| axumblade said: I wasn't necessarily saying he was belittling it because of the platform, i was simply stating that when I play a game through the first time and enjoy it, it's x amount of hours that I had fun playing the game, as opposed to a game that got old 5 minutes in. |
Here's Eternal Sonata (for X360) in a nutshell:
First 5 hours: Superb
Next 5 hours: Great
Last 10-20 hours: Progressively bad.
The game starts out firing on all cylinders. Thats why any early impression was good. The game is AWESOME when your first learning the battle system, and getting wow-ed by the graphics. The co-op was also a great plus.
But by the time the game ends, you go from thinking the game is one of the best JRPGs released this generation (on consoles), into thinking that it is somewhere just above Enchanted Arms, or other games. The story absolutely falls apart at the end, and made absolutely no sense, ruining the great start the game had.
Spoliers!
Going in, you think that Chopin's real life story is going to be explored in some depth. It's not. There are a few picture-based cutscenes about Chopin's life, but it's rarely conveyed in the actual game. By the end, the storyline is so nonsensical that my girlfriend and I were making fun of the storyline because it makes that little sense, and that poor of dialogue. My GF is a casual game player, for the most part, and SHE was making fun of it along side of me.
The battle system gets monotinous, as do the enemies later on. What starts out with maginificent design choices becomes very poor - Because your going to fight the same 10 kinds of enemies in different colors over, and over, and over again. Combos become routine, and battles become very routine by the end. The battle system, fun and awesome at first, becomes monotinous because when you get Harmony Chains, you can just mash the buttons and wind up killing the last boss in............3 turns. I don't even think the last boss hit me, he was that easy. And the 2-3 bosses before that too.
So with all of that, and having played Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, and most importantly, Tales of Vesperia, you realize how Eternal Sonata falls apart. It would seem that Namco just used Eternal Sonata as a test bed for the concepts in ToV (I've been very vocal about that one), as ToV takes every positive element from ES and kicks it up 5,000 notches. That's not because it's a X360 game, and it's not because ES went to PS3. I gladly invite every Playstation 3 player to play both Eternal Sonata and Tales of Vesperia, and decide which is the beefier, more polished, better game. Because in every respect outside of better cell shading, and maybe music, there's a noticible difference in execution. That both made ToV better, but ES worse at the same time, because by the time you get decently far in ToV, you realize how much of a mess ES was, because every grip I had with ES isn't there.
But that's not to say more JRPGs will come out, and make ToV look bad, but for now, ToV is just about the pinnacle I've seen of JRPGs at the moment.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
