Mini-Review: Eternal Sonata

As we all know, there aren't many RPGs on the PS3 at this point. There are even fewer Japanese RPGs. That being the case, I really want to like Eternal Sonata. It got some decent reviews when it was released for the 360 a year ago. As you'll see, I'm still a bit on the fence with this one.

Pros:
- A colorful world with likable characters, presented with gorgeous visuals.
- Unique story that revolves around a real-world composer - Frédéric François Chopin.
- Cut scenes between chapters that reveal the stories behinds many of Chopin's compositions.

Cons:
- Lackluster tutorials for the battle system.
- Very unforgiving difficulty right from the start.
- During battles, accidentally "activating" your character is a real problem (explained below).
- Pauses in cut scenes make the characters look and sound silly.

Don't get me wrong, the battle system in and of itself is sound. However, many problems plague it, in my opinion. First off, there's two tutorials in the whole game that don't really explain things well. Couple that with insane difficulty right from the start, and I've had more "Game Over" screens pop up in the first couple hours of game play than I ever have in any other RPG I've played in my entire life. If you don't block during battle, you will die. Its as simple as that. While that mechanic alone is questionable, you have a very, very short amount of time to hit the block button when the icon pops up above your characters' heads. I'm talking nano-seconds, or so it seems.

Also, because your characters only get five seconds or less to perform any actions during their turn, and at party level two onward the timer never stops, its incredibly easy to be blocking an enemy's attacks or moving another character the turn before and accidentally start moving the next character before you even realize it, thus starting the timer. If you don't use every second of that timer, you can't do as much damage or healing as you expect, thus the battle is tougher. It makes regular encounters that already seem as difficult as boss fights should be, become even more difficult, through no fault of your own.

I'm starting to get beyond the difficulty curve of the early game. Blocking is becoming fairly natural to me now, and battles aren't so painful, but still feel much more difficult than they should be.

Like I said, I really want to like this game, but so far I'm a bit on the fence because of the rather high difficulty that, to me, really doesn't need to be there. But, then again, some people get their kicks from making attempt after attempt after attempt at a regular enemy group. Personally, I call those people masochists.