http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/lucidity/review.html

Who knew that Lucidity would be someone that another human being would think of as a good title for a videogame?

I don't suppose this really affects me, but it was certainly jarring to see a 5.5, of all possible scores, next to the title of my pet concept.

Do not take seven courses in one semester.

I'm having fun, but... I want my role-playing game time back.

I'm relatively new to this idea of being a music student, and relatively new to the idea of being a music enthusiast (I know how to keep tabs on what's happening in the game industry, but no such skills for the music industry), but even so, I've identified Frederic Chopin as my favorite classical composer. I think that too many other composers are susceptible to creating what is ultimately "just another piece", but I have yet to find a Chopin piece I do not find unique, engaging, and heart-rending. Melodically, chordally, he's someone I'd like to emulate, although my own playing has a long, long way to go before I can even attempt some of his more difficult compositions, let alone try to create anything to rival them.

That, and with my known predisposition for Japanese role-playing games, you'd think I'd be all over Eternal Sonata. But I'm not.

Despite its unique premise, despite a combat system that does have some innovations, despite an attractive visual presentation, I just don't think it works particularly well. Many of its flaws are the sort that can be pointed to in Persona 3, a game I'm head-over-heels for, but the difference is that things like merely adequate writing, inconsistent voice acting, and overly stiff animation are the rough around the diamond. I'm not so convinced that there's much of a diamond at the bottom of Eternal Sonata.

There's no suggested subtext to characters; I don't think Beat is anything more than your typical, plucky sidekick, or Allegretto anything but your "let's do what we have to for good!" protagonist, or Polka anything but your symbol of innocence female lead. It's a little bizarre to have Chopin in there too, as one of your party characters, but once you get over the sheer unreality of it, he doesn't seem to possess anything but the generic torment that RPG characters seem prone to.

It'd be a little bit easier to stick out with the story if I was more sold on the gameplay. I will say I'm sold on the combat, but not the combat system. It's an engaging enough set-up, as it has some nice tactical implications for where it will go, but I don't know if it's deep enough to sustain a thirty hour game by itself. Usually, that's made up for in RPGs, is customization outside the combat itself which allows for character development that keeps the combat compelling. It works for Persona 3, making what might have grown tiresome after thirty hours fun well into the eightieth, but there doesn't seem to be the same infrastructure in Eternal Sonata. Changing the light dark ability does not strike me as enough depth. If this game was hard to the point of making those choices critical, maybe, but it's been too easy on me so far.

As for the much lauded visuals... they're fantastic when everything is relatively still. But it still suffers from the very common problem among JPRGs of poor, jilted animation. It's too bad, because the one thing I will not dispute is that the art direction is fantastic. But perhaps they should take my brother's advice, and study c1assical animation before they work on another RPG project; what they're doing right now isn't even close to acceptable.
I'm not saying this game is bad, but there are so many problems, and not quite enough bright spots for me to be certain that I'll finish this. I might, simply because it has redeeming qualities and according to Van'Ord's review it won't take me that long, but I'm seriously contemplating giving up on it before it ends.

I guess part of my problem is... that right now, if I was given the choice, I would flip scores between Eternal Sonata and Blue Dragon.

Blue Dragon is so far and away the better game, I don't even think they're in the same league. Now, they have many of the same problems. The writing, acting, storytelling, characterizations and animations are all similiarly suspect, but Blue Dragon has one critical element that Eternal Sonata does not: depth.
The c1ass system in Blue Dragon gives you room to play in a way that Eternal Sonata does not, and the combat system is tough enough on you to make you pay if you do not get more out of it. Playing Blue Dragon is rather... liberating, because it is not a highly rethought JRPG system, like a Persona 3, but rather, an elegant streamlining of the Dragon Quest archetype. You fight, you have healing spells, you have offensive spells, and then there are all the other abilities around them. The acquisition of those spells and abilities, the re-arraning of properties, has been done many a time before, but Blue Dragon has a way of letting you at that essence quickly, showing you what the effect of a sty1e change will be with no confusion, or showing you what one ability will provide over another, or just giving you a tough decision because equipping one item will boost different statistic than another, instead of one being flat-out better. It's a smart system.

Part of the reason I like it, though, is that it gives me something else besides a combat system to admire. I know scomer, probably the only major defender of Blue Dragon (who has since disappeared from these parts), thought that the characters were redeemably charming, and worth cheering for. I don't. I've sat through a few JRPGs where quality characters made up for some weaknesses elsewhere in the plot (Tales of Symphonia jumps to mind, though its had other qualities), and Blue Dragon is not one of them. Boring characters and a plot that goes nowhere. But! It is very pretty.

I just like the look of Blue Dragon; it feels like a chest of toys come to life. The monster designs are consistently fun to look at, and while the animation is still weak, it does not noticeably detract the way Eternal Sonata's does. I can understand many of Van'Ord's criticisms, but his dismissal of Blue Dragon's visuals as "bland", I find particularly puzzling. Maybe he played the game in a parallel universe where the charming, full-of-life character designs are considered a flaw, rather than a strength. Too much use of depth of field? Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the game is highly easy on the eyes. Moreso than most 360 games, in my opinion.

So I don't know where he's coming from on these two; neither has a particularly engaging story, but Blue Dragon is, at least, highly playable and deep, whereas Eternal Sonata just seems to be another face in the crowd.

I am grateful to the man, though, because even if we can't agree on those two games, he pointed me towards a game that I've enjoyed more than any RPG since Final Fantasy X, and that is Persona 3.

I've talked about the game before in this blog, but I don't think I've stressed enough how unusual it is for me to have played eighty hours of the game. I've got a lot of games in this house, and a good number of my unfinished ones are role-playing games. Really good role-playing games. Planescape: Torment, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy XII, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Quest V, to name some of the better ones. And despite having played all of these to varying degrees (between one and thirty hours, depending on the game), Persona 3 is consistently the game I turn to.

I don't think a role-playing game has done enough to capture my attention and generate interest in a series since playing a SNES game that I then thought of as Final Fantasy III (I remember seeing a poster for Final Fantasy VII around that time, a game I would turn out to merely like, and being enthralled at the possibility of playing a game in the same series, while despairing of my chances of getting my hands on a PlayStation). As such, with the game wrapping up, I've recently bought two games in the same series. The first I bought was the DS Shin Megami Tensei game, Devil Survivor. The Shin Megami Tensei and high GameSpot review were enough to get me interested. The second was, unsurprisingly, Persona 4. A game I played briefly just because, well, it's exciting to play more Persona, but I'll likely roll right into as soon as I polish off Persona 3. Although I might start a new playthrough of Persona 3 as well. And definitely start playing The Journey. It's entirely possible that all my role-playing hours will soon be within the Shin Megami Tensei series.

As for impressions of those games, I have not even fought my first battle in Persona 4, so I won't say anything except that it seems to have gotten the same stylish, but rough, presentation and translation as Persona 3. Devil Survivor seems to be a smart mix of SRPG and turn-based combat conventions, though I haven't delved into the system too much yet, but it's highly promising. Oh, and it's kind of nice to play the game on a system where the limited presentation abilities of the team are actually pretty high compared to what you expect out of a DS game.

It's a strange, and wonderful world, that of role-playing games, and it's just too bad that one only has so much time for them.

And if it hasn't been made clear already, I whole-heartedly recommend playing Persona 3.

Note: The c1ass and sty1e errors have not been fixed yet. This goes beyond incompetence into the realm of pathetic negligence. Get it together, GameSpot. Whatever you're having your programmers work on, it should not take precedence over fixing what's broken. And this has been broken for years, now!