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.
I give Eternal Sonata a 9/10.
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