Game Journal – Eternal Sonata (Entry 03)

I found this informative and fascinating as with the last history lesson. I wish more games did something similar to this!

Yeah, another good segment about how a song was written. Learning that it was about the November Uprising in Poland in 1830 really lets you understand why the “Revolutionary Etude” sounds the way it does. An intense and angry piece of music.

It’s time for our whole team to come together!! Everyone meets in Agogo forest. Beat and Allegretto find the village inhabited by March (so cute!) and Salsa (out at Castle Forte). Polka and Chopin were rescued by March after the Agogo’s tip her off. They apparently don’t normally come out to interact with humans.

Oh man…it was like an episode of the CNN Meeting Room! There was a discussion about economics and how the high taxes are affecting the people. There was politics and everything!

This was a pretty serious discussion. Polka wants the taxes on Floral Powder lowered to the point it can compete with Mineral Powder so she and her mother can live well. Allegretto, surprisingly, doesn’t want this because Ritardando relies on Mineral Powder mining and sales for its middle class. March wants the Count to stop mining Mt. Rock so much because it is damaging the Agogo habitat (which is why Salsa went to Forte). The discussion gets pretty heated, and Allegretto says that, without Mineral Powder profits, people in Ritardando will start dying of hunger. This is pretty heavy stuff. By the end of the discussion, Polka/Chopin and Allegretto/Beat agree to travel together to see the Count, even if they don’t agree on what they will ask him for.

On a side note, March is indeed adorable, though her skull necklace is a bit troubling. I wonder what being a guardian of the forest entails?

When the team comes together, Beat mentions he knows that Polka can do magic, and he thinks it’s really cool. It’s a bit too convenient that he and Allegretto are the only two inhabitants of Ritardando that aren’t afraid of her magic, but oh well. Polka takes off immediately, apparently ashamed/afraid of someone that has seen her magic, and has to be saved from another giant critter boss battle. Geez, March, nice work guarding the forest. Polka eventually has a flashback where we learn she is going to try and trust people instead of always assuming the worst, and she decides to join the Allegretto team. She also expresses a desire to “become a Heaven’s Mirror”, though I’m not sure what she means by that.

The group thinks they have see an Agogo when they find a small, jumping, glowing ball, which vanishes as Beat is taking out his camera to take a picture of it. Oddly, when they tell March, she is confused, because she has never seen a glowing Agogo. Ever more oddly, we see March talking to what looks like a human boy, and when it talks, the dialog box is labeled “Agogo Boy” or something like that – maybe Agogos are not small glowing balls after all?

Another interesting aspect of this is how angry Allegretto gets at Beat for pulling out his camera and possibly causing the glowing ball to disappear. I mean, he is really laying into Beat for a while. Maybe seeing this glowing ball causes people to become really aggressive and angry? This would certainly fit with the monocle guy beating us up for no reason and also being on a quest to get a glowing thing.

The Prince and Legato (his advisor) are trying to stop a rebellion of some sort that’s happening. This actually seems to parallel the history lesson we got. Chopin was sent away by his friends (he didn’t know it at the time) from Poland because a rebellion was planned. They wanted him to support their cause with music. Later, when the Rebellion failed, Chopin never returned home but wrote a song due to his grief over his homeland.

This was a cool way of tying the music lesson to the game. I’m interested in where this rebellion plot is going. The Count is unconcerned, and doesn’t want to take down the rebellion’s leader, Andantino, because a) he doesn’t fear him in the least, as his castle is impregnable, and b) he thinks Andantino is being backed by someone, and wants to draw them out. Intriguing! The Count personally seems like a real jerk, very arrogant.

He’s just kind of wandering around, and seems very distracted when asked if he’s going to join the group on the trip to Forte, though he does agree. I hope he writes something in the game that they can use.

When it was raining in the fantasy world and Chopin and Polka were beat up by the monocle man, Chopin back in France (now 11:23 PM, on Day 1 it was 10:48 PM) was apparently having violent seizures. As the rain stops in France, a clear morning dawns in the fantasy world. It looks like the two worlds are more closely linked than we thought at first.