Eternal Sonata is a Japanese-style RPG that takes place in the dying fever dream of Frederic Chopin. Yes, really.

Here's the story. Chopin (the brilliant Polish piano composer) is dying of tuberculosis somewhere in Spain with his rather masculine (in real life, not in the game) girlfriend watching over him. He has a fever dream on his deathbed, and in that dream is where your adventures take place. In this world, people with terminal illnesses are capable of performing magic. Two members of your party, Frederic and Polka, are terminally ill, therefore they can throw long-range comets, heal the party, etc. It's handy to be Terminal in this world.

So you, the player, take control of up to 10 of these party members and go on adventures. Each character has their own motivation for the adventure, but it just so happens that they're all going to the same place, Forte Castle. (Yes, all the places and people have names that related in some way to music. During the game, you meet sisters Jazz and March, you fight with people named Beat, Viola, and Allegretto, and you encounter people from the country of Baroque.) The adventures take the form of a very on-rails JRPG. You walk through fantastical landscapes and ridiculously poorly designed castles and dungeons, having encounters with the monsters that live therein. This isn't a rant about standard RPG fare (why does a rat have 300 gold? Shouldn't the government clear the giant man-eating bears off the road? How long has "the only bridge between the kingdoms" been out? Why are the castle doors only able to be opened with the heart of a dragon? Who makes the dining room a maze?), but Eternal Sonata simplifies even standard RPG fare. For instance, in one of the first towns you come across a woman who, when you talk to her, says "oh woe, have you seen my husband? He dresses all in green and he ran off with my dentures! Please bring him home!" Outside of town you find the husband, who is busy stomping on the wife's dentures to shut her the hell up. That's it. You can't do anything other than listen in as he rants to himself about his wife. There are no sidequests, no strange items that you don't know what to do with, nothing like that. You just get the main quest, and off you go.

So the overworld navigation is pretty standard. There's no sidequests and most of the journeying is on rails, but there's a few branching paths, hidden treasure chests, etc. One element that I actually like is that you can see the enemies. So there's no more FFVII-style "damn I walked another half inch and here come 9 wolves that couldn't possibly fit in this hallway." You see the enemies coming, and if you touch them you fight them. There's still some craziness in that you only see one of the enemies when you normally fight them 3 at a time, so you bump up against one small harmless tiny pumpkin man and suddenly you're fighting two pumpkins the size of a short bus, plus the little harmless pumpkin man.

Once you're in combat, that's where the game really shines in my opinion. The game is a turn-based action RPG...of sorts. When it's your turn, you have a certain amount of time (known as "tactical time") to plan your next move, then when your turn starts you have a certain amount of time (known as "Action time") to move, attack, heal, or use items. It's all very exciting. Plus, like any good RPG, all your characters have different spells and attacks at their disposal. Since this is an action-style RPG, you don't have lists of 500 spells you can use. Each character has, at most, access to 4 spells during combat, and 32 items. You can carry, as a party, an unlimited amount of items, but you can only carry up to 32 of them with you into battle. This keeps the item selection quick (you only have 3 seconds of action time at one point) and forces you to prioritize.

Another very interesting part of the game is that light and dark affect the status of the party, and of the enemies. In sunlit areas, your party has access to their "light" superpowers, and in darkness or shaded areas, they have access to their "dark" superpowers. For instance, in the light, Polka is capable of healing people. In the dark, she summons comets of dark energy to smash into the enemy (which she immediately apologizes for, which is cute the first 3 times but then gets FRIGGING ANNOYING). Enemies also change based on light and dark. The aforementioned pumpkins-the-size-of-short-busses are really just normal pumpkins that strayed into the shadows. So you have to be wary of where the enemies are moving throughout the battle, and set lures for them to keep them in the areas you want them to be. Also, some enemies have lights or "darks" on their bodies that create small circles of either light or dark around them, regardless of their position. This is something you can take to your advantage, by luring a light-generating enemy to the darkness, you can get rid of some of the area where a dark-loving enemy can be. Also, your characters can step into the circles of light or dark to unleash a different special attack than they would normally have 2 feet further away. One more thing that will be a "gotcha": Enemy shadows count as darkness. You won't realize this until a boss fight when you accidentally try to heal yourself standing west of the boss and end up giving the air a stern whoop-ass.

Now the game isn't perfect (few are), so let me talk a little about what I DON'T like. First of all, the button to "skip your turn" is "press left stick." However, the left stick is used for movement, and sometimes the game thrusts a turn at you unexpectedly. Since you only have 6 seconds to fully complete your turn, sometimes you panic, jam the stick in the direction of the enemy, and very quietly take a single step and cede your turn. FanTAStic. Guess how many times that happened to me in the first chapter?

Also, the ranged combat is retarded. Both Beat and Viola are capable of ranged combat, and neither one seems to know who you want to attack. Since, again, it's an action RPG, you can't really choose an enemy from a list. Then again, since it's an RPG they can't (god forbid) give you a camera that's worth a damn when you're trying to run in precise patterns. So when you run toward the boss and hit "attack" with a ranged character, sometimes they turn and fire at another enemy that's sort of near where you may have been pointing (you can't really tell), or sometimes they'll just uselessly fire at the edge of the battle arena. Also, these ranged characters take more than a full second to switch attacks. With Allegretto in particular, I can execute 16 hits AND his special attack, since the special attack can be chained right after his normal hits. However, with Beat or Viola, I'd be lucky to get 4 hits in a round, and mostly I'm frantically smashing the "special attack" button while the camera twirls away and the character jumps around, oblivious to the fact that they're about to be eaten by a giant monster. The developers tried to fix this by really ramping up the damage of the ranged characters, but when the battle arenas are so small, your best chance is to just run up and punch the bad guys, even with the ranged characters.

So that gets the battle system out of the way. There are a few more minor annoyances, like sometimes you can't tell when your turn is coming up so you're caught unawares (which leads directly to you accidentally forfeiting your turn), and the useful aggressive items like poisons don't work on the bosses, but they are, as I said, minor. The story is pretty standard, big evil king doing evil things and no one seems to know about it except for 6 teenagers, yadda yadda. However, I got caught up in the story and managed to miss an entire town, apparently. There's one scene in which you enter town, hit an enormously long cutscene (the cutscenes are so long my controllers turned off) and then Polka starts screaming in the next zone over. You are immediately given control of your character, facing a doorway. So I ran through the doorway. Silly me, I was supposed to turn around and shop in the town first, that's the only way! Stupid.

Also, the money system in the game is pretty skewed. Beat is capable of taking pictures instead of using a special attack, and your pictures can be sold at stores. You can carry 12 at a time. The first time I walked into a store, I had $200 (representing about 30 fights). I walked out with $11,000 after selling my pictures. So really, instead of fighting all these monsters, I could just fight 2 and take their picture. Dumb.

Overall, the game is pretty great. No sidequests, no item juggling, no huge lists of magic to slog through, but it's a pretty cool RPG/Action game. The music is, of course, gorgeous, since it's mostly Chopin pieces. There's one last thing that needs mentioning before I wrap it up: Party level. Your party level is determined by your progress through the game, and it appears to be analogous to the chapter you're on, sort of. Party Level determines the number of items you can carry into battle, the number of special moves you can perform, and the amount of Tactical Time and Action TIme you have. So when you start the game, you have 10 items, 2 special movies (1 light, 1 dark), unlimited tactical time to survey the battlefield, and 5 seconds to act. By party level 3 you can carry 20 items, you get 4 special attacks, and you have 3 seconds of tactical time and 4 seconds of action time. Later party levels get even more difficult. This, combined with tougher enemies, helps ramp up the game difficulty. In almost any other RPG, you can keep the game on the same difficulty by level-grinding or min-maxing. However, in Eternal Sonata, the battle system itself gets faster and more complex as you go through the game, so actually performing "run up, attack" is more difficult. I really like this, as it keeps the game interesting.

Overall, the game gets an AWESOME from me. Great music, great art, standard but well delivered story, and interesting battle system. There are some things I would have changed, but nothing that's overly life-threatening. If you have an xbox and you like JRPGs, and especially if Blue Dragon was a disappointment (or even if you loved Blue Dragon) you owe it to yourself to check out Eternal Sonata. Just explore, have fun, and remember that there's no sidequests. None. So stop talking to townspeople, they don't give you anything but story-related data.