izigame.me

The end of the tank trilogy. I reviewed the previous two games, so I might as well finish it off with the third. The game feels a bit all over the place, so putting down my thoughts is a bit difficult. Overall I think I mostly enjoyed it and it's a decent ending to the series, but there's also a whole lot of weird stuff going on too. There's going to be some spoilers since this is about the ending of the trilogy and it's hard to be vague about some of these things.
Gameplay was largely unchanged, and all the new features (support units, combos, tank skill tree, and every child having a passive that can randomly activate) really only serve to make an already pretty easy series even easier. The support units were the most interesting addition, but even though there's almost a dozen of them, I largely ended up using just two of them because they were so much more useful. The passives the kids have that can randomly activate are very strong, and they activate WAY more frequently than I would have ever expected, which lets you just chew through most fights with no real rhyme or reason.
The other new feature, the Akasha Panel, is just a timeline and doesn't actually open up until the postgame, but it is very convenient because it makes it a lot easier to jump around and fulfill the requirements for things like the bad ends without having to replay the entire game. You also unlock a challenge battle mode which is just a ton of back to back fights through the 12 chapters of the game with no story, dialogue, or intermissions to break it up. Again, it's not very difficult because at this point I've got everything maxed out and can just cruise through most of the fights, but man there's a LOT of them. After every couple chapters you unlock some background story chunks about Ash, which was interesting, however it takes several hours of largely mindless battling to unlock them all. And the final two chapters don't even unlock more story, your final reward for beating the whole challenge mode is a reused CG with the characters recolored and "CONGRATULATIONS" slapped on top of it.
The main 11 chapter story was alright and it felt like it had a decent ending point, but then if you still have all the kids (and again, it's very easy NOT to use the soul cannon) you get a 12th chapter with a true ending that feels strangely tacked on. Chapter 11 ends with you fighting the main villain who has established motivations and has been involved with the plot throughout the game, and then chapter 12 begins with "Actually the CEO of racism is still alive somehow and you have to stop him from nuking the city because he's EVIL!!!" It just feels a little jarring to suddenly switch gears so hard and for seemingly no real reason.
Once you do all that you unlock extra ending vignettes for the kids if you've maxed out all their friendships. They range from dull or expected (Boron is very strong, Jin and Flam end up working together, Sheena leaves to better study magic) to ones that came out of left field (Kyle is a mafia boss? Mei is having weird visions of three versions of herself that are identified as "witches"?? Hanna ended up with Kyle and has a human baby???). Though between the final ending vignette with a large timeskip and punished Malt, and the final secret video teasing a new noir/murder mystery looking type game, maybe all the weird stuff is just leading into that future title and these weird things will make more sense eventually, I dunno.
Music and art are still good, and it seems like there's a lot more CGs this time and they even have some light animation in some of them. Unfortunately though they seem to have heavily cut back on the French dubbing this time around, which is a shame since it is canonically how they're speaking in this universe. The French narrator was entirely gone this time, so those parts are just silent. The director of the previous two Fuga games was French, but he left the company shortly after Fuga 2 released (to go work for PlatinumGames right before they started imploding, whoops!), so I do wonder if that's connected. Though the previous title in the Little Tail Bronx series, Solatorobo, was only voiced in french and that was before he joined CC2, so it's hard to say either way. French is still an option and it's nice to still have, it just feels a lot emptier than before, which is a little sad.
In the end it's all a bit mixed. The Fuga series as a whole is fine, but never really anything too amazing. I don't really ever see myself replaying these games, but it did make me want to replay Solatorobo. I am still interested in what the next title in the Little Tail Bronx franchise will be, and if it does end up being directly connected to Fuga again, just after 15ish years have passed, then I hope it's presented in a way that allows for more interesting character development, because the specter of the soul cannon potentially erasing any character from the story has weighed heavily on the ability of all three of these games to have any real meaningful character development.