Symphony of Eternity

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Symphony of Eternity is a Turn-Based JRPG released on mobile devices in 2011 and ported to Nintendo 3DS in 2017. This game follows the story of a princess escaping a violent coup who joins with a pair of adventurers searching for a fabled wish-granting artifact.

The story here is nothing special, and it’s done no favors by a pretty poor localization. I never felt invested in these characters or their story, as we’re not really given a proper introduction to anyone before they join on their quest.

The rest of the presentation is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there’s a decent anime-style animated opening video, some decent anime-style music, and even voiced characters in some parts (voiced in Japanese), and there’s some nice pixel art for some of the enemies in battle, too. Unfortunately, the entire game is viewed from an extreme distance, making everything look teenie-tiny on the screen. What’s more, this makes it all the more obvious how the game uses repetitive tile sets for its visuals. And despite the retro look of the game, it can’t seem to maintain a decent framerate, looking choppy whenever your characters are moving.

As for the gameplay, this is bog-standard JRPG stuff, with the only real attempt at injecting originality here coming in the form of the ability for your characters to change stances from attacking to defensive. Otherwise, there’s nothing this game does that hundreds of other games haven’t also done, and better.

There definitely does seem to have been some attempt made here to make Symphony of Eternity something more than a dime-a-dozen retro-style JRPG, but that effort seems to have begun and ended with the presentation, and only partly, at that. The Nintendo 3DS is absolutely filled with great RPGs, meaning there’s little reason to waste your time with this one.

tl;dr – Symphony of Eternity is a Turn-Based JRPG about a princess who escapes a coup and joins a band of adventurers. While there are a few elements of the presentation that are nice, for the most part this is a mediocre retro-style RPG that does nothing to make it worthwhile on a platform with tons of better RPGs.

Grade: C-

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