Some Thoughts About… Fuga 3
The initial story in Fuga 3 is exactly the same as it has been in the previous games: the fascist Empire is ignoring its treaties and attacking your towns and it’s up to some plucky kids and their god-tank to stop this. However, I think the simplicity works in the larger story’s favor. By keeping the inciting elements familiar, we focus more on the larger story of the never-ending cycle of war and Malt’s backstory and his powers. Sure, there’s another war going on, but the REAL story is something so much bigger than that. Ash’s story (Malt’s mysterious lost brother) is fleshed out and boy does that get dark fast! You quickly get an illustration of a kid holding a bloody knife while standing over the bodies of his dead parents and, yep, that’s Fuga all right! Mei shares in Malt’s psychic abilities and that makes up a big chunk of the story. They do a really nice job of incorporating gameplay mechanics into the story, and I always appreciate when games do that. The larger story only works because this is a video game. If you changed this to a movie or a book, the mechanics and story would lose a lot of their meaning. And you wouldn’t hate the villain nearly as much as you wind up hating them.
The store description says you don’t have to play 1 and 2 first, but I highly disagree with that. The story is a direct continuation and the gameplay is a lot harder so it expects you to know the basics, good strategies, and how to manage your team at intermissions right away. They really force you to use skills a lot more. Enemies hit harder and use skills a lot so you’re going to be healing regularly, have to use items to regain your special move points, and foes start battles with a lot of armor. Common grunt enemies regularly start fights with 3 to 5 armor, so unless you’re firing off armor reducing skills turn after turn, you’re in for a lot of drawn out fights. Then just on the story front, without playing the previous games, the final two chapters would fall totally flat.
The game straight up cheats a mid-game fight, all but forcing a bad end onto you for your first playthrough. Unless you’ve specifically spent the entire game building to counter the boss, it just cheeses the entire fight by getting to go multiple rounds in a row and keeping your health in the critical zone every turn. You just don’t have enough health to stay out of the critical zone so the Soul Cannon counter is constantly ticking down and you can’t do enough damage to the boss to end the fight before the counter expires. It’s not like the game just gets hard from this point forward; I was able to beat every other boss after this chapter’s. It’s really lame and just unfair, especially with all the guilt the game dumps on you for losing a character. I didn’t “earn” the bad ending, you just cheated.
From this boss on gameplay-wise, the back half of the game… kind of stinks. Every battle becomes a tedious slog where enemies do a ton of damage, have a lot of armor, have a ton of health, can make themselves invincible, keep hitting with status debuffs, and can spawn new enemies. It’s not unbeatably hard, it just really drags on and stops being any fun at all. And I think the developers kind of knew this. The game adds a “Fast Mode” where you can just instantly win every battle. And just to rub it in, once you’ve turned Fast Mode on, you can’t turn it off. Even once you beat the game and start New Game Plus mode, your save file is forever “tainted”. It’s a real bummer the only choices are “tedious and not-fun” and “super simple and not-fun”. The game kind of just becomes a visual novel with tons of upgrading and some keen boss fights. It would have been nicer to have an “Easy” mode that leaves the enemies on the map but lowers their health, raises your attack, prevents normal enemies from gaining armor/invincibility/stealth, and cuts down on the status debuffs. At least you can play the boss fights normally and that’s where the meat of the gameplay is anyway.
There’s a new feature that adds a unique currency for some new upgrades for the tank itself, on top of the usual armor and weapon upgrades. But, they’re not very useful on your first playthrough. The armor and skill point upgrades are super expensive and the special powers you can deploy on the map are so expensive that you won’t be able to afford them until New Game Plus. I guess it makes getting the true ending easier, but it just feels like an addition for the sake of adding something to the game.
You can now “Combo” attacks to do extra damage, but you do this by hitting enemy weaknesses, which is probably how you were playing the game all this time anyway. So cool it’s a new feature, but it actually doesn’t add anything to the game. You still spend so SO much time changing characters around in battle to maximize weaknesses and now you spend even MORE time doing it trying to preserve the combo bonuses. It would have been nicer if they just added a faster way to swap between your frontline and backline attackers.
Other than that… Kind of exactly the same game as Fuga 2, which was kind of the same game as Fuga 1. The UX is still the same kind of clunky setup where it takes too many steps to do simple actions. It’s still super frustrating to try to find a specific ability on your team or review the characters’ bonuses. The UI is still weirdly slow. It’s still a pain to clear all the “!” icons on “new” pictures in the library, even though you’ve seen them as part of the story. You still can’t leave up a list of items needed when doing shopping. There’s a new ability to see what weaknesses enemies have when swapping characters around, but you have to click an extra button to do it and it has a too long animation entering and exiting the new view. So, Fuga 3 is kind of an extra big expansion pack for Fuga 2, but that’s cool with me since the series is already really good and I’m in it for the story and boss fights. Hey, they made more of a game I already like. Yay!
“Snipenir” might be one of my favorite puns for a horse-based sniper mech. That’s so good.
This feels like yet another strategy game that fakes accuracy. A “70%” chance to hit will regularly miss four times in a row. If you have an 80% chance to hit an enemy and then get hit by a debuff that lowers your accuracy by 50%, you now have a… 70% chance to hit that enemy. Either “70%” is a catch-all for all “bad” numbers or the scale is some kind of logarithmic or these animal people have their own maths.
For as good as the main story and character moments are, man are a lot of the cast just one-note anime cliches. Boron is fat, so for three games all he’s done is talk about food and he’s kind of dumb. That’s it. Boron is fat, dumb, and cares about his friends and for three games that’s all he’s ever done. Socks is an inventor and… that’s it. For three games, Socks has just been an inventor. Jin is a tsundere mechanic and that’s as far as his personality has ever gone. Kyle has been the most boring cliché “rival friend” for three games and it’s only in the post game scene where we flash forward to his life as an adult does he actually become interesting. Kind of suddenly and massively so. I’ve hated Kyle for three games but now I really want to see more of grown-up Kyle’s story. Wappa is still exactly the same, but I kind of dig her Gandalf-y “this child has smoked weed and we all know it” hippy vibes. Sure, Wappa, you go wander into an active warzone with no provisions, shelter, or plans. That’s totally a thing an eight year old would do.
We finally reveal the secrets of Sucre, the in-world Tintin-esq comic book, and how it all connects back to the game’s real world. It’s really silly, but I’m cool with that. And don’t try to wrap your head around the foreshadowing abilities of Sucre. So the comic foreshadows major turns in the real story, but then the guy that writes Sucre is surprised when the thing he said was going to happen then happens. Whuuut? There are still unanswered questions at the end of the story, but they’re more franchise questions than series questions. We know where the robots came from but if the tech to build them from a previous society, does that mean there’s an Old-Old World? Or are we to assume that Sucre’s explanation is the real one, but how would the writer know that? Gah, it makes you sound like a crazy person to anybody that doesn’t already know what you’re talking about and I like that. For the ending of the Fuga series, it’s kind of beautiful and they go out on the right notes. Within a series so dripping with despair and tragedy, the ending is moving. I’m a sucker for turning instruments of hopelessness into hope, I guess. And they pull off one of the coolest “power of friendship” moments that’s so keen you can’t even dare to accuse it of being cheesy.
I recently replayed some of the Valkyria Chronicles games and, while I love the gameplay, the difference from Fuga’s quality writing and acting to VC’s storytelling is stark. VC deals with a lot of the same themes: the cyclical nature of war, the inhumane things people allow themselves to do in a war, super unethical science experiments, child soldiers, and so forth, but VC makes almost none of it work. VC’s dramatic moments are melodramatic, they don’t land, and nothing has weight because the characters stink, the writing is lousy, and so much of the game is undercut by trying to be serious one minute and then being bogged down in anime cliches the next. Fuga handles it so much better. When Fuga gets anime, it partitions that between fights and keeps it to small doses, so when Fuga needs to get serious, Fuga gets serious. VC even constantly waters down its villains, compared to Fuga where the villains seem to get worse every time you meet them so by the end of the game you’re thrilled to put a stop to them. VC has a cast that’s a who’s who of anime voice actors (there are people in VC’s cast that have over 400 credits on IMDB), but none of them can wring any emotion, either through their the fault of their performance or the bad script. Versus Fuga where one weepy scene with Mei can bring down the house. At best, VC’s Claude turns a blind eye to racism, war crimes, slavery, and scientific crimes against humanity. At worst, Claude is an active participant in this. Malt and his crew would be disgusted by Claude and his.
So cheers to Fuga! You spent a series making me feel awful and great.
