Eternal Sonata: Video Game Review (PS3)

Eternal Sonata is a role-playing game released on Playstation 3 and developed by Tri-Crescendo. The role-playing game has really fallen out of favor these days, but there's still quite a few of them around. Let's talk about Eternal Sonata.

Story : I really want to say nice things here. I really do. However, there's absolutely nothing engaging here story wise. The characters are uninspired, the plot is very simplistic and cliche, and the development starts out promising but totally falls flat on it's face. A really disappointing affair unfortunately. There's a ton of repetition in this game. The cinemas are skippable, which can be a plus if you totally abhor this game's story. Which I do.

Graphics : The graphics are all basically middle ground here. Nothing will totally blow you away, but there's nothing awful either. Plenty of it is animated quite well and draw good too. Unfortunately, compared to the graphics of other games being released it's just not enough. The bar for graphics is just getting higher and higher, and this game doesn't really deliver but doesn't totally bomb either.

Sound : Not surprise here, but the English voice actors are total crap compared to the Japanese actors. Consider yourself warned. If I didn't have the option to use the Japanese voice track, I'd consider this game unplayable. It's that bad. The music is really excellent, as it should be with a title like Eternal Sonata. The sound effects are all good as well. Sound wise, if you enable the Japanese voice actors the game is really quite excellent. With the English, you may as well just not play the game.

Game play : The game gives you fun by the boat loads. First of all, if you choose to do this game multi player style, I promise you will love it. There isn't anything to dislike there. The fighting is really easy to pick up. Anybody who's played an RPG before, which is most of us, will pick up this game very easily. There's turns, there's bad guys, there's strategy, and it's all done perfectly. If you've ever played Vandal Hearts, you'll be familiar with attempting to strike the back of your opponent. Every character automatically blocks to the front of themselves, which opens up another cool part of strategy. It's hard to say why the game play is so good. They really just executed everything perfectly. Things that are annoying in other games are all basically fixed here. Instead of drastically altering the formula, this game takes what's tried and true and really keeps it functional and fun.

Re playability : The game isn't very re playable unfortunately. You'll see all there is to see in one play through, and altering the difficulty level doesn't really make you want to play the game again.

Overall : 7/10. Great game play, great sound, re playable, awful story.