Eternal Sonata was released on 19^th October in the EU on the Xbox 360, but will only be released in Q1 of 2009 on the PS3 over here (EU), whilst those darn Americans have had the PS3 version since October 21^st.

Never mind, eh? Importing games is easy as hell lately, especially when you have a boss who sends them to you, so let’s get right on with the review, shall we? I’ll try not to make you other Europeans feel too bad about not being able to go out and buy the game yet, but I’m not promising anything, because that will be damn hard.

When Eternal Sonata was released on the 360 last year, it got rave reviews and the score on Metacritic right now is 79, with review scores ranging from 92 to 60 (whilst the PS3 version’s metascore is 80). The PS3 version has some extra features on top of the 360 version, too, such as extra quests, battles and events, new playable characters and costume changes and exclusive new music.

The story goes; Chopin, a famous composer (the more learned amongst you may know of him) is lying on his death bed, drifting in and out of this (read; the real) world and a wonderful dream world where there are numerous characters, including amongst them your party (who you progressively meet more of during the first few chapters), an evil king and legions of dangerous, inexplicably numerous creatures along all the paths, caves and anywhere that isn’t populated by people (just the routes between those places). The storyline within his dream world (strange, I know – it’s a storyline wrapped in a storyline that is based in real life history) is actually referential to real life.

The dreamstory (as I will now call it) is told through cutscenes and dialogue like any other RPG, whilst the story of Chopin himself is told through artistic painting-like images and text between the chapters accompanied by touching music by the composer himself (though not performed by his zombie, that would be strange).

The graphics are nothing short of beautiful, featuring intricately detailed cities, cracked but still as pretty forts to swamps that don’t look quite as impressive as the cities, but are still easy on the eyes. The character models are cel-shaded and typically jRPG (read: anime), but looking good whilst being so, with quite a lot of detail themselves. Enemies are numerous and, luckily, are quite good looking too, though nothing to write home about (that wouldn’t be a very rational reaction anyway). The art style is very impressive too, with royal palaces and forts looking suitably rich, smaller towns looking charming and huts looking very hut-like, as is expected. Magic/special move effects look very pretty.

Now we get down to the important things. Gameplay. Between fights, there’s an awful lot of running around, but, luckily, this is frequently broken up with dialogue, storyline and, of course, fights. When you’re running around in villages/towns/cities you can talk to people with X, listen to (read) what they have to say, or you can open doors and talk to the people inside. There are people you can buy items, weapons or apparel from with gold you’ve collected from battling creatures (though why creatures carry gold around with them is a up to debate. Perhaps they have their very own civilization, with their own shops and families, and we are in fact intruding on their territory, which is quite an abstract thought that brings up many moral questions which we probably shouldn’t get into)

Throughout the game, you can, if you’re lucky or particularly curious, find ’score pieces’ (pieces of sheet music) lying around that you can use to accompany other budding musicians that ask you if you’d like to perform with them when you talk to them – and if you do a good job, they’ll give you an item. You don’t really need any musical know how for this, you just pick one and play, if it doesn’t work you can talk to them again and try another score piece (if you have any more).

When you’re outside the settlements, there are creatures roaming around in oddly predictable patterns for wild animals/creatures, which has it’s upside – if you don’t feel like fighting you can simply sneak past the buggers. Be careful though, if they see you they’ll run after you until you get out of range. You can also find conspicuous-looking chests littered around the wilderness/caves/etc that contain some kind of item, from weapons and armour to healing items.

Finally, the fighting. This is the really interesting part, because it’s very original. After you bump into a creature you’re teleported into a battle arena that looks nothing like the area you bumped into it in, with your front 3 party members (you can choose the order) and however many enemies you are up against (they are seen as a single creature when you touch them to start a battle, so you’ve just got to hope) which can be up to 3, also. Now, in the battlefield, the fastest character or enemy goes first (character speed increases as you level up, along with other stats like attack, defence, magic, that kind of thing).

Before you move, you have Tactical Time, which you use for planning what you’re going to do. Up until Party Level 3 (more on this later) you have infinite Tactical Time at your disposal, but at Party Level 3 you get 5 seconds. When you’re done planning whatever you decide to do, you move your character with the analogue stick, use X to attack, triangle for a special attack and square uses an item, whilst L1 and L2 scroll through items. Attacking from the front runs a very high risk of being blocked, which you can also do if you’re attacked from the front too by pressing circle when the word ‘Chance’ flashes above your head, complete with an accompanying sound. When you master this, battles that seem ridiculously hard can get much, much easier to do.

Now, here’s the interesting thing. You have different special attacks depending on whether your character is stood in shadow or light. This makes for some interesting tactics (one character, for example, starts with a healing move in the light and a ranged magic attack in dark), some of these special attacks heal a single person, heal multiple people, are melee attacks or ranged attacks. Normal attacks can be melee or ranged attacks, involving weapons from umbrellas to bows, swords to strange hammer-gun fusions.

In addition to your attacks changing in light and dark, enemies can actually change form when they go between them, which leads to some simple creatures you’ve been beating for the last half an hour suddenly stepping into a shadow and becoming something altogether harder to kill, with different, more powerful attacks. Drawing enemies out of the dark/light to return them to their weaker form, by either hitting them or making them move to hit you, soon becomes a tactic you might want to think about if you don’t want your face to be introduce to your own anus over and over again, as well as moving between light and dark to change your special attack to something more preferred (for example, to hit an enemy from a distance).

Each turn is limited by time. For the first Party Level, you have 5 seconds of turn time, which is used by moving, attacking and using items. Each special attack uses a set amount of time, ranging from around 1 second to something like 3.7 seconds. This might sound harder than it does, however, because if you start a 3.7 second special attack when you have enough time left in the timer to finish it the move will still finish regardless. At Party Level 1, the timer stops counting down when you stop moving or otherwise doing some kind of action, but at 3 it continue to drop after your first move or when your Tactical Timer runs out.

After winning a battle, you are awarded with XP and some gold, and, if you’re lucky, an item. After levelling up your stats increase and, at certain levels, the character will unlock a new special attack. You have (at Party Levels 1 and 2) one slot for in light and one slot for in shadow (special moves are light-level specific), at Party Levels 3 and higher you get two slots per light-level.

Mostly, the sound in the game is wonderful, with orchestral scores through most of the game and Chopin’s own piano music is great, all of which are available to listen to at any time from the pause menu. However, there are a few hitches, like, for example, every time you use a special attack the character in question says the name of the attack. Everytime. Shockingly, this grates on your nerves a little bit after a while, but it’s more of a small niggle.

Other problems? Well, sometimes the pace of the game can be quite slow sometimes, with certain areas of the game seemingly taking forever. Also, with it being a jRPG, the dialogue can be quite…corny, but that is honestly more of a genre cliché than a game problem. The game is about 30 hours to get through, so it’ll last for quite a long time before you’re done with it, and with score pieces to collect you may feel inclined to play through it again, but I don’t really see that happening unless you fall in love with it. Enemies are numerous but not that various. It is very likely that, in any one area, you’ve have 2/3 types of enemy populating the area, leading to many encounters with the same enemy. Fighting the same thing over and over does get a little tedious, but that is to be expected. If you leave an area and go back the enemies immediately respawn, which is a a double edged sword; it’s great for levelling up to beat that pesky boss, but it’s not so great if you accidentally go the wrong way or need to return somewhere for any reason.

All in all, Eternal Sonata is a very good game. I want to give it a 9/10 but, for some reason, I don’t think it should get it. Whether that’s the repeating battles with the same ever-respawning enemies, the dragging sections or the slightly awkward dialogue in places, I’m not sure, it gets an 8 that is close enough to a 9 for you to be happy with it. I am certain that a lot of you will fall in love with the game, especially the jRPG fans. If you’ve completed it on the 360 before it may not be worth buying again unless you really want to, but for anyone else interested, go and get it (unless you’re European, in which case you’ll have to wait or import), you won’t be disappointed.

8/10

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