So after a lot of procrastinating and getting distracted by other junk (Lego Batman?!), I finally beat Eternal Sonata (Mysterious Unison included). Probably the weirdest/most ridiculous ending of all time. (this is a really disjointing, all over the place ramble.)
I will admit, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the game from the get-go. I’m not big on massively long cutscenes in games – especially when they’re pretty constant. They just distracted me from the game – having to stop every 30/60 minutes to watch a 15-20 minute scene was not what I wanted. I wanted to play a game, not watch an animu movie! I also found that the dialogue was really overly poetic – using a lot of fancy/strange similies to describe life/flowers/mineral powder/fighting. I don’t mind that especially but having to read something like that while I’m already irritated about sitting through the 3rd cutscene after an hour of gameplay – barf. The real-life Chopin scenes were always kind of unnecessary – I’m sure they were interesting to someone, but I just didn’t care. I love classical music and I’ve read a lot about composers on my own out of personal interest, but these bits were just dumb and, to me, threw off the pace of the game (yet again).
The music was phenomenal, though, which I guess is to be expected of a game with a pretty huge musical basis. Motoi Sakuraba is one of my favourite video game composers (Valkyrie Profile is one of my favourite gamez), so that alone kept me playing until the end. That, and the absoluely gorgeous graphics – the backgrounds are beyond beautiful and INCREDIBLY detailed. The characters were also adorable and had awesome outfits, although Claves/Falsetto (Claves especially) have ridiculously long, creepy legs.
The battle system was also good – I liked the idea of no MP, but special attacks instead. I especially enjoyed later party levels when you get to use Harmony Chains (chaining your special attacks to do maximum damage) to absolutely rape enemies. Taking away tactical time/overall movement time also added to the difficulty in an interesting, yet not irritating way.
The bonus dungeon, Mysterious Unison, did turn the game around a bit for me. I LOVE dungeon crawlers/grinding, and this dungeon was great for that. The maze aspect was decent, too. The only downside was the sheer size of the dungeon – I’m a bit slow, but it took me a good 3-4 hours to beat the goddamn thing (but it was worth it). It brings up another small complaint about the game – the overall difficulty. I was able to coast through the game with relative ease, not grinding too much but never having an issue with enemies. Once you get access to Mysterious Unison, though, your levels skyrocket, while enemy strength is pretty relative to what you were fighting regularly (for me, at least – I was level 69 when I went to the dungeon). Doing this dungeon did make the end boss of the game way, way too easy though.
The ending of the game is my biggest issue – it makes very little sense and is pretty confusing. I admit I didn’t play the game with any sort of regularity and did go a couple months at a time without playing, but my memory is pretty decent. I still had next to no idea what was going on. That, coupled with the fact that the ending is 45 goddamn minutes long. Part of my confusion does stem from the fact that I played the game with japanese voices on, yet come the ending, they didn’t subtitle half of end sequence? so I had to youtube after the fact to figure out what they had said – costing me even more than the 45 minutes of the actual ending. Why would you subtitle the rest of the game yet.. not the ending? or even warn that the ending wasn’t subtitled? What a huge inconvenience.
Overall, the game was pretty meh, so I probably won’t ever play it again. I know the game is pretty well-loved by all, but I just couldn’t get into it like I had hoped. My husband is going to give it a go so I may watch him play and see if that changes my perspective at all – but I doubt it.
