The last few months Official Xbox Magazine Demo Discs have been lacking, but this month they have an exclusive demo of Eternal Sonata. Initially I was not that interested in Eternal Sonata, but since I can’t turn down trying a demo I gave it a shot. Eternal Sonata is about the final hours of the composer Chopin’s life. In an unusual twist Chopin travels through his own dream world. The game is an RPG, but it is not to heavy on the stat upgrades. The stats automatically level up as you gain experience. It does have the usual RPG style item collection, but a lot of the times are music related since it is based around Chompin.

Graphically the demo looked really good. It has a anime type of feel, but not as much as Japanese import games. Since it is a dream world it is very bright and colorful with tons of great art. There were some points where the game would hiccup as some of the large areas loaded, but I’m not sure if that was the demo or the OXM disc. Either way I assume that will be worked out in the final game.

Throughout the demo there seemed like a lot of enemies to fight to get to the boss at the end, but not a lot of NPCs. I’m not sure if the game is like that the whole time or just the demo so you can get a feel for the fighting on the game. The one thing I found a little frustrating was that a lot of the map sections are pretty small. You’d walk on the screen fight one group of bad guys and then walk off the screen to the next section. There were some larger areas on the own, but outside the town the sections seemed really small and linear.

The fighting is simple, but has some skill and strategy. You have a party of three people who fight as a group. The combat is turned based where your players all get a turn and then all of the enemies get a turn. During the enemies’ turns you can still block, but you can’t move or attack. Each character’s turn is timed. The timer starts as soon as you start moving or attacking. Before you do anything the timer is paused so you can work out your strategy for the fight. Each character on you team has a normal attack and a power attack. The more normal attacks you get in before the power attack the more damage it does. Each character you control has two assigned power attacks. One they can use in light and one they use in the dark. There are additional power attacks in your inventory, but each character can just have the two assigned at one time. The battle areas play into this well by providing sunny and shady areas. Additionally, some enemies are stronger or weaker in sun or dark, and are therefor effected differently by the light verses dark power attack types. This makes for some great strategies as you use a couple of your team members to attack from the light and then have the other team member use is dark power attack to finish the enemy off.

Overall, I’m more impressed with Eternal Sonata that I expected to be. I’m not really into this style of RPG, but it was fun to play through the demo so I may end up having to check out the full version. It is a one player only RPG so I’ll probably rent it, but if you’re into RPGs this one has some very unique features that make it worth checking out.