Eternal Sonata/Fridge


 * Here's a thought: if you live in a world where the terminally ill are granted magical powers, and the incredibly cheap "miracle cure" of the Evil Empire happens to grant you magic as a "side effect", then why on earth would you think Mineral Powder is safe?
 * Trying to get all your citizens hooked on a powder that will grant them magic and turn them into monsters to attack the other country does not seem very smart in the long run if said citizens are slated to die within less than a year of developing their magic. Who will be left to rule over? Even the characters themselves comment on the stupidity of this. This is the reason why Count Waltz has been seeking a more effective mineral powder.
 * Everyone in the game save Frederic has some kind of musical pun name. That's all well and good, but considering this game takes place in the dreams of a composer from the 1800s, why is there a guy named Jazz?
 * And his Japanese name is Jitterbug, which still doesn't fit the period.
 * There's also "Mt. Rock" and the "Blues Sea". Also, claves are Latin instruments, so a man raised in 19th century Central Europe probably wouldn't be familiar with them. There's also Phil's friend, Koto, whose name comes from a traditional Japanese instrument that Chopin likely wouldn't have been familiar with.
 * This one is admittedly highly nitpicky, but many of the descriptions of armor, weapons and accessories carry descriptions that reference mythology or popular culture. One of the accessories, Alice's Watch, is described as a pocket watch from a rabbit in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll's Alices Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, over sixteen years after Chopin's death.
 * One could suppose that names such as Jazz/Jitterbug and Claves, however, are just further evidence that the game's setting really is a separate world rather than merely Chopin's dying dream.
 * Of course with those names, it also doubles as description of the area "Rocky Mountain" and "Blue Sea", so it's forgivable.
 * While we're talking about anachronisms, the doctor's stethoscope. Stethoscopes like that weren't invented until about a hundred years later.
 * It is repeatedly stated that the characters live in a world where the only people that can use magic are those who have a fatal illness. Yet every character has a stat called "Magic" and can use abilities that most definitely seem to be magical in nature. Or perhaps this is just an odd case of Blind Idiot Translation in a game that otherwise doesn't seem to suffer in translation. In the Japanese version, this stat is apparently referred to as "Trusty" (after the original title Trusty Bell: Chopin's Dream), but this still doesn't explain why there are characters that aren't magicians using abilities of a seemingly magical nature, such healing skills or attacks that carry an elemental appearance (even if they don't have an actual elemental effect.)