly at the start of a battle, frantically mashing the camera button in hopes of finding an enemy before your turn is over.
The camera also makes it difficult to really see where an enemy is in relation to your characters. Sometimes you'll think an enemy is within range of your attacks, only to find that every single hit is missing, and by the time you try to cancel and move in closer, your turn is over. Either the collision detection or the camera (or both) could have used some serious fine-tuning here.
Another feature that drew us to Eternal Sonata was the opportunity to play with a friend. Very few RPGs have multiplayer co-operative options, so we jump at the chance to try out any of them. In ES, much like in Valkyrie Profile 2, the second (or third) player can take control of additional characters in battle. Generally this works well, except when characters are forced into your party for plot-related reasons. In these situations, the characters are reassigned seemingly randomly to the controllers, which can be annoying if you have each player normally handling certain characters.
Dungeons range from short to annoyingly long, with some containing puzzles and others being straightforward. Enemies appear on the field, so it's technically possible to avoid them. Most dungeons, however, place the enemies on a narrow path, making it nearly impossible to miss most of them. Treasures are hidden on side routes, though usually it'll just be another expendable curative item.
In the end, the experience is a mixed bag. It's unfortunate, since I really had high hopes for this one. The graphics and sound certainly do not disappoint, but the gameplay suffers from issues that make it feel clunky. The plot and battles both work much better in theory than in practice. With those complaints aside, however, it's still a pretty and somewhat entertaining RPG. It's just a shame that Eternal Sonata wasn't more than that.
Anthony:
Before getting a PS3, Eternal Sonata was one of the games I felt most disappointed about in being unable to play. Tying an RPG into the works of a brilliant composer with the sound and graphical capabilities of this generation of consoles? And it’s an action-RPG that supports co-op? It was a complete no-brainer. But, it’s with great sadness for our time and wallet that I’m here to report that the game was a pretty sincere letdown.
But before I get into the depressing stuff, I want to highlight a few things where they absolutely nailed it here. Eternal Sonata is a truly gorgeous game. The environments positively burst with life, and the tremendous use of backgrounds without draw distance was a joy to see. Character art and battle scenes were pleasant to look at, but basically every environment was a visual feast.
Second, the music is similarly awesome. The game’s music sounds great, and having recorded versions of Chopin’s work performed by an expert pianist was a genius idea. They managed to capture the essence of Chopin’s beautiful and mysterious compositions very well. My only extremely minor complaint is that it couldn’t hurt to have more than one random battle song. They also give some scenes detailing short snippets of Chopin’s life story correlated with some of his greatest compositions. These were some of my favorite parts of the game, and even if you’d happen to find them boring or uninteresting, you can easily skip them.
However, that leaves us with two areas that are arguably the most important when it comes to RPGs: the story, and the gameplay. These two areas are riddled with problems great enough to completely drown out the enjoyable and/or well-made aspects of them.
The story apparently is based upon dreams that Frederic Chopin was having shortly before his death. Well, Chopin’s unconscious mind could really use a good writing staff, because this aspect was all over the place. There appears to have been an attempt to integrate Chopin himself into his dream world, but the execution of this was poor. Aside from the few “real life” scenes Lauren mentioned, only the ending brings the two together... otherwise Frederic is just another weird character stuck in a story about rival kingdoms and magical forest dots.
No, really. The story is almost entirely about magical forest dots being used by an evil kingdom to control its subjects. That, and a few meddling kids bent on stopping it! Eternal Sonata makes some direct attempts at trying to put nuances in the morality of decisions made, but then charges you headlong into fighting all the evil things anyway. Hrm, maybe having a storyline where an eight year old kid is a prominent character with other early teens characters making up the bulk of the plot was a bad idea? Spoiler alert: it was.
Having a 39 year old genius composer taking advice from an 8 year old may seem absurd enough, but wait until you’ve seen some of these story scenes! A couple of fetch quests are shamelessly added into the story, and while they give you full scenes basically saying “oh well, guess we have to!”, as soon as you beat the boss of the area, you’re instantly whisked off to some other storyline. You earn nothing, and you don’t even get to see the results of your actions. Huh? Even a somewhat prominent baddie gets this treatment, as immediately after fighting a certain henchman, there’s no scene showing her, no one says a thing about her, and yet apparently she’s dead. Huh.
Or, there’s that lovely scene whereupon we’ve beaten the evil king, and have him kneeling a sword-point. Then, eleven characters sit there and watch as the evil king gradually and blatantly coaxes his servant to drink an evil potion. That’s followed by all eleven characters inexplicably doing nothing as they allow the evil king to stand and leave the area to create more chaos. Yep. One character with a gun and one with a bow just couldn’t be bothered to shoot that evil potion away while the two evil characters argue line after line (ignoring the fact that any character could’ve walked up casually to stop him,) and now that he’s done something even worse, sure, let’s allow the evil guy to stand up and go free. Are you kidding me?
Even better is the death scene. I don’t know how this hasn’t earned some notoriety, but basically, I thought long and hard about the decade+ I’ve been playing RPGs, and I’m not sure I could think of a single more ridiculously bad scene as was contained in this game. I’ll try to summarize:
Girl has a brief conversation with Guy. Guy leaves, Girl is assassinated. Assassin immediately leaves. Girl, on the floor alone and dying in a room, begins talking to no one. Game flashes back to a few lines of dialog we just saw a minute ago. Girl, still dying on the floor, responds to no one about that flashback. Game gives another flashback to a line we just saw. Girl, still dying on the floor, again responds to no one about that flashback. Game flashes back further to older scenes. Girl, still dying on the floor, now inexplicably starts to stand up and drag herself around the room, responding to no one about every scene she’s been in so far this game. Between game recapping numerous old and “minutes ago” scenes for us, and scenes of Dying Girl gradually dragging her talking body around a room... Girl, still dying, still moving around, and still talking to no one, apparently manages to call a carrier dove. Either Girl has already amazingly ordained the timing and already written a message, or Girl, still dying, manages to write out a perfectly legible message... but either way, Girl, still dying, manages to attach the message neatly to the dove and sends it away. Girl, still dying, now falls to the floor, and says yet more lines to no one. Girl dies.
I’m pretty sure Plan 9 From Outer Space doesn’t have a scene that bad in it.
Oh yeah, then the ending comes around and makes zero attempt to address any resolution for the twelve+ characters that aren’t Chopin, despite them taking up the grand bulk of the storyline. Their noble attempt to wrap the “dream world” back to Chopin himself ends up bizarrely disjointed; while it clearly tries to evoke emotion and beauty, it fails at this due to the virtual entirety of the game being about magical forest dots, a kingdom’s rivalry, and whether one annoying kid was taller than the other annoying kid. I really can’t say anything remotely positive in regards to the plot.
That said, I have at least a couple positive points to say about the battle system. Though it’s repetitive, there is a certain satisfaction to be had in building up and unleashing powerful special attacks and chains. Ignoring the boneheaded controller reassignment issues, allowing a second or third player to join the battles was a nice touch that more RPGs should employ. And the interesting dynamic of the character Viola, who instead of attacking normally, can zoom to a first person mode to manually aim and shoot at enemies in the distance... though there were multiple flaws with this execution, it was a very cool idea that I’d like to see implemented in other games (it just begs for use with a Wii remote).
Praise over. Lauren touched on the impressively poor camera system, which is exacerbated by no markers indicating where enemies/players are on the field at any given time. This “evolving” battle system gets a bit too much praise in the reviews I’ve seen for the game. Although it’s presented as a way to wean the player on the gameplay and add new elements to the system, it really seems more like a way to keep a very simplistic battle system seeming more complex than it is. Honestly, regardless of how much the battle system “evolved”, you’ll still do basically nothing but run up to enemies, hit them a lot, then follow it with a special move. The last stages completely eliminating “tactical time” was an inherently dumb move too, as it requires you to be holding the next direction you’ll move so you won’t waste your turn. The game doesn’t even keep up with its own speed at that point, as I’d have to be attacking before the game even gives the audio and visual cues that it’s my turn! That’s just poor design.
On top of that, there’s a slew of non-functional aspects to the battle system: If Viola’s turned a certain angle away from the enemy, rather than aiming a shot, she’ll just pointlessly punch thin air in front of her. If two enemies are bunched together and you’re hoping to attack them both simultaneously, the game will turn you away from the angle you’re facing to only attack one and thus inhibit your ability to damage both. The game’s prompts will lag, sometimes showing that you’ll use one attack, but in reality you use a different one because the game lagged in showing the skill changes (a fun aspect when you badly need to heal). It also lags at the end of the turns: sometimes hitting a special attack button at the end of one person’s turn will make the next character bafflingly waste his/her turn using a skill against nothing. The Guard command becomes absolutely necessary for survival against bosses and even some enemies, yet they’ll give you a split-second timing for some attacks that require premeditation, and simultaneously punish you for hitting Guard too early against attacks that may have a several-second windup. Oh, and the faster bosses can just run up behind your characters (where you can’t Guard), easily murder them in one turn, and then are so speedy that they get two turns straight. I could go on, but the point is the same - the battle system is bafflingly flawed for an RPG of this generation.
That aspect is made worse by the fact that there’s really nothing else to do in this game. Weapons and Equipment are very simplistic, there’s no item editing/creating or collection to do, and there’s only one genuine sidequest to do throughout the game. Otherwise, it’s just dungeon-scene-dungeon-scene-dungeon-scene until you beat it. And that one sidequest? Turns out it’s an interesting idea done very poorly. You can find “score pieces” hidden in the game that play a sheet of music, and various characters that wish to have you perform these pieces with them. Sound interesting? It’s not. All it boils down to is you opening a menu, picking from a big list of songs, trying an option, having it usually fail, and then having to restart all over. Even a “try a different song” option would’ve made this more tolerable... but it’s boring, it’s impossible to complete on the first playthrough, and it just wastes time joylessly.
Some other gems: despite having a roster of twelve playable characters and it occasionally forcing you to use other characters, the game actually openly discourages you from experimenting with others. You can only take three at a time, and all the others gain notably less experience during that time. Further, regardless of the levels they gain, unless you level them up in battle, they don’t gain any new skills. At minimum, a character needs two light skills and two dark skills to not be gimped, and I managed to use a new character for several levels without gaining a fourth skill. Then as Lauren hinted at, characters will be inexplicably forced into your party before certain battles. But guess what? You don’t get to choose who exits the party, and you don’t get to adjust anyone’s equipment... so now a deadweight’s in your party for a difficult boss and you lost your most valuable member. Wow.
They’ll give you a New Game+ option for your troubles, but there’s so painfully little to do in this game with no plot twists or intricacies... I can’t see anyone seriously wanting to replay it.
This game would be perfect if it were just a slideshow of all the art and environments coupled with its musical score. Unfortunately, it forces you to basically do nothing but trudge through dungeons full of repetitive and flawed battles so you can see another scene of a bad storyline. For this many fundamental gameplay flaws to exist in an RPG of this generation is incredible, and while I don’t need an epic and amazing plot in every game, just not having to feel insulted watching it would be a good start.
Eternal Sonata is like the world’s prettiest poisonous death-swamp. Sure, it’s beautiful and all, but I don’t really want to spend time with it.
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