Eternal Sonata was a game that came out for Xbox in 2007 and while I played it at launch I didn't get round to actually finishing it until much later. Then my Xbox version got stolen and I decided to replay it on PS3 recently so I thought I'd spend a little bit of time talking about it.
Eternal Sonata is a game with a very strange premise. You follow the adventures of Frans Frederic Chopin, the pianist, through his death dream. On his adventure through his own mind he meets up with a colourful cast of characters and together they have to stop the evil Count Waltz from taking over the world. Obviously there's more to it than that, but if I tried to tell you every facet of the story I'd be here all fucking day.
The game itself is actually really good with a really interesting combat system, good music, nice art and really well done voice acting (at least in Japanese) despite some of the silly lines. You spend most of your time exploring environments and fighting monsters but the environments are so varied and the combat is so fun that the the games formulaic structure never really gets all that boring.
Aside from the interesting locales and fun combat the game is also split up between chapters with some real life information about Chopin himself which is really interesting. Each little history section has one of Chopin's pieces playing in the background and it brings a nice bit of realism into what is essentially a very silly and outlandish anime game.
The game does suffer from a few problems though. The story does like to stop and spin it's wheels while the characters do something completely pointless like explore a mirror or some shit. There are certain segments and certain dungeons that do feel a bit like filler in order to pad out the game. Also the combat, while not too challenging really is extremely unforgiving. When an enemy attacks you have a chance to block and successfully doing this will greatly reduce the damage. Not getting a block is OK for most normal enemies but there are some boss fights where missing the block will mean the death of a character.
The ending is also fucking retarded and I had absolutely NO idea what the fuck happened. Someone died and then came back and then someone else died and came back and they had a chat about something or other and it all made no sense. Also the game just fucking removed ALL subtitles for the credits sequence. This is fine for me because I can speak and understand Japanese but for people who turned on the Japanese voices just because they prefer it that way get totally shafted in the games final moments.
However these are all little niggles in what is essentially a great RPG for the PS3 and Xbox 360. I would recommended Eternal Sonata to any RPG fan who needs a fix of whimsy and light hearted adventure.
