Trivia / Fuga: Melodies of Steel

• Acclaimed Flop: According to a Famitsu article, Fuga was only able to recoup 30% of its development cost in the first three months of release, with that number barely budging over the next few months. It took a year and a half for the game to sell 150,000 copies worldwide. This is a game that was able to get an 80% and above rating on average whenever it was reviewed. There are three major factors in this:
  • The Invisible Advertising due to not having an official publisher while having no prior experience with self-publishing.
  • The various stigmas due to it featuring furries which turned away those that did know about the game.
  • The $40 USD price tag (on average) which turned away those that actually want to play the game. Using the game's SteamDB page as a reference, the price of the game in Japan is around 4180 yen, which is equivalent to slightly over $30 USD.
• Acting for Two:
  • Yuichi Iguchi voices both Britz and Doktor Blutwurst, who interact directly in Chapter 7.
  • Sachi Kokuryu voices both Kyle and Lieutenant Muscat.
  • Yasuhiro Mamiya voices both General Merlot and Colonel Pretzel.
  • Characters who only have speaking roles or appearances in the "How It All Began" manga share their voice actors with other characters from the game proper: Kenji Nomura (Shvein Hax) plays the village chief; Sachi Kokuryu plays his wife; Naomi Kusumi (Von Baum) plays Malt and Mei's grandfather; and Yui Kondo (Flam Kish) plays Hanna's mother Yona/Jonah. The Berman soldiers are also voiced by Tomohiro Tsuboi (who plays Baion) and Yukihiro Nozuyama (who plays Jin) in this short, and possibly in the game itself.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • At launch, there was no way to reliably see which expedition will give you certain items needed for Taranis upgrades, forcing players to keep an off-site guide on hand to check what they need. Version 1.01 added an item list to each expedition, cutting back on the mental multi-tasking needed for management.
  • One of the more vocal concerns was the game being locked to 30 FPS in an era where 60 or higher is the norm. The October 2021 update finally gets around to implementing 60 FPS mode, with the addition of being able to switch back to 30 frames through the in-game options menu.
  • That same update also contains the option to rebind keyboard controls, which was another lacking feature people mentioned at launch.
  • As of Version 1.10, players are now given the option to activate "turbo mode" during route progression, allowing you to get to fights or intermission spots a lot faster than before. The only catch being that you can only activate it on New Game Plus runs.
• Colbert Bump: Despite the lack of advertising, many furry streamers did do their best to help get word of the game out, notably Sean Chiplock who streamed the game in an effort to raise awareness for it. The game also gained a mild boost in popularity after being added to Xbox Game Pass.
• Creator Backlash: Yoann has joked about this regarding an idea he had for the Japanese voice actors to speak French with German accents:
  Yoann: I thought I was a genius. I wasn't. It was a terrible idea. Please never try this at home.
• Creator's Favorite: The game's director Yoann loves Boron. So much so that he called out every streamer who sacrificed him in the tutorial on Twitter, and purposefully made him a Game-Breaker just to spite his boss for doing the same during every playtesting session.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Female actresses Sachi Kokuryu, Miyu Tomita and Tomomi Mizuma voice the male Kyle, Socks and Hack respectively.
• Cut Song:
  • Well, more like Cut Song Layers. There was supposed to be two tracks that would overlay the intermission theme "Our Steelclad Home" whenever you use the kitchen or the workshop. For unknown reasons, they go unused.
  • For a more straightforward example, two piano pieces were also cut from the game, but can be found in the game's files, A non-specific one, and an arrangement of the game's ending theme "Memories of Earth and Sky".
• Distanced from Current Events: Though the game is available to purchase in Russian territories, as mentioned in this article, any plans for a Russian translation was put on hold due to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the economic sanctions resulting from it.
• Dummied Out: A text dump has revealed certain removed elements of the game:
  • The kids would've had dialogue for when they reach their Hero Modes in battle, and they each have lines of dialogue in the game's files seemingly reacting to an disturbing vision of some kind.
  • A cut story event for Chapter 7 would've involved the kids running across a mortally injured escapee from the Berman prison camp, who would wish on his dying breath that the other prisoners would be freed.
  • Failing recipes in the Taranis' messroom would have resulted in them being given new names as a result. For example, failing to cook raclette would've renamed it to "Tolerable Gratin", a failed mixed salad would've become a "Veggie Mixture", and failing to make jam pawbuns would result in you simply getting "Ordinary Pawbuns".
  • The laundry room of this Taranis would have at one point been upgradable.
• I Knew It!: From the moment Socks was revealed, the well-versed Little Tail Bronx fans were immediately able to tie the connection between him, Merveille, and Red just from his last name alone. Sure enough, Yoann confirmed it in a tweet not long after the game's launch, and told fans to max out Malt and Socks' friendship to see the reasoning unfold.
• Invisible Advertising: CyberConnect2 tried their best to avert this, learning from their mistakes with Tail Concerto and Solatorobo, but because they lacked an official publisher to help distribute the game, they couldn't go any further than beyond their own social media accounts. Basically, if you weren't already following CyberConnect2 or its employees, you would have no idea Fuga even existed. To make matters worse, Yoann confirmed he sent out review codes to many reviewers both big and small, but never heard back from most of them, and none of the major gaming news sites like IGN or Gamespot has bothered to review the game (at least in the US), further hurting its reach.
• Inspiration for the Work: Yoann Gueritot has cited Studio Ghibli films such as Howl's Moving Castle and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as key inspirations for Fuga.
• Milestone Celebration: Booting the game up reveals that this game is considered to be part of CyberConnect2's 25th Anniversary.
• Model Dissonance: None of the vehicles have a backside rendered to them, which helps with performance as you can only see one side to the Taranis and enemy tanks anyways.
  Yoann: Essential rule of game development: Never make what you don't show!
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: All characters are voiced by the same actors for both the Japanese and French dubs, with the exception of the narrator (Akane Tokunaga in Japanese, Adeline Chetail in French).
• No Dub for You: While the game was released with support for seven languages at launch (Japanese, English, French, Spanish, Italian, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese), only Japanese and French have corresponding voice over tracks. In fact, the only actor that's different between the two dubs is the narrator, who is voiced in the French dub by Adeline Chetail.
• One for the Money; One for the Art: Though they never outright say it, it's no secret that CyberConnect2 had to use whatever earnings they got from their much bigger, licensed anime-backed projects in order to fund Fuga, as Bandai Namco made it clear that they have no interest in continuing the Little Tail Bronx series themselves. As the creative director himself put it:
  Yoann: For those who wonder, the only reason we can make Fuga sequels and donate its sales to charity despite Fuga making no money is because we have no publisher with common sense to tell us we’re crazy.
  • As argued by Sean Chiplock in a Twitter thread, despite Fuga being an Acclaimed Flop, the developers have still chosen to spend additional time and money to make frequent post-launch improvements to it.
• Refitted for Sequel: According to Yoann, the Vanargand's design came from an unused Titano-Machina design from Solatorobo: Red the Hunter that the devs thought was too good to let go to waste.
• Role Reprise: 11 years after Solatorobo: Red the Hunter's release, Tomohiro Tsuboi returns to voice Baion for the ending.
• Regional Bonus: Unintentional example. The Steam and Epic versions of the game are sold in Asian regions at an incredibly affordable price of US$15 for the standard edition and US$25 for the deluxe edition, before taxes. The pricing at Latin-American Steam stores (aside from Brazil) is also much lower compared to the United States and Europe, with the price in Argentina being equivalent to $10 USD.
• Schedule Slip: An unfortunate result due to CyberConnect2's inexperience when it came to self-publishing titles. Fuga was pushed back from its original 2019 release date to 2020, then got pushed back again to July 29th, 2021 due to the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic along with CyberConnect2 being dissatisfied with the state of the game. And even with its release date solidified, it was struck with this again with the pre-orders. Hiroshi said they would be up by July 15th but they wouldn't be up until the weekend after, and only for Nintendo and Xbox users. And then the game got released... only for the US release of the Switch Deluxe Edition and the worldwide PlayStation release to be delayed yet again to August, the latter of which due to a pricing mishap that resulted in the game costing between 60 to 90 USD.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Do not expect any costume packs based on Tail Concerto or Solatorobo, as Bandai Namco still has ownership and a say when it comes to those properties. It's also why the game (or its spin-off, "Comedies of Steel") can't reference Lares, Baion, or Red directly by name, since it would come into conflict with Bandai Namco's partial ownership as well. Strangely, this does not apply to locations or terminologies, as Bandai Namco never cracked down on the development team's free usage of phrases like "Titano-Machina" or "Caninu" and "Felineko".
• Sequel Gap: Solatorobo was released in 2010, with Fuga releasing in 2021.
• Throw It In:
  • The Secret Garden was something Matsuyama was insistent on implementing. This is despite the fact that at that point in development, the project was 50 million yen over-budget and went past their projected development time by six months.
    Yoann: One day he broke into a meeting and said "Guys, the game's almost perfect as it is but the Taranis still lacks something vital: A PLACE TO POOP". Then we added the potty duck.
  • Britz wasn't initially part of the line up, but Yoann wanted a "Friend or Foe" cast member in order to spice the game up a bit, citing Tommy Oliver.
• Tuckerization: Malt and his friends' home village of Petit Mona is indirectly named after the real-life village of Monthureux-sur-Saône in northeastern France, where game director Yoann Gueritot and his little sister spent their childhood summers with their grandparents. More specifically, "Monthureux" is derived from the Latin word monasteriolum, which translates to "petit monastère" ("little monastery") in French.
• Troubled Production: CyberConnect2 has been releasing development articles on Famitsu, showing how hard it was to get Fuga out the door especially as an indie developer/publisher. With the amount of things they implied went wrong, it's a miracle the game didn't turn out to be one huge dumpster fire at launch.
  • For the first year of development, they laid down the plan and budget for the game. And then CyberConnect2 realized they had two planners, one artist, and zero programmers on board (everyone else was either working on Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Hinokami Chronicles or Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot). They had a hard time getting external help with Fuga as well.
  • Somehow, CyberConnect2 forgot to contact each of the console publishers (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) for their respective console's development kits to port Fuga to. At the end of the game's development cycle.
  • During the price set portion of publishing, the team confused wholesale price for retail price, resulting in the game's price being out of sync just about everywhere. It's what resulted in the game's PlayStation launch getting delayed as they had to pull and refund all copies in order to fix the issue.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: It’s commonly believed that one condition for the Golden Ending is to see all of Britz’s level 2 Link Events before he leaves after Chapter 10. While it is true that you need to raise his affinity with the other characters enough to get the scene where the others see the photo in his pendant, this is possible without seeing all of the Link Events in question or even getting his affinity with every other character to level 2 in the first place— you just need to ensure he has a total of ten levels of affinity between all the other kids.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Before Fuga was announced, CyberConnect2 initially planned for Strelka Stories to be the third game of the Little Tail Bronx series, which would've focused on space-exploration and bridge the gap between a post-World War III society and Tail Concerto, while taking even more cues from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, but their inability to get a publisher on board to fund the game along side the company working on Asura's Wrath and the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm series lead to its silent cancellation. Matsuyama hasn't completely given up on the idea, and would consider restarting development later down the road.
  • In earlier pre-release material from back when the game was originally announced, the Berman Empire's symbol was going to be a bone-shaped Iron Cross-like symbol. It was changed to a stylized three-headed dog design in the final build. The original symbol however still appears on General Hax's uniform.
  • The game was also going to have a lot more Roguelike elements as well, which can be seen through things like the alternate pathways, the different expeditions, as well as the option to restart from your last intermission upon dying, but all of it had to be scaled down into a more traditional RPG due to lack of proper resources. Interestingly, pre-release reports about Fuga (such as this one from Gematsu) described that a Game Over would force the player to return to the beginning of the game with all their experience. In the game proper, the opposite happens— you only reset back to the last intermission, and instead lose all experience gained after it.
  • According to character designer Yusuke Tokitsu's Twitter, Jin was originally designed as a Dachshund before being changed to a basset hound later in development. He was also intended to have a more feminine appearance at one point, and another early idea was for him to be a boiler engineer instead of a mechanic.
  • Digging through the games files reveals a lot of rough, Dummied Out animations such as proper sprinting motions (the final game simply reuses the character's walk animations and speeds them up), cinematic◊ movements◊ that would suggest that using the Soul Cannon would be rendered with in-game models rather than in a motion comic style, and a Taranis animation◊ that implies that it would've had a Super Mode involving a lot of missiles.
  • Earlier builds of the game show that there was going to be a morale system to manage that probably would have influenced the "Fear" and "Depressed" statuses that the children would be inflicted with (in the final game, they were susceptible to it if the Taranis' health was below 50%), as well as tarot cards◊ that would've influenced both morale and stats.
  • Some artwork revealed by the game's lead artist shows scenario arts featuring scenes that are either heavily altered or not referenced anywhere in the final game, such as Malt being more direct with enlisting Jin's help, Kyle commanding his weapons in rage with a injured Hanna near him, to Sheena being a Death Seeker with Hanna saving her from the Soul Cannon at the last minute.
  • Initially, there was no plans to turn "The Adventures of Sucre" into a full Show Within a Show. It became a full unlockable comic when Hiroshi looked over the script for Socks and Hack's Link Event and decided that it should be accessible to the player in some way.
• Word of Saint Paul: According to character designer Yusuke Tokitsu, Sheena's mother is named Edna.
• Working Title: Judging from the PC executable, when CC2 first conceived the game, they gave it a very generic codename of Tank.
• Writer Revolt: As mentioned above, Yoann's decision behing making Boron Purposely Overpowered was to get back at the company CEO for repeatedly killing him during playtesting.

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