Eternal Sonata - Anyone?

[Daria]

I preordered Eternal Sonata through Gamestop online (because it's the only garanteed way of getting preorder bonuses) and started playing this weekend. I wasn't sure what to expect and at first didn't care for the game, the story seemed conveluted and the characters shallow. I hated Polka.

But after my initial disgust, and right around the time the story introduced Allgretto I started digging it. The battle system's fun, very much like Star Ocean with the 3 dimensional battle board. And the whole light and dark gimmick works. Monsters and characters cast shadow's and your special attack can change in a split second if the enemy moves just right and you're positioned there... it's all very subtle and kinda cool when it happens.

I'm around 16 hours into the game in the church catacombs and it's easily one of my favorite of the "Tales" style games. Right after Eternia. Even the characters I didn't like I've grown attached to, namely Polka and Salsa. I forgave Polka for being soft spoken and "slow" after realizing she's only 14 and Salsa still has an annoying accent but she's a great fighter anyways.

My only complaint is the Chopin sequences. The game has these little slide shows at the begining of each chapter that read like textbooks. They're suppose to chronical the period of Chopin's life around the time of his death but it's all somehow shallow and very subjective. Not to mention boring and I find myself immediately pressing the skip button whenever they pop up.

The game's also incredibly beatiful, but when hasn't a Tales game looked damn good? Still the 3D modeling is so smooth and the fixed camera combined creates the illusion of 2D animation. It's a very pleasing effect and reminds me very much of playing older RPGs only... better looking.

[Mad Gear]

I'll deffo pick it up but will wait for the xmas madness to be over. Should be half price come the January sales.

[ZiLL]

I preordered Eternal Sonata through Gamestop online (because it's the only garanteed way of getting preorder bonuses) and started playing this weekend. I wasn't sure what to expect and at first didn't care for the game, the story seemed conveluted and the characters shallow. I hated Polka.

But after my initial disgust, and right around the time the story introduced Allgretto I started digging it. The battle system's fun, very much like Star Ocean with the 3 dimensional battle board. And the whole light and dark gimmick works. Monsters and characters cast shadow's and your special attack can change in a split second if the enemy moves just right and you're positioned there... it's all very subtle and kinda cool when it happens.

I'm around 16 hours into the game in the church catacombs and it's easily one of my favorite of the "Tales" style games. Right after Eternia. Even the characters I didn't like I've grown attached to, namely Polka and Salsa. I forgave Polka for being soft spoken and "slow" after realizing she's only 14 and Salsa still has an annoying accent but she's a great fighter anyways.

My only complaint is the Chopin sequences. The game has these little slide shows at the begining of each chapter that read like textbooks. They're suppose to chronical the period of Chopin's life around the time of his death but it's all somehow shallow and very subjective. Not to mention boring and I find myself immediately pressing the skip button whenever they pop up.

The game's also incredibly beatiful, but when hasn't a Tales game looked damn good? Still the 3D modeling is so smooth and the fixed camera combined creates the illusion of 2D animation. It's a very pleasing effect and reminds me very much of playing older RPGs only... better looking.


I picked this up last week as well, and just got around to playing it this weekend.

I am only about 5 hours in, but I am loving it. It started off a little slow, but things are starting to finally pick up now. I HAD to change the voices back to japanese...the american voice overs were horrible!!

The combat system is great, I really enjoy the evolution of it so far with the different party levels. The art/graphics are also some of the best I have seen in a cell shaded game...very nice.

I enjoy the Chopin sequences...although I do agree they seem a bit out of place..especially since they usually start with some real life static image...kind of throws you out of the game in a way.

All in all though, very fun, look forward to getting back to it after Halo 3 :)

[blissfulnoise]

The game's plotline is wildly uneven. It shifts from extremely shallow and insultingly obvious to surpising and uniquely insightful among most JRPGs. It makes me wonder who the target audience for the game is.

A watershed moment for me was after defeating a boss character, one of the characters comments completely off the cuff that they just barged in here and killed a creature that might have been guarding this location for many years against intruders with evil intentions. Another character then just blows it off and says, "I'm sure it will be fine."

Very meta for an RPG.

The plot has a lot of potential and is extremely unique, but it seems to squander it more often than it takes advantage of it. It also doesn't help that characters are extremely long winded and have to beat you over the head with a plot point until you're skipping scenes just out of frustration.

At one point, a character reflects back and the game replays an entire previous scene with small breaks inbetween. Not so bad, lots of games do this. But this previous scene is the same scene you're watching! I can't talk about it in more detail because it's a major plot point early in the game, but damnit, people who have played it know what I'm talking about.

On the positive, I find the Chopin history lessons to be very refreshing and an interesting diversion between chapters. There's not many, so it doesn't disrupt the flow of the game, and they're interesting enough for me to watch.

Obviously the music is all first class and serves as the high point of the game. And the set pieces are absolutely stunning too. The character models are of high quality, and are serviceable, but they're very static outside of combat animations.

Perhaps, outside of the frustratingly uneven plot, the worst element of the game is the voice acting. The voice acting itself is fine for the most part (outside of a few annoying voices), but it's the bizarre seconds of silence between each line delivered. There's absolutely no technical reason for this. I haven't turned on the Japanese voice track to see if it's present there, but it's unacceptable. It takes you out of the flow of the game and causes cut scenes to run way longer than they should.

Combat is a lot of fun at first, but it's already beginning to get old. And the party level changes seem to take more than they give and thus serve as an artifical difficulty increase during the course of the game (it's not a big deal though given how easy the game is).

A friend asked me for a review of the game. I gave it a B-. Graphics and Sound are solid As. It's the rest of the game that drags it down. Too bad because it's shockingly original in inital scope. They just squander it by succumbing to stereotypical JRPG trappings.

[mailman187666]

I feel as though the main plot to the story is loosely based on what they are telling you in the Chopin cutscenes with the static images. I mean the story has its own subject matter but if you get the general idea of what they are telling you about Chopin's life you can almost see the relationship between what he had gone through in his life and how his memories are brought out within' the "dream". Its kinda hard for me to explain but its almost as if the dream (the game) is an analogy for what really happened in his life.

[Eternal Tune]

I'm about 18 hours into it (leaving Baroque Castle) and so far the only thing that bothers me is how shitty Beat and Polka are compared to characters like Allegretto and Viola. Also, you have to play through the game twice in order to get all the achievements. That kinda sucks.

I went around the Gamestops/EBs near me and ended up with six faceplates.

http://www.dustincarter.com/bjb/OMGFP.jpg

[Drexel923]

Just got to chapter 3 last night and am enjoying it overall. Not the best RPG by any means, but everything is done well enough to make the game worth playing. Nothing in particular that I don't like about it. The graphics are quite nice also. Definitely worth picking up if you like RPGs, especially action based ones.

[segagamer4life]

I'm about 18 hours into it (leaving Baroque Castle) and so far the only thing that bothers me is how shitty Beat and Polka are compared to characters like Allegretto and Viola. Also, you have to play through the game twice in order to get all the achievements. That kinda sucks.

I went around the Gamestops/EBs near me and ended up with six faceplates.

http://www.dustincarter.com/bjb/OMGFP.jpg


damn I got the game from gamestop and they ran out of faceplates.

[Daria]

I got a Beat faceplate... definately not the one I wanted but now having played the game it's not like they had even made a Viola faceplate. So eh... Beat's a likeable enough character.

[dairugger]

i didnt know eternal sonata was part of the "tales" series..? btw- i got the polka faceplate.

[Daria]

i didnt know eternal sonata was part of the "tales" series..? btw- i got the polka faceplate.

It's not a Tales game... just made by the same people and plays a lot like it were a part of the series. Only difference I can see really is the name. And that the healing items you consume are cookies not jellies. :P

[mailman187666]

the best part of the game is definately the visuals. I think its kinda cool that you can play with 3 players durring battles. Its one of the few turn based style games I know of that does something like that. I mean there was always 2 player action rpgs but not like this one. I enjoy the game a lot and hopefully I'll stick with it to the end of the game so I can go back to finishing blue dragon. I like ES alot better than Blue Dragon myself.

[FantasiaWHT]

the best part of the game is definately the visuals. I think its kinda cool that you can play with 3 players durring battles. Its one of the few turn based style games I know of that does something like that. I mean there was always 2 player action rpgs but not like this one. I enjoy the game a lot and hopefully I'll stick with it to the end of the game so I can go back to finishing blue dragon. I like ES alot better than Blue Dragon myself.

Didn't FF VI/3 allow you to have 2 people controlling different characters in battle?

[Drexel923]

Just completed the game. A very good experience overall. I'd probably give it 9.5 out of 10. The ending is very long (and good IMO), which is always good after spending a ton of time in RPGs...even the credits are done very well. Took me almost exactly 20 hours to beat the game. I'll probably play through it again at a later time.

Definitely recommending this to anyone who likes RPGs at all. Great game.

[boatofcar]

Just finished this. Here's my review.

i started Eternal Sonata with a little bit of trepidation. The last RPG I played was Final Fantasy X, and it was not a pleasant experience. I ended up giving it up about ten hours in. Luckily, ES, while a very modern RPG, cuts out a lot of things that I hated about FFX. I compare ES to FFX in this review simply because it was the newest RPG I'd played before ES.

To begin with, the cut scenes are far fewer. The time amount is probably the same, but the time between them is much larger. One of the worst things about FFX is that you'd have a cut scene, usually about 10 minutes or so. It finally ends and you think you're getting ready to start the action. You take five steps out of the village and boom, another cut scene. ES has no such problems. Admittedly, there are a lot of cutscenes, and if you play this and last generation RPGs, it's just something you're going to have to deal with. Luckily, ES lets you skip any cutscenes you like by pausing and pressing B. Or A. Whatever the green button is. This is especially useful when you're fighting a boss repeatedly, because you know each boss has to have a long soliloquy before each fight.

This leads me to my next point. The game actually makes you grind a little. This is my number one complaint with modern RPGs. It's even worse than the rampant cutscenes. What's the sense of spending $60 on a game if you can just breeze through it? The first time I died fighting a boss and had to start from my last save point, I practically wept for joy. Fighting around in this game is a joy too. The battle system is half turn-based and half action-rpg like Secret of Mana, which adds an extra element of difficulty to the fights. There are no random battles--you can see every enemy before you enter the battle screen. FFX suffered from major loading problems before and after battles. ES has next to no loading when fighting enemies.

Of course, the game is beautiful. This is by far the best-looking game I've ever played. All the scenery is perfect; I just wish I had an HDTV to take in even more of the goodness. The jaggies that made every PS2 game look bad are gone. There is no overworld, like in traditional FF or Dragon Warrior games, but the in-game world's environment is really, really vast, so while you travel across a wide plain you really get a sense of the size of the area. One downside is that unlike the RPGs of old, the linear nature of this games means that you rarely revisit places you've been before in the game.

The plot is pretty interesting, and I give Tri-Crescendo some points for thinking outside the normal RPG box a little. You really learn a lot about the life of Chopin during the game, and also get to hear full versions of his works. Of course, if this doesn't interest you, it's not important to the game and can be skipped using the method described above. The cut scenes are well done, but the dialogue, just as with all JRPGs, is a bit on the corny side.

There are a few things I don't like about the game. When do we get an RPG that doesn't use the same enemies over and over again, just with different colors? I mean, for crying out loud, this is the XBOX 360! Some of the monsters are poorly designed too--some of them look like monsters you'd see in a PS1 RPG--a striking contrast to the beauty of the rest of the game. Another annoyance is that the game has locked up on me 3 times since I started it, maybe 4. Luckily it's always been just after a save point, but it's still annoying to have to get up and cold start your 360. Of course, this is a problem that's not relegated only to ES, but it kind of puts you on the edge of your seat a little more when you're playing a game that's so dependent on save points.

Another thing I question--why is the voice acting so bad? I thought for sure we'd left bad voice acting behind in the last generation, but it's back with a vengence in ES. You're better off just turning on the Japanese voices and reading the subtitles.

I was pleasantly surprised at the ending of the game. I thought for sure I knew how it was going to end, and while I was mostly correct, the pacing and structure of the ending was excellent. The game took about 30 hours for me to complete, and I spent probably more time than I needed to wandering around the areas collecting things and grinding.

I can't recommend the music in this game enough. In a game about Chopin, I was expecting some of his music, but I believe the recordings they used of his pieces during the cut scenes were recorded specifically for the game. The in-game music is some of the best video game music I've ever heard. Unfortunately, like most RPG's, the battle music stays the same throughout the whole game, so you get sick of that after a while.

On the whole, this is the RPG that has given me hope in the future of the genre. While I'd like to see a return to the less linear RPGs of yesteryear, I know that those days are probably gone. In trade, now we have beautiful games like Eternal Sonata that are truly works of art in every since of the word--story, pictures, and music.

Boatofcar gives Eternal Sonata a 9/10.