Fuga: Melodies of Steel 3 Review

I'm a huge fan of the Little Tail Bronx series; so it's probably worth mentioning that although I was excited when Fuga: Melodies of Steel 3 was announced, part of me was at least a little bit concerned. As much as I enjoyed the original, Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2 was almost infamously a rather iterative sequel. While that was all well and good at the time, I was concerned that the same would hold true for Fuga 3. A concern that has turned out to be quite well founded. If you haven't read my Fuga and Fuga 2 reviews, in the interest of not repeating myself I won't go over returning features in that great of detail.

If you've played either of the first two Fuga releases, you already know what to expect. The game is split into 12 chapters, with each chapter having our group of a dozen kids travel along a roadmap, choosing different forks in the road that force the player to juggle risk vs reward. In battle, enemies have different weaknesses corresponding to the different classes of weapons that each of the children can wield. Many enemies will have armor that players would be best served whittling down, either with skills or one-time use items. Periodically players will run across intermission points where players must choose how to use their allotted time to foster the kids relationships amongst their selves, bolster their resources, and upgrade their tank. All of this remains exactly the same as the previous titles.

Especially if you've played either title recently, Fuga 3 will feel almost eerily familiar. There are new additions to the game, but many are simply cosmetic. The Taranis can fly now, but this changes absolutely nothing in terms of gameplay. Dialogue choices return from Fuga 2, but instead of unlocking Leader Skills they're the key to unlocking Assist Characters, which can be used for a special attack that also offers a one-time effect without spending a turn whenever the gauge is filled. As far as gameplay is concerned, these Assist Characters are the most significant change, though chaining together attacks that target enemy weaknesses now can fill a combo gauge, especially increasing the effectiveness of certain skills. To make such a system more challenging to upkeep, past a certain point of the game specific enemy weaknesses can only be exposed once others have already been depleted. 

During intermissions, digital avatars of your party members and assist characters can be sent to mine virtual currency which can then be spent to gain new items, upgrades for the Taranis, or music that can be played in the new Jukebox - allowing you to change the background music for the intermissions. These upgrades to the Taranis could have been interesting, but beyond the first few which unlock some basic abilities that can be used at points on the map that replace similar actions from Fuga 2, they quickly turn into little more than basic stat upgrades.

While Fuga 1 and 2's gameplay is and remains strong, it's striking just how little the feel of Fuga 3 has changed. While it feels like a refinement of what came before, certain elements of the game feel like they haven't lived up to how CyberConnect2 hyped them up. First and foremost, the variety of different endings awaiting players in Fuga 3.

In Fuga 1 and 2, there were essentially 2 endings. A Normal Ending and a True Ending, and in order to get the True Ending players had to ensure that a certain character was friendly with the rest of the crew; that's no longer the case in Fuga 3, with the idea being that now the story branches out depending on your choices. Except these choices are as simple as whether all characters survive to the end of the game, or if they die during specific chapters where the new "Mega Soul Cannon" may be activated. Instead of a branching narrative, these extra endings instead feel like busywork, where most players will simply reload the requisite fights from the timeline after their first clear of the game.

What makes matters more frustrating is how the feature inherited from Fuga 2, where after reaching a certain HP threshold in a boss battle a character will start a countdown before they throw themselves in the Soul Cannon without your input, feels almost at odds with Fuga 3's new toolset. In Fuga 2, while character's being forced into such a countdown was frustrating, players also had access to a "Diet" Soul Cannon they could use that wouldn't kill a child, if all else failed. Without it in Fuga 3, the frustrations of the forced Soul Cannon come with no recourse. Yet since players can simply reload those same fights after their first clear, and Fast Mode exists, these frustrations feel almost completely aimless. Something I can't really argue for the rest of the series.

That "aimlessness" isn't just limited to boss battles and the overall familiarity of the gameplay loop, either. In many ways outside of cursory references it feels very much like Fuga 3 completely ignores Fuga 2's story. Vanilla is no longer a member of the crew, instead relegated to being an Assist Character. While the events of Fuga 2 are mentioned in passing, they're not at all relevant to that of Fuga 1. In fact, the game itself continually references Fuga 1 as if Fuga 2 never even happened. That combined with a very noticeably rougher English localization made the story feel almost phoned in. You already could've drawn a through line from the ending of Fuga 1 to the later Little Tail Bronx titles, so the fact that in retrospect Fuga 2 feels like nothing but filler, and Fuga 3 feels like spectacle for the sake of it, it's hard not to feel like one or both of Fuga's sequels didn't really need to exist. I'd even go as far as to say that for anyone looking to play the series, I'd actively argue they should skip Fuga 2 entirely - even with as much as I'd enjoyed it at the time.

Fuga 3 is still a great game, but it's hard not to wonder exactly what the point of it all was. Fuga was a daring and highly focused release, and at the time Fuga 2 felt like a similarly tight experience relying on the knowledge that players had already grown accustomed to the gameplay. Yet Fuga 3, in it's attempts to expand its scope feels like it just misses the mark. What should have been a satisfying conclusion to a trilogy feels like a coda to a performance whose curtains had already fallen years ago.