Some Thoughts About... Fuga Melodies of Steel 2 (Patreon)

An evil army has invaded your town.

Good news! You have a hyper advanced magic tank with a laser that can destroy anything!

Bad news! Said laser is powered by a human sacrifice.

More bad news! The only people on board the tank are tiny children so to fire that laser you need to... yeah... commit a lot of war crimes.

Oh gods the bad news doesn’t stop! The murder tank’s AI is independent so it chooses when to power up the death laser, not you. And it’s brutal. It can even snatch a character out of your active party.

Fuga and its murder tank are back, baby, and... it’s pretty much the same game as the first time around! But that’s pretty okay because Fuga was a neat strategic RPG with a Grandia-esq battle timeline system. Everybody in a fight is shown on a timeline and when a character reaches the end of the timeline, they act. However, your tank has three types of attacks and by hitting the enemy with the attack they’re weak to, they get shoved back down the timeline and their actions are delayed. It’s not quite as good as Grandia because you can only delay an enemy once until it acts, so even if you keep hammering them with their weakness, they won’t keep getting bumped down the timeline. But it is still a fun battle system and the game has style and tells its story well.

There are some nice quality of life features in Fuga 2 (that the Internet tells me were eventually patched  into the first game).

You can now speed up the tank’s movement on the travel screens. It’s still kind of slow but not as awful as it was before.

You can now see what enemies are in the battle on the formation screen when setting up your attacks. No more fumbling with UI to remind yourself if the enemy is weak to Red+Red or Red+Yellow.

You don’t trade items for other parts in town, you just earn money and buy things. You mostly sell unwanted items for money but expeditions pay out cash items too. There are still a lot of trading events on a trip or giving things to people for unknown rewards in story moments so there is still some of the trading component.

When you’re shopping in towns, you can now see what items are needed for upgrades on the tank. That’s huge because trying to remember all of it before was a pain!

Making upgrades no longer has a failure chance, it instead has a “high success” chance that will refund some of the materials spent on the upgrade if you hit it.

The game’s difficulty is really uneven. I’ve had boss fights I just waltzed through and then fights against regular enemies that I just barely survived. It’s usually against enemies that boost their evasion so you can’t hit them or enemies that can boost their defense every turn for free so you can barely do any damage. Defense enemies you can counter by using skills, but that gets expensive quickly and some enemies can raise defense faster than you can lower it. But for some of the evasion enemies, no idea how to counter that early on. You just have to play a really tedious fight where almost all your attacks miss until the enemies decides to stop evading. It’s not fun or hard or complex, it’s just annoying. Towards the end of the game, you eventually learn some skills that are guaranteed hits but it takes a lot of leveling up to get there.

I did save scum once, but in my defense, it was a BS moment where the enemy magically jumped up the timeline and knocked me under half health in a single attack, activating the Soul Cannon and taking away one of my best characters. The game broke the rules, so I did too.

There’s a new Airship feature but it’s pretty half-baked. You can hire the ships to take you to alternate paths, destroy enemies, or drop off supplies. However, it’s way too expensive to use on your first times through the game. Even when going through New Game Plus and NG++, you’ll be saving your money to buy the stupidly expensive post-game items so you can’t afford it. Then when you can afford it, you’re strong enough to not need the airship to destroy enemies.

Story is the big thing for Fuga, but for new players, they do a really bad summary of what happened in the first game. Unless you played the first one, just getting a series of images without any text or explanation does not catch people up, so you need to Youtube/wiki that business. Like, it starts with a flashback and then has multiple flashbacks within its flashback. I would recommend reading a wiki on it all because the franchise’s backstories are bonkers but really neat. “Little Tail Bronx”. Even the franchise name is weird. That’s not the name of any of the games, that’s just the collective name for the three series that make up the franchise.

The story has a fantastic homage to TinTin and his ilk. I genuinely looked forward to the end of each chapter so I could get the next issue in the comic series. They put so much effort into it and they totally didn’t have to. Bless you, Captain Sucre and your owl that understands human language!

In Fuga 1, the moment-to-moment story bits were not great but the overall story was really neat and F2 carries that through. Some keen intrigue, magic tech, and really leaning into how depressing its murder tank mechanic is so it never becomes a power fantasy that glorifies war. In F2, you quickly find out that the uplifting “power of friendship” moment at the end of 1 wasn’t what you thought it was and is secretly extremely depressing and something you’re going to have to deal with now.

The characters, though, are such one-note anime tropes. It takes a LOT of time with the conversation/friend mechanic to get to their interesting parts, but some of them still just never change. There’s a fat kid in your group so of course his only role is to eat food and talk about food. Then you have the sullen jerk kid. The smart nerd kid. The innocent childhood friend girl. But then there’s Mei, your little sister whose role is to be damned adorable and if you loaded her into the murder tank laser, you are a monster. A MONSTER!

They do a nice job of laying the groundwork for future games without making you feel like you’re missing out on this one. Everything in F2’s story gets resolved well but there are multiple characters that you want to know more about and they stay mysterious. And the trailer/secret movie for the third game is super intense and looks like they’re going to go to some wild places.

An addition to the story is a new moral choice system, but it too is really half-baked. The moral choices don’t matter. No matter what you choose, the same outcome happens. Even if that doesn’t make any sense.

For one example, the villain deploys a drone to attack a town and your choices are to ignore the drone and go after the villain or to let the villain escape and save the town from the drone. If you choose to go after the villain, it gets away and when you get back to the drone, it’s already destroyed the town. If you choose to go after the drone... it got to the town early and has already destroyed the town. Way to make your choices feel utterly meaningless. I don’t need the story to do a complete branching since this was just some random town, but man, make it have SOME significance.

You do unlock some team moves by continuing to make the same “class” of choices (“Resolve” or “Empathy”) and they’re the main draw. You tend to make your choices based on unlocking the next move, rather than what actually fits the story, and that reeeaaally doesn’t feel like how that system should work. And the more violent Resolve powers are way better and more useful than the Empathy choices that actually fit the characters and story better.

Fuga 2 also has a really nice New Game Plus mode. There are multiple endings worth getting and all your character levels and tank upgrades carry over across your runs. Unfortunately, all the bonuses you get from the “moral choices” in the story are removed. There are events tied to your scores so I understand resetting that, but to take away the team abilities is lousy. You only unlock the really good ones at the end of the game so because they reset, you only get them for a chapter or two. Replaying the game makes taking new paths on the next run easier so you can feel powerful and stomp your enemies, or keep some difficulty by choosing a harder route and getting better upgrade materials from them.

The game seems more balanced towards the NG+ playthrough. The “Safe” routes are easy in the early and mid game. The “Normal” routes will knock you around a bit if you play sloppy. The “Dangerous” routes require you to play strategically. On NG+, you finally have the tools to counter enemy actions and you’re strong enough that delaying an enemy might give you just enough time to defeat it without taking damage, compared to the first playthrough where you’re so weak that you’re going to get hit whether you delay the enemy or not. Unfortunately, on NG+, you’re going to have so much health and special energy that the first two-thirds of the game are a total breeze. You have to go out of your way to lose some of the boss fights once you’re super upgraded (like say if you were a questionable person and you wanted to go for the “let all the children die” ending. Hypothetically, of course). They really made getting the bad ending super difficult. You’re going to need all those upgrades and tons of items at the end if you want to be a bad person and that really helps sell that this ending is not good and not something you should be striving for.

If you’re interested in the series (and are okay with the, ya know, fictional war crimes), there’s a demo for the first game on the Playstation and Switch stores that is irresponsibly long. It’s like a quarter of the full game so it gives you a really deep look at what you’re in for. These are well-made games with a lot of effort and care put into them so I hope the series does well (and we get that third game).