Fuga: Melodies of Steel

A superweapon that costs a child

Fuga: Melodies of Steel is CyberConnect2's first self-published game, and its first return in over a decade to the Little Tail Bronx setting the studio built for the cult-favourite Tail Concerto and Solatorobo — a world of anthropomorphic dogs and cats living in a steampunk alternate history. Here that world is at war: the Berman army has invaded Gasco, and twelve children fleeing the destruction of their village stumble onto Taranis, an ancient sentient tank built by a long-extinct human civilisation. The rest of the game is that tank's journey across occupied territory to rescue the children's captured parents.

The idea the game is actually built around, and the reason it's remembered at all outside a niche JRPG audience, is the Soul Cannon: a devastating one-shot weapon capable of wiping out entire enemy formations, which only fires by draining the full life force of one chosen child. It's not a button you press lightly — using it visibly and permanently marks that character for the rest of the playthrough, replaces their artwork with a hollowed-out silhouette in the game's ending sequence, and drops their closest friends aboard the tank into a depressive state that locks them out of their own abilities until they recover. It's a rare example of a video game moral choice with real, felt, ongoing consequences rather than a one-time cutscene branch, and it's the single best reason Fuga has built the loyal following it has.

Where the rest of the game doesn't quite keep up

The turn-based combat wrapped around that idea is solid without being remarkable. Taranis fights using turret positions the crew mans and rotates between, with abilities and buffs that expand as more of the children level up and unlock new roles. Several reviewers describe an excellent early learning curve, where new tactical options keep arriving right as the previous ones start to feel routine — and then describe that curve flattening out well before the campaign ends. The most consistent specific complaint in the game's own Steam review corpus is that enemy variety doesn't keep pace with the stage count: the same handful of Berman unit types reappear across nearly every level, so what should read as escalating threat instead reads, to a real slice of players, as repetition with a higher number attached.

That repetition compounds with a level structure that's strictly linear — the game moves the Taranis along a fixed path stage to stage, with no open exploration to break up the rhythm — and a crew-management layer that asks for real attention between fights: specific windows to heal, specific timing to build affinity between characters, and enough incentive to keep reshuffling which children sit in which turret that more than one reviewer describes it as busywork rather than meaningful strategy. None of this makes the combat bad, but it means the game's back half is carried more by curiosity about where the story and the Soul Cannon's consequences are heading than by the fights themselves — a pattern echoed by a detailed, fully-completionist 196-hour review that still, after finishing everything the game has, argues the execution never quite matches the strength of its core idea.

A story some players say hasn't earned its weight yet

The writing gets a more divided response than the mechanics. Plenty of the review corpus praises the cast — twelve genuinely distinct children rather than palette-swapped archetypes — and the affinity system that rewards spending downtime actually talking to them rather than skipping straight to the next fight. But a real thread of feedback, including from players who otherwise recommend the game, argues the character writing in this specific entry is comparatively basic: one detailed critical review says the entire plot could be summarised in five minutes and that individual characters lean on a single trait rather than real depth early on. Several reviewers who say this specifically flag the sequels as the stronger execution of the same premise, which is a useful signal for anyone deciding where to start in the now three-game series — this is the foundational entry the format was built on, not necessarily its most polished chapter.

Setting it against its own sequels

Two further entries have since followed the same template — an AI-piloted successor tank in Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2, and a third game closing out the trilogy — and one detailed review in this game's own corpus argues all three should really be read as a single story told across three releases rather than three separate purchases, since the structure, art direction and combat barely change installment to installment. That framing is useful context for judging this first entry specifically: it's the version of Fuga with the roughest edges, the thinnest early characterisation by its own players' account, and the least enemy variety, because it's the one that had to establish the format from nothing. Judged as a standalone game rather than as the opening chapter of a trilogy, the repetition and pacing complaints above land harder than they might for someone who already knows a sharper sequel is waiting on the other side.

Value

At NZ$49.99, Fuga sits at a genuinely contested price point in its own review corpus. It's not an unreasonable price for a full turn-based RPG with four-platform day-one support and a distinctive setting, and the aggregate 94%-positive score across nearly 1,300 reviews says most buyers feel they got a worthwhile game either way. But a specific, repeated argument inside that same corpus — including from a player who stuck with it long enough to fully complete it — is that the production scale feels closer to a well-made mobile or handheld title than a $49.99 console-scale release, and that the game is best bought on a real discount rather than at launch price. There's no ongoing monetisation to weigh against that either way: it's a single purchase with no add-on content, so the only value question is whether the Soul Cannon's central idea is worth the price of admission on its own. For a lot of players, including plenty writing after finishing it twice, the answer is yes.