I have to say, in regards to gaming, 2022 has been nothing but bangers. I started the year off strong with the amazing 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim and I cannot stress enough; you need to get this game. I was so in love with 13 Sentinels that I decided to continue to support Vanillaware with the Odin Sphere remaster. I owned the PS2 version but never completed it for whatever the reason but I 100% this time and it awesome game. Great ending and Whoever voiced Odin did a amazing, phenomenal, excellent job. After Odin Sphere I decided to step back into the door to the unknown.. and I came back with another banger.
Lets talk about FUGA: Melodies of Steel
u
First 12 minutes are focused on Intermission. Skip to 12 minute mark for movement/battle
FUGA is a Turnbased Strategy RPG developed by CyberConnect2 (.//hack, Naruto) guys as part of their Little Tail Bronx series (Tail Concerto,Solatorobo). Unlike the typical TSRPG that uses the familiar grid movement system, FUGA replaces the grid with on rails side scrolling. You follow the adventure of 12 kids that man a comically large tank called the Taranis as they set out to rescue their families and push the invading Berman Empire out of their country. Game is divided into 3 phases : Movement, Intermissions and Battle.
Movement - The goal is to make it to the end of the map and defeat the boss to clear chapter(which there are 12). Taranis will move along a set path, and while moving through that path, will run across various icons with different effects: Heal your HP(low/high), SP(low/high), get items, initiate battles, ext. The player involvement happens when that path diverges and you are given choice between the Safe, Normal, and Dangerous paths. The game is balanced around the normal path so if were to always choose the normal path you, power wise, will be on par with enemies and will have gotten a balance of healing and part items(used to upgrade the Taranis). Safe will have you fight less enemies and give you plenty of healing items, but less EXP and Part items. Dangerous is the most lucrative path but it is a much tougher trek though, but you will get tons more EXP thus being ahead of the curve and way more parts to upgrade the Taranis. Ultimately speaking your task with balancing how you move though the paths, but really peeps, always pick the most dangerous path. It's tougher but over time, that toughness will wide down because eventually your team will meet and exceed that challenge by the later chapters.
Intermission - Arguably the most important phase. This is where you power the team up. Taranis is so huge that it has several facilities built into it. The most important of these are the upgrade room, kitchen, and farm. There is a fishing area where you can fish for parts but I did not find it necessary because if you are only doing normal and dangerous paths you will have more than enough to keep Taranis up to date and then some. You can cook food to give buffs that last until the next intermission(one in the beginning, middle, and right before the boss) and of course the farm is used to grow the food needed for the recipes. When you are done messing around with facilities you are building relationships between the 12 characters. This is crucial, even above level and Taranis upgrades, in building a powerful team. In battle 6 characters can be active at time; 3 will man the weapons and the other 3 will play support role. Lets use Malt and Kyle as an example: Malt is a Red type (Cannon) who has high attack power, strong skills but is slow and has low accuracy against anything not a huge tank. We can fix this by using Kyle whos support ability is to raise accuracy. At level 1 there is not much different, but as Malt and Kyle talk during the intermission phase their relationship levels will rise and at level 10 that 30% hit chance against flying enemies becomes 90 - 100%. Vice versa Kyle is a Blue type(Machine Gun) who is fast but weak. At level 10 Malt support will add 100 points to his attack power. Also any relationship that reaches 2 unlocks a link attack, a powerful team attack, that does big damage and buffs you or de buffs the enemy. Great for clearing out waves of enemies quickly. These grow more powerful at level 5 and 10 relationship level. I almost forgot the Intermission allows for 20 AP and every activity during intermission takes off a certain amount of points and some of those activities can fail.....(Just restart). Plan ahead!
Battle - For those of us who have played Grandia, this battle system should be recognizable as a large part of it is about delaying enemy action to get more turns to whack them around. Each enemy has a colored symbol underneath their health bar matching your teams weapon type. Hit them with the matching colored weapon and you'll delay their turn. Starts off easy but of course as the battles continue, enemies with multiple symbols will appear and then throw 3 - 5 enemies on the field at a time and you have a lot planning to do. Gets worse too! Some enemies have an armor value ranging from 1 - 5 which reduces the damage they take (10 - 50%). Now your Machine Gunners have skills to chip that armor off but when blue is NOT the delay symbol, and you 5 enemies to take out and 2 of those have armor and one of them heals ... ugh ... it becomes how many can I take out before it is their turn to whack me around. FUGA is tough and sometimes it can be exhausting, especially when battles have multiple waves that just have a "ugh" combo of enemies. Some of your skills have Status effects. Use them. Use them frequently. Smoke, Weakness, and Burn are you friends. Outside of skills and Link attacks, you also have hero mode that gives each character a unique perk for 5 turns like no SP cost, skills do double damage ext. Really great way to turn the tables around. Your final tool is the Soul Cannon, which kills EVERYTHING in one hit, at the expense of a child's life... yes they die for the rest of the game. The game actively pushes you to use it but don't. You have a shit ton of tools at your disposal and knowing how to use them is better than the Soul Cannon. If you happen to die, you can restart from after the last intermission OR before it. If you start before I believe that means you lose everything after the intermission but you keep the progress you did during the intermission allowing you spend 20 more points make more progress (no dead games).
Guys, these 3 phases are 90% of the game. There is a story of course but while heartwarming, I found it to be very standard, so standard in fact, that there is no plot twist. It is a very straight forward story. There is something that I want to give credit to and it's a more serious tone to a war setting that we typically get from a anime JRPG. At least one time in any anime war game somebody will bring up the idea of "Are we just as bad as them? We're killing too.", then somebody will rush and give a answer that completely absolves them of any guilt/responsibility and then they quickly move on from it. As early as the fist chapter the kids are hit hard; they just killed a bunch of people. There is a status effect called Depression which locks the use of skills and Link attacks, but talking to members under the effects of Depression in the Taranis will show that a lot of them are having difficulties coping with the stress of war. One such conversation has Malt revealing that his sister and youngest of the crew(Age 4) asked him were there people in the tanks they destroy and Malt told her no. He's dealing with both the blood on his hands and hers and she doesn't even know it. You can get more about the kids from building the relationships with the other members of the Taranis. 12 total characters that can have 3 different scenes with each character. That is a lot but not of them are that interesting. Too be honest, most of them are not. I think the problem the kids all have one solid personality so it feels more how does the lone wolf act with the shy girl? How does the shy girl act with the nerd? ext. The only other story comes from reports. Interesting but delivery of info is not (just text reports).
FUGA has excellent art direction; all the tanks look badass and the special effects and explosions sound and look fantastic. Music is also awesome; Flower on the Trails and Elegy of the Winds are just so beautiful. The weakest part of the presentation is that there are no motion videos/cutscenes at all. Still art is used to progress the story and they look great but I feel that some motion scenes for high climax moments would of made a lot of moments more impactful. No voice acting either. Clear that the game was the most important part and that is totally fine but hopefully they bring up the story presentation if they ever do a sequel.
I loved FUGA so much that I was actually to immediately get Solatorobo for the DS, and then I say the $399 rpice tag and the I said never mind and I now I am kicking myself for not getting when I had the chance. Awesome, awesome, awesome and hopefully with CyberConnect2 moving into self publishing we get another one sooner rather later... or another .//Hack would be cool too.
Get FUGA!
