The Strange History of Little Bronx Tail, CyberConnect2’s Secret Furry Video Game Series
Most people probably know the Japanese game studio, CyberConnect2 from their work developing the Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Games and a number of other big shiny anime games like, the recent Dragon Ball Z Kakarot. Some might remember them for .hack, their series of hit ps2 JRPGs that take place inside of a fictional MMO and the huge multimedia franchise surrounding it. Or maybe you know them from their less successful ventures, like when they got kicked off development for Final Fantasy 7 Remake or the contentious, Capcom published, Asura’s Wrath. Regardless of which of these games sticks out to you, all of these titles are fairly well known mainstream games associated with some of the biggest companies in the video game industry. But in addition to all these big properties, CyberConnect has another franchise that’s a completely original IP, ongoing for decades, spanned multiple genres, multiple media formats, and yet remains obscure and underappreciated in the larger public consciousness.
The series I’m talking about is Little Tail Bronx, and it’s an eclectic collection of games that all take place in a shared steampunk universe populated by adorable anthropomorphic animal people living on floating islands and piloting giant robots. You’d be forgiven for never having heard about these games or not even realizing they were an interconnected series if you were familiar with them, because each game varies so wildly in style, tone, and gameplay you can barely tell they’re related.
The series started with the first game CyberConnect ever developed, Tail Concerto, a charming little collect-a-thon type 3d platformer game on the original Playstation released in 1998. You play as a rookie cop dog named Waffle Ryebread who pilots a bubble blowing cop mech and goes on an adventure involving long lost childhood friends, gangs of cartoonish petty criminals, and ancient weapons of war and mass destruction. Tail Concerto has a simpler story than some of the future LBT games, but it’s fully animated anime style cutscenes and extensive world building for it’s steampunk furry society were years ahead of any of it’s contemporary 3D platformers. While Tail Concerto received generally favorable reviews it under-performed sales-wise and publishers rejected multiple proposals for sequels despite strong desire from CyberConnect staff to continue the series.
For the first few years of the 2000s the nascent Tail Concerto series remained dormant while CyberConnect was busy with the .hack series, until tail Concerto’s lead character artist, manga artist, and anime character designer for series such as vision of escaflowne and record of lodoss war, Nobuteru Yuki, designed a public safety mascot for a disaster warning email system in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Japan.That mascot was a little anthropomorphic dog boy in the style of tail concerto named Mamoru-kun, and the promotional for this public safety disaster early warning program revealed that Mamoru Kun and his friends live in the country of “Nipon,” which exists in the same world as Tail Concerto and was given the name “Little Tail Bronx.”
In 2010 Tail Concerto finally got a proper follow up with Solatorobo: Red The Hunter for the Nintendo DS. Solatorobo would see the return of a lot of the creative team from Tail Concerto, including the aforementioned Nobuteru Yuki, composer Chikayo Fukuda, and director Takayuki Isobe. Just to name a few. Despite the returning team Solatorobo was a drastic departure from it’s processor and honestly deserves it’s own retrospective, exploring everything it has going on. The quick run down is this; You play as Red Savarin, a treasure hunter/mercenary traveling around a floating archipelago nation known as the Shepard Republic with his adopted sister/airship pilot Chocolat, and his signature mech the Dahak, which is a sick ass robot red rides on top off and has big ole stretchy arms. Red and company get dragged into a massive geopolitical conspiracy involving warring factions, more ancient weapons of mass destruction, mysteries about the nature of the world, and a plot to annihilate the civilization of animal people. You deal with pretty much all of this by getting on your mech, and using it to pick dudes up and just toss ’em around.
Unlike Tail Concerto, Solatorobo isn’t so much a 3D platformer as it is a combat heavy 3D action game with a really unique gimmick, and that’s the fact that your main ability is to pick things up and chuck ’em. I mentioned before how Red’s mech, the Dahak, has big stretchy arms, well you don’t really use them for traditional fighting what with the punching and what not, instead the primary way of doing damage to enemies is to get into a mini sumo match with them, flipping them over, picking them up, and chuckin ’em. Or you can pick up an object and chuck that at the enemy, or pick up an enemy and chuck them at another enemy. It’s just a whole lotta chucking stuff and it rules there’s no other game like it. If you only play one game mentioned in this essay it should be Solatorobo, it’s a fascinating and eminently creative game, and that quality would be appreciated by the market. Solatorobo was reviewed remarkably well, earning it a number of awards in game publications, and the game would also chart as the seventh most bought title in japan on its debut week. Despite critical and commercial success, after Solatorobo the Little Tail Bronx Series would see another lull. There was a light novel adaptation of Solatorobo titled Red Data Children also released in 2010, but Little Tail Bronx wouldn’t see another game until 2014.
The series entry that year was a now defunct free to play mobile game called Little Tail Story, which was only available in japan from March 2014 to October 2014. Yikes. Being a delisted Japanese mobile game that was only live for 7 months there is no way to play it in current year and there is very little information available. My understanding is that Little Tail Story was a turn based RPG where you put together a party of little animal people all with different little classes and have them fight monsters. There was very little, if any, story and the aesthetics leaned more to medieval fantasy rather than steampunk like the previous LTB games. During the Game’s short life it did have cross over costumes inspired by Solatorobo and other Bandai Namco properties such as .hack, God Eater, and Tales of Xillia.
A failed mobile game sounds like exactly the kinda thing that would finally put an end to a niche franchise that never quite reached mainstream success. And if the galaxy-brained weirdos at CyberConnect2 didn’t love making games about adorable cartoon animals and engines of war and destruction you’d probably be right. At the time of writing there’s a new entry in the Little Tail Bronx series only a few weeks away from release, called Fuga: Melodies of Steel.
Fuga sees the series first return to home consoles since Tail Concerto, with it’s release on all the major eight and ninth generation consoles and PC. Those being Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch. Fuga also follows the series tradition of never following series tradition, as the game is a strategy role playing game.The story takes place in a country ravaged by the fascist Berman empire’s campaign for world domination.
You play as a group of 11 animal children who survived a Berman attack on their home village and have commandeered a gigantic ancient tank called the Taranis in order to travel across the dangerous landscape and rescue their parents who were taken prisoner by the empire. Gameplay is split up into 2 main parts; story segments where you move around the inside of the tank, interact with other children, develop relationships, and perform maintenance on the Taranis, and combat sections where you engage in tactical turn based battles where you need to manage your resources and actions to defeat enemy war machines. There’s also a game mechanic where when you’re losing a fight and won’t be able to survive with the resources you have left you can stuff one of the animal children into a furnace and use them as fuel for the giant tank’s giant laser cannon. Which is a truly wild mechanic and exactly the kind of thing
At the time of writing, Fuga: Melodies of Steel has not been released. So who knows if the game is actually “Good” or if it can continue the franchise, but it’s certainly conceptually interesting and it has gorgeous art. It’s also worth noting that Fuga is going to CyberConnect’s first self published game and is part of something CC2 is calling the “Trilogy of Vengeance” which is a series of games developed by smaller teams within the company and aren’t actually related story or gameplay wise but share a theme of vengeance. The other two games in the trilogy are Tokyo Ogre Gate, a high speed 3d parkour action game about a Japanese school girl running on the side of buildings and killing monsters, and Cecile, a side scrolling action game with characters styled in a gothic lolita aesthetic. There isn’t much more information on either of those two games right now. Cyber connect said that they are working on them, we’ve seen some VERY early development footage, and they haven’t even given proper trailers or release dates yet.
And that’s kinda where we have to end our story. We’ll have to wait and see where the Little Tail Bronx series goes after Fuga comes out and given the franchise’s unpredictable nature, who knows when we’ll get more news. While the future of Little Tail Bronx games is uncertain, the series’s 20 year long journey is inspirational. The people at CyberConnect2 have believed in the franchise since day one and despite massive roadblocks they’ve managed to return to the series time after time. Whatever CyberConnect makes in the future it’s sure to be interesting.