When you are creating a game with voice acting, it is important to do several things. Firstly, you need to make sure that you have subtitles whenever people are speaking. This is to make sure that everyone who might be hearing impaired can still play the game. Secondly, you need to make sure that there is no time when there should be voice acting, but there are instead only subtitles because then people who don't have them enabled won't understand what is going on.
Eternal Sonata violates both of these guidelines. This is made more aggregious by the fact that the game offers to let you play with Japanese audio + subtitles rather than an English dub. During combat, occasionally friendly and opposing characters will make quips. These are not subtitled. More aggregiously, nearly half of the ending sequence is not subtitled. This is very bad if you've just played through the entire game and then characters start talking without you being able to understand
at the game's conclusion. This is even worse if the only way to understand is to restart the game, enable the English dub, and then re-fight the final boss. As to the second guideline--always dubbing things--the game also fails. There are interstisials between chapters that describe various pieces of Chopin's music. Unfortunately, these apparently did not exist in the Japanese version and are thus undubbed. This means you have a soft song playing with text scrolling incredibly slowly against various static images. Such a situation is a very poor way to keep my interest.
This isn't hard. Do it right.
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