I liked the demo of Eternal Sonata also, but the full game turned out to be drek. Eternal Sonata is the most deceptive game I've played this year. For the first two or so hours, I was enjoying myself. The art direction is beautiful despite the technical achievement of the graphics being below what's expected of a HD-console and the soundtrack is simply wonderful and I don't just mean Chopin's original pieces. I even put up with the cutscenes that was filled with inane dialogue in hopes that there would be some silver-lining of the reason why I'm traveling in Chopin's dream, and I liked the battles at first.
However, as I progressed through the game the flaws became more apparent.
First of all, this game is extremely easy. I heard people complain that the X360's other JRPG of the year, Blue Dragon was easy. Well, this game is my first-RPG easy. I never worried about dying in this game, I never needed to use any stat-altering items to buff-up my party, the enemies gives you a crapload of an experience, your character receive a crapload of HP, and I didn't need to worry about constantly healing my party members every few fights. The good thing is that there is no need to grind and many battles can be avoided provided you a fast enough to manuver around your enemies.
This is great because the battles will become repetitve as there isn't any real, deep strategy most of the skills your characters gain are worthless and only there to prolong the already easy battles you will encounter. Before this game was released, people speculated that music will play a role in the battles. It doesn't--unless you count the weapons-musical instuments hybrids your party members carries. You gain Party Levels after defeating a plot-point boss, meaning the rules to the battles will change in an attempt to make them more challenging in to spuce up your comands. For example you are unable to counterattack until your party level is at level 3. Late in the game, you will have a chance to actually combine attacks with other characters, this isn't nearly as great as I thought it would be since it happens
near the end of the game. Thus, this probably would have been more cool in a New Game +, assuming you want to play this game all over again. I should mention that there are a total of 10 enemy designs(excluding bosses) in this game with the only semblance of differentiation are pallete swaps.
The story is your typical animu RPG that tries to hard to be deep. Crazy, evil king taxes every thing except the dubious, "cure-all" mineral powder, because said powder can turn people into mindless soldiers for his army. So it's up to Chopin, Allegreto, Polka, and the rest of the motley crew to stop him. Witness long cutscene after cutscene that is on Xenosaga levels! Cringe as you hear pretentious and dumbed-down dialogue as read by substandard English voice actors! Groan as you see godawful deaths to characters you don't give a damn about! I swear there is an overdrawn death in which
one of your party members betray the resistance group and she talks and talks about how she was a weak, pitful woman for ten minutes after being fatally stabed. Goddamn! The plot really takes a turn for the worse in hilarious, anti-climatic levels in the last hour. Supposedly, this is game is an allegory for Chopin's life and the
November Uprising. If that's true, then they did a piss-poor job of it, and it's just as terrible as the "racism" plot-point that are found in most Tales games.
The game is linear and short. There are hardly any secrets, only one side-quest near the end of the game, no backtracking, and no true feeling of an adventure. Not counting the cutscenes, the game can be completed in 12-14 hours in a first playthrough. It feels like the game was produced on a very limited budget as it seems the full potential of this game wasn't realised. As I mentioned before there is a New Game+ after beating this game which only allows you to change your Party Level, and keep musical scores you've collected. However, I did not have the will to go through this crap all over again just for some measly Achievements. I wouldn't reconmmend paying $60 for it, heck I'm not sure if I would reconmmend it for $30. You could try it out for yourself for a rental as you could complete it in a week, but that's about it.