So I finished The Last of Us (follow-up post forthcoming) and invested in a copy of Eternal Sonata to sate my JRPG hunger.
To start, the graphics demonstrate a beautiful, hand-crafted, cel-shading technique. Cel-shading has never been used this well in games.
The audio is solid, featuring acceptable voice actors and well-performed music originally composed by Chopin (who happens to be a main character in the game). My only complaint is the field music (as opposed to the cutscene music) is quiet, dull, and doesn’t remotely match the on-screen action. No, I have another complaint. The voices of many of the main characters, half of which are whiny children, are absolutely obnoxious. The adult characters are fine. I turned the audio volume down to where I could only hear battle sound effects and used subtitles through most of the game.
The gameplay, while much more active than most RPGs, is ultimately quite uncompelling. There is effectively no character customization. Weapons and equipment replacements are found all over the game world and in shops at various intervals. There really isn’t any give-and-take with the gear, though. It’s always just a straightforward “oh, this new suit is better than the last one” situation. Money, as usual, is obscenely easy to acquire. I sold a single photo I took during the first boss fight in the game which resulted in my wallet overflowing with cash throughout the entire game. Why do developers do this? It renders currency utterly pointless. Gear might as well be handed out free of charge. Even consumable items, which you could spend some dough on, are largely pointless to use.
The only time money matters in this game is during the massive, unimaginative, boring optional dungeon near the end. You have to gather 99,999,999 gold to buy one seventh of a soul, all of which you can combine to resurrect a character who died at the beginning of the game. She comes back at the same level she died (like 25 or so) when the rest of your party is upwards of level 80. This all happens after the final dungeon but immediately before the final boss. So you get a cool but uselessly weak character who is not worth leveling up, even though she’s awesome at high levels, because the remaining 3-minute final boss battle is both idiotic and laughably easy.
The story is the worst part. So one of your main characters is the real-world famous composer Chopin. He’s unconscious in the real world, but appears to be living in a dream world where he meets the rest of the cast of characters. He assures everyone that they are just in his dream, and they react in a totally outrageous way. They don’t care. They don’t call him crazy, nor do they believe him. They just ignore him.
In the absurd ending, Chopin dies - as is supposed to happen according to real history. But then another main character commits suicide for absolutely no reason, is immediately reborn as a four-year-old child at home with her mother, and suddenly teleports back to where she died and magically becomes a living, breathing, teenager again. Sigh.
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