Eternal Sonata

[Hero-of-Time]

All done!

 

Beat the hell out of Rondo when I went back at level 79! Then the last boss in the Mysterious Unison was in for a beating as I levelled up while I was getting cash for the last soul. Lastly, the last boss was a real pushover what with me being level 85 and him being 59 Lets just see if I can keep going and play through it a 2nd time....

[Guest Stefkov]

Lastly, the last boss was a real pushover what with me being level 85 and him being 59 Lets just see if I can keep going and play through it a 2nd time....

When I found out about the last boss I wanted him to have really crappy gear, but like I said I sold all my crap items so everyone had the best items I could find.

As for the second time, I'm having trouble on some of the bosses, being only level 5 or 6 with no good special moves, but with Party level 6, this Baby Dragon in the Agogo forest is really annoying. Especially having more health and whatnot.

 

3 hours in and I just got up to Fort Fermata. This game is so good.

[Hero-of-Time]

I started my 2nd run when I got in from work today and I have just finished the first chapter.

 

The normal bad guys are pretty much the same but the bosses seem to be alot tougher than they were on the 1st time through.

[Guest Stefkov]

I started my 2nd run when I got in from work today and I have just finished the first chapter.

 

The normal bad guys are pretty much the same but the bosses seem to be alot tougher than they were on the 1st time through.

Yeah, the small green turnipy things are a doddle. But the massive wooden ones needed a beating. The small dragon boss was pretty hard, but when you have to save Polka that boss wasn't that hard.

 

Have you gotten up to Viola yet in your second run? They guy you have to give the long johns to gives you some milk, and you have to give him the milk apparently but having gone forward and backwards I can't seem to give him the milk. Did you already do this on your first play through? I'm thinking I can use the teleporter in Baroque to come back later hopefully.

PS: What did you think of it then overall? You said you hated the whole musical aspect of the story if I remember?

[Hero-of-Time]

Yeah, the small green turnipy things are a doddle. But the massive wooden ones needed a beating. The small dragon boss was pretty hard, but when you have to save Polka that boss wasn't that hard.

 

Have you gotten up to Viola yet in your second run? They guy you have to give the long johns to gives you some milk, and you have to give him the milk apparently but having gone forward and backwards I can't seem to give him the milk. Did you already do this on your first play through? I'm thinking I can use the teleporter in Baroque to come back later hopefully.

PS: What did you think of it then overall? You said you hated the whole musical aspect of the story if I remember?

 

I havent got there yet but its just a minor trading sequence so dont worry if you miss it. The major trading sequence for an achievement happens later in the game.

[Guest Stefkov]

Ahaha, what guide are you using? One from Gamefaqs?

[Hero-of-Time]

Ahaha, what guide are you using? One from Gamefaqs?

 

Official guide book.

[Guest Stefkov]

Wouldn't mind buying me one of those. I got one for Blue Dragon and that was a waste of money.

The game's pace is so much quicker if you skip the cutscenes. I'm already on Chapter 3 and I've only done 8 hours.

[Hero-of-Time]

Ive finally got all 1000 points off the game after another 20 hour run through. The trading sidequest and the score piece sidequest are just annoying.

 

For the final score piece you have to get to chapter 7 and then walk all the way back through 3 MASSIVE levels/areas all so you can get the last one.

 

For the trading sidequest the game gives you the ability to teleport to certain areas but these areas are always miles away from where you have to be. Be the time I was finished I was sick of the sight of Hanon Hills!

 

Now that Eteranl Sonata is done I can finally start Lost Odyssey, had it on my shelf for a few weeks now.

[martinist]

After abandoning this game for a number of months i've decided to come back to it. Just started chapter 3 awhile ago and i'm in some pirate ship. Everyone's level is in the low to mid 20's atm.

[Guest Stefkov]

Ive finally got all 1000 points off the game after another 20 hour run through. The trading sidequest and the score piece sidequest are just annoying.

 

For the final score piece you have to get to chapter 7 and then walk all the way back through 3 MASSIVE levels/areas all so you can get the last one.

 

For the trading sidequest the game gives you the ability to teleport to certain areas but these areas are always miles away from where you have to be. Be the time I was finished I was sick of the sight of Hanon Hills!

 

Now that Eteranl Sonata is done I can finally start Lost Odyssey, had it on my shelf for a few weeks now.

I go for a weekend and you completely finish it. *shakes fist*

I need to get it done. I will do it this week I think. Then I might put it on my shelf and love it forever.

[Goron_3]

Started playing this today and i'm loving it. It reminds me very much of Tales of Symphonia so I can't wait to get into it more.

[Magnus]

Sorry to bump this old thread, but I just have to rant about how absolutely boring this game was.

 

• At least it was pretty.
   
   
  
• The cutscenes felt pretty last-generation, though. Almost every single one was just characters standing around talking, and occasionally doing a stock animation like raising their hands to their mouth or slowly turning their head. I mean, I realize there's only so much you can do when your game has so many cutscenes, but they could have put a little effort in. Cutscenes that last fifteen minutes at a time that are nothing but characters sitting around talking about things that aren't interesting with long pauses between lines and no lip-syncing just aren't fun.
   
   
  
• I probably wouldn't have minded the cutscenes being filled with talking heads if the story had been at least somewhat interesting. The only thing I knew beforehand about the story was that you played through the dream of a dying Frédéric Chopin. And that actually sounded interesting! Something different from most JRPGs! And then Chopin takes a backseat to a plot about magic and an evil count and magic drugs and two nations on the brink of war. Oh, and there's a band of rebels.
   
  There's always a band of rebels.
   
   
  
• This is the best scene in the game:
   
  

 
I don't get the whole 'glowing agogo' thing at all:
 

So, Prince Joffrey produces a thinly-veiled drug allegory called mineral powder that he uses to turn his loyal subjects into mindless monsters (though somehow he can still control them...) and to make the drug stronger he needs to use glowing agogos as an ingredient.
 
Which is all well and good, except no one even knows that glowing agogos exist! The forest guardians who protect the agogos mention several times that they've never seen an agogo glowing and we later find out they're the stuff of legend. And apparently they only glow around one of the main characters in the game!
 
Yet somehow Prince Joffrey knows that glowing agogos will boost the strength of the mineral powder. 
Actually, the whole game is just the main characters being led around by the events of the game and making zero logical decisions. It's the story leading the characters in the worst way possible.
 
 
Prince Crescendo is an idiot:

Watching Crescendo painfully consider starting a war in cutscene after cutscene is painful. He can't assassinate Prince Joffrey because that'd be mean and he can't start a war - even though he knows he's sure to win - because that'd be mean, too! What a dilemma!
 
And then Jazz, his old friend comes to him to ask him for help and they apparently spend an entire week discussing what to do. And then Jazz decides to give him some time to think. He's had an entire week to think about this! How much more time does he need?!
 
Oh, wait. The writers just needed to find a way to let Crescendo and Princesss what's-her-face (who turns out to have been a spy all along, but that has absolutely no bearing on the plot and barely comes up after it's revealed) sneak off when no one was looking.
 
And your party is all, "they must have gone off to Prince Joffrey to turn themselves - and the kingdom - over to him so he won't start a war at some point in the future!" Erm, what? That makes no sense whatsoever!
 
But of course that's exactly what they did.
 
And after you catch up with them they completely disappear from the story from that point. In the PS3 version, they come with you as bonus characters for the final two dungeons in the game, but they never once say anything after that point. The only time you see them again is in the background in one of the final cutscenes. 
The Jazz love quadrangle is boring:
 

Jazz is dating Claves who's secretly a spy for Prince Joffrey. Eventually she's discovered (not really, no on suspected her) which means she has to be eliminated. Jazz, understandably, barely even has a reaction to his lover's death.
 
Falsetto - Jazz's childhood friend who's secretly in love with him - on the other hand, gets so broken up about the death of her rival that she goes for a long walk and doesn't return until much later to defeat Claves's killer.
 
But I hope you weren't hoping for Jazz and Falsetto to get together, because nothing of the sort ever happens. There's one scene near the end of the game where Jazz says there's no point in holding the dead up on a pedestal (or something like that), but it just sounds like he's speaking generally.
 
Meanwhile, another character called Viola is in love with Jazz, which is revealed in the same cutscene where she decides she can never have him and gives up. Riveting stuff!
 
And that's not even mentioning the fact that you can resurrect Claves by playing an option dungeon (as if anyone would bother), but this has absolutely no effect on anything, other than giving you a twelfth party member. 
The combat system is part okay, part really annoying. I love chaining together attacks and it's really satisfying to do three special attacks in a row and completely obliterating the enemy. The light/dark system is an okay gimmick, too.
 
I hate that you only get four seconds to move around later on. There were so many times where I didn't have time to position myself properly (this is especially bad with Viola, who will completely miss enemies with her bow if she's not standing just right). The camera can be pretty terrible at times, making it easy to miss enemies or to have smaller enemies hiding behind bigger enemies in the foreground, making them really hard to attack. You can cycle through three pre-adjusted camera angles (all equally terrible), but who has the time when you only get four seconds to move around?
 
I don't like how you won't last five minutes in the game if you don't learn how to block attacks successfully. It's fine with the larger enemies where you get more time to react, but for the faster enemies, you need to memorize every single attack so you can react the moment the game tells you to block. And even that doesn't help against the faster bosses, who will just attack from behind and unleash a special attack that kills you in one shot. You later learn how to counterattack, but whether or not you're even allowed to do so is completely random and requires a different input than blocking, making it almost entirely useless.
 
I hate how the inventory works in battles. You're limited to certain amount of spots, starting out with ten spots and then unlocking more until you're at forty spots by the end of the game. Which is bad enough, but all of the good items take up more than one spot. The best healing items take up nine spots - a quarter of your inventory - making them completely useless. There are a ton of items that cause or heal status effects, but there's no room to bring them into battle. Not that using items in battle is anything but a last resort, anyway, as the game doesn't pause when you access your inventory, giving you four seconds to cycle to the correct item, making sure you're close enough to the character you want to use it on and then using it on them.
 
 
The score pieces are a terrible idea. Maybe they're fun if you're a musician, but to someone like me, it just became a matter of trying every score piece I had an hoping that one of them was the right one. "Hey, that sounded alright." "Rank: F. Booo!" Oh, shut up.
 
 
Not that you can even finish all of the score pieces as there's a lot of content that's only unlocked in a new game plus. I kept thinking that at some point I'd be allowed to travel freely to past areas, but that time doesn't come until late into your second playthrough. Not that I mind linear games, but it's so obvious that there's stuff there that you can't do at the time.
 
 
The final bosses were kind of weird:
 

They've made the fight with Prince Joffrey's second-in-command harder in the PS3 version, as you now fight Prince Joffrey at the same time as well. I eventually switched to Frederic to give myself some better healing magic (previously I'd been using Viola) and finally made it through.
 
... And then the final boss fight was against Frederic and the game decided to replace him with Falsetto. Nothing against Falsetto, but the woman doesn't know any healing magic, so that was really annoying. I nearly made it through but then I ran out of healing items. The boss was a breeze when I brought a healer with me, though. A lot easier than the fight against Prince Joffrey and his pawn. 
The ending is ridiculous:
 

So you fight Frederic for... some reason. If you lose against him, he wakes up in real life. If you win against him, he dies in real life and in the dream world, but not really because he wakes up after a while (but it's possible Polka did something to resurrect him?).
 
And then Polka sacrifices herself to save the world for... some reason. Nothing actually appears to happen after she kills herself, and she'd been close to sacrificing herself on numerous occasions throughout the game, so it couldn't have been to fix what Prince Joffrey did before he was defeated.
 
And then a younger version of Polka slowly floats down from the sky to her mother.
 
And then Frederic wakes up from being dead and gives a five-minute monologue about how awesome the dream world is and how he's never going to forget his dead sister.
 
Then Polka's walking with her mother again like she did in the fifteen-minute-long intro and then she tells her mother that she has to leave and floats up into the sky, where she ages back to age fourteen.
 
Then she floats back up from the cliff she'd jumped off to commit suicide (but it's the aged child Polka this time) and everyone's surprised and happy to see that she's still alive.
 
Finally, Frederic becomes a ghost and steps out of his body in the real world and plays the piano.
 
Fin.
 
Apparently there is an explanation that makes sense of the ending, but it's just such a mess that I don't even want to know what actually happened. It was just so bad.
 
The one interesting plot point in the game seemed to have something to do with either time travel or time loops and involved Polka somehow, but it's never explained, and I can only assume it had something to do with the nonsensical ending. 
Basically, it's really pretty but one of the most boring RPGs I've ever played. I feel like I played a different RPG from most people in this thread. :p

 

 

Started playing this today and i'm loving it. It reminds me very much of Tales of Symphonia so I can't wait to get into it more.

Well?

[Debug Mode]

...It would seem you have!

 

Not even a praise for the stellar soundtrack? No? Sir, I'm going to have to ask you politely to leave. That or pretend you liked it.

[Tales]

It's been some years since I played it but I remember liking it very much.

[Magnus]

Maybe I'll remember liking it in four years, too.

 

 

Not even a praise for the stellar soundtrack? No? Sir, I'm going to have to ask you politely to leave. That or pretend you liked it.

Nah, the music was pretty good. I just got so distracted by the horrible story that I forgot to mention it.

 

The best way to experience Eternal Sonata would probably be to look at screenshots while you listen to the soundtrack.