Eternal Sonata

[Animalor]

Here's a treat...

there's a demo of Eternal Sonata that went up on XBox Live in Japan today (Japan only).

The cool thing with this is that if you make youself a Japanese account, the demo is done with the US localisation and is completely in english!

I setup a Japanese account this afternoon and downloaded it. The demo weighs in at about 534 MB's and took me all of 5 minutes to download. The game itself is absolutly beautiful(even on an SDTV) and the gameplay is quite fun.

After playing through the horrid Enchanted Arms, this one looks like an absolute winner. Apparently it's coming out on both the 360 and PS3 simul-release as well.

[Kwonryu DragonFist]

Platformer? Shoot'em up etc?

[Animalor]

JRPG.

[Animalor]

I played through the whole demo yesterday. Here are a few impressions.

Graphics are gorgeous. No drops in framerates that I was able to see and the animation is beautiful. It's a fixed camera game so you see what the dev wants you to see.

The combat system is sort of a hybrid between old school FF and FFXII was. You initiate combat by running into monsters that are visible in the exploration scenes. Then it changes, with hardly any load time, to a combat screen.

The combat is turn-based, when it's that character's turn, you get to walk him around anywhere in the field you wish. You have a time bar where you can perform any action you want within that timeframe.

So let's say you're far from an enemy and you only have a melee weapon, your turn will be mostly spent running around to where that enemy is and you may whack him 2-3 times. If you're close, then you get to spend most of your turn just beating that enemy senseless. you can use your time to heal, run around, attack or use abilities in whatever combination you see fit.

If an enemy is hitting you, between each sequence of hits you get a chance to block the attacks for less damage. If you hit the B button when it's lit up, all attacks in that attack sequence will deal noticably less damage. Failing blocks will hurt like hell.

If you get him from behind or hit an enemy from behind, no blocking is possible.

Combat is less fast and chaotic than it was in FFXII but you also don't have the option to pause it to queue action either so it does tend to become a bit chaotic and keeps you on edge.

NPC interaction in town was pretty limited but I suspect that a lot was chopped out so as to not spoil anything.

The whole affair gives a great taste for the game. Run around in the wilderness, get a good glimpse of the visuals. Reach a city have a couple meaningless conversations with people, then hit the forest, kill a boss and end of demo. There's about 30-45 minutes or so of gameplay here if you take the time to explore everything.

It looks like the game will display for the language your 360 is set to so we get all the localisation stuff in the demo if you download it to your US 360.

The demo said there was a September release for this one. Hopefully that's for NA as well as Japan cause I am definately going to be buying this one.

[Winnow]

Here's a video of Eternal Sonata Demo Gameplay.

Onions!

http://kotaku.com/gaming/onions-and-ora ... 260154.php

Looks like it could be fun although I hope there's more than onions!

[Winnow]

I grabbed this one today instead of Halo 3 off the newsgroups to try out!

I didn't get a chance to play the demo back in May.

Some initial comments:

-This game is beautious. I love the cell shading look to the characters and the environments are so brightly colored and oozing with detail. I much prefer this over the Blue Dragon (nothing wrong with BD, just a different look)

-The look and feel of the menus are outstanding as well. The game is highly polished.

-As Animalor mentioned, the combat system is very cool. It's early on, but I think it will provide for a little more strategy and interest than Blue Dragon's system. You can actually move around and the mix between live action and time bar'd movement it cool.

-There's no camera rotation at all. You're stuck with one angle while moving around but I supposed that's required for the graphics style.

-Main character is 14 years old. Other two I've encountered (played as part of the story) are 16 and 8. While they all look like anime kids, they are much more stylized and detailed than Blue Dragon...and English voices are much better IMO.

-The story, while not deep, is well narrated in English. It has a cinematic feel to it as you play. It feels like a Disney type storybook.

-I'll mention again that it's a very polished game. (important as compared to Enchanted Arms and Blue Dragon to a lessor extent) The graphics that come up as you enter various areas are pleasing to the eye and the special effects, transitions, etc are all well done.

While not too far into this, I think I'm going to enjoy playing it more than Blue Dragon. It's just more visually appealing and even though neither story seems deep, the Eternal Sonata storyline is more unique and interesting. I'm not hating on BD, it was rushed I'm sure under pressure from Microsoft to get an RPG out quickly.

This looks like a great addition for the 360's RPG genre.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platfor ... rnalsonata


Note: accept all the tutorials. It may appear that they are the same, but each one expands on the battle tactics. Left trigger zooms out the camera which helps initially as you aren't close to mobs typically at the start of a fight.

From one of the Games Reviews. A good summary for what I've experienced:

Some might dock Eternal Sonata for being a tad on the short side for an RPG (around 30 hours), but how much does that really matter? What it may lack in length, it more than makes up for in absolutely every other aspect. The battle system is addictively fun, the multifaceted story is riveting, and the graphics are amazing... we couldn't ask for much more. This is definitely the best traditional RPG for the 360 to date, and a must-have for any 360 owner, RPG fan or not.

You'll Love:

* Fun, dynamic battle system
* Creative, engrossing story
* Gorgeous graphics

You'll Hate:

* Cut scenes sometimes drag on
* Typical, stilted RPG dialogue
* Poor Achievement distribution

Here's an excellent video review of Eternal Sonata:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/24972.html

If that doesn't make you want to play it, then don't bother. : )

[Animalor]

In my obstinate "I'm not getting Halo 3" holdout, Eternal Sonata looks to be a game to get once I'm done with Blue Dragon.

I've started watching GameTrailers reviews and i'm really enjoying their format. I'll have to start paying more attention to them.

[Sabek]

When I was playing in the demo the whole light/dark mechanic seemed really cool.
When a monster goes from a lighted to dark or vice versa it may change into an entirely different monster.
Also your characters cast different spells if they are in the light versus the dark.

[Funkmasterr]

Yeah this one seemed pretty cool, the battle system and the game in general reminded me very much of "Tales of Symphonia" for the Gamecube. The only real difference is the light/dark thing. I will probably pick this up after Halo has been out for a week or two.

[Winnow]

You'll Love:

* Fun, dynamic battle system
* Creative, engrossing story
* Gorgeous graphics

You'll Hate:

* Cut scenes sometimes drag on
* Typical, stilted RPG dialogue
* Poor Achievement distribution

After playing another night, I can confirm that the cut scenes are loooooong...looooooooooong. About 60-90 minutes into the game, you defeat the first boss mob of the game. Now, up until this point, the cut scenes are all long, but this one rolls right from a cut scene, straight into the credits for the game. It seems like about six or seven minutes of watching scenery shots of places you've already seen while the game credits are popped up on screen...im not sure about the time because I fell asleep at my PC. When I woke up, the game had paused itself. I continued on and it went straight into another loooooong cut scene beginning a sequence with two different characters. The whole cut scene, to credits, to cut scene had to have been a minimum of 20 minutes, and I think it was closer to 30 minutes that you're sitting there watching the screen without having to hit a button.

You can probably hit a button and advanced through the scenes but I don't want to miss anything as they talk a lot in the cut scenes. They're well done and pretty, but long. They should have broken sequence up that a bit with a little interactive stuff.

-----

As with Blue Dragon, the battle system in Eternal Sonata doesn't crank up until an hour or so into the game. There are six levels to the battle system. When you start out. Everything is paused while you decide what your next move is. Even when you walk around in battle, the timer goes down only when you're moving. I'm now at battle level 2. Level two gives you five seconds to complete anything you can after you first move. Various attacks and spells have cast and action times associated with them so if you can get to your target and have enough time, you can get off multiple attacks. The timer doesn't start until you move though so you can sit there and think about things before you have to focus.

All characters have special light and dark attacks. You gain additional light and dark attacks as you progress and can always have 2 special attacks loaded (one dark and one light...maybe two of the same dark/light) There is an additional damage bonus modifier called "echoes". If a character uses a normal attack (swing sword, cast non special magical attack, etc), each hit adds a 1X multiplier to the echoes...so if you use three normal attacks in a row, your echo modifier will be 3X. The next time a special attack is used by anyone in your party, that special attack gets a damage modifier equal to the current echo, so in this case, it would be 3X damage. All players echoes add up and any player that uses a special attack will use all echoes. Kinda cool. You can build up some monster 12X special attacks.

Up until the tutorial that explained special attacks combined with echoes, I was using my special attack every time. Special attacks usually take a lot of time. (2.8 seconds for example, and your character has 5 seconds total to act in a turn), so if you can manage to whale away using normal quick attacks for awhile, that next special attack will be big.

So, as with Blue Dragon, I think there's a slight disservice done to the game initially as the generic level one battle system seems pretty easy but it gets more challenging from there. Battle Levels 3-6 will continue to add more challenge and combo type things.

You can heal during battle and outside of battle using various things that would be equivalent to healing potions and there are items that can rez a fallen character during battle so it's pretty easy going so far. The light/dark thing is pretty fun as some mobs will be much more powerful in light or dark so you'll want to move them around, the same with yourself to get your best attack off.

Angle of attack matters in this game which makes it interesting as you can't just fire off an attack if you're close, otherwise you'll swing at air. Ranged attacks are more lenient. I had a "charging" type mob to deal with which had a pretty well fortified front so I placed my characters enough apart from each other so that one or the other could get in an attack to the flank or rear of the mob.

This combo turn-based/real time battle systems shows a lot of promise and I think will be effective in other games.

The game is pure eye candy though. All of the interiors are unique and detailed. Nice to look at and the bright colors are a pleasant change from the browns and grays in many games today.

[Somali]

I pulled the demo down and messed with it last night. This will be a game I pick up in the near future. The only two complains I would have are the fixed camera angle, and the fact that I can't seem use magic to heal out of combat. Both of those are things I can live with.

Like Winnow, I enjoy the combat system (the demo starts you at lvl2 Battle System). Having the light/dark areas of the terrain dictate the type of specials made it require slightly more thought process than previous RPGs I'd played.