The game has a lot of mechanics to keep track of but it reaches basically the exact balance I would want it to.
This game was recommended to me on a whim and I fell in love with it.
World's first RPG where I managed SP (MP) and actually enjoyed it.

Will be doing more playthroughs to 100% it.

It's an excellent game, but not without its fair share of caveats. It's a prime example of everything japanese narrative gets right and wrong at the same time. I like at how they used rather heavy themes without being an outright tear-jerker and with an positive message overall. It also completely lacks subtlety in anything it does. Characters are sometimes trope-y to the extreme. Certain twists are very predictable. Sometimes it feels like the stakes aren't as high as it should be.

Gameplay-wise it also does the best and worst of the genre. Its tactical options are great in offering more than just raw DPS to roflstomp everything on your path. But the combat also overstays its welcome at times. Technically it has no "flaws" in the combat, but it still gets tiring.

And more importantly: WHY THE FUCK IS THERE AN SWIMSUIT DLC FOR THIS GAME? For crying out loud man...

FODA-SE, FUGA É MITADA
A introdução já chuta a porta com dois pés e introduz uma mecânica que simplesmente custa caro demais, você facilmente fica instigado a não usa-la e tentar zerar sem perder ninguém
A batalha contra o Britz foi um dos melhores usos de status em um RPG, Omori gostaria de ter isso
Existe um brilhantismo em não só desenvolver os personagens off-screen nos vínculos como dar ao jogador a escolha de conversar ou não com o Britz, resumir que as crianças vão perdoar o inimigo ou não se depender do jogador foi um acerto
Minha única reclamação é todo o plot ser muito underlying pra outra jogo ou seu universo, mas ainda amo como tudo pode ser resumido a crianças que acabaram sendo jogadas em uma batalha além da sua compreensão sem razão alguma, perderam suas vidas pacatas e até seus pais por um desejo egoísta de uma entidade, e a qualquer momento podem acabar colocando sua vida em risco, uma experiência akin a Bokurano
Eu não ironicamente não me importei do combate ficar repetitivo, não vou colocar desculpa de que não é pra guerra ser divertida, mas você só se aproveita do sistema quando tem pelo menos uns 7 bonecos com vínculo no máximo e nivel 27, existe um bom espaço para combinações que ajudam a não ficar usando só um personagem
O jogo no máximo peca em ficar fácil na reta final, e o combo Sheena+Boron/Kyle+Hanna recupera recurso facilmente

Fuga was, for me, a highly enticing and charming adventure overall. The gameplay loop, for half chunk of the game, worked well, in that, maybe because of its streamlined JRPG structure, every system seamlessly fed into each other.

So yeah, just saying that I really do like this game and can feel all the heart and passion that went into creating it. I had never played a CyberConnect game before, but am now eager to do so. Fuga is unique and brings, for the most part, battles that feels like puzzles while also having great risk/reward and tension/relief gameplay structure. The things this game gets right alone made it worth it for me.

Even with all that, though, I can point out a lot of major things that hinder the overall experience from reaching the full potencial it has.
Starting out the bad stuff, then, I must admit that the game does overstay its welcome, so that after around 10 - 15 hours (beat it at ~20) I started to notice that some of its parts were not working that well anymore. Its difficulty, while engaging at first, was, at a certain point, completely overcome by my finding of optimal strategies, and even though I continued to iterate and experiment upon some different party combos, the challenge just wasn't there anymore, and the battles started to feel unnecessarily long and repetitive, for my solution to most of them was kinda same, even more due to a certain degree of repetition of skills across party members.

The intermissions were interesting, but after the point when the game started to drag out more there were not a lot of incentives for me to keep up the micromanaging of resources (namely AP) I set out to do doing at the start of my run.

This part also circles back to the battles, in which at a certain point I had like almost 20 high SP recovery items which, even when using lots of highly SP-consuming skills, I only had to use 1 or 2 of per chapter. This, too, reduced the necessity of a stronger strategy, and with that the stakes of the battles were also diminished, which in turn affected the stakes of the overarching war story in general. I ended up dying only once throughout the entirety of the game, at the beginning/middle of it, because of some dumb decisions I made in a fight, since I didn't have enough familiarity with the fights to understand the streamlining process of each of them yet.

Speaking of stakes, there is the soul-cannon, and while it seems to be a cool idea on the surface, the thought of using it never crossed my mind, since I faced no hardships that would lead me to. If the cannon were in the game simply as tone-setter or stakes-elevating mechanism, it would be ok, I'd just choose to never use it and matters would be settled. The problem is that, much like in Mass Effect 3 where, because of the suicide mission at the end of 2, there would be no way of the devs building a strong story centered around its characters since half of them could have straight up died in the last game, they effectively didn't, here in Fuga any of the characters could be shot out of the cannon and died at any moment. This complicates things, since there are close to none deep character development because of that, those being left out for "link events" during the intermissions, which (even though I didn't see all of them) usually are filler and don't bring much new things to the table, while the main story could, if more fleshed out.

All of that, though, didn't break the game at all for me. The combat kept being fun at times, even after the 15 hour mark, and the longer battles were not such a slog since I had podcasts on in the background during most of them at that point. I still think it is worth playing through, and still believe it is an 8 out of 10 game, a great one, stopped from reaching the peaks it could because of a handful of problems.

Another stellar short rpg I will have trouble convincing people to play. Fuga is my 1st dive into the Little Tail Bronx games that isn't me looking at old silent let's plays of Tail Concerto and Solatorobo. Never found the 2 latter games anywhere in the wild and I was convinced they didn't exist. All this preamble to say that this is a very new experience for me. Now what I do know about and like are rpgs with time management. Fuga wants you to be balancing the needs and wants of 12 kids, which sounds daunting, but the children are unrealistically easily pleased and usually want something simple. The kids always want something you could feasibly do like making a meal you have all the ingredients for or upgrading a weapon with all of it's components ready. Really the AP requirements in the Intermissions feel more like a restriction on you so you don't get horribly overpowered early on. Most of the game is spent looking at the map and planning which route to use based on how well you're doing. The "war is hell" message is actually taught through the necessity to extinguish life by destroying as many and/or the biggest war machines throughout the map (jokes). These kids need a lot of xp to get cool new skills to deal with the baddest machines the Berman Empire throws at them. So the strategy outside of battle is to take what the game will call the "Dangerous Path" in every fork in the road. Yes you could take "normal" or "safe" but that's not advised unless you are really going to die if you fight a bigger encounter. One thing to note is that danger paths also usually give you consumables to replenish your HP and SP if it went REALLY poorly as well as better upgrade parts. Actual battles are pretty tough if you do the advised danger path spam, requiring a lot of resource stat management as well as figuring out what skills, enemies, and when you should use each. Sometimes it's worth having half your hp off if you need to conserve your sp and there's only an hp heal node coming up in the map. Now usually I hate timeline based rpg combat but I have absolutely no complaints with it in this game. It only makes sense that your machine guns are the fastest in the timeline and your cannons the slowest. All the kids control their own type of weapon with a buddy to passively support them and you can swap out any of your kids every timeline reset. It's really cool to just tag out all your party members at once to say set up your grenadiers to stat effect a boss before swapping to all cannons to get in obscene damage, then swapping back out to delay the boss on the timeline and start it all over again. Unfortunately there is a combo a little too good. The characters Chick and Socks synergize way too well by Chick reducing enemies' stat resistance and Socks following up stunning whatever you need. All grenadiers have lots of debuffs to give to enemies so you always end up having them in your party regardless, it makes cannons feel a little weak. I gotta say though that stunning the chapter 5 and 9 bosses into having ZERO turns did scratch the SMT part of my brain. With the story I feel a little weird with this game. The story is very light early on and told in a past tense 3rd party narrator way, which fine I guess it's more about the kids being friends right? I didn't get as much as I'd hoped as the affinity events are shorter than Fire Emblem's. The events are about as intense as kids passing through the hallway between periods at school. "Hey man can you please teach me how to talk to girls later? Move it tubby you're in my way you are so uncool fatso." And only at level 10 affinity do you really get anything. Honestly it feels more like the Taranis tank itself is the protagonist. We see it through it's long journey through Gasco and we want to see it and the kids by extension get stronger to liberate the whole country. Even when one child has a particular story arc it's in service to the Taranis because the Taranis is linked with the kids and all the kids are sad. The last 3rd of the story is very good with the finale having crazy biblical sized events happening throughout the country. I just want to say that I don't hate any of the children or find them all really boring or anything, it's just that the way they're telling the story isn't telling me what I would find interesting about them. I am anticipating playing the sequel to see what sort of improvements they make, and if I really like that I'll be hyped to the moon for the 3rd entry.

A decent foundation that's led down by several aspects.

1) The game is too long and too many of the encounters are samey and start to repeat themselves. Repetition can be somewhat mitigated by making the leveling process rewarding and fun, but I don't think that was the case here.

2) The presentation is really boring. The way you're constantly driving from left to right, looking at nothing but your vehicle the whole time makes the game feel even more monotonous.

3) The micro management feels tedious. The way menus work makes it more annoying than it should be to switch out your party members and their partners. Same goes for the Tanaris sections, where the way from A to B can feel a bit more tedious than it should be. Feel like you shouldn't walk around the Tanaris but rather make it a menu.

4) The combat, while pretty challenging at times and dependent on ressource management, is a little let down by it's story bosses. Never are those the actual challenging part of the game. Which leads to the next problem:

5) The soul cannon. The big interesting game mechanic that pretty much got me interested in the game or at least more curious about it. The harrowing decision of sacrificing a character for good to get out of a sticky situation is a really cool idea, but doesn't work, because there's never a reason to use it and you even get a bad ending by doing it. The whole mechanic is useless and not encouraged to use at all. Honestly, the game would work better as a shorter roguelike, where a sticky situation is more likely to occur and can't be save scammed or if the game forces them on you anyway and the decision who to sacrifice is what it's all about.

And finally:
6) The story. I can't even really say much about it. It was bland and the characters felt like stereotypes. Obviously nobody can have a huge stake in the main story because since they can be sacrificed, nobody is allowed to be really relevant. So the party feels like one big hivemind aside from one example.

So, even though this was super negative, I don't hate the game. I like myself a turn-based game that forces me to manage my ressources and time (AP) to take priority in one thing over the other. The decision making is what made the game for me. It's the Persona style of RPG, where everything you can do has an advantage, but you could always spend your time in another (better?) way. Deciding if I want to cook for great buffs and EXP boosts, working on relationships, go for more materials or plant more vegetables can be tough! And the biggest success of the game for me.

I'm probably going to give the sequel a shot to see if they made it a bit more interesting. Some of the critique I had are things I could look past in the sequel (like a mediocre story and the presentation, whatever) but I hope the game gets more challenging, encourages the use of the cannon maybe and works on the QoL stuff.

On one hand, I think the people who refuse to play Disco Elysium because it's "too mean" or because Cuno is so vulgar are depressingly childish.

On the other hand, after the fourth fat joke about the fat character, who is fat, I lost all desire to help anyone in this game and shut it off.

Everyone's a hypocrite somewhere!

que joia escondida no gamepass
uma trama basica, sem grandes reviravoltas mas q cativa muito com seus personagens, é tão bom ver a evolução das crianças
a gameplay é bem simples e acaba ficando enjoativa se vc jogar por muito tempo seguido
a trilha sonora tbm acaba ficando repetitiva mas melhores momentos ela aparece de uma forma incrível
recomendo a todos q curtem um estratégia e uma trama simples e envolvente vai fundo.

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.

A turn-based RPG distilled to its basics combined with careful resource management is a great idea on its own. Even while writing this, I still crave more of its core gameplay loop. It is a rather easy game once you figure out optimal strategies, but it was so satisfying that I just didn't care.

Its biggest downfall is that the writers seemed torn between telling a friendship-conquers-all JRPG story and a harrowing war story. This not only holds the story itself back, but its indecisiveness with its theme makes one of its "major" gameplay mechanics - the soul cannon - utterly redundant.

I look forward to the sequel and I hope that they stick to one narrative direction. Preferably the pessimistic one that the game first sold me on... y'know, 'cause I'm a moody bastard.

Honestly Im super biased cause I just love CyberConnect2's world building and art style and always have, but its a really fun RPG! Its straight forward and just throws you into the action, and it honestly offers plenty of challenge if you choose to seek it out. The balancing felt good, I never felt overpowered or like I was falling behind the curve (though I was always taking the hardest path for maximum rewards). The game doesnt overstay its welcome either, with a nice roughly 20 hour playthrough just to see the story through, and the pacing felt great.

The time management aspect of the intermissions was fine, it added some depth with deciding what you wanted to do but it definitely felt like your choices were pretty obvious (upgrades -> build character bonds -> maybe a meal/restocking cooking supplies), at least the scenes between characters as their bonds built were cute and definitely gave something to look forward to each intermission

The real focus of the game was definitely the combat and it delivered well on that front, its tight and bombastic, landing stuns on enemies feels great and engaging with mechanics like character swapping and pairing felt plenty of rewarding, and most skills felt like they had their uses. If I had to pick my biggest complaint, I would have liked it more if the game put more pressure on you to use the sacrificial cannon, at least in my playthrough it was super easy to ignore the mechanic entirely and never consider its use at all, which given its story impact was a bit disappointing! Ruins exploration could have been more too, I dont expect them to package an entire side game necessarily but if its going to be a little walking minigame I think some world building would have been cool to include and give me more reason to actually spend SP on it during intermissions

Overall I really enjoyed it as a tight RPG experience with challenging and fair turn based combat with a cute art style and fun juxtaposition with the darker tone of the story, no bugs or crashes in my playtime and load times were snappy