[Click here to start from the first progress log]

This is another 1-2 hours of nothing in particular happening while random subplots arise and are apparently resolved out of nowhere. I haven’t been keeping track, but it seems like both of those things have been happening a lot. It’s kind of stunning how everyone has plenty of cause to act and are currently in an advantageous position to strike, but various convenient roadblocks exist that force them to run around doing busywork for literally no reason so that time can pass. And then you get a random cutscene about the real Chopin that basically consists of “he wrote this song while everyone he cared about was dying in an uprising and that was sad” repeated over and over again. Ugh; it’s just frustrating how one-note this game is.

I’m sorry, what was that at the end?

If you remember from earlier, we’re supposed to be looking for Jazz to tell him that his deal with the nation of Baroque is off. Eternal Sonata certainly doesn’t remember, as most of the characters end up reuniting in a church and going on a tangent where they hunt down a random monster under said church for no real reason. Not only that, but we find out the entire party is planning on going back to Baroque afterward. None of this makes sense; while Jazz went to Baroque on his own and the prince found out that his fiancee is a spy, the party has no way of knowing about any of that. From their perspective, they’re merely giving up immediately and heading back empty-handed for no clear reason. This is something you see in poorly written games sometimes, where characters act based on knowledge the player has despite those characters not being privy to the same cutscenes full of information, making everyone seem uncannily omniscent. Anyway, finding and killing the monster requires running around in some corridors, and it’s horribly awkward all around. You can even see an enemy get stuck in the environment and start glitching out at 20:35.

Then there’s a scene between Allegretto and Polka. He bailed on everyone fighting the monster under the church and found a weird rock on the shore, so when Polka throws her weird rock (which was brought up for the first time on the pirate ship because the writers were apparently making stuff up as they went along), he gives her the one he found. It turns out to be identical to the point where she thinks it’s the same one. After all, what are the chances that there are two identical rocks out there? That would require there being a lot of rocks! Sarcasm aside, she brings up the fact that she got the original from someone she loved, and now Allegretto gave her the same one. I honestly don’t know if this is a causal loop thing or if she’s merely dumb beyond belief, but the point is that Allegretto and Polka are now secretly in love with each other. Because that’s how things work in Eternal Sonata.

Then things get truly stupid. The prince and Jazz have a conversation about how Baroque is looking for a better option than funding rebels and that he needs time to figure out what to do, and when Jazz leaves, the prince launches into what appears to be a monologue directed at a hypothetical Serenade. Only it turns out that it’s actually directly addressed to her, as she’s been standing between some cabinets listening to the whole thing. Everyone in this game gets an F- in spycraft. And how the hell did Jazz not see her there? Speaking of Jazz, he wanders outside while Viola is taunting Polka about Allegretto, only for the game to suddenly decide that Viola has a thing for Jazz. Am I missing something? I mean, it’s expected that this isn’t built up to at all, but why on earth is everyone obsessed with this guy in the first place? And why does she go back inside having apparently already come to terms with the fact that she doesn’t stand a chance with Falsetto also having randomly decided that she was madly in love with him? This isn’t remotely coherent writing.

“Let’s make a quest item equippable!”

Almost everything in Eternal Sonata is overexplained, which makes it confusing when it suddenly goes in the complete opposite direction. Take the following section: Prince Crescendo is still busy thinking about what to do, so the party decides to walk around the city. Eventually they stumble across a priest and decide to go investigate a temple to hear more because they don’t know much about religion (despite having just helped a church with their monster problem and Allegretto having explicitly mentioned the priest helping teach him stuff). Yeah, but whatever. Moving on.

They go through the city, only to be told that they can’t actually get inside the temple because it’s locked, with the key having been given to a magic researcher at the castle. That means running back through the city, and the researcher refuses to hand over the key unless you first find a “spell book” he’s lost near the temple. This requires yet another trek through the city to get back to that area, and this is where things get weird. This spell book he’s referring to is an equippable item found in a chest. There’s no “hey, we found what that guy wanted” cutscene like you’d expect. You have to realize that the name of the equippable item is the same as what he asked for and run back for the key so that you can finally unlock the temple (and if you’re keeping count, that means going through the city two more times!). I remember getting stuck here the first time I played Eternal Sonata, and it’s no wonder given how the game suddenly bucks genre conventions—like putting quest items in a special category so that you know when you’ve grabbed something that pushes the plot forward—while deciding to eschew its patronizing wordiness. That’s not a bad thing, but it becomes a perfect storm for confusion here since equippable items typically exist in a completely different universe than quest items.

[Click here to go to Eternal Sonata log #8]

The post Eternal Sonata: Progress Log #9 appeared first on Killa Penguin.