Fuga: Melodies of Steel

While I end up recommending Fuga, it ends up being more timidly than I expected at the start. The game left me with a great first impression. The combat mechanic is excellent with the right amount of depth yet a very smooth learning curve helped by the fact that your strategic options keep expanding as you unlock more crew members and abilities. The time management aspect is also very solid as you always feel like there are many things you want to do whenever you get a break from the action with some non obvious decisions, yet you still feel like you can do most of what you wanted to and don't have to feel too frustrated, which is a difficult balance to reach. The opening sequence that forces you to |SPOILER]sacrifice a child|/SPOILER] is very effective and gripping, although immediately undone by the fact that the game doesn't commit to it and lets you rewind time to abort that decision. The aspect of constant progression is also a good thing. It removes the need or even the tentation of grinding and helps keep the pace through the 15 hours or so of the story. The music is nice although a few more tracks wouldn't have hurt. The artistic direction is also fine and the concept of anime WW2 would be interesting if I hadn't seen it in many other anime and games, starting with Valkirya Chronicles. Making everyone a furry doesn't bother me, but I don't think it adds to the charm. Now on to criticisms, starting with the less important : the boss fights aren't good. They are not terrible by any means and do their job at testing that you powered up enough by the end of the chapter, but they ar mechanically uninteresting, bringing almost no mechanic that isn't found on common enemies. That isn't their main issue though. That would be that they for the most part have no story relevance. They almost always come out of nowhere, barely get a few lines and then get blown up by our tank. And that's the best case! Some of them are just big versions of standard enemies with no dialogue at all. And when the narrative tries to build them up and make them intimidating, they end up to easy. Shout out to the lady that you beat once, swears to get revenge and then comes back all fired up... in the same tank that you beat her once in! I almost pitied her. That brings up to my second issue which is the difficulty. While the fights can be pretty engaging, especially is you always pick the dangerous paths when given the option, I never felt challenged or like I was about to lose and that was my first blind playthrough without any guide. And in most games, that would be fine. I enjoy a challenge, but a power fantasy aboard a big tank is also fun. The issue is a that thematically, this is supposed to be a grueling journey where the kids are always on the brink of having to sacrifice on of their own to make it through. But in practice, I never got close to need the Soul Cannon even once. And that's an issue, it prevented me from feeling the stories most impactful beat of having to sacrifice one of your crew to succeed. Part of the issue is that restorative items are too powerul and abundant. I made a liberal use of them and still ended up with way more than I could use. The other issue is that, as I already said, bosses are too weak, especially if you take the dangerous paths where stadard waves can be just as, if not more dangerous and you rake in tons of exp and items. In fact, I suspect the most interesting challenge is to only take the "safe" routes to limit you xp intake for the boss but that's dumb, counterintuitive and makes most of the level boring. Finally the fact that you get both a rest point and a HP/SP refill before every boss makes it trivial to heal your injured/depressed crew members, boost them to the max with food and roll over the boss, no matter how much you might have struggled in the rest of the level. That difficulty issue might get addressed in NG+ but I feel no interest in going there since it doesn't seem to bring up anything new besides bigger numbers. I guess the incetive is to max out all relationships to get every children's full sotry but... well... The story sucks. That's my final but also my main complaint. The charcaters are fine. Very tropey, but cute and distict enough for you to get attached. But aside from that, there is nothing interesting. The interactions you get when you level up relationships are soooo boring. I get that there were a lot of possible interactions and they had to keep them short, but they could still have given them some sense of progression or conclusion. To give you an example, the story of the two twins starts with "Hey, aren't we going along?" and ends, after maxing out their relationship with "Hey, aren't we going along?". [SPOILER]Brtiz[/SPOILER] is an even worse offender. Most of his relationships start with "I'm sure you are a traitor!" and end with "Okay, maybe you're not so bad." which is a fine enough progression, but is sooo boring when it feels like that's what all his interactions boil up to, especially when the other guy is still doubting him at lvl 5, meaning they have at this point spent dozens of battles fighting together! And the worst part is [SPOILER]when he actually "betrays" us all these same characters who were doubting him minutes ago are suddenly shocked and beg him to come back. Speaking about that, that betrayal incident was also completely uninteresting. You know from the start that he his forced to do so and the fact that his family is found safe right after he leaves us has some irony to it but makes solving the conflict ridiculously easy. There is no sacrifice, no tough decision, just "Hey, turns out your familiy is alright and we don't mind that you were about to blast us and help a genocidal tyrant destroy our country in the hope that he'll let you see them. You can join us again."[/SPOILER] As for the main plot, it doen't fare much better. The plot twists are obvious and underwhelming, the villain is paper-thin and spends all his screen-time looking clever and complex until the last part of the story where we realize that he is neither. The fact that the children are so incurious and never ask questions about their situation doesn't help. Nor the fact that they seemingly have to fight a whole war alone as the adults of their faction are shockingly useless. The tone is also flawed. From the setting to the opening chapter, it seems qhuite clear that the story wants to portray a gritty and cruel world torn up by war and atrocity, but never dares to fully commit. There is literally a doctor Mengele character running experiment on prisonners and the game doesn't show us anything more horrific than a few people drained of their life energy. I'm sorry but you can't do WW2 for children. If that is your setting, commit to it. At least Valkyria Chronicles had concentration camps. [SPOILER]The fact that everyone's family is alive and well is also a terribly missed opportunity for drama.[/SPOILER] I could go on because, past the first act, the story is that much of a trainwreck but I'll give it a rest. After all, despite all my gripes with it, I still had a good time with the game. It is mechanically excellent and that somewhat makes up for it's subpar story. The run time is enough to enjoy it without is feeling dragged on. If you want to enjoy a very solid turn-based combat with a nice presentation, I would recommend it. 6.5/10