Eternal Sonata is the latest RPG from Tri-Crescendo, starring – of all potential heroes – Frederic Chopin. Yes, that Chopin – the Poet of the Piano, the famous composer who tragically died of tuberculosis aged only 39. The game takes place inside his last dream, as he slips into a coma on his deathbed. Here, he meets a young girl called Polka, who is also affected by a terminal illness. In this imaginary world, people suffering in such a way are able to use magic, and Polka has the power to heal others. However, most people are afraid of catching her illness and avoid her, so she has no real friends.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, her family – and most other people – are struggling to support themselves because of absurdly high taxes imposed by the corrupt ruler of their kingdom, Count Waltz. Polka plans on seeking an audience with the despot to plead with him to lower taxes, but is too weak to travel alone, so she asks Chopin to accompany her. Interestingly, Chopin is aware that he is dreaming, and thus has no obligation to help Polka; she’s not real. Yet despite this he decides to help, and thus the adventure begins.
 
With the male and female leads doomed to die young from the outset of the quest, you might expect the game to have dark and depressing visuals, but those are the last words I’d use to describe Eternal Sonata’s graphics. They utilise an unusual cel-shading technique where the outlines around objects are only a few pixels wide, and very smooth, instead of being conspicuously chunky and jagged like in most titles that use this style. Also, instead of having deliberate colour banding caused by sharp changes in tone, hues smoothly flow from one into another. The overall effect gives the game a very soft, delicate look – which, when combined with the admittedly rather twee character designs and pastel colour scheme, might be a bit too saccharine for some:

If you happen to be one of these people, I urge you to suspend your disbelief and just give Eternal Sonata a try: it’s quite easily one of the most original Xbox 360 RPGs out at the moment, so even if you don’t like the way it looks, you may well enjoy the freshness of the underlying game mechanics. And since there’s a demo on Xbox Live, you can try it out for free. Also, you may well find the graphical style to be an acquired taste: bright, cheerful looking games such as this are my natural preference, but I managed to learn to stomach the grim, gritty mise-en-scène of Gears of War after playing it for a while. The opposite may well be true for you.

The game’s originality is not in the way you go about your quest, which is extremely orthodox: you will move from one area of the world to another in order to uncover more of the story, which is told via cutscenes, and whilst journeying to each location you will have to fight monsters that roam the land in order to reach your destination. Rather, the originality is in the battle system, which is a hybrid of both turn-based and real-time approaches:

Enemies can be seen wandering around on the path from one area to another, and if you come into contact with each other, you will both be transported to the Battle Screen, which is an arena based on your current location, in which you will fight. Your initial formations in the Battle Screen will depend on how you came into contact: if it was from the front or sides, then you will begin the fight facing each other. However, if one character bumps into another’s back, then the character that was hit will begin the battle facing away from the one that bumped into them.

This is important, because you can only block attacks if you’re facing your opponent. Therefore, although you can change your position and the direction you’re facing later on in the battle (as can your opponents), you preferably want to bash into enemies’ backs to initiate a battle. That way, you will be able to deal extra damage early on, which will give you a slight advantage. Obviously, you don’t want to let this happen to yourself. Anyway, once you’ve arrived at the Battle Screen and your initial positions have been decided, you will have a short amount of Tactical Time to plan out your moves. During this period, no character can do anything, so you can safely move the camera between different positions by pressing the Left Trigger in order to see what you’re up against and work out a strategy.

You will need to pay attention not only to the various sorts of enemies and their positions, but how light or dark each part of the arena is: every character has a set of special moves, some of which can only be used in light, and others only in darkness. Therefore, you will obviously have to move to certain places if you want to perform particular moves. Unfortunately for you, enemies also have these abilities – and furthermore, will morph into different forms based on their surroundings as well. For example, the cute little onion-like creatures in the next screenshot will transform into the vastly more powerful behemoths in the one underneath if they are in shade:

Once the Tactical Time is up, each character will be able to move and attack in real-time for a short period. You can move around with the Left Analogue Stick, and perform normal attacks (which are fast but do low damage) with the A Button, or special attacks (which are slow but powerful) with the Y Button. However, no more than one character is allowed to do this at once, so you must think very carefully about where you will end up after your attack is finished, because after that you won’t be able to move or attack again until your next turn. For example, if you wanted to do a long-range special attack which only worked in shade against the cute little creatures I mentioned earlier, it would be wise to move out of the dark area after you’d finished, or else when they came over to attack you they’d morph into their considerably more dangerous dark form, and you wouldn’t be able to move out of the way.