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.
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.