Finished: Eternal Sonata (450th Post) |
 Pros - Amazing, beautiful artistic graphics. - Fun battle system that adjusts as you progress. - Amazing Music. - Some good characters, some interesting moral messages. - Good voice acting. Cons - Battle system too button mashy and is tiring long battles. - Guarding/blocking in battle sometimes requires in-human reaction time. - Enemy damage unbalanced/ cheap AI. - Dialog can delve too far into jaded social commentary. - Cinematics tend to have dramatic pans that drag. Now that I have broken down the pros and cons of the game I am going to delve deeper in to each of those points. Of course starting with the better points of the game. Probably my favorite thing about Eternal Sonata is the graphics. It is a beautiful game to look at and each area has a much grander scope; which is why it is too bad there is no first person camera. The battle system isn't totally unique, it plays a lot like Namco's Tales of series, but is turned based. The things I enjoyed the most was the lack of random battles, it was really nice especially when you got more powerful and didn't need to fight as much; the evolving of the fighting system is also cool, it basically gets a bit harder as you progress, but your characters get more options in the fights. There are a few good characters, including Chopin himself and even though I (will) moan about the harshness of some of the dialog, there are some cool moral messages in the dialog. Also on that note the voice acting is pretty well done, there are some annoying characters, but there are more good then annoying. Just like all games there are a few not so good things that hurt your enjoyment of the game. The first things are the downsides of the battle system; right off it is too button mashy, which isn't the worst problem in the world, but when you are fighting a boss with 10 bajillion HP for 30 minutes your mashing finger can get pretty sore. Another problem with the battles is that when fighting a lot of enemies the reaction time to hit the block button when the "Chance!" icon pops up is ridiculous. Some of them are so quick that you have to practically press the button BEFORE it pops up or you don't have a chance. This wouldn't be a problem but if you don't block the damage, especially against bosses, you are going to get destroyed. Which is frustrating to take 300 or 400 damage a hit when blocking but then take 2000 or 3000 because you couldn't react in less then a second. The enemy AI also likes to run behind you a lot, which is cheap because of the amount of damage they do when you can't block (of course you can run behind them). Now here is the part about the dialog, but thankfully this only really seems to pertain to the first half of the game, before all the characters meet. They have some pretty jaded and harsh opinions on the world and its people which I find off putting in a game with such a pretty and charming world. Finally during the cut scenes there are lot of dramatic pauses in dialog for pans that seem to last forever and close ups of character's mouths which while artistic are not interesting in the long run. I put off the game which might have taken me less than 25 hours to finish, but I decided to try the bonus dungeon and that added another 5 hours or so to my time, I didn't actually finish it even because I didn't feel like attempting the final boss for 45 minutes of button mashing only to lose. I probably will tackle that some other time. It isn't the longest RPG, but I think that it is a pretty good length for the game. It is a good game, I enjoyed it in the end and I recommend it if you like RPGs and have a 360. That is it for today, before I go though I want to mention that this is the 450th post here on Now Loading and I am sure that I will hit 500 before the year is up. When that does hit I will have something special, but that is a long way off. The next time I will talk to you is Saturday with NLU Weekly #72, so I will talk to you then. Loading Complete! |
POSTED ON APRIL 25, 2008 |
