A fun and beautiful game that has great characters but a horrible story.
When you first turn on ES, you'll be very impressed by the quality of the graphic. They are cell-shaded, very colorful, and extremely well done. Every graphical aspect of the game has been given a good amount of attention and some of the still could be hung in an art museum. Of course all of this is even more impressive in motion as the animations show the same level of polish.
In ES, the enemies are visible on the map and fights can be easily avoided. While that is definitely appreciated, the greatest joy in the game comes in the battle system. The game is turned based, when a character gets a turn they're given a certain amount of time to perform their actions. There is no MP and you're free to preform a special move at any time, however your moves are more powerful the more regular attacks you land before using them. The game limits your fighting ability by only allowing your party to carry a limited amount of items into battle. These items must be set up before the battle starts and more powerful items require more space on your item list.
One part of the battle system that is underutilized is light and shadow. Your characters and the enemies have different moves depending on where they're standing. While your characters have one set of moves for standing in the light and on set for the dark, enemies may even take on different forms depending on where they're standing. Some enemies are weaker to light attacks and some are hurt more by dark. While all that sounds interesting it doesn't come into play much besides moving around once in a while if you need to heal. All of your characters attacks are very strong and you'll have little trouble defeating the enemies no matter how illuminated your characters might be.
The story is the only real problem with this game. The game is set in the mind of Fredrick Chopin, the real life famous composer and pianist. While this game might or might not be accurate historically isn't too important to someone playing through it, though I'm sure the real Chopin did not have blue hair. Fredrick is dieing and on some sort of quest in his mind. Meanwhile your other characters are on a quest to stop Count Waltz from using mineral powder to turn his citizens into mindless zombie soldiers. Both of these plots are developing at the same time and in the end neither of them come to a satisfying conclusion. If you manage to put up with the slow moving redundant dialog and make it to the end, you'll probably be left with more questions than answers. It could be that some cultural refrences got lost in the localization.
Despite the glaring story problems, it is hard to rate this game poorly. It is fun enough to push players through the main quest, which last about 25-30 hours. That alone seems enough to justify the now lowered price. The game probably wont leave you with any sort of excited feelings after completing it though. Still every other element of the game is well done, and for that Eternal Sonata is worth checking out.