SinComics

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.

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and becoming a princess of the puffy jacket.

Our request was by Revan for their character, Jay, to make his way back on the trail and through the trees, despite some extra padding. Anything to keep those customers safe. Insurance rates are through the roof for chalets!

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and becoming a princess of the puffy jacket.

Our request was by RossP to have Pip take advantage of a fine sale and make the mistake of tying the spare jacket around her waist, leading to some bonus jacket changes. And Greed will never back down off the sales grind. Greed hears Lust talk about hussy culture all the time, so everybody loves the hustle.

Our theme for the MORT this month was a combination of our Oblivious storyline and puffy jackets.

Patrons voted that our hero needed an 80-20 split on what should grow: our lead or the dress. Finally, a story about the common man triumphing over corporate business interests!

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and becoming a princess of the puffy jacket.

Our request was by Zamiel to have Baxter use his fancy new uniform to become a snow queen. Every good hero needs a fancy super suit! Demons will be looking for dark things hiding in the shadow so they totally won't suspect a thing! Also, seems like a great way for Bax and the crew to sell a new set of action figures in alternate costumes!

Hiya, thanks for the Ask!

It depends what you're looking for. The Patreon page went up around 2014-ish, so that has a bunch of bonus arts and most of the Mercynaries comics (starting from page 57 it seems). https://www.patreon.com/SinComics

The comic collections are up on Lulu still. https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/sins

Anything older than that is iffy. I should have almost all the story comics and fan arts since those were backed up, but I had a computer die on me way back when, so a lot of the one-off pictures and stories are lost to the digital aether.

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and becoming a princess of the puffy jacket.

Our request was by Melkorios to have a snow that turns the surrounding town into unaware princesses. And that's why you have to support the arts and sciences! When all those people in lab coats show up and want to build a strange lab and observatory on top of the mountain, only good things will come of it!

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and becoming a princess of the puffy jacket.

“Deck-building rogue-like” is highly ranked among my least favorite game types, but I did enjoy Vampire Survivors, so let’s give it a shot. Surprisingly, the dungeon crawling is the worst aspect of Vampire Crawlers since it slows everything down. The stages are too long. From the second stage on, they’re five floors deep without much ramp up. When you’re playing “right”, your hands can take several minutes to resolve for boss fights, so they drag on. I regularly spend about 50-70% of my Switch’s battery on a single stage (in airplane mode and the screen at under 50% brightness). If you want to make the final stage that long, sure, but build up to that. The first difficulty of stages could have been 2 floors, the next 3, the final 4, and then the last two stages your 5 and 6s.

Crawlers doesn’t seem like it would be as enjoyable for people that haven’t played Vampire Survivors, but also because it’s a sequel, it doesn’t have that sense of discovery the first game had. It’s all the same items and all the same characters and all the same locations and all the same enemies. And for people that are really into deckbuilding games, it’s probably too simplistic to remain interesting outside of the meta progression. Like, it’s so simplistic that it almost doesn’t matter what your attack cards do. The combat system is built around building combos from what the card costs so what really matters is how much a card costs, not what attack it performs. Once you figure that out, you stop really looking at the cards and just look at costs. What’s the difference between the ice wand and the fire wand? The ice one costs 0 and the fire one costs 1. There are no other considerations beyond that cost value. In VS, attacks fired at different rates, for different durations, in different patterns, on different timers, and at different speeds. Here, you don’t have to think about any of that.

It’s considerably smaller in scale too. There are fewer characters and items. Most stages get repeated three times and there are fewer locations. The stages are even less interactive than in VS. The Milk Factory has the mine carts, but you can’t use them in combat. They’re just candlesticks with different animations. The enemy spawning sigils are on the floor of Gallo Tower, but they’re just decorations and don’t do anything when you step on them.

I’d hesitate to even call this a “sequel”. It’s more… a reimagining of VS in a different genre.

Just like with Vampire Survivors, the game will crash on you. BUT! This time, it actually saves mid-run. So, that’s some kind of improvement. It always crashed on me after beating the final boss of a dungeon or when stepping into a dungeon’s exit so there every crash was a horrible “oh gods I don’t want to have to do that again” build up to a sigh of relief seeing I just needed to re-collect the final treasure chest and exit.

Man, there are some bad loading times. Over 15 seconds to load a stage and frequently again to move from one floor to the next. I played the demo on PC and don’t remember that, so maybe it’s yet another problem they have making games for the Switch or something happened going from demo to full release.

I would still recommend a handheld for the game. It’s the kind of game to play on a treadmill or safely wandering and having your attention elsewhere. Plus, it just plays better with a controller. I didn’t like just mouse/touchscreen, or mouse and keyboard in the demo.

The UI is a cluttered mess both on the map and in battle. Important information gets covered up because multiple elements overlap yet there are spaces where the screen is empty so everything could have been spread out, there’s a lot of junk on screen, and it uses the same lousy menus as VS.

You can’t auto-sort your hand in any way. You can manually drag cards around, but it’s really slow once you have a big hand and it glitches out frequently and moves multiple cards at the same time if you try to loop around from the left side of your hand. The whole battle mechanic is built around combos based on the cards’ costs but then they don’t even let you sort by cost. I was pulling hundreds of cards for my hand and each card was barely enough pixels to see the cost. You stop playing strategically at some point and just throw things down.

There’s an “auto-play” button, but it’s not good. It doesn’t play well strategically, so it stops being useful beyond the first few stages.

The art seems to be straight ripped from VS, which was itself a shameless rip of Castlevania, so that still looks good. And the soundtrack is full of bangers. They do a fun thing where the audio is muted when you’re moving around the stage and it only kicks in at normal volume once you enter combat.

The voices are annoying. The announcer is funny, but the characters don’t add anything.

The game rather unfairly changes how combat against bosses works towards the end. I spent most of the game having fun with decks that did a little damage each card but led to long strings of cards so I could play very long hands. After the switch, bosses do massive damage based on the number of cards you play, so you’re punished for my style of play and pushed towards doing a lot of damage in as few cards as possible. That style of play isn’t as fun or rewarding and leads to very few gems being viable. I beat the last stage with a not good build dependent on pulling a specific card that could kill anything in the game in two hits. The game really just gets kind of boring once you’ve figured out the few strategies that work in the late game, because every battle is just you executing the same play order each time. There may be more viable strategies, but the game really pushes you to either build a single card that does ludicrous damage or to abuse the freeze ability. It’s just those two things over and over for every boss fight.

Vampire Crawlers is… fine. It’s a perfectly fine follow-up/sophomore project for a company, but not something I’ll likely devote as much time or attention to as I did with Survivors.

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and Ruins/Tombs.

Our request was by Melkorios to have the temple guardians wanting to modernize/grow tired of your standard curses and treat things a bit more like a reality game show. Everybody screws up in that final round assembling the totem and gets captured by the mummy guardians. And they should be thankful they had to do most of the "crawling through small spaces" physical changes up front.

Our theme for the MORT this month was a combination of our Oblivious storyline and the temple/ruins options.

Patrons voted that our statue wind up in the gift shoppe, because that's where the real education happens. Children need to learn about edible rocks as candy sold in museum gift shops! And maybe that bikinis increase learning.

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and Ruins/Tombs.

Our request was by RossP to have some plucky or unlucky thieves breaking into the temple of a cougar goddess and only realized the other has changed. That's how the Divine get you: wordplay! Everybody thinks it's smiting, but nope. Just wordplay and fashionable leopard prints.

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and Ruins/Tombs.

We did a community art event where Patrons offered up booths and events for the studio to run a carnival. What a nice way to bring everybody together for peace, fun, and low quality plush toys at marked up prices!

Cydra suggested a dunk tank, that maybe was used for earlier potion storage and wasn't quite cleaned out. Well excuse us for caring about the environment and not wasting water!

Our Patron requests this month are themed around Obliviousness and Ruins/Tombs.

Our request was by DZamiel to have the MORT staff unknowingly fend off curses using the most modern of technology that ancient spirits would not know about: pocket mirrors! Mummies are always ready to dish out curses but not take them. At least the bandages hold up nice and sturdy over the centuries.

We did a community art event where Patrons offered up booths and events for the studio to run a carnival. What a nice way to bring everybody together for peace, fun, and low quality plush toys at marked up prices!

RossP suggested a bungee ride that might have some issues squashing and stretching its guests.