Fuga: Melodies of Steel
It’s been almost 25 years since game developer CyberConnect2 first hit the scene with Tail Concerto, an action/adventure game for the original PlayStation featuring cute, anthropomorphic anime cats and dogs in a world of floating islands and robots. While the game and its spiritual successor, 2010’s Solatorobo for Nintendo DS, didn’t turn significant profits, they’re still looked back on fondly today by gamers as hidden gems of their respective systems.
Undeniably, the vast majority of CyberConnect2’s success has been in the licensed game market, having developed dozens of titles based on anime franchises like Naruto and Dragon Ball. Still, their passion to develop their own original titles always burned brightly.
Things reached a turning point by the late 2010s. Self-publishing had become a much more feasible means for developers to craft passion projects without needing a large publisher’s backing. Thus, work began on Fuga: Melodies of Steel, the third game in what is retroactively known as the Little Tail Bronx franchise.
“The intent was to make games that were faster to make, with total freedom for our creators since we were our own publisher,” says Fuga’s creative director Yoann Gueritot, who helped craft the game’s story, characters, systems, enemies, items, level design, and music.
Set 700 years before the events of Solatorobo, Fuga is about 12 children from a war-torn land taking control of a ludicrously powerful tank and traversing the land to save their families from captivity by the evil Berman army. While its predecessors focused more on action/adventure gameplay, it was decided that Fuga would go the RPG route. Two children would man each of the tank’s three cannons, their attacks determined by each child’s
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