Games: Eternal Sonata demo available (spoilers: GET THIS GAME)

[mrwiseman]

A demo of one of the best games in the making (if not the best) is now available for people who happened to have been born in Japan. While other people in the world are discriminated against, you can be born in Japan too.

1. Register at Hotmail.com as Urashima Keitaro, Shikimori Kazuki or something. You're Japanese, so your country is Japan. Get any prefacture and Google for post codes, they are like XXX-XXXX.

2. Create a Xbox 360 profile for Harima Kenji, Motosuwa Hideki or something. Sign on to Xbox Live, registering for a new gamertag using the "Windows Live" account you just created. Like always, lie about your personal data (Microsoft is about the last entity in the world I'd give personal data to). Choose Japanese as your language. Read the terms of service carefully and meditate on them, then agree. Choose the Silver subscription (siruberu or whatever), accept the free Gold month.

3. Note that the Xbox 360 interface is still in your language. Go to Xbox Live bazaar, under demos, new games, get Eternal Sonata/Trusty Bell. It says "RPG" somewhere, and you can confirm you're on the right game if you want for the logo to show up before the download.

4. Enjoy a pleasure forbidden to westerners because they are westerners.

5. Also download the video, and other videos from other games forbidden to westerners such as Far East of Eden or D-something (5-6 letters, can't remember). You'll see videos of great games you'll never play because you're not Japanese and your money is just not as good.

Angry European man rant time!

Americans will be getting Eternal Sonata (don't even think on getting the other two games though, they're too Nippon super happy number one, no chance in hell of getting them). Europeans will probably not get it; Europe no rike RPG. I estimate there's a 5% to 15% chance of seeing this great game in European stores.

I suppose besides discrimination and maybe phallic complex, they don't release RPGs in Europe because they "don't sell" because people don't even know what the fuck is an RPG. They never introduced them to the market, let alone advertise them. Worthless MBA businessmen wearing suits and two litres of hair cream would always manage to screw up selling the product no matter how great it was (happens to every industry), then they'd justify their total fuckup with anything such as customers not liking the product type or lack of Buddha power.

?????

Comments on Eternal Sonata/Trusty Bell:

This game is beautiful in the broadest sense of the word. A true masterpiece. You'll like it no matter what your favourite genre is.

Setting: Chopin. Fantasy world. Anime characters. Musical instruments. Cute girls. Beautiful. Warning: this game kicks ass outside limits recommended by the World Health Organization. Proceed with caution, or you'll destroy your interest in other games.

Gameplay: I can hardly think of a better game. You have an RPG, and you have a true strategy/action hybrid combat system that's about the only combat system that could best Grandia. When I say true strategy/action hybrid, I mean you have strict turns, and you have character stats and numeric attacks, and you have a lot of strategy, and you can take your time. But when you start your turn, you have a number of seconds to act as you please: move around (like Grandia, position is free and it plays an important role in your strategy), attack as much as you can until the time runs out, attack and run, cast spells, anything the time allows, and it looks and feels like Star Ocean 3. There are no random battles; you see enemies on stages and they do funny things. There's even support for multiplayer cooperative combats up to three players! (I don't know how this works, I don't have two Xbox 360 controllers at home.) Oh, and if all of this were not enough, loading times are null. Null as in *poof*, you're in a combat now.

Music: Masterpiece-level. The game is worth getting just for the music. Simply beautiful, and perfect for the scene. This is the kind of soundtrack you remember, and I don't know who composed and directed it, but he/she's probably as good as Yasunori Mitsuda.

Visuals: Stunningly beautiful, brilliant, orgasmic. Environments seem to be taken straight from a Thomas Kinkade painting. Everything is cute to a reasonable degree, realistic to a reasonable degree, colourful to a reasonable degree, and the whole environment feels alive. I can't imagine somebody would not fall in love with how this game looks. The anime look in characters is just perfect (even better than Xenosaga 1, the Xenosaga game with the right characters), thanks to a well-balanced anime-like but NOT flat shading producing more colours than you'd be able to tell in your life.

Sound: The demo doesn't have any voices outside combats, but ambient sound is great and really adds to the atmosphere.

Overall: What the heck are you doing here? Go register as your favourite Anime character and play this demo.

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ May 14, 2007 08:22 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[Cataferal]

Fucking yes! Kthxbai.

Edit: Ok, that was excellent.

Wiseman, did you check out those 3 "attract" demos? If you leave it on the title screen, it should enter a cinematic event (and for a further 2 times after, if you continue to leave it). They looked absolutely gorgeous. I wasnt sold on the the manga cel-shading style at first because i thought it looked a bit generic, but Tri-Crescendo executed it flawlessly. I wouldnt have it any other way.

My opinion of the game, judging from the demo? I'll summarize it as a SNES-era J-RPG designed with current-gen quality graphics and music, complete with a Grandia/Star Ocean combo battle system. The whole game design felt very generic in this way, but the fact we havent seen anything like this so wonderfully polished for the last two console generations makes it feel refreshing and new anyway.

(By the way, is it just me or was there some stuttering as you walk around the town and dungeons? This wasnt a big deal, but it always happens while traveling over a bridge or narrow pathway, and im not sure why...).

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ May 15, 2007 02:12 AM: Message edited by: Cataferal ]</font>

[DJ Saltack]

Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano! Aya Hirano!

Sorry, but after hearing that exact same voice in three separate anime, what makes you think i would play a game with that inane voice?!

Cuz there's a dub for this game, lolz.

Seriously though, i like the looks of this game and i adore the concept of being set inside a musical genius' dreams.

Their portrayal of said musical genius outside of the world annoys me though. The dude was around 40 when he died, he would look like a teenager!

[mrwiseman]

I've discovered the attract demos, and finished all of the playable demo, including finding the two scores and trying every attack, item and feature.

I hereby declare Eternal Sonata the most beautiful game ever. My expectations for this game were huge, and the game lived up to them and even impressed me further with its incredible beauty and musical atmosphere.

They better release this game in Europe, they better. Besides, they have no moral right to use our culture for profit if they don't.


IRT Cata: I'll summarize it as a SNES-era J-RPG designed with current-gen quality graphics and music, complete with a Grandia/Star Ocean combo battle system. The whole game design felt very generic in this way, but the fact we havent seen anything like this so wonderfully polished for the last two console generations makes it feel refreshing and new anyway.

I completely agree with this analysis.

(By the way, is it just me or was there some stuttering as you walk around the town and dungeons? This wasnt a big deal, but it always happens while traveling over a bridge or narrow pathway, and im not sure why...).

Yes, I experience the same. It seems to be loading at specific lines you cross. It's not too disturbing, so I took it as a small fee for the visuals and varying ambient sound you're getting.

The combat system is indeed somewhere between Grandia and Star Ocean. It seems it gets more and more action-like as the game progresses, by increasing what they call party level. In the beginning of the game (not the demo), you have infinite time before starting a turn, and turn time halts if you stop. That's level 1. In the demo, level 2, you have infinite time before starting a turn, but time doesn't stop if you stand still after you've moved. I suppose the next steps will be to limit your decision time until it's null and you have to act fast. I'm intrigued as to how does this work with more than one player.

Actions in combat seem somewhat limited though, as you have a limited set of items you can ready for combat, and just three actions per character (normal attack, one light attack, and one dark attack when you're in the shadows). I hope this doesn't limit the combat system possibilities.

There's this interesting score system where you collect short musical pieces played by different instruments, and you're to match them with what NPCs play in towns. If you get a good sounding combination, you can receive items. If well exploited, this system has a lot of potential. Remember that if there were just 20 scores you can obtain and 20 NPCs with scores, you'd have 400 combinations to try, and if you can make 3 or 4 piece combos against a single piece from an NPC, you have 136800 possible combinations (20*20*19*18).


IRT OCB: i adore the concept of being set inside a musical genius' dreams.

Yes, this idea fascinated me from the day I saw the game listed in some website.

Their portrayal of said musical genius outside of the world annoys me though. The dude was around 40 when he died, he would look like a teenager!

Indeed, by the time Chopin died, he would look like this. However, we don't the time setting in the game. He always had a fragile health, and it may not be his final hour. I suppose the game won't stick to every fact for the sake of its own story, though.

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ May 16, 2007 04:59 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[DJ Saltack]

I still shake my fists in disproportionate aggression!

[mrwiseman]

I can't believe it because it's too good to be true, and through time I've learnt that, in the videogames market, when something is too good to be true, it's not true; especially if Japanese product management is involved.

However, I'll timidly drop this link:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=78286

Edit: Now that there's a small chance of actually playing the game, I experienced a series of orgasms as I watched videos from Xboxyde and GameTrailers. Think I should go wait in line outside some game store to wait until this game is released in autumn?

<font color="#345E81" size="1">[ June 23, 2007 06:43 AM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[Cataferal]

Sounds like confirmation to me.

[mrwiseman]

I've heard a bit of the Eternal Sonata OST, and after a series of spasms, I came here to write about it.

Expect an score of extraordinary quality, the kind you never forget, the best I've heard in many years if not the very best I've ever heard.

The soundtrack spans over 4 CDs, totalling 3 hours and 51 minutes in 69 pieces. There are 7 Chopin pieces (37 minutes) performed by Russian pianist Stanislav Bunin, a Chopin specialist, and 62 pieces composed by Motoi Sakuraba, featuring several additional piano solos and a beautiful song performed by Akiko Shinada. All of the tracks are orchestral (no modern instruments were used?), and choral voices are used in many of them. This is easily Sakuraba's best, by which I'm not saying the others were bad, but this one is exceptional: a very inspired, vibrant soundtrack that will live up to the highest expectations and honour Chopin's dream world.

____
?: And what a relief that is; that electric organ Sakuraba loves would always get on my nerves.

[Templar Zeratul]

Everything about this game that I've seen so far is amazing, I've been keeping up with it as of late in anticipation. I can't tell you how happy I am that my roommate owns a 360 [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[MaxSwell]

This game caught my interest and looked amazing to me since the first time I heard of it. I was dissapointed to find out it would only be on the 360. Maybe someday they'll make a port for the PS?