You've Got to Give Them Points for Trying

Recently, gaming has been suffering from a lack of original ideas. Most of the biggest-selling games, much like the highest-grossing movies, have been sequels of already successful franchises. Eternal Sonata strives to be a fresh breath in the RPG market, but it's the type of game that proves you can have all the great ideas in the world, but if you don't execute it doesn't mean much. Ultimately, the game turns out to be a lot of half-baked ideas that provide a solid foundation, but never pay off in the end.

Dude, Death is Like, Totally Trippy.

The basic storyline of Eternal Sonata is that as famed composer Frederic Chopin lays unconscious, racked by tuberculosis he drifts off into a wondrous dream world. In his vision, people who are near death are granted the power to use magic. It is with this premise we meet Polka, a young girl who, though terminally ill, is still trying to make ends meet by selling floral powder medicine in a local city. Things aren't going well however, as Count Waltz, the ruler of the kingdom has placed severe taxes on all goods other than mineral powder, a supposed wonder drug that masks its more sinister side effects. Frederic and Polka set out together to try and speak with Count Waltz in an effort to make him change his tune, (hehe, I made a music pun and didn't even realize it, I'm so clever) and meet a motley crew of supporting characters along the way. As you can tell, the game relies heavily on musical terms for the names of its characters and locales, and it's definitely a hit and miss proposition. Some names are clever and unique (Allegretto, Falsetto, Tenuto), while others are downright stupid (Beat, March, Ritardando). Seriously? Ritardando? How am I not supposed to make fun of that? No, no, I refuse to make a cheap joke about mental handicap; I'm too mature for that. Now, if they had named it *BLEEP*sville instead, then I'd be all over it.

It's nearly impossible to describe the story beyond the first few hours, as from that point on it devolves into a mess of philosophical musings, convoluted storytelling, and unsatisfying conclusions. None of the characters' objectives or intentions are ever spelled out very well, and for the most part the party just seems to float from objective to objective with no real sense of purpose. Inter-dispersed within the main story are scenes of Chopin on his deathbed and lengthy still-motion landscape pictures, with

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