This means the game goes at a pace where you are interrupted by monster encounters every few steps to make sure your party is up to scratch to fight the boss, and then follows this pace to have you repeat the same pattern throughout most of the game. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that bosses usually demand that you defeat every monster you encounter in-between, which essentially mandates grinding. This is interrupted only occasionally by a random town in which you can stop to buy additional supplies. The story segments are often several cutscenes punctuated by a linear worldmap in which you run around fighting things until you reach the next boss or story segment. The first thing that took me aback was how formulaic and grindy the setting of Eternal Sonata was. At it's core, Eternal Sonata is a great game, and I'd even go so far as to say that it could potentially be one of the best RPGs of the generation, but it's hard to say that with much conviction when much of the experience is fragmented by poor design choices. How then, this comes across to the player can be confusing, because there's a jumbled of conflicting information being fed towards the player. Fundamentally, I believe it's a great game, but it presents itself through various questionable design choices and presentation methods that seem either long-winded, or entirely unnecessary.

If you haven't played this game yet, I suggest you stop and consider if you're ever going to try this game before continuing on.Įternal Sonata is a very troubling experience for me. I'm going to talk about the plot in varying levels of detail, so there will be some minor spoilers, though I will try my best to leave out any important plot details.

So I did a very, very long write-up on Valkyria Chronicles on here a while back, and I just recently wanted to start some discussion on Eternal Sonata while it is fresh in my memory.

Eternal sonata ost unbalanced