Cliché Central

What kind of video game have I gotten myself into here? The other night I was bored so I went ahead and rented a new Xbox game from Blockbuster called Eternal Sonata, because I heard that it was good, and that it was based on music so I went ahead and rented it. What. The. Heck. This game is more about philosophy and the morality of mankind than about RPG gameplay at all. I get to play for like 15 minutes until I have to sit through another 10 minutes of cutscenes, in which the characters (whose really bad voice actors sound like they’re 12 years old) give their perspectives on life in general, following such clichés as the boys who steal bread from an old baker lady to give to the poor, one wielding a gun-like object (and I don’t know if they’re trying to make him seem like a kid but they show him playing with horse action figures in the cutscenes and rocking on a wooden horse… and this guy wields the gun-like object here? And he has the option to waste his turn taking a photo of the enemy, so that later on he can sell it in the marketplace. As if. Who would buy that.). The other boy, conveniently named Alegretto, takes the bread to his homeless shelter he has set up in the sewers. That’s right, there’s kids living in the sewers in the little town of Ritardando. Throughout the course of the video game, we do learn some interesting facts about the composer, mainly about his love life with a woman named George Sand, who was supposedly a very masculine lady if you know what I mean. These interesting facts are horribly marred by their length though, as we sit there staring at a picture slideshow and reading the text for a solid 10 minutes. This leads to another problem in the game, and that is that in order to save, you have to get to a save panel in the game. That makes it very frustrating with the amount of sheer minutes you spend at the cutscene and just walking around. I literally walked around for 45 minutes before finding a save point and I was in a hurry to quit too, but I didn’t want to lose all my progress! I mean seriously; this game is indoctrinating transcendentalist philosophies into me, with ideas like, for example: our dreams can possibly include someone else’s reality and that we can choose whether or not our dreams are real or not, and possibly just live our entire lives inside that dream; we will get magical powers if we are inflicted with an incurable disease, so we won’t have them for long; and finally that famous music composers (Frederic Chopin) fall in love with their own “dreams”, who are probably 20 years younger than them. Also, there is this persistent theme that government is the root of all our problems. I don’t really know if the game developers were trying to say something with this constant theme of “Oh, I’ve gotta go to the Count to tell him to lower the taxes. It’s hurting our poor and forcing us to steal bread for them!” That’s also a constant theme: the taxes need to be lowered. Apparently in this game medicine is the only thing that isn’t taxed and everything else is ridiculously expensive because it’s been taxed so highly. Reductio ad absurdum much? I still have not seen anything musical in this game at all, except for Chopin, who is a playable character who wields a sword. The villains in this game are non-existent, except for one guy who was wearing a monacle and apparently he was pretty TO’d that it was raining on his new clothes, so he just went out and completely demolished us with a like 10 foot long sword that I have no idea from whence it came. The main villain is apparently the king, who actually has a teenager voicing him, but he sounds like Lance Bass (It wouldn’t be the first time he’s voiced a villain (i.e. Sephiroth from Kingdom Hearts)) The game is sickeningly cute, with all the voices sounding overly perky and like a 12 year old voiced them. Quite frankly, I was embarrassed to be caught playing Eternal Sonata in front of my brother, who was working on homework at the time. How this game was rated T in the first place is beyond me. It should be rated E, because I see nothing wrong with it at all other than its stupid transcendentalism. I thought I was done with that when I graduated from English III.