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Musical games are all the rage these days, but games about music tend to make somewhat less likely bedfellows. Odder still: games that delve into the death knells of celebrated Romantic musicians, say pianists like Frederic Chopin, who, after battling tuberculosis, finally succumbed in the early hours of October 17, 1849. Eternal Sonata is a whimsical Japanese-style RPG from the designers of the well received Gamecube RPG Baten Kaitos which supposes that, as Chopin lay drowsing in those final delirious hours, he dreamed of a world where people with magical abilities are also incurably, fatally ill. Blink and you’ll miss the symbolism.

Convention Tension

Now fold in a didactic, episodic, occasionally tender but mostly juvenile tale of two warring cities and a corrupt money-grubbing government and you know all you need to about Eternal Sonata’s story, which opens promisingly with a suicide, but ends rather vexingly with a lecture. The game’s narrative trips past anything like subtlety into bouts of jarringly school-masterish sermonizing. In fact, Eternal Sonata occupies most of its non-combat moments wagging a “just-in-case-you-missed-the-point” finger in your face while moralizing thematically at the level of “See Dick Run”. Worse, while you can skip the cut scenes, which are both lengthy and frequent, you probably shouldn’t as the game lacks a quest log or journal. Miss a plot imperative and you’ll be left casting around for directions and talking to the area’s inhabitants who have all the lexical depth of dawdling signposts.

For good or ill, the rest of the genre’s tropes are present and accounted for. There’s the obligatory “get thrown in a dungeon and escape” sequence, the “gather keys to unlock doors to gather more keys to unlock more doors” level, and — late in the game — the “teleport from this area to that area inside another area you just visited until you’re thoroughly lost without a map” level. Don’t forget the tortured soliloquies, lame attempts at romantic comedy, and a tendency for characters to vocalize private emotions like someone doing comic book thought-balloon voiceovers. Even the title of the game sounds like something random you’d get off an existentialist’s refrigerator poetry.

World of SonataCraft

Of course you can’t help but notice the way Eternal Sonata looks like it borrowed its palette from a peacock or a kaleidoscope or maybe a stained-glass bowl full of Fruity Pebbles. If you love three-strip Technicolor (The Wizard of Oz, Fantasia, Gone with the Wind) and wild, rococo, rainbow architecture, you’ll appreciate what lead designer Yasuyuki Honne and company are up to here. The music by composer Motoi Sakuraba (Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile) is also some of the most memorable to hop the pond since Hitoshi Sakimoto’s brilliant work on Final Fantasy XII. You’ll even get to hear Chopin’s “greatest hits” during little history lesson interludes performed by Stanislav Bunin, a Russian-born pianist who placed first in the 11th International Frederic Chopin Competition in 1985.

For all that, the game’s only music-related mechanic involves locating “score pieces” (four measures of a single stave melody) which you can use to play “sessions” with other musicians. Good counterpoint wins bonus items, bad just wins you boos, except the game’s idea of rhyme is pretty much at odds with musical reason. Speaking as long-trained pianist and musician, stuff that should work doesn’t, and stuff like that doesn’t gets you high marks. Musical aesthetics aside, finding a good match is less skill than guesswork; forcing you to try everything and removing all educational or entertainment value.

Otherwise Eternal Sonata plays like any other JRPG. You start with one or two characters named after musical terms like Polka and Allegretto who eventually meet some other characters (Jazz, Clave, etc.) who eventually border on “gang” sized by the game’s midpoint at nine total. Separated or jammed together by recurrent artifice, you travel in strict sequence between towns, castles, swamps, lava caves, snowy mountains, etc., battling increasingly powerful creatures and looting everyone’s favourite shopping list of weapons, drugs, duds, and jewellery from critters that wander to and fro on meter-long leashes like target dummies you can either slide past or try to sneak up behind.

Chanson de Combat

Bump into one of those creatures and the game shifts to tactical battle mode, this is where Eternal Sonata improves dramatically. You can bring three characters at once into these mini-arenas, and then moves each (sequentially) in real-time while tapping buttons to initiate basic or special attacks against opponents. Each character moves and fights on a tactical clock and can execute different moves depending on whether they’re standing in light or shadow. Something the designers employ day and night areas replete with unpredictable effects like swaying lamps and roving spotlights. Lighting affects creatures as well, causing them to change shape and potency. Unfortunately, they make dumb tactical choices as often as good ones. As your party levels up, your tactical options evolve - moving faster, but at the cost of preparation time.

The best part of combat is probably the way you can group-chain “echoes,” special multipliers generated by individual attacks and executed by any member at any time. It can take dozens of hits from more than one or even two party members to max this gauge, but the results can be devastating. As such, lighting and position and movement speed and strength combine and recombine dynamically, requiring fairly dexterous finger work that never veers into button mashing. That’s important, because Eternal Sonata’s twenty-some hours are roughly seventy-five percent combat versus twenty-five percent spamming item shops and watching cute, albeit clunky, exposition.

Eternally Overdoing It

Is it too much to ask that JRPG’s grow up? That we stop letting “aww, pretty!” moments excuse cornball ones? There’s no reason an RPG like Eternal Sonata couldn’t be twice as well written and half as morally blunt. Of course you could always pretend you’re five or six again, in which case the story’s probably not half bad, and the acting and pacing are no worse than your average Saturday morning cartoon.

Review by: Matt Peckham
Video Produced by: Michael Leffler