Fuga: Melodies of Steel

Fuga: Melodies of Steel makes a compelling pitch. It’s a JRPG that distills the formula down to its essential elements. Gone are the random battles, the dull sidequests, and the gratuitous cutscenes, leaving only combat, dialogue, and party building. It sounds like a juicy formula but does it deliver on expectations?

Fuga is the story of bunch of anthropomorphic kids and their giant tank. The game opens with Free Lands of Gasco fighting a losing war against the Berman army. Taking refuge in a cave to escape an attack on their hometown, the group of children stumble upon an ancient tank, the Tanaris. A voice from within the Tanaris invites them aboard, and off the children go to save their captured families.

It’s a journey that could be summed up as “Turn-based JRPG Battle: The Game.” The Tanaris only moves one direction – forward – and automatically initiates combat with any and all resistance. To JRPG veterans, combat will feel familiar. Characters come in three varieties – light, medium, and heavy. Lighter fighters do less damage but their turns come around more quickly, and vice versa. Turn order for both allies and enemies is displayed on a timeline, and enemy turns can be delayed by hitting them with certain combinations of attacks. The Tanaris only has three seats for attackers, so you’ll often find yourself shifting party members in and out of the gunner seats to exploit enemy weaknesses. It’s not the most original system but it gets the job done.

Then there’s the Soul Cannon, a feature prominently mentioned in the game’s marketing materials. If you’re about to lose a boss battle, you’re given the option of sacrificing one of your children to the cannon. Doing so instantly annihilates the boss, but the downside is that you lose one of your characters for the rest of the game. This is no small sacrifice; each character is unique and non-replaceable.

Unfortunately, I found this choice to be less interesting than it sounds. First of all, the cost vastly outweighs the benefit. Sure, you win one battle instantly, but enduring a handicap for the rest of the game is a very high price. While there is enough redundancy between the characters for you to limp ahead while missing one or two of them, your tactical agility will nonetheless take a hit. This will in turn make later battles harder, increasing the likelihood that you’ll feed more kids into the cannon. It’s a vicious cycle.

The bigger issue with the Soul Cannon, however, is that there’s not enough incentive to use it. JRPG veterans won’t find much challenge in Fuga. During my playthrough, my crew and I plowed through the entire Berman Army without encountering a single Game Over screen. Winning strategies are easy to sniff out, healing items are abundant, and if you rotate characters in and out of the gunner seats regularly, you’ll be overleveled before you know it. The game’s relative ease combined with the Soul Cannon’s high price meant I never had to seriously consider firing it.

Worse yet is that the Soul Cannon and its sacrificial cost don’t just impact combat; they have downstream effects on the story as well. Because Fuga lets you feed (nearly) any party member into the Soul Cannon, the narrative can’t rely on individual characters to drive its story. The tale will limp along regardless of who is or isn’t still in your party. Events occur, the narrator reads a few lines, and the surviving members of your party chime in with a line or two of lighthearted dialogue. This result is a flat story with limited character development.

The game tries to compensate for this by allowing you to build support between characters, as in Fire Emblem, but these trope-heavy conversations are a poor substitute for a dynamic, character-driven narrative. Perhaps memorable villains could’ve made up for this shortcoming, but here too the game falls short. The bad guys are simply bad dudes, doing bad things for bad reasons. I’ll be surprised if I remember them a month from now.

What does this leave us with? While I appreciate the effort to create a streamlined JRPG, in the end Fuga is too threadbare for its own good. The combat is mechanically sound but never pushes the player hard enough. Likewise, the plot is somewhat interesting but feels too detached from the one-note characters. It’s a shame, too, because I really wanted to love Fuga. It’s clearly a work of passion, and the Ghibli-esque stylings are extremely charming. While I did enjoy it in fits and starts, the overall experience left something to be desired. Only time will tell if I decide to continue on with the sequel or just let sleeping Caninus lie.