Fans of Japanese RPGs, rejoice! Eternal Sonata will be your long, cool drink of water on the Xbox 360.
Actually, if you want to be accurate, it’ll be a long, cool, colorful, combat-filled, bizarre drink of water.
Namco Bandai supplied TeamXbox with a preview version of the game, and we spent a few hours with it to check out what it will have in store when it comes out next month.
As we noted in our earlier preview, the first eccentricity is the game’s story, which involves classical composer Fredric Chopin extremely ill and dreaming. Those dreams are what makes for the playable worlds in Eternal Sonata, complete with fantastic, almost sci-fi situations. Of course, from the standpoint of JRPG gameplay, this explains the wild creatures that your party comes across every few steps.
While Namco Bandai might not have used the Xbox 360 hardware to make Eternal Sonata a realistic-looking game, it certainly has taken advantage of the console’s color palette and graphical capabilities. With every turn, your eyes are filled with such views as brightly colored fields, detailed architecture, misty fog, walkways made from translucent glass and beams of light shining in through holes in the walls.
The combat system makes for big battles.
There are also nice cinematic-style effects thrown in, such as depth of field and blur. For instance, when a character moves from the background to the foreground or you’re your “camera” view, they’ll quickly come into focus as if your eyes were adjusting. All this adds to the 3-D look that the developers have created.
The characters (most of them with music-related names) also come to life through their appearance and voice acting—though if you’re not a big JRPG enthusiast, you might see their traditionally wide-eyed presentation as excessively cute and over-the-top sappy. With each battle comes their various comments that add a layer of goofy to the proceedings (though, unless more variety is added in the final version, also soon quite redundant). I’m sure JRPG fanatics will say, “I can’t wait—bring it on!”
Which brings up another way that Eternal Sonata comes out of the usual mold: Combat here is an interesting mix of turn-based and real-time. When it’s your character’s turn to go, you have a “tactical time” to plan out what to do, and once you start your action—whether it’s moving the character or initiating an offensive attack—the timer starts ticking down. You can then button mash during that time and fit as much as you can in that time.
Each character has a “light” action and a “dark” action, depending on whether he or she is standing in a shadow or in the light—not only with regard to the terrain, but perhaps from the foe. For example, if the adversary has a lit tail, sneaking up behind might enable a light attack. Additionally, you may choose to use some of the move time to navigate the character to a light or dark section in order to fire off a specific offensive move.
The light and dark moves can be specified in the character screen (the same place where you can do off-combat heals and gear changes), and that enables you to craft the party to your liking. You might choose to have one character with a light heal and a dark offensive attack, while another character has a dark heal and a light offensive, so you’re set for whatever the terrain offers.
There’s also a “special attack” sequence that is unleashed by hitting the proper button, and that action is enhanced by the number of “echoes” you’ve built up as a result of your standard attacks during the turn. That makes pressing the special-attack button right as your timer is hitting zero a good strategy—and it dumps a large load of hurt on your adversary.
When you start, you have unlimited tactical time and five seconds of move time, which pauses when you stop your action. As the game goes on (when it’s assumed you’ve become more comfortable with the structure and as your “party level” increases), the quantity of your move time changes so you have less time to take your turn and the timer doesn’t stop if you cease your actions mid-turn.
While you can skip past many enemies that fill the various pathways you travel through the game, it doesn’t make sense to miss out on the opportunities for leveling and item/gold acquisition. All that is essential when you hit the occasional boss-like creatures that requires a concerted effort by your party’s members. It’ll also be necessary to build up your wallet in order to buy advanced gear—weapons, armor and the various items that aid your party’s HP replenishment.
In addition to combat and item selling bringing you gold, I found that Beat (one of the younger/cuter characters in the starting party) could take pictures, which can be done in place of an offensive attack. While it does leave Beat more vulnerable to losing HP to an adversary’s pummeling, selling photos to vendors later can reap large quantities of gold. (You can see how these various offerings take Eternal Sonata in crazy directions.)
Eternal Sonata’s story evolves through detailed cutscenes.
In the time that I played Eternal Sonata, the party size changed many times. In fact, it started with alternating treks with a party of one (Polka) and a party of two (Allegretto and Beat); then Polka joined up with Chopin as one group, while Allegretto and Beat continued on their way; eventually having the four of them branching together into a four-person party (though only three are active in the combat segments); and after that adding another member (Viola).
And that brings up yet another peculiar element, which is how the story ends up coming out to you. Certainly, the conversations between the characters help flesh out what they’re going through, but at other times, I was given a slideshow-like sequence of real photos, while the captions detailed, historical background that was somewhat peripheral to the story’s fantasy. For instance, the first one gave information on Chopin’s relationship to French novelist George Sand (a pseudonym for the “masculine” Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin). While I appreciated the real-life history lesson, it was a jarringly weird contrast to the game’s anime-ishly styled characters and settings.
I found the game (at least the portion of the preview I was able to get to in the hours that I played) to be extremely linear, with lots of obstacles and invisible walls stopping the party from going into the “wrong” area. In some cases, if I piloted a party in the wrong direction, they boomeranged with something like a “I’m not supposed to go this way yet…” in dialogue. That should eliminate the misdirected wandering that sometimes comes with JRPGs, though frequent save points enable you to take a snapshot of your status and load it back if you went astray.
Gamerscore addicts will be happy to know that the game seems to be set up with 22 achievements that can bring a total of the standard 1000 points. In our preview version, all of the achievements were listed as “Secret,” though there’s no saying that this is how the final game will be structured or if the list of achievements will change in count.
We’re expecting to get a look at a more final version of the game before it comes out in September, so be sure to peek at TeamXbox for any news or information on Eternal Sonata. While the rest of the year looks to be packed with a quantity of “normal” games, we’re looking forward to see how some of the quirkier entries are coming together and if they’ll provide interesting counters to the standard fare of shooters and action titles.
Hands-On: Eternal Sonata
Linear Mode
