Eternal Sonata will torment you for eternity.
Firstly as it turns out, there is no real local play. Oh, you can still plug in two extra controllers to the console and two other people can play, each at his own ****y turn!! Make no mistake about it, this is single player disguised as a 3 player co-op. You could replicate the same "multi-player" experience by passing on the controller to someone else, when it's his character's turn to play.
Secondly, this game sucks. Bigtime. The combat is excessively button mashy and repetitive, while the encounters last somewhere between 2 to 10 minutes each. It doesn't sound like much, but believe me, that's probably about half the time it takes to win a boss battle in most Final Fantasy games. That is to say, the encounters last for ages. To make matters worse, the further you progress in the game, the more critical your block timing becomes. you can shave off most of the damage inflicted to your character by tapping the defense button when the prompt appears, which will reduce the damage taken from an enemy attack. Sadly, many of these prompts flash up for less than a second, sometimes giving you no time to react. These are much like quick-time events, only they appear and disappear from your screen faster than you can blink, and are far more common too.
Also, encounters happen quite frequently, so you can imagine how tedious it may get. some dungeons force you to backtrack or have very narrow paths riddled with monsters that block it entirely, forcing players to plow through all of them, on occasion - several times, just to get to the exit. Also, monsters respawn every time you leave and re-enter a screen, so if you took a wrong turn and reached a dead end, be prepared to fight the same enemies on your way back.
In fact, some boss fights are quite difficult, resulting in a most unpleasant situation that forces you to go back and grind a few extra levels until you are high enough to not die from a single hit combo. It wouldn't be a bad thing were it not for the repetitive nature of the combat. Every combat move goes basically like this - you run up to the target and mash the attack button until the timer for your turn runs out, or in case you are a ranged character - stand in one spot and mash the attack button many times until the timer runs out. There is of course the strategic element which is the light and shadow spells. basically every battlefield is full of lights and shadows. Characters standing in the light can only use white magic, or adversely, standing in the shadow allows you to use shadow spells and abilities. Some battle fields have moving shadows and lights, some enemies produce these effects, while others turn into different enemies when exposed to a certain element, all of which doesn't really change the same boring combat routine mentioned above.
So the combat is kinda crap, but maybe the story is decent?
Turns out the story is actually far worse than the combat and to be honest, not having a story at all would have been a much better story than this.
*spoiler alert* The story tells about Frederic Chopin, a famous Polish composer who is laying sick in his bed, apparently dreaming of the world of Eternal Sonata, in which he is looking for something. After hearing that magic users in the kingdom are destined to die a horrible death some day as part of some unexplained curse or whatever, he stumbles upon our group of "adventurers" who also happen to be going in the same direction as he is, so they join forces and go there together. So far at least, the story is consistent. But then shortly after they arrive to the city, they get ambushed by city guards and learn that the king is secretly evil. A peculiar thing considering that they should have realized it ages ago when the king's right hand man tried to murder innocent bystanders, who happened to be our protagonists too.
There are several occasions in Eternal Sonata, where the heroes recap last events and explain to each other facts about the world or the situation, that the audience has grasped years ago. They also act surprised(again) when they realize that the ruler of the land might turn out to be evil, despite being repeatedly told that he tried to invade other countries and turn them into his slavering ****es, several times in the past.
Eternal Sonata also has a habit of shoving pointless quests that have no relation to the plot even despite repeatedly mentioning that our heroes are on a strict time limit. There is a point when (and this is a spoiler, for anyone who cares) our heroes arrive at a rebel camp and are ordered to stay put for further instructions. So instead of obeying orders like any other sane person would do, they decided to help some little girl to acquire a rare flower that grows only in the most dangerous place on earth. And for what purpose? because the little girl is very sad that her old flower died. At which point I contemplated strangling myself to death with the controller cord.
Eternal Sonata(which is an ironic choice of words since the game feels like it will last forever), has so many of these baffling situations, that it's impossible to recap all of them. I'll try to recap the last idiotic cut scene I remember as best I can before my brain starts to hurt - *spoiler alert* At some point in the story, our heroes realize that there is a traitor among them. They deduct that there are only two possible people who could be traitors - one is a very old and good friend of the rebel leader, and the other is some girl who's background is rather shady since the game doesn't seem to give any details about her past. The rebel leader, as if possessing some kind of world cla$s intellect, while conversing with the real traitor, reveals to her that his suspicion lies with his best friend. Yes, it must be his best friend. I mean who else could it be? and just when I was about to lose my mind completely, the real traitor DISMISSES his accusations in what I can only call the world's greatest act of stupidity. Then the rebel leader decided to commit an even greater act of stupidity as if challenged to a duel to see who is dumber, by leaving the traitor all by herself in their ONLY PLACE OF SHELTER ON THIS SIDE OF THE GLOBE (since being a rebel usually carries some sort of wanted status among the realms) and goes off with the rest of the group for a short walk, leaving the traitor ample time to rat out their safe house's exact location to the enemy. I remember being so astounded by the accumulated mass of raw unbridled retardation, that I slammed my head against the desk.
Another thing that I find infuriatingly stupid, is the fact that Fredric Chopin - a 40 year old man, follows a 15 year old kid. It's the 15 year old kid who leads the group, gives orders, and the guy simply follows them. It also occurs that the kid is the most level headed person in the group, while the rest are a bunch of pillocks with pants on their heads.
"hey lets head down this muddy road, maybe it leads to generic village number 24, and maybe there we will find our long separated companions". Causing me to shake my head in disbelief since just a minute ago we were told that we need to make haste in a different direction. But lo and behold, there we are at generic village number 24 and we finally found our long lost party members, to which I commented "You read the script too?".
All of this would have been bad enough if it weren't for the god awful voice acting. Speaking as a person who can usually tolerate squeaky voice actors, the voice actors in this game went far beyond the call of duty, to the point when I had to play with an almost muted TV. Add to the bad voice acting the badly written dialogues, and you got something resembling a schoolyard adaptation of the Lord of the Rings.
I assume that the intention behind the making of this game was to pay homage to the great musician, especially when many segments of the game are dedicated to explaining his life story and how he became a famous composer. Though I expected something in the way of a short verbal exposition, or a clever integration of his life's story into the gameplay, not a bunch of pictures with Wikipedia quotes on them.
The ultimate Irony is that the piss poor voice acting, bad storytelling and poor combat, as well as the characterization of Fredric Chopin as a fickle minded, slightly schizophrenic imbecile who follows a 15 year old kid and does whatever he says without question, turns this "attempt" to pay respect to the great artist into a hilarious parody, and ultimately a mockery.
Though on second thought, I suspect that paying homage is the last thing on that was on the developer's mind. If they cared about the poor guy that much, then they would have at least given more thought about the plot. No. Fredric was just a fitting persona because he had a very tragic story behind him. It was the basis for an interesting story to build upon, and nothing more. He was just the means to an end, and on the way they paid a half hearted and pathetic acknowledgment to his existence, as well as the customers who bought this game.