To my knowledge, there have been few video games featuring prominent musicians as protagonists and there have been none featuring Frederic Chopin, genius composer and piano virtuoso of the Romantic period. "Eternal Sonata," developed by Tri-Crescendo for Xbox 360, takes place in the fevered brain of Chopin as he lies on his deathbed and the entire game world is made up of his dreams. Without irony, I can say that I had never been more excited about a game premise in my life.
"Sonata," unfortunately, doesn't quite deliver as promised. What it does deliver, for better or worse, is a brilliant, engaging battle system married with the formulaic throwback of a role-playing game. Immediately noticeable are the graphics. The game looks fantastic. Many developers seem focused on harnessing the power of next-gen systems to make the most realistic games possible. Tri-Crescendo takes a different route, using vibrant, cel-shaded graphics and a cheerful color palette to create a world that I never tire of looking at.
The character art is particularly notable, even for those averse to typical "big eyes-small mouth" manga styling. Crisp lines and smooth shading effects enhance creative takes on 19th-century outfits and Chopin in particular looks slick, sporting an adorable top hat and gentleman's coat. The environment graphics are a bit spottier: cities and castles scintillate dazzlingly across the screen, while the forest, swamps and mountains are nondescript. Also, the enemy designs, while interesting for a while, are endlessly recycled, and the combat visuals for the characters don't change in accordance with the weapon they have. These irrelevancies aside, though, Sonata is a treat to look at.
What a disappointment it is, then, that Sonata's beautiful world is filled with such bland, trite characters. The cast, which begins with an innocent flower girl and balloons rapidly into a mess of plucky urchins, iron-jawed rebels and infuriating twins, is far too large to be properly developed. Chopin himself is pivotal early on, but as the game continues, he fades into the shadow of a big, silly political pissing match. When the characters do take the foreground, they tend to do so with long-winded, inexplicable monologues, filled with wretched statements about 'the human condition': "Nowadays if you see anything glowing out there, it's usually just the fires of distrust burning in people's hearts." Everything from love and art to class struggle and economic theory is mangled in a similar meat-fisted way.
Even if the characters had anything interesting to say, you wouldn't want to hear it. The voice acting, while not necessarily worse than the average role-playing game, ranges from unimpressive to absolutely atrocious. Notably bad are Lord Waltz, the faux-insane villain who opposes you through most of the game, and Beat, the iconic naive, wide-eyed youngster who just asks to be punted through a brick wall. Switching the language to Japanese, a sometimes effective remedy for this problem, proves ear-bleedingly worse.
The game's saving grace (and what a grace it is!) is the battle system. In most console RPGs, the battle system is a mechanism to advance the plot, develop the characters and uncover mysteries. Sonata's story and characters, on the other hand, are a cobbled-together excuse to fight a bunch of awesome battles. The combat is an even blend of turn-based and real-time; characters and enemies trade off turns, but during each turn they have a set amount of real time to attack and move freely around the screen. Tactical decisions must be made in a brief period of planning time, which decreases as your party progresses through the game. The number of tactical options available to you increases with time as well, allowing you to block and counterattack enemies. The combat is enjoyably kinetic, requiring rapid tactical judgments and fast reflexes.
The pace of combat is manageable enough in the beginning, but the endgame becomes frenetic and challenging. It's worth noting, however, that until that end, the battles themselves aren't particularly difficult. During my play through, I skipped as many fights as I could (there are no random encounters; monsters all appear out of combat), yet I was able to win nearly every battle with ease. It wasn't until a boss fight three quarters of the way through that I even had to use a healing item. In addition, it's also possible for up to three to play simultaneously, at least during battles. Multiplayer doesn't actually add any content to the game, but it ramps the fun level up considerably. The energy of the battles takes a leap with three people yelling and pounding controllers, and you get some buddies to laugh at the dialogue with.
The gameplay outside the battle system, though, is lacking as well. The story is painfully linear - there's no overworld map to speak of, no side quests, no chocobos to ride or bonus dragons to slay. This would be acceptable if the story itself were riveting; since it's anything but, the end of the game left my thumbs itching for something more. Equally linear is the character customization, or lack thereof. There are four stats for each character, and they increase automatically when you level up. That's it - no crafting, skill trees or class configuration. It baffles me that Super Nintendo games 14 years ago had better character advancement than a next-gen RPG.
Despite its shortcomings, Sonata ends up being pretty fun. You won't care about the story, and you won't care about the characters, but you will care about getting to the next battle, because they're so damn awesome. It's a shame that the storyline, arguably the meat of a proper RPG, is so hackneyed. Developers take note: with contenders like the recent "Bioshock" raising the bar for voice acting and interactive storytelling, performances like Sonata are inexcusable.
Tri-Crescendo has shown that they know how to make a game fun; if they could have put that fun into a gripping, full-bodied game world, "Eternal Sonata" would have been an instant classic. As it stands, it's about $30 of fun with a $60 price tag - not, unfortunately, worth the cost.
Contact John Bailey at
John.C.Bailey@UConn.edu.
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