Review: Eternal Sonata

There’s a big problem with beauty. When there’s too much of it about, you start to almost yearn for something ugly just to break the monotony. You start to pick at the corners, you start looking for dust, for any sign of normality.

Eternal Sonata, or ‘Trusty Bell: Chopin’s Dream’ in Japan, is painfully, achingly, deeply beautiful. My Goodness it’s beautiful. Running in proper high def, your eyes will bleed it’s so beautiful. I swear, when I switched the game on for the first time, my console started spewing pink sugar and rainbows. Example - the outflow in the sewers of the town of Ritardando, one of the early environments, is so sparklingly clear and fresh you’d think the townspeople pissed the finest French mineral water. Wow.

Goth Lol

The point to all this incredible, ultimately alienating beauty? Well, you’re playing through the story of what happened in the mind of 19th Century Polish composer and pianist Frederick Chopin as he lay dying from tuberculosis in his bed in Paris. What this has to do with a ‘Trusty Bell’ I have no idea. On the theme of bafflement, there’s the opening cutscene. Here, you’re presented with a seemingly unrelated series of characters and events, including one suicide (well, it is a Goth game), with the people dressed in the ever-popular Cozplayer style known as Gothic Lolita.

In a way, the opening scene is very useful. For the rest of the game, the essentially simple plot is heaped with bafflingly wordy dialogue, so get used to it now. If you watch the first scene on YouTube and come out of it irritated and/or laughing at the po-faced, soppy earnestness of it all, then this is not the game for you. If you find yourself intrigued then play on (and for pity’s sake, stop moping around with your hair combed over one eye).

How Long?

In the 35 hours or so it’ll take you to pass through the very linear game and its story, you’ll be witness to some of the wettest musings on the nature of death, individual responsibility, tyranny and environmental interconnectedness that you’ll have ever have suffered in your puff.

Get to the end, and you’ll be treated to a 45 minute cutscene that wraps everything up in the slowest, wordiest, most painful way possible. If you’re a floppy Emo you will find the cutscene, indeed the whole game, full of real tragedy, poetic sensibilities, aching otherworldly perfection, and romantic self-sacrifice. Of course, you’ll only see half of it, as you’ll be inspired continually to rush off and write awful poetry to be poured onto MySpace in a fruitless effort to find your soulmate.

And Now For Something Completely Different

It’s a blummin’ shame that the trappings of Interminable Dirge are quite so nauseating, because the mechanics are, frankly, excellent. Yes, the JRPG has been trapped in the 1980’s forever, and things have lurched along in a turn-based, number-obsessed style since then. However, Eternal Sonata shakes things up just enough to make them almost interesting.

The world Chopin finds himself, pretty though it is, is full of invisible walls that prevent you from exploring properly. This is irritating. Fortunately, there are no random monster encounters to add to the pain – you can see where everything is. This does allow you to sometimes avoid creatures, where the remarkably restricted paths allow, or to work your way around behind them before initiating the encounter. This means you usually get to strike first.

Hit Them With Your Rhythm Stick

The strategic element carries into the combat arena itself, of course. Each character has a variety of attacks and/or healing magic. You can also select and use items from a communal pool during combat. During their turn, characters have a limited amount of time to move freely around the combat arena and launch attacks or whatever. Position on the field becomes important quickly, particularly for those with ranged attacks, some of which need manually aimed. Build up hit combos, which can be transferred between attacking characters, and you can unleash very pretty super moves.

This all goes for the enemy too, though the AI here can let them down badly (if occasionally amusingly). When attacked by the enemy, those not stuck on scenery or randomly running around in tight circles, you have a second to hit the defend button to avoid at least some of the damage. This keeps you nicely focused on and involved with the combat at all times.

What also helps is the addition of a light and dark mechanic. Stand in the shadows, and you’ll have access to different options than when you’re in the light. Enemy critters are also affected, with some of them changing into entirely different beasties as they move about. It’s a shock the first time a lumbering lizard becomes a fast-flying bat thing that can suddenly reach the wounded character you’d tried to get out of the way. Additionally, some weapons and spells work differently against opponents who are in the dark than they do against those in the light. All this makes combat nicely edgy and satisfyingly unpredictable.

And Back Again

Unfortunately, combat is let down by a lack of variety in your foes. Even early on, within the first couple of hours (I played just under ten), you find yourself up against different coloured versions of the same enemy. This is weird considering the efforts made on the environments. Furthermore, no matter what equipment, weapons or clothing you give your party, they always look the same and wield the same items. There are no really meaty subquests, just some irritating, grinding pseudo-puzzles to artificially extend the life of the game (Fort Fermata anyone), and an uninteresting item trail. Along with the almost excessively beautiful, oddly inaccessible surroundings, you’re left feeling oddly uninvolved. Speaking of which…

Strangely, the designers have chosen to drop in mini-documentaries on Chopin’s life and music, sometimes breaking up a story cutscene to do so. While genuinely informative and very, very vaguely story-linked, they do snap you out of the game, as they are presented very differently from everything else. Weird.

Thank You For The Music

Despite being about one of the great composers, music is not an integral part of the game. Yes, many of the characters and locations in the game are cutely named from musical terms. The in-game score is very fine indeed, with a mix of Chopin’s work and new compositions from Motoi Sakuraba. However, the music remains aloof, save for a strange and shallow sub-quest where you use bits of score sheets you stumble over to obtain items from NPCs by playing along with them through what sounds like a kazoo mixed with Rolf’s Stylophone.

Added Bonus

The PS3 version of this game has added content, with extra playable characters to swell your party, new music to listen to, additional cutscenes to fall asleep in front of, and new dungeons to explore, one of which only opens up at the end of the game when you use the secret password ‘gratuitously tacked-on’.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark

I’m trying very hard not to say that this is just one for fans of the genre. There’s a lot here to commend, so much so that even the tragic romance/Goth rubbish of the story and all the other faults don’t render the game utterly unplayable. However, the JRPG and all its Western cousins occupy an evolutionary dead end in games history, and they play to a very select, if dedicated audience. However, there will still be some boss-eyed birds of paradise like this before extinction finally strikes. Maybe that’s no bad thing.