Eternal Sonata First Impressions
Eternal Sonata is the latest beautiful-looking RPG from Namco/Bandai. In some ways, I sort of understand what it’s like to be a Star Wars fan now. I see shots and hear plot synopsises of previous works from the studio and get all excited, despite being disappointed with previous efforts from the same studio. I eagerly rush out to buy the title and then discover that I’ve actually bought a particularly beautifully-illustrated copy of The Berenstein Bears. I get annoyed with it, declare I’m done with the studio, and then the screenshots of the next project come out, at which point I get excited again, rinse, and repeat. I’ve finished the first few chapters of the game and find myself creeping forward with the story, but unless there is a radical change of tone coming soon (not entirely unprecedented in a Namco title), there isn’t a lot of reason to keep playing.
The game is a typical RPG — you and your friends are setting off to right great wrongs and save the world by fighting progressively more-difficult monsters, aquiring items, and occasionally deciding that the world-saving can wait while you go on a sidequest. The twist to this game is that the entire world takes place in the dream that Frederic Chopin (the 19th century pianist composer) has as he lies dying in his apartment in Paris. In his dream, he meets a young girl named Polka and the two of them go on a journey to make her world a better place. The game promises a deep, existential theme revolving around the concept of perception verses reality, and some of the most gorgeous graphics yet for an RPG. While many may consider this game to be the ultimate triumph of form over function, the game’s ambitious attempts to create a game that’s simultaneously fun, deep, and educational excels at none and instead does a tepid job with all three.
Characters
The first and most glaring problem with Eternal Sonata is Polka. As the first character you meet, she’s the female lead. She has a terminal illness, the symptoms of which are the ability to use magic. I believe the terminal illness may be some sort of rheumatoid arthritis, as she is completely unable to place her arms flat by her side and minces about the entire game. Because she has a terminal illness, she doesn’t have any friends because they’re afraid of being infected, but she has a good heart and endures the abuse and scorn of strangers with the sad expression of a Margarete Keane painting and about as much depth. Her obstinante desire to do good and turn the other cheek may have been an attempt to create a sort of female Christ figure, but just comes off as that sad unpopular kid in middle school who would endure the worst sort of abuse in the futile attempt to find friends.
The true pathos of Polka is her complete lack of self-respect and self-worth. She is the ultimate expression of high romantic pathos: The opening cutscene has Polka standing on the edge of a cliff, pumping herself up to jump off of it by declaring that she will do this for him and that her life is nothing compared to his. Then she falls backwards. Flash back to her childhood, where Namco makes a compelling case against homeschooling by showing a young Polka walking with her mom through a field of flowers asking why the ocean has waves in it, and the mom declares that the oceans make waves because the moon is so beautiful and that it’s important to kill yourself when the waves get too high because it will win you the love of the person you care about the most. Seriously. It was the worst attempt at metaphore I have ever. read. So now you know why Polka is so eager to kill herself — her mom has been drilling it into her that her life is pretty much only about as important as she’s beautiful and can kill herself for some boy.
Polka plays the distressed maiden quite a bit, she runs off into the forest and screams and then has to be rescued from a boss, she’s completely ineffective in battle — she charges around with an umbrella like some weepy-eyed John Steed and every time her turn is over and she’s actually managed to damage an enemy she apologizes to it. Her lack of self-preservation is off the charts. It may be that later in the game she goes through some sort of awakening and realizes that people who are mean to you for being sick are assholes and that it’s not worth your time trying to change them, or that creatures trying to kill you are not worth apologizing to when you defend yourself, but somehow I doubt it.
The good news is that after a painful first two chapters, other female characters begin to appear — and while they aren’t exactly perfect examples of self-aware, independant women, they are definitely better than Polka.
The only other thing I have to say on the matter of characters in the game is the following:
Themes
As mentioned already, the game has a series of themes. The expressed theme of existentialism is the one that the writers try to belabor — that Chopin’s death is really just a transference of realities. Rather than write about these things well, the game prefers to enter into long, stilted dialog scenes where characters repeat, over and over again, how they feel about themselves, other people, and important issues. And the cutscenes are not scarce. You can easily trade cutscenes for playtime equally.
This, along with Polka, is the absolute death-knell of the game. It seems that you spend as much time watching painful cutscenes as you do playing the game. There was no trimming of shots, they planted the English voice actors in front of the monitors and told them to match the script with the screen, so there’s a good 2-3 seconds between someone finishing their starting thought and the other person actually interrupting them. The dialog is the most naive, simplistic drivel I’ve read since… well, the last Namco RPG I played. They spend long minutes belaboring the daring truth that friendships and trusting people is good, and predjudice is bad. They don’t bother to qualify the position that taxes are bad, but then they start into a theme of hippie drugs made from plants are good whereas manufactured drugs involving minerals (possibly crystals) are bad and will turn you into a terminally ill monster. So I give them points for that. Put down the meth and pick up a doobie, for Frederic Chopin!
There is some educational content of the game, if you want your kid to learn anything about the life of Frederic Chopin, then this might be a good game for them, if you don’t mind them thinking that Chopin was a bishie emo goth kid who fought people with an elaborate conductor’s baton. Between chapters will be snippets of his life with George Sand, the November Uprising, and the illness that eventually took his life.
The first educational cutscene is about Sand, a masculine woman that Chopin shared his life with. She was a french novelist and feminist, and despite being a little knocked over that she was, in fact, a woman, Chopin got over his initial aversion to her limited femininity and the two became very close. She was with him to the end, and did all she could to comfort and aide him. The game pays tribute to this touching lovestory and feminist icon by populating the game with a bunch of ultra-femmy weepy-eyed waifs like Polka. With it’s emo sentimentality and lush world, Eternal Sonata looks for all of it more like a Baudelaire poem than a Chopin etude. This contemporary of Chopin said of Sand: “She is stupid, heavy and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of janitresses and kept women… The fact that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation.” So there you have it.
Game Mechanics
When you are actually get a chance to play the game after spending a few hours watching cutscenes, you will find that combat isn’t the most audacious system invented. There’s a general clunkiness to it that makes it difficult to manage at its worst and boring at its best. Add to that some balance issues with roaming creatures between chapters and a failure for special attacks to scale with the character, a difficult character management screen, and an inability to have more than three people in your encounters at a time, and it doesn’t really make the game very fun.
Here’s a sample:
As you can see, combat is taken in turn. The left side of the screen is an action meter, which tells you how much movement or attacks you have left in your turn. You can block enemy attacks, and keep a half dozen items in your inventory for healing and resurrecting as necessary.
Like most RPG battle systems, simple attacks can be combined together and finished with a special attack, allowing you to build up power for a good finish.
The battlefield will be divided into light and dark areas, and navigation of allies and enemies between these areas will change their abilities. For example, if Polka or Chopin are standing in a light area they can cast a healing spell, whereas if they’re standing in a dark area, they will cast an attack spell. So far my biggest gripe with the battle system is how little control you have over your targets. With melee characters this isn’t a big deal because you just walk up and start wailing. But if you’re trying to heal someone, the computer will automatically try to heal the person who is in the most need of healing, unless you’re too far away from that person, in which case you won’t heal them at all. And there’s no good indication of where that line is. The feature also plays a part when your ranged attack pick a target. My best advice for the game is simply to stock up on healing and resurrection items and do your best.
You will find that each area usually doesn’t have more than two types of enemies, if that, and a boss. So there’s very little each segment can offer except blatant grinding for experience. For a game as taken with itself about how physically beautiful it is, I’m disappointed that they couldn’t have given a little more variety in the wandering monsters.
Conclusions
Well, I’m still playing the game, which I think says more about my own masochistic pride than the game itself. It is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, until someone opens their mouth. Between the horrible faceplant for feminism, the clunky dialog and combat, and the labored themes, the game really doesn’t offer much for the gamer. It takes hours and hours of play to even get started… I’m still not to any decent place where I can start on sidequests.
If the game changes things up and gives me a reason to perform a mea culpa, I will do so without hesitation, but I’m just not seeing that. So I will finish this review with a quote from the Robot Devil: “Your lyrics lack subtlety! You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!”
October 6th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Your discussion of Polka reminded me of some excerpts from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor on 19th century conceptions of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was apparently considered a romantic disease to have. It was a mysterious illness for which there was no cure at the time, meaning that the tubercular person faced an imminent, tragic death. At the same time, the tubercular person could still be productive, which led to myths about the disease enhancing the spontaneity and creativity of artists, with the tubercular patient receiving a final burst of inspiration and productivity right before death. I’ll quote a paragraph from Sontag:
And, of course, tuberculosis is what Chopin is dying from in the game. So it seems like the game’s trying to evoke that 19th Century attitude towards tuberculosis. Still, authentic or not, I’m not sure how much we in the 21st Century need a return to 19th Century romanticizing of wasting diseases.
October 6th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Not having read the Sontag article in question but having studied Vic Englad pretty extensively… I suspect it was more a function of the Victorian obsession with class than it was with the sense that a tubercular person was endowed with certain powers. Instead, when a person whose class worth was considered above a dirty, wasting disease like TB, the apologists had to rush out and proclaim that this disease was affecting the countess by giving her super-artsy powers… not like that trashy whore dying in the gutter whose TB was simply another indication of her depraved life.
October 6th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Well, can’t it be a little of both?
I mean, the Sontag article is fairly long (89 pages), so I left a lot out in distilling it down to what I thought was the most relevant point to the discussion. She touches on class a bit in the discussion, too, but she addresses a lot of the different metaphoric lenses through which TB was viewed.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Dammit. I so hoped that it’d be good. The 360 needs a good RPG. Guess I’ll just keep waiting for the next Megami Tensei game. ’cause the current one? Wins. So much win.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
On the game, ech. The battle system looks clunky and unpolished. And the voices, oh god, the voices! Please make them shut up! I don’t want to hear Polka apologizing to every enemy she strikes with her dark magic, or Chopin (?) crying out the attack name every time he swings his sword.
On the TB discussion and the romanticizing of wasting diseases, it’s an interesting parallel to draw to Eternal Sonata. I don’t disagree with the view that some disease like TB would be seen as a blessing and a curse to a higher class, because with every disease comes some sort of mental state that deviates from the normal. I don’t think that the writers of Eternal Sonata were explicitly drawing a parallel between the Sontag article and the modern age, rather it feels like a coincidence, or at least a possible viewpoint of analysis. I say this because we’ve already had games in the past with the protagonists living in a “dream world”, like NiGHTS, because of some “real world” circumstance.
Now, going back to how much we as a society need to return to the status of upholding diseases as a romantic ideal… I believe we already do that, to an extent. How many hospital dramas do we have on television nowadays and in the past? How many movies with a character, primary through tertiary, have some sort of disease that has become a central plot point to the storyline? There is something about diseases that makes the rest of the healthy populace wonder if there really can’t be some sort of upside to the pain. More generally, altered states of mind are very popular fodder for media in general: Russel Crowe’s character in “A Beautiful Mind”, the artist in “Heroes”, and Chopin in this game show a sort of fascination with the mind deviated from the normal and sane, with the viewer/player expecting to find a sort of exoticism in the disease that the characters suffer from. “What would it be like if this were me?” is a question that the writers could be shooting for.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:35 am
And I thought Colette was bad.
I don’t have a 360, which makes it a moot point, but I wouldn’t pick up Eternal Sonata based on this review. Thanks a lot for all your work. I hope it does start to rock, but perhaps that is a meager hope.
I bet, at the end, Chopin recovers from his oh so very Bronte illness and finds new meaning in life [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjhSp7xGsMc]scoring Halo 3[/url].
October 10th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Thanks for the review; the game looks beautiful, but if the combat is uninspiring and the characters are annoying (and it sounds like they are), I’m not sure if it would be worth my time. I have to admit, I’ve about had it with female characters who apologize for hurting their enemies (male characters never seem to do this, for some reason.) I remember being annoyed with that in Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria, where Alicia kept saying how much she was sorry at the conclusion of each battle. It just made me want to go back and play the original again; sure, Lenneth may have been overly dogmatic and duty-bound, with an unfortunate confidence in the efficacy of violence as a dispute-resolution technique, but at least she didn’t have a tendency to express regret at smacking down the forces of evil.
Also, in light of Moira’s comment, I would pay money to see what Atlus would do with the directive “create an RPG based on Frederic Chopin’s dying dream of a world where the terminally ill possess magical powers.” A cameo appearance by Raidou Kuzunoha the 11th is not strictly necessary, but would result in bonus experience points for the development team.
Finally, I suppose this is as good a place as any to recommend The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers, a historical fantasy which offers a novel explanation for why so many of the famous Romantic poets suffered from wasting diseases.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Can anyone think of any games where men are expected to sacrifice themselves for women? I’m sure there’s one or two, but I can’t really think of any.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:29 am
The only such game I can think of off the top of my head is Xenogears, although in that case it’s a father sacrificing himself for his daughter, which is probably a special case.
Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis does have a designated Sacrificial Girl, but permits the protagonist to die in her place if she’s not present during the final battle; there are minor variations on the ending depending on whether she’s not there because she wasn’t included in the battle party, or because she’s already dead. Unfortunately, I suspect that’s also not quite what you’re looking for, as it’s not presented as a conscious choice, and whether or not Sacrificial Girl survives is treated as somewhat incidental. On the other hand, if you want the “good” ending, complete with epilogues for all the major characters, you have to let her sacrifice herself.
The original Valkyrie Profile had quite a few male characters who willingly die to protect or help women. Of course, that’s a slightly different situation, since in VP, dying is a necessary prerequisite to becoming a playable character, and “dying to protect a woman” has a long history as a convenient narrative shorthand for “being heroic.”
Finally, since I was just playing Final Fantasy X yesterday, I’m obligated to point out that the guardians are expected to die for their summoners if necessary. On the other hand, given that it’s painfully clear from the beginning that said summoners aren’t expected to survive fighting Sin, the end result is more of a “men and women expected to sacrifice themselves for a particular woman until that woman has the chance to sacrifice herself.” While I think it results in a more compelling narrative than, say, Aeris’s sacrifice in Final Fantasy 7, it’s not really the sort of gender-role-reversal you’re talking about.
Talking about FFX brings up another question, though: in how many other games is the concept of self-sacrifice treated with ambiguity and skepticism?
October 12th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
In several of the endings to Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Laharl attempts to kill himself to bring Flonne back to life. (Different endings show Laharl’s attempt leading to different consequences.)
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:04 am
Fatal Frame/Project Zero focuses heavily on ritual sacrifice, the cannon ending of the first game has Kirie the ghost of the rope priestess taking her place in front of the hell gate to keep it bodily closed forever, the building is starting to collapse all around them and Miku’s brother (Miku’s the main character and has been trying to find/save him through the game) decides that he will stay behind with Kirie so she wont be alone, even though this means he dies in the collapsing mansion
Second game involves twins as the main sacrifice, two boys, Itsuki and his brother go through with the ritual(where Itsuki has to kill his brother) so that the female twins Sae and Yae don’t have to do it.
In the third games the only men I know of being sacrificed are the men who built the shrine, who were sacrificed and put into the building.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:11 pm
It’s interesting that the other reviews I’ve seen have been generally positive…
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/trustybellchopinnoyume/review.html
http://www.rpgamer.com/games/other/xbox2/trustybell/reviews/trustybellstrev1.html
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/819/819923p1.html
I guess they’re not feminists.
/me shrugs
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:27 pm
(shrug)
Some people like mushrooms. I think they’re gross. Linking to a bunch of reviews about how great mushrooms are isn’t likely to change my mind.
Except for the green mushrooms that give you an extra life. Those are pretty cool.
Come to think of it, that was peyote. And now that I’m remembering that night, it didn’t end well.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Thanks to XBox Live, which enables my video game-related stalking of my friends, I see you’ve played some more Eternal Sonata. Is it getting any better?
October 29th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
nope. It’s actually becoming a chore to play.