Fuga: Melodies of Steel

Beaucoup d'amour dans ce jeu! Le gameplay du jeu est très malin : la difficulté est exigeante, la route est parsemée d'embranchements high risk high reward...et si jamais vous vous trouvez face a un mur ...vous pourrez toujours sacrifier un enfant pour alimenter le canon des âmes ! Plus ce sera déchirant mieux il fonctionnera! Je vous recommande a fond!

Peak game with adorable characters and a dark story. If you're not strategic, you can snooker yourself, but the game is generally pretty forgiiving. I had so much fun plying this on Xbox, I just had to get it on Steam. Price-wise, it's leagues beyond so many more popular games of the same price. Sheena, my beloved SP farm. Hanna is best girl. Screw you, Jin. You screwed up my perfect run, you little edgelord.

When I first started playing the demo for this game, I was completely unaware of the Soul Cannon mechanic (somehow), so you can imagine the immense emotional damage afflicted upon me during that first chapter. Needless to say, this game had me hooked from the very start, and it quickly became one of my favorites!

Entré al juego totalmente a ciegas, las fotos me llamaban la atención y dije pues pa'dentro. Muy contento con el resultado. Lo recomiendo bastante

Maybe it depends on how much you engage with the story and characters, but for me personally, I had an absolute 10/10 experience playing this game. That's not to say the game necessarily is a 10/10 game, but I had an incredible amount of fun playing this game and think anyone who loves jrpgs will love this. Especially fans of persona or deltarune who know what it's like to engage with a fun young cast and really connect to the story. Now, I do have quite a bit to say about this game, so lets start with [h3]the characters[/h3]. I really liked them. I know many people might see this game or the people who play it as weird because all the characters are dogs and cats, but all that really does is give the game a nice, unique charm (and maybe make it slightly less resembling of ww2, because maybe some would see that as insensitive as racism and persecution can be found as themes in game.) All of the characters felt at least a little bit likable, making it ever more emotional to even consider sacrificing one of their lives to decimate an enemy. Another thing I liked is that there wasn't necessarily a "main character" in the sense that the game followed all the children as a unit rather than telling the story from the perspective of a single person. This does ironically lead to a few minor annoyances I ended up having, but in general I think it was really cool to not focus a single character, because it kind of allows you to have your own main character if you play most of the intermission time with a specific person (which in my case, was Kyle) However, I didn't write this review to mindlessly glaze the game, so I will share a few slight nitpicks I had with the characters. Now I do acknowledge that with 12 unique characters with no "main character", it was hard to divide screen time equally. But I couldn't help but feel that some characters felt like they were on screen a bit more than others, which I've boiled down to 2 reasons: 1. Certain characters were just featured more, and some less. Simple. The solution would just be to include the characters with less screen time more in scenes where it didn't really matter who was speaking, as long as the same thing was being said. 2. There just weren't enough main story events. Even if the first possibility is true, I still feel this is true regardless. The characters didn't really interact much outside of link events, which I guess could be because "that's the whole point of the link events" but I don't really agree with that. I think in games with these mechanics, the purpose of link events is to dive in to the connection of 2 specific characters. This doesn't mean the main story should ignore the connection of the group as a whole, though. For example, persona makes sure to have mandatory story events that involve the whole group interacting and having fun with each other, increasing the whole connection, and generally making the message of friendship that most of these games have a lot more powerful. That's my biggest issue with the characters though, which is pretty good considering the whole thing basically is I wanted a bit more. I know the section of my negatives may seem longer than the positives, but I assure you that was a really small nitpicky detail and the characters are still amazing. [h3]The gameplay[/h3] Is something I see a lot of people in the reviews criticizing for being repetitive. I do see where they're coming from, but I just simply loved the battle system. It felt really satisfying all the time for me, constantly swapping out formations every couple of turns for the sake of playing optimally, considering who should be charging/using link attacks, who has and should maybe save hero mode, who should go behind the active gunner for the best passive for them, it really did feel like I really was commanding a huge tank and a crew. There is a point where entirely new do enemies stop appearing, the game playing more off the new combinations of enemies instead of introducing new ones, but I found myself adapting formations so often that I didn't really notice all that much. The soul cannon mechanic is a very interesting mechanic, giving you a free boss win in exchange for you being forced to suffer emotionally, including locking you out of the true ending, meaning you'll never have the true satisfaction of saving "everyone" (because one of your party members has DIED, PERMANENTLY) , which is the entire purpose of your journey to begin with. On the other hand, I was also slightly dissatisfied with the soul cannon purely because of the game's difficulty. There is no fight in the game that will ever pressure you into actually feeling the soul cannon is necessary, which I found a bit disappointing. It's a last resort for a situation that never comes, meaning most of its purpose is just to intimidate you by just being there, a symbol of the consequences that could come should you be too weak to be able to complete a boss. Speaking of difficulty, the game would surely benefit by some form of it. I get that you kind of choose it by choosing safe/normal/dangerous routes, but I think those would do better as situational routes that may change depending on your hp/sp/whether someone is knocked out, rather than acting as the whole difficulty setting by itself also actually what fast mode just why Finally, [h1] The Music [/h1] is so incredible, it makes me want to compose fantasy. That's not a joke. I do music, and I actually love analysing the small aspects of the ost, even the names of the tracks are all connected for crying out loud. There's not much else to say apart from the soundtrack being great and fitting the theme of the game incredibly. (seriously listen for the suspension at 0:47 in the strings of flower on the trails it's genuinely the most beautiful thing I've ever heard) In other news, grass is green, the sky is blue, Kyle has a crush on Hanna, and Malt is very much the oldest. 10/10 experience will be getting fuga 2 and 3.

Ignore the playtime I actually have a little over 50 hours on a copy I barrowed from my good friend Amélie Poulain I've now played through this game three times and am surprised at how much I enjoy it, CC2 is responsible for one of my all time favorite game series with the original .hack quadrilogy and although im not a furry I really wanted to see what they were cooking finally making a game that wasn't just a licensed anime arena fighter and I'm really glad I did, sure parts of the game are a little cliche but the game play loop is really fun as someone who's favorite genre is turned based rpgs and the art is really well done throughout. I really miss these basically AA games as honestly AAA these days is normally a soulless mess and the majority of indie games I find slop and a waste of time (how many more friend slop, crafting simulators, or rougelites do we really need?) But this game hits the sweet spot of feeling like a fleshed out experience and although i think full price for it is honestly as little much it goes on sale half off enough that 20$ is totally worth the price for a game that takes roughly 20 hours for the first play through and is fun enough to go through multiple plays.

What a gem of a game. Highly Recommend! [spoiler] Edit: After researching what this series can offer, I am kinda sad that some character are set to what they gonna be in the future. Like come on, were dealing with multiple timeline and time travel shenanigans could we have a what if route to each character you raised your affinity with? I want Sheena to be with Malt ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! Anyway still recommended this game, guess I just have to look up a fanfic about this. Edit 2: Fck It's only Hanna and Malt... [/spoiler]