Eternal Sonata Member Review for the PS3

There are many things I love in life and Classical music and RPG's are definately one of them.  Eternal Sonata delivers full package of beautiful music, epic battles and a touching story line. 

Graphics-  One of the greatest parts of this game was the beautiful 720p three dimensional world.  Eternal Sonata brings you a world filled with nicely developed monsters and stunning backgrounds of rivers, hills and other works of art.  The characters were sadley were typical anime designs, but still maintained originality with their clothing.

Storyline- The story line starts out by giving you the basic idea that Chopin is deathly sick and has embraced himself into a dream world.  In his dream world he begins to meet a gang of new friends who are all cleverly named after instruments and notes.  (Violla, Crecendo, Polka) One of the things that does keep you playing is the story, as slow as it gets sometimes, you can't help but wonder what will happen to Chopin.

Gameplay- A typical RPG at length, you'll probably see around 30 hours of gameplay and possibly more.  This game is pretty much just a play through.  There are a few extra things that you can do outside of the storyline.  Performing musical peices with random strangers was a pretty cool extra I though.

Battle System- Eternal Sonata delivers a very interesting battle system, free roam but still turn based.  Each of your characters have their own individual turns in battle.  Once their turn has begun, a time bar begins to run out, during this time you can attack or use items.  As soon as the time bar runs reaches zero, that characters time to attack is up.  For the first 10 or so hours I spent playing the game, I had a blast with the battle system,  but it did get old and slightly boring especially with the long durations of battle.  The battle system is however challenging and creative.  You'll either love it or hate it.

Character development- Development in Eternal Sonata is quite typical: you gain EXP and you level up which in turn lets your stats go up and allowing you to learn special abilities, that's it the end....

Voice overs- There are a few characters will rather good voice overs, Beat being one of them.  I won't say that this game has fantastic voice acting but I will say that it isn't the worst I've ever heard.

Basically I reccomend this game to any RPG fan who enjoys beautiful music and scenery.  I wasn't a huge fan of the story or battle system but the music and graphics is just enough for me to give this game a B.