If you have ever wanted to know what it is like inside a dying composer's head, Namco's Eternal Sonata has your answer. Full of gorgeous graphics, beautiful music, and a nice twist on regular turn-based RPG battle, Eternal Sonata is noteworthy for more than its eccentric story.
The game maintains its musical theme throughout, including the characters' names. From Polka to Beat to Allegretto to Falsetto, the game names all its characters music. This is both a clever touch and a wise decision since the main plot takes place in the dreams of dying composer Frederic Chopin. In an apparent coma, the game's cut scenes shift between the loved ones and doctors at Chopin's bedside and the fantasy world inside his dream, where all the action takes place. The world inside Chopin's head is rich with romance, tragedy, and friendship.
The story is an engaging tale of a young girl, Polka, able to use magic because she is sick and will pass away shortly. This frightens most everyone she sees in the city where she tries, unsuccessfully, to sell her floral powder, leaving her with no friends. She eventually meets Frederic Chopin, who explains to her that this is all part of his dream and joins her on a journey to restore the popularity of floral powder, to leave her mark on the world. Along the way, other adventurers, such as brothers Allegretto and Beat and a rebellious gang plotting an uprising, join them. The two brothers are homeless thieves in the vein of Robin Hood, stealing from stores to feed the poor who cannot afford the steep price of bread. Woven through the story are little details on the latter stages of Chopin's life, providing gamers a little background on his music and interesting music history trivia.
Though the expansive story is as solid as nearly any RPG, it keeps the game tethered to a slow-moving pace. The number of cut-scenes is not an issue, but the molasses pacing of them certainly is. Players speak a line, then the scene pauses for a few moments as if pondering what was just said and their response before saying something in return. It is really a shame because the story is really well told, but most gamers will get impatient and want to skip the cut-scenes altogether after the first few hours of putting up with the story's snail pace. This would be understandable, but a definite mistake; as the game's slow reveal of the full story keeps gamers on their toes as to exactly what is happening and who is at fault.
Like most RPGs the game is rather linear, although Eternal Sonata makes it even more so by limiting the exploration of the land and providing extremely limited opportunities for side quests. Though is some dungeon crawling in the game, it is not nearly the wide-open range most gamers are used to. Rather the game, fairly strictly, limits where you can go. When tasked with finding someone inside the city, you are stuck in said city until you succeed. While walking the straight-forward path from one end of an area to the next, the enemies are wobbling around in a set pattern until they see you get too close; at which point they lunge at you to start a battle.
The game's battle system is a nice upgrade to the typical turn-based RPG 'select attack and watch' action. Purists will be pleased that the game retains the tried-and-true turn-based battle system, but where Eternal Sonata changes things up is in the way you attack. When it is a character's turn, they must run toward an enemy, or a better vantage point if using a ranged attack, and hit 'A' to swing their weapon. There is a limited time (five-seconds at the game's start) to make your moves, but you can repeatedly swing away for the entire turn. Once the timer is up, it is the next character or enemy's turn to do the same.
When the enemies are taking their best shots at your characters, it is not time to make a run to the fridge. Rather, Eternal Sonata has come up with an equally as effective blocking system, where gamers have a split second just before the hit to tap 'B' to lessen the damage. The active battle system really pulls you into the fight well, without going full-bore into real-time battle a la Fable or Dark Cloud. The system works well, but when first entering a battle it is sometimes hard to determine which direction to run to find the enemy, leaving you with a wasted turn.
