Eternal Sonata

Simply love this fascinating JRPG. There's lot of different caracters with their own abilities. At first fights are quite a bore but after 'bout 10 hours everything becomes much more interesting!
Most of all, soundtrack and setting are magnificent.
Try it!

I am a huge RPG fan, I enjoy the pacing much more than your standard shooters and am one of those geeks that really gets into the Final Fantasy games with all the laughter and tears that involves (blush). Anyway, Eternal Sonata is much in the same vein as it's superior big brother but it manages to be surprisingly original and endearing all at the same time.
One of the most important things in an RPG is going to be story and there's buckets of it here. Given, sometimes it can be told in a little bit of a childlike way and really does labour on some dullish points (we all hate taxes kids) but it does a good job of explaining character motivation and how intricately intertwined they are. Some of the cutscenes can be a bit laborious to get through but it's all there for a reason so just enjoy it. One of the coolest features is shown at the end of the chapter, there's a mini history lesson on the life of Chopin, personally I love this, I play the piano and quite a lot of Chopin and it's really interesting for me to find out where the motivation for some of his music came from. I will add here, this is specific to me and some might find this really boring but this is a game trying to teach you something as you play and that really has to be commended, I've certainly never seen it before and it's got to be a good thing.
Gameplay is very much standard RPG fare. Set amount of characters in battle, set amount of time to move and a handfull of attacks to choose from. It's nothing out of the oridnary but works quite well. I have found, on occasion, that some of the monsters you fight can be a little bit unbalanced in as much as you can be nailing a goat one minute only to take 2 steps and be pwned by some massive dragon. It's fine though, after a bit of a rant you'll be back trying again. Something I love here is the fact that battles can be fought multiplayer stylee. This is fantastic as I love a good RPG, my cousin isn't generally a fan and there's not a whole bunch of same screen multiplayers to choose from on PS3 but this has fared very well with us and we're both way too critical for our own good usually. Basically, you can assign characters to controller 2 for battles if you want to, it's a nice little feature and this game has benefitted from it masively in my opinion.
Not much more to add really, it's a solid littlebig game with a nice story, very decent characters and a good measure of education. If you like an RPG, you can't really go wrong here, it does its job well, the only thing I could pick up on is that sometimes the tone can be a bit childish but once you're past that and in your 5 year old head again, the game's ace.

It may just be me....depending on what type of games you like you may tottally disagree with my opinion of this game...

but being that i love games that look good and love the adventure aspect of games....this is deffinatly one of the best games ive played in a long time....

it just takes you to another world.....abit like final fantasy does where the game looks so amazing you just get lost in it.....theres so many different playable characters and so many different types of levels the cities the story all of its amazing....

mind you i had been starved of a good looking rpg game being that i only own a ps3 so maybe thats why i enjoyed it so much.....

infact when i get a new tv and an hdmi cable im going to buy this game and play it all over again....

I have read loads of mixed reviews on this game, but i think its really entertaining. Granted, the battle scenes can get repetative, but other than that the graphics are good, the story line is good, though a bit wishy washy at times and the game play is good.

Overall, im glad i played it and would recommend it.

I picked up this game a couple of months ago and have not been able to put it down since. The battle system is one of the most user friendly systems i have come accross in recent years, easy to learn difficult to master.

The graphics are phenominal. Every detail on the landscape has been lovingly created and it all comes together extremely well.

The storyline grows from nothing more than a simple backseat plot to something that makes you question your own beliefs. It really makes you want to keep playing, and allows you to connect really well with every character in your party.

The music is, of course, nothing short of perfect. Every musical score for every scene fits in perfectly.

Overall, i would give this game 6 out of 5! In my opinion, it's the best JRPG to be released since the Playstation 1 era and should be picked up by anyone with even a remote interest in the genre.

I am a huge fan of RPG games but this game was a little dissapointing. Sure it looked great but I expect that from any PS3 game otherwise I might as well buy it for my PSP. The dialogue seemed really fake and the story even more so. It was the kind of dialogue you'd find ina kids TV show but things like this i can usually overlook.
My main issue was the repetitive game play. I have come to expect random battles in RPGs and like them usually but in this game it seemed I was fighting the same battles with the same moves over and over again. The moves list was limited, the weapons and armour didn't do anything spectacular and after I had completed it I traded it in straight away without even bothering to go to the bonus dungeon as i was bored of the gameplay. There were no decent mini games either which usually help to break the monotony of random battles.
All of this aside the game has it's moments. Chopins life story thrown in at various points is a nice distraction and his music is always appreciated when played in the game.
If you are expecting a game in the realms of of 'Oblivion' or 'Final fantasy' you will be very dissapointed. this game presents many good ideas but fails to fully capitalise on any of them.

I bought this game after reading a number of positive reviews on various gaming websites and I must say that I am disappointed.
I am no stranger to JRPG's, but I do feel that this is a particularly weak release.

First, the good points:

It is a beautifully presented game. The cel-shaded characters and environments are rendered fantastically.

Also, the musical score is something special, and that is aside from the Chopin that ends each chapter.

On to the negative:

The game plays a lot like Final Fantasy, with the user selecting three members to fight out of a sizeable roster of characters. However, the gameplay is extremely repetitive. It consists of using a normal attack repeatedly until you build up enough Echoes to make a powerful special attack, then rinse and repeat. Sometimes you might want to move into the light or shadow to change what special attack you use, but most of the time you'll just run up behind the nearest enemy and smack them about until they die. Interspersed with this are boss fights which are abnormally more difficult than standard fights. I came across an annoying feature on a number of occasions in which a save sphere was placed some distance away from a boss fight, so you had to repeat an entire section to get back to where you were before.

The voice acting is ok, typical lost-in-translation Japanese nonsense provided by Americans who do an excellent impression of an annoying child. But the voice acting will eventually start to grate because of....

THE CUTSCENES!! I play RPG's mainly for the story and character development, and I love a good story. Despite this, the amount of bloated, overlong cutscenes in Eternal Sonata is astounding. You'll often find yourself sitting through 7 minutes of cutscene, too scared to skip it in case you miss some crucial plot point, only to find out it's seven minutes of some minor character wittering on about how they want to be a flower when they grow up. It's soul destroying whenever plenty of games manage to get an excellent story across without having a 20 minute cutscene in which a character reveals he doesn't like dancing. I have plenty of time for the whimsical nature of JRPG's, but this one takes the mickey.

As for character customisation, there is none. Picking up new weapons and armor will upgrade your stats, but your character will always look the same, whether in roaming mode, or in fights. No possibility of customization exists whatsoever.

These are just the main issues, there a few minor bugbears that I won't mention here.

I think that this game garnered positive reviews simply because it is one of the very few RPG's available on the PS3.

Simply, if you like RPG's with a strong, well delivered story and gameplay that really requires you to think, the Eternal Sonata isn't for you. If, on the other hand, you like repetitive fighting and a linear plot, get this game.

I consider this game a masterpiece, starting from its wonderful Soundtrack with the addition of Chopin's pieces, its stunning cel-shading graphic, so that it doesn't seem this game came out more than a year ago on Xbox360, but I think that its peak it's reached with the story, starting slowly but increasing as you go on with the game, facing battles with a nice and quite original battle system, to arrive at the beautiful end...I'm going to play it another time just to see the other ending,and I'm sure i won't get bored at all...
A game that I reccomend to all Rpg fans,because it has some kind of fashion and magic that I did not find in any game but Chrono Cross...

This game is amazing the scenary and colours and characters just everything is so cute and amazing at the same time. All i want to do is play!!
I recommend it to any rpg fans! And even yr not rpg fan i think youll like it!

Beautiful scenery, even more beautiful music. An all familiar turn based battle system which starts off pausing between actions but as your party level progresses switches to real time which lets you ease into the game slowly if you're not a seasoned rpg player.

The voice acting was good which you can listen to in either english or japanese. The characters were believable and not annoying which is always a plus

Educational as well as you get little cut scenes during each chapter which details the real composer chopin's life. I found this added to the game emmensly.

The ps3 version has new costumes, characters and an additional dungeon which has made me buy this version rather than the xbox360 version.

Even if you dont like computer games, you should buy this if only to switch it on and listen to the music