izigame.me

It's Fuga 3! If you've played Fuga 1 and 2, you know you're gonna play this one. Go and do it. If you haven't played the first two, go play those first.
But how is Fuga 3? In some ways I think it's the best game in the series. Without spoiling anything, the plot starts of seeming like it's going to retread the same beats as Fuga 1, but it doesn't take too long to diverge, and when it does, it goes all out. While the previous games just gently nodded toward their connections to Solatorobo, this one goes all-in, to the point where Solatorobo is more relevant to the plot here than Fuga 2 is. All the loose ends get wrapped up and all the recurring characters get their moment in the spotlight. If you believe in the power of friendship, you can give these furry kids the happy ending they all deserve.
But despite that, I've got a few complaints. The story feels a lot like they hadn't planned this far out when they wrote Fuga 1; there are elements here that are clear retcons of things that happened back then, and the writers decided to just fudge things a bit for the sake of what they felt would make a more interesting story. Fuga 2 is also strangely not relevant; you could skip straight from 1 to 3 and not miss much. How much these things bother you could affect your enjoyment of the story quite a bit.
For better or worse, the gameplay is exactly the same gameplay loop as the first two games with only some minor tweaks. Link attacks are gone, replaced by two different abilities: burst attacks, which charge as you deal damage and automatically activate when the gauge is full, dealing damage based on which two kids are active when the gauge fills; and assist attacks, which have another gauge that fills over time, but you can choose when to activate it in order to summon a guest character who will use a special ability. These and a few other tweaks and rebalanced abilities make combat a little more complex, and I think they're good changes.
Unfortunately, that's pretty much it. Sure, the Taranis can fly now, but it's purely a plot device; it doesn't give you any sort of tactical options in combat or change how you move across maps at all. There's also the new Mega Soul Cannon, which again, is purely a plot contrivance that is used to force you into a bad ending if you let a kid die; it doesn't affect the gameplay at all. And the game shows you a timeline of events between chapters, which might make you think the game has branch paths or alternate routes... but it doesn't. It exists purely so you can rewind when you die and get a bad ending, or so you can see some extra scenes that don't fit into the main plot.
The result is that it feels like there was a lot of potential to make this the most ambitious game in the series and make some fundamental changes to the formula, but they didn't. It's still a good game, but there's a constant nagging feeling that it's not as good as it could have been. That's fine, and the game is worth playing, but I really hope CC2's next entry in the Little Tail Bronx franchise tries to break the mold a bit.