Idle Thoughts

The finale falls flat (★★☆☆☆)

TL;DR, This is going to be another post about the sequel not being as good as the original.

The first Fuga: Melodies of Steel was something of a revelation for me. It’s something you never see in JRPGs: a concise, 20-hour game. All killer, no filler. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, the game wisely limits its scope. You control ten children in a time of war who, through a twist of fate, find the means to end the war and save their loved ones. To paraphrase: they stumble upon a giant magic tank and go on a rampage. This concept also informs the gameplay design. As befits a game about driving a tank, Fuga is very linear: you literally follow a straight line indicated at the top of the screen and you are occasionally asked to choose a safer route or a more dangerous (and more lucrative) one. No going back, so no grinding either. Except after each chapter, there are no villages or shops. Instead, you carry your own village with you. At regular intervals, you get a base-building interlude inside the tank where you can heal up, upgrade, play a minigame for resources or chat with the others. I found this approach refreshing: it makes you realize just how much time is wasted on endless NPCs that have nothing particularly useful to say, with backtracking across the continent to give some random person the thing they asked for, with hugging every dungeon wall just to find another potion, etc. I’m sure you know what a JRPG is. Not only is a lot this kind of content pure filler, it also kills the momentum of the story as well.

The first Fuga also did a few other things JRPGs rarely do. For one, it nailed its sense of tone. As befits a game about children thrust into war, it reaches an impressive equilibrium between childish and mature. For example, the first chapter has the children cope with the consequences of taking a life. Still, the tone of the game is mostly hopeful, even downright Pollyanna, while not averting its gaze from the horrors of war. Perhaps I’m overstating the game’s virtues here, but it feels like a breath of fresh air when most JRPGs are firmly adolescent or “young adult” in tone.

Another unique idea in the game is the Soul Canon, a weapon that will obliterate any enemy at the cost of one of the children’s lives. Now it goes without saying, dear reader, that the whole point of the game is not to sacrifice any of the kids. Considering the game is fairly easy, this isn’t that hard to do. Still, it puts the onus on the player: there is no magic plot armor, you are in charge of the survival of the children.

I dig the style too. The anthropomorphized animals are really cute. The French theming is interesting and the music in general is excellent (the children’s choir that sings in French during dramatic moments tears at my soul).

On the other side of the battlefield, we have the Berman empire, evil Nazi-adjacent dogs (Get it? German, Doberman?). Who doesn’t love to hate the Nazis? Their tanks and war machines are menacing and grimy and yet still sport adorable little dog ears.

The game was also deeply modular. It was clearly the first game in a series that would reuse the same framework. In fact, the game featured extra endgame objectives; completing each one would light a gear on the main menu. Lighting all of them would grant you access to a secret video: a sneak peek of the next game in the series. The next games would also keep this mechanic.

Now, on to the sequels. We’ll gloss over the second game here, but suffice to say that its story was clearly immaterial in whatever arc the trilogy was going for. Still, it did introduce some interesting ideas, like some villains redeeming themselves and an intriguing attempt at giving the teenage hero PTSD (for a while at least).

Now for the third game. If the first game had a relatively focused sense of scope, at least by JRPG standards, the third game throws all restraint out the window. You’d think that ten kids single-handedly winning furry WWII would be anime enough, but no. It turns out every single event up to the first half of the third game is merely a footnote to the “real” plot. An ouverture, if you will (Get it? I can do musical puns too!). It’s like the devs were speedrunning through the Grand List of JRPG clichés.

Here are some examples of what happens in the third entry. A never mentioned before character literally shows up out of nowhere with the line “Long time no see… brother!” Pretty much no one killed in the first two games has stayed dead. Someone is the descendant of a hero of yore. Big mechas start showing up left and right and most of the WWII tanks get replaced by generic sci-fi enemies. There’s a prophecy millennia old being fulfilled. The last of the “ancients” show up. Your tank starts flying on butterfly wings. In fact, your tank gets a new transformation or unexplained power whenever the plot asks for it. All sentient life on Earth is at stake AND the real bad guys are humanity all along. The villain’s plan relies on quantum leaps in logic to make any kind of sense. There’s a last-minute villain that pulls a Necron (if you know your jargon). By the way, now the action happens in spaaace.

In other words, they went full anime. Never go full anime

I blame Neon Genesis Evangelion for some of this.

That’s what I’m talking about when I’m referring to an “adolescent” tone: an obsession with being ridiculously high concept and cataclysmic in scope, combined with juvenile notions of sexuality. That last part is still thankfully absent in Fuga 3. We all know what happens when anthropomorphized animals start getting a libido.

To be fair, a lot of the cast is very likeable, especially the side characters. My favorites are the two geriatric Berman officers, loveable grandpas who grudgingly help you out despite your youthful insolence and the fact that what they’re doing is treason. Oh well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out they might not be on the side of the good guys. Without going into detail, I like the main villain too. Not that one, that one. That being said, interesting characters without a compelling plot is like a nice car without a destination. Something like that. That’s the best analogy I’ve got for now.

The combat is also getting stale. The trilogy has a somewhat in-depth combat system, where your actions depend on which child you put in the tanks three gun emplacements. Each child uses one of three weapon types (canon, grenade, machine gun), which roughly works as elemental weaknesses that stall the enemy when triggered. The kicker is that you can reorder the position of your team at regular intervals to change up your strategy as the battle progresses. Every child has a little bit different set of spells as well. Finally, every active character is partnered with a passive one that grants to the other his signature bonus (more damage, higher chance to inflict ailments, etc.).

This is all well and good, but it’s easy enough to completely master this system by the end of the first game. Some new enemies in the later games require a tiny bit different approach, but it’s barely worth a mention. Most of the later opponents just have higher armor, which requires your team members with machine guns to painstakingly strip away before bringing in the big damage dealers. There’s not really much else the game can do to forestall you. While an interesting idea, switching characters in the heat of battle is a finicky process, which makes these battles more cumbersome than really challenging. In other words, the battle system is very stale by the third game.

To add insult to injury, in each new instalment you need to re-upgrade the tank from scratch. The process is exactly the same, which adds to the tedium.

They did try to switch things up a bit. In Fuga 3, there is now a combo system for hitting consecutive weaknesses and ally characters that can be summoned when a bar is full. When you pile that on top of characters having a “Hero mode” gauge and a “Burst attack” gauge AND triggering random special “Leader abilities”, the enemies rarely ever stand a chance. If I were the Berman, I’d go “WTF? Haxor.” Some battles are just limit break after limit break. Cloud Strife never had it this easy.

So yes, the third instalment goes off the rails in terms of story and its combat is stale and predictable. And yet… without giving away any spoilers, there are a lot of tantalizing details in the story, especially about the past, present and future of the characters. And some of it is really very tantalizing (Wait a minute, if there’s a secret video of the sequel in every game and this is the end of the trilogy, what is this secret video about? Hmm…). The problem is that all of these crunchy bits are post-endgame content gated behind hours of extra grinding and replaying. I’m all for giving players who go the extra mile something special for their efforts, but who hides away all the best parts of their story? Very disappointing.