I was born at the wrong time to truly enjoy the “Golden Age” of the 8-bit and 16-bit RPG, back on the early days of the SNES and beyond. So it wasn’t until later in life, having begun my RPG fandom with Final Fantasy IX on the PS1, that I decided to work my way backwards and 
educate myself with many of the older games. Breath of Fire, the early days of the Final Fantasy series, and such other classics as Secret of Mana and Dragon Quest: all of these truly represent the best and brightest of a pinnacle for the genre. And now, verging on two decades too late, we have Symphony of Eternity, a 16-bit style RPG for iOS and Android devices, that has taken everything it has learnt from those before it, but slipped up on a couple of notes leaving the game not quite in the rankings of games such as Final Fantasy IV or Phantasy Star II.
It is a most valiant attempt by developers Kemco_Games to revive the old school RPG format for a modern platform, and I will be the first to agree that handheld devices do not have enough “proper” RPGs available. There are plenty of games with RPG elements, I mean what game doesn’t involve stats, or inventories full of equippable items or even some good old-fashioned turn-based combat? In so many ways, as I stated, Symphony of Eternity does succeed.
The game kicks off with a Kingdom under threat by a military coup, a royal family destroyed and a Princess making a daring escape to unknown lands, where she happens upon a couple of adventurers searching for some magical wish-granting maguffin known as Regratlute. And while Regratlute sounds like the feeling some people may experience after making an unnecessarily expensive purchase of a medieval instrument, it is what our characters desire to make each of their dreams come true. Kreist, Dauturu and Leishthenaria, or something utterly incomprehensible, set off on a Wizard of Oz meets Final Fantasy style journey where they each want the Regratlute to bestow upon them some power of quality to make everything in their life better.
Bowled over by the plot I am not. I’ve heard many other reviewers say “This is the Final Fantasy for the Android market” and “It wouldn’t have surprised me if Square Enix had put their name on this”, which I will agree with on the whole, however, in reference to the latter, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Square had put their name on this in the early 90s. Nowadays, Square and many other RPG developers have learnt a few tricks that could have been put into Symphony of Eternity to overcome some of its failings. The plot, and indeed the translation of said plot, is wafer thin and incredibly standard at best, and handheld title or not there is little excuse for such a cookie-cutter plot with such bad localization as there is here. However, working with what we have, despite the dialogue being clunky at times, the characters themselves are quite loveable and flawed, and if we’re going to award points for glimmering moments of nostalgia seeping threw, Symphony of Eternity might get itself another point and a half.
