A pleasant little 30 hour romp for those of us who enjoy our RPGs.
The storyline is interesting enough and the characters likeable.
Combat is turn-based and some of the special attacks are fantastic to look at. However, special attacks can become a little clumsy and sometimes unresponsive later on in the game once the Y button is used to alternate between two attack moves. The attack move used is dependant on whether you tap or hold the Y button and if your timing is out, you sometimes find yourself healing your party instead of issuing a huge multi-hit combo.
In no way a ground breaking game, but definitely "casual" enough for anyone to grasp without ever becoming overly difficult to progress through. (I managed to easily get through the game's boss battles with only one party wipeout in the very early stages of the game)
By simply following the storyline and fighting every monster you encounter along the way, you will have your core party of 3 levelled high enough to take on the final boss battle and survive without any hassle. Unlike some RPG titles, I found no need to "grind" for xp to level my core team. (I decided on my fave 3 characters during the final 2 chapters of the game) All characters gain xp regardless of whether you have them set as the core team or not (however, the ones you don't use only gain 50% of battle xp) Some grinding would be necessary should you wish to have all of your characters at the same level, but there are plenty of areas in the last chapter where you can backtrack for some great xp before taking on the final boss.
I had my core team levelled to 64 and they easily took down the final boss.
Money is easy to come by too. Simply find monsters that spawn in a zone near a town with a shop, head out with camera-toting Beat in your team and have him fire off 12 decent photos of the monster as you fight it, then zone back to the town and sell the photos once they are developed… rinse and repeat.
I found that a bank balance of around 300,000 was more then enough to stock up on weapon and armor upgrades as well as 99 of each HP healing item throughout the course of the game. Photos are ranked based on quality and content. With an "average" ranked single photo fetching several thousand gold, it doesn't take too long at all to emass a decent amount of cash.
I also found healing items to be more beneficial than character's healing abilities. Just a personal preference. I found Viola's Healing Arrow and Polka's Earth Heal to be nothing special. Clovers and Snowpuffs did the job just as well, if not better. This also allowed me to slot in some of my more preferred melee characters as opposed to feeling "forced" to slot in a healer for healing's sake.
I had a great time with Eternal Sonata. The game is VERY linear, which I found a refreshing change after having just come away from the multi sidequest/mini mission based Dragon Age: Origins. And with a clear game save at the end of the game allowing further levelling, some collecting and a couple of little sidequests thrown in, I was certainly left with the desire to jump in for a second playthrough.
The final ending (all 45 minutes of it) is a little lack-lustre, but ties off any of the storyline's loose ends nicely.
A couple of years old now, Eternal Sonata is definitely worth a look. Nice eye-candy with an enjoyable storyline and a fairly solid combat system. Does nothing to push the genre forward, but does what it does well.
In one word… Pretty