Eternal Sonata – OMG, I’m Playing a Game…

When I started this blog, I hoped to divide about half of the time to talk about game theory, game reviews, and the industry in general.  Well, as you can see, that failed.  I did some early, introductory posts on psychology in games, my previous life as a crazy gamer person, and mentioned games in a few random posts.  I had even had a goal to play one game a month and write about it.

However, just as other interests in my life wax and wane, I’ve just come to terms that my gamer fetish is definitely in a waning phase.  Of course, I regularly DDR, but that’s got the dual purpose of fitness.  I’d even go so far as to say that if it did not provide me fitness benefits, I probably wouldn’t play it THAT often.  I love me some Rock Band 2, but the horrendus allergies making singing sucky coupled with lots of nights out and not in have made playing it a very occasional thing.  I just have no desire to play an MMO right now beyond jumping into mine on a casual basis, I’m enjoying my friends right now who are not just pixels.  So, for the most part, I play some web games and we occasionally have a session of something like Little Big Planet or Fable or some other random game that we picked up, but nothing has grabbed us by the proverbial balls and made us play very long.

As for living the dream – well, the industry is in a sick sad state where people are either clinging to their jobs with clenched fingers, or being laid off and finding themselves competing with hundreds of other applicants for one job.  Everyone I know that has changed jobs has taken pay cuts.  Some have been unemployed for over 6 months.  I sort of have been ignoring the gaming news because it’s just too depressing.  Since I don’t plan to change jobs and my position right now has very little to do with staying on top of trends and the zeitgeist of the scene out there, I have sort of adopted a *hide my head in the sand* approach.

So back to happier, gamier things.  Enter Eternal Sonata.   This is the website’s overview, which I liked and stole:

On his deathbed, the famous composer, Chopin, drifts between this life and the next. In his final hours, he experiences a fantastical dream where he encounters a young girl facing a terrible destiny and the boy who will fight to save her. On the border between dreams and reality, Chopin discovers the light that shines in all of us in this enduring tale of good and evil, love and betrayal.

It’s a really bizarre premise for a game, but it works!  On the surface, it’s your standard jrpg (Japanese Role Playing Game), akin to the Final Fantasy series where you talk to people in towns, travel through the world running into beasts and fight them, and complete quests and progress through a linear story.  And, as is with all good jrpgs, you will inevitably get to a point where you advance through the story too quickly, it gets too hard, and you have to grind (fight creatures over and over just for the sake of getting levels and becoming more powerful) for a while.

The really cool and unique thing is that it’s a 3 player game!  One person navigates around the world, but once you jump into battle, you can assign all three characters either to one, two, or three different controllers!  So, Zliten, Mr. Pangryface, and myself can sit down and play together all day, and not have to either pass around the controller or stop every time someone has to go pee, nap, cook dinner for an hour, or whatnot.  It’s like playing an MMO with your friends, except those friends are actually on your couch with you.  I think if there were more games out there with this control scheme, I would totally be playing more.  This is the game for me and my crew right now.

Other cool things about the game – there are these huge, long… for the lack of a better word “picture sequences” telling the story of Chopin (the real Chopin composer dude) and his life.  The battles are turn based, but timed – so your turn is whatever you can do within the seconds it gives you.  For example, our party right now has 3 seconds to plan and 4 seconds to act, which means you have to be paying attention or you’ll miss your turn.  You can only move your character during this four seconds as well, so there is a lot of strategy involved (do I run in and position myself in back of the two monsters right here so I get maximum damage each hit or do I run up to the front where it’s closer and get more hits off, but they can block).  If that didn’t add a twist to the game this does – certain special spells only work in light, and some in shadow.  So if you want to heal, you have to run to the light and make sure your party is within range and spam it as many times as you can in your 4 seconds.  It sounds confusing here, but it’s actually pretty intuitive and they provide a lot of good tutorials on how to do combat.

The game is not without it’s flaws.  In traditional badly translated Japanese video game fashion, some of the dialogue doesn’t really make sense or it just doesn’t flow well.  It’s not too bad, but you can tell it originated from outside the states.  The voice over work in the cut scenes can be horrendous.  There are some story sequences that seem like they should have been cut scenes but they ran out of time.  Sometimes it seems like you stay…in…one…area…forever and are dying for  change of scenery by the end of it.   It’s also sometimes a little wonky when reassigning controllers to player 2 and 3, sometimes it just doesn’t stick properly.

However, it’s awesomeness totally overwhelms it’s flaws.  If you’re looking for a new RPG to play, and you didn’t pick it up previously (I believe it was 2008 title for the PS3 and a 2007 title for the XBOX 360), definitely check it out.  Considering we’ve logged about 15 hours in less than a week – I think that says something in and of itself.

Happy weekending, crazy kids.  What’s your current game of choice?  Anything dropping soon you’re excited about?  Hit me up.  See ya Monday, for another week of fun and games.  What’s in store?  No clue.  But I’ll be here wingin’ it, like usual! 🙂