Boss
If I were to describe Furi to someone simply, I'd probably say it's a very tough boss fighting game with bullet hell thrown in. Yet that doesn't properly convey what makes it unique, especially given that it easily is a sum of parts of different popular games - Shadow of the Colossus, No More Heroes, and Bayonetta to name a few. Furi gets the boss fights and obscure story from SotC, a proper sense of style and boss personalities from NMH, and the easy in theory but tough in practice gameplay from Bayonetta. Regardless of easy comparisons, it manages to stand on its own and be a game worth thinking about once you're done with it…if you ever finish it.
From when you fight the first boss, The Chain, all you know about your purpose is that you are a prisoner, and you must defeat a series of jailers in order to gain your freedom. As the player, you don't even learn the name of the character you're controlling (it's not Furi), or the person aiding you in your escape, oddly garbed in purple skater pants and the top half of a costume rabbit's head. The Chain, who's title you learn from the trophy you earn for defeating him, acts as a tutorial for your limited tool set.
You have a four-chain sword combo, the ability to do a charged sword attack, a chargeable dodge move, a laser gun with a charge shot, and a parry move, which can reflect energy attacks, restore health when successful against melee attacks, and occasionally leave the boss open when timed perfectly. No matter how far you get in the game, these will be your moves for the entirety of it, but you'll need all of them to survive without exception.
Shortly before fighting the fifth boss, The Hand, you're told that he and a hundred of his men took you down to imprison you. But there's something I find a little unbelievable about that. The bosses, on top of melee combos, execute a lot of energy based attacks — charged shots, wave rings, thick crescent waves, massive targeted lasers, etc. Furthermore, their last lives, for the most part, comprise of them freaking out by filling the screen with tough-to-dodge bullet hells while remaining invincible. It would be nice, given that you are supposed to be so formidable, if you could do anything similar. I'm making a small complaint there, sure, but you'll be impressed with what your foes can do that you can't while they insist they cannot let you leave their confines.
Still, it's a lot of fun to learn the strategy for taking down each boss, even if it's only by the skin of your teeth. Unlike the aforementioned Shadow of the Colossus, each boss fight is separated into lives of sorts. With some variation for each character, lives can involve a distance round, where you mostly shoot and dodge projectiles with a few openings for your four-hit combo, and a close-quarters round, where you have a lot less space to dodge melee combos and area-of-effect attacks. You, personally, have three lives. If you lose one, you must start from the beginning of whichever boss life you were on. If they lose one, you gain one back. Thus, for a seven-life boss, for example, you could technically "die" eight times and still be able to defeat them, though I wouldn't recommend it.
I really enjoyed this system, particularly because I've never seen it before, and also because it turns each boss into a chapter of their own. Between each, you walk what the game calls a Path. The only thing you can do is walk while your accomplice talks at you about your foes and your prison, slowly eking out a story in parcels. Controlling your character during these Paths can be a little wonky as the fixed camera shifts as you cross certain markers, but this is made easier by the auto-walk feature attached to the X button. For real, you can push X to meander to the next enemy.
Anyway, these Paths manage to set up their beautifully designed environments while also staging the essence of your feud with whomever is next to be felled. But the multi-level facet of each battle really drives home the desperation each enemy feels towards stopping you. Commonly, boss battles in games serve as short tests of your skills but boil down to figuring out the one or two patterns and exploiting them. They are memorable on their own, of course, but unless you've interacted with the boss before that point, they serve as fairly meaningless obstructions to your progression.
Furi, on the other hand, gives you time to form a relationship, however adversarial, as they taunt you and demonstrate just how many patterns they've devoted to ending you. So that last life, where they go all out, becomes, in a way, the real boss battle because you are trying to survive a gamified distillation of their anger, fear, hatred, sadness, and in one case, elation. This elevates the experience above the trope of the cautiously dismantled robot. Your fight becomes a war, and it gains meaning that would otherwise be lost in a one-off challenge of "Find the Opening."
That said, this approach makes Furi absurdly challenging on its default difficulty, Furi, for someone like me. Unless you're particularly good at adapting to games, which require as good defense as offense, you will perish a lot and often before you even see your foe's third life or beyond. I spent the better part of two week's worth of evenings on the seventh boss, The Burst, if that's any indicator. Also, later bosses force you to change your approach in ways that will make you regret not thinking of doing so for early bosses. So many needless deaths.
Each fight requires that you stay on your toes continuously, and when it becomes a struggle, your heart may pound through your chest just by making it to the second round of a life. Killing your enemy is always immensely satisfying, a great marker of your improved skill, but the amount of defeat you suffer on your way may feel empty. Plus, defense can be so timing-reliant that you'll be entirely unsure if your mistakes are your fault or not.
Accessibility is also a major concern. Though I rarely comment on that aspect of a game, I eventually found my hands contorting in ways that would be unimaginable to physically handicapped players. First, the controls, at least on the PS4, cannot be customized. Next, as I said before, the default difficulty, which is the lowest that you can earn trophies on, requires a near-constant state of alertness and quick reflexes that may also prove to be a challenge.
And last, the final boss, The Star, requires that you shift your hands on the control so that your right thumb is constantly pushing on the right thumbstick (to shoot projectiles) while the remaining four fingers can tap Square, X, or Circle more like a keyboard. Otherwise, you can leave yourself open to projectile attacks while you move your thumb, or you'll have to press the face buttons uncomfortably with a curved index finger. This control scheme actually comes in handy for earlier bosses, but it obviously requires a range of motion that is not available to a certain sector of gamers. Luckily, while there's no colorblind mode, projectiles are brighter than their backgrounds and are visually distinct, and enemies have easily identifiable visual cues before executing melee moves.
Those visuals are vibrant and exciting, which should come as no surprise from the Afro Samurai creator, Takashi Okazaki, a surprising addition to an otherwise all-French team at Game Bakers. And the music — forgive me but OMFG is it good. The soundtrack is replete with super hard trance music that'll really work your subwoofer. In-game, it is procedurally played as you progress in each fight, but it's an engrossing treat on your MP3 player, too. If I may be so bold, it's easily the best video game soundtrack I've listened to since both Journey and Papo & Yo of 2012 despite the obvious stylistic departures from either. I cannot stop listening to it on repeat.
Quick digression: I'll need to spoil a few aspects of the story to properly dissect it for this review.
The story is honestly quite intriguing and tough to grasp entirely with only one play through, but it suffers some pitfalls. As I take it, you are, to put it softly, a foreigner who actually poses a humongous threat to the people of this land. You were caught and imprisoned in this series of floating prisons with jailers, each of whom has either volunteered or been forced to be there. The man who freed you, The Voice, has his own story and motives for being in jail and helping you escape, but one goal is to turn you, convince you not to finish your plan. So you're actually a bad guy who, via the story, will be given a few opportunities to be better. I mean, you do have to kill at least nine people to get there.
In terms of execution, I like the bits of plot you learn during the Path sections as told by The Voice. However, because of the intense focus you'll devote to defeating your enemies, some of whom may require days depending on your skill level, it's very easy to lose track of the story. By the time I reached the end, I understood about as much, maybe more, as I vaguely wrote in the previous paragraph, but all the intricacies and nuance to the story beyond that were lost. I ended up watching a developer play through on YouTube to fully understand what I witnessed.
To Furi's credit, it's obviously meant to be replayed. When you defeat the final boss, you're given a grade based on the amount of time you took, the amount of lives you lost, and the number of hits you took over the course of the entire game. Also, defeating each boss opens them up in Practice mode so you can try to hone your skills for the next round. Improving your rating for each, in any game mode, will reveal developer artwork explaining their designs, another reason to keep playing, which I'm currently doing. Finishing the game also unlocks a Speedrun mode and the Furier difficulty if you, I assume, hate yourself. Although I lost track of the hours I poured into just finishing Furi once, the fact is that you can, with sharper strategies, beat it in two hours or less.
The game also features multiple endings, one of which is worth discussing and criticizing here. Halfway through the game, the sixth boss, The Song, offers you the opportunity to live out your remaining years in something of a floating garden haven. You can reject her offer by proceeding to the exit platform, which flips her kindness into fury. To accept, though, you need only stay still for a few minutes.
Having seen the ending, her plan to stop you is blatantly foolhardy. Although you, the player, would not know any better at that point, the threat your people posed to these people is not necessarily diminished by you being in prison, only delayed. (Actually, one of the bosses proves this point — he is one of your brethren who was also caught.) But taken as it is, in ignorant bliss, The Song's offer reinforces a rather bum treatment the women get in this game.
Furi features four female bosses — The Strap, The Song, The Burst, and The Beat, which is almost half if you exclude the genderless final boss. That's great in terms of numbers, but breaking their characters down further reveals other problems. The Strap is a bound psychotic prisoner whose breasts are free and accented and whose outfit is basically flesh colored. When released from her confines, she basically crawls around like an animal or a demon from The Grudge. The Beat is easily the weakest boss and employs almost no physical attacks herself, basically begging you to stop as you kill her. And The Song fulfills a feminine trope of appearing as an Angel of Mercy/Death in battle. Thankfully, I've nothing ill to say of The Burst, who is portrayed as every bit as deadly as her male counterparts with just a flair of extra allure.
Back to The Song, when she pleads with you, she states, "I will take care of you." But when you do accept her offer, she explicitly states, "I will be yours," after a clearly doting grasp of your wrist. Although I appreciate that Furi offers a sort of non-violent way out of completing your deadly campaign, that someone as powerful as The Song is written to be given to her prisoner with an obvious suggestion of sexual servitude undermines her character's strength entirely. It is just not a believable setup for someone as capable as she, and it turns her into a commodity for no clear reason. I'm sure there could've been a way to offer the player character a life of happiness and wealth in that garden that did not include indentured sex, and it would've also eschewed an unfortunate display of heteronormativity and cissexism on the part of the developers. (Your character skews male-presenting via signifiers, but their gender and sexual identity are otherwise unknown.)
All told, despite the frustration it cost me and some cringe-worthy aspects to the story, one of which is technically wholly avoidable, Furi is an excellent, challenging game. Its appeal, for a number of reasons, can really only extend so far, but as something quite niche, I think it could easily be used as a gameplay reference for years to come. I look forward to whatever else it inspires. Regardless of whether or not you choose to buy the game, please buy the soundtrack.
