Well, it’s that time of year again. You know, that time of year where you try playing a million things, but nothing quite seems to click or stick for some reason. But I recently got my Steam Deck in the mail and felt like messing around with it some more, and it turns out a favorite of mine from last year, Furi, was Steam Deck verified. So one thing led to another, and I ended up playing through Furi three more times; a normal replay through the Steam Deck, a speedrun (in speedrun mode) on standard PC, and then Furier again on my desktop. And despite being as simple to pick up as the day I started playing last year, it’s still an absolute joy to run through. So let me try to answer this question: how is Furi, despite being a simple game compared to its influences, still one of my favorites?
I’ve already talked about how Furi’s tough but fair and inviting through its health and progression system, so I won’t go into too much detail about those systems and instead shift the discussion to the controls. Furi boils down your actions into four basic control mechanics: firing your pistol, dodging with your dash, slashing your sword, and parrying. Accessibility is 100% one of the biggest draws of Furi; the developers wanted to make a game that you could immediately pick up and figure out quickly how to play and exploit via its simple control scheme. To add on to this argument of accessibility, consider the melee attack signals; The spectacle of it all is absolutely a key selling point to Furi too. The developers were less concerned about realistic animations and more concerned about creating a fair system of mechanics that remained consistent between bosses, which is why there’s a noticeable speedy animation between the sound effect signifying a melee attack and the actual attack itself. That said, I will say that it is deceptively simple, because you can charge all of these actions and chain them together successfully to mix up strategy. Want to quickly get the drop on an enemy sending wave attacks at you? You can charge your sword slash and dash while holding down the charge so you can immediately release your attack to get that sweet, sweet punish, or if you prefer charge shots, you can do that too.. Need to get rid of a bunch of projectiles while dodging grounded waves? You can fire with the right joystick while dodging with L1, something that took me a long time to get used to in Furier. You can also parry while charging your slash (a much more difficult series of inputs in my opinion) and during close quarters combat, similarly charge your slash while inbetween enemy attacks so as long as you don’t get hit, you can deal much more damage on the counter attack. There’s also a degree of player control in that enemy attack patterns can often be interrupted with your own sword slashes or charged shots, while mixing in dodging and firing simple shots to avoid staggering or interrupting more favorable patterns. A friend who played through Furi’s normal mode recently had been telling me that he had no incentive to try any of this, since he was able to get by just fine with parrying and counter attacking, so allow me to provide a different perspective as someone who’s run through Furier and speedrun mode; you need everything you can get because bosses are far more punishing, both in their tougher attack patterns and aggression. In a sense, I find that the normal Furi mode is a great way to feel good about yourself by successfully pulling off the right inputs and mastering the basics while speedrun and Furier mode push those limits further, forcing you to find every opportunity to deal damage because every second spent not ending the fight is a second gone towards potential death. Not everything has to have a complicated system of long button presses and abstruse strategies; sometimes you just need that simple dose of dopamine you know? And if you don’t feel like that’s enough, then go for speedrun and Furier mode (and there’s even a cheat code to unlock Furier mode from the start if you just want everything thrown at you at once).
Let me expand a bit more upon my perspective due to these more difficult modes. Because combat’s relatively simplified already, combat gets pretty damn fast. Don’t even think about trying to coast by with “parry and counterattack” on Furier; bosses love to swarm you with so many projectiles that there’s no way you can parry them all, and have plenty of wave, laser, and AOE attacks that you absolutely have to dodge. Moreover, while Furi is generally a very fair game in giving you multiple avenues to solve a problem (i.e. avoiding damage while dealing damage), bosses have some degree of “RNG” in choosing when they want to block/dodge/parry your counterattacks as well as mixing up their patterns and mixing up how many times they choose to attack you with melee attacks. On regular difficulty, bosses will throw in the occasional green bullet to help you get health back, but these are not present on Furier, and many of the melee attacks I ended up parrying were blue counterattacks that didn’t grant me health back. As such, it was no longer good enough to just play defensively and focus on parrying all attacks then counterattacking, because it was too risky. It’s Furi’s frenzied push & pull combat at its core; you have to mix in charging attacks, peppering bosses with standard bullets, and parrying/dashing inbetween to avoid damage while interrupting unfavorable patterns with your own attacks, because when healing becomes that much more rare and damage becomes more deadly, the best defense happens to be a good offense. And before I forget, there's plenty of wrinkles to be found in the form of speedrun strats that can save tons of time in the Speedrun mode while saving you a lot of toil in Furier mode, such as shooting a wall alarm to bait out The Strap from her hiding place or targeting The Hand with shots as he taunts you or lays down beam after beam; in the thick of the fight, you'll need every advantage you can get.
The spectacle of it all is also absolutely a key selling point to Furi. The quick and often tough combat obviously sells to how over the top the game usually feels, as well as the flashy boss patterns filled with lasers and neon bullets/waves and the pounding, often relentless synthwave themes of each boss. The boss designs (from Takashi Okazaki, perhaps better known for designing the characters of Afro Samurai) and speedy attack animations are a huge part of this as well, and damn if it isn’t satisfying watching the fruits of my labor in the form of an extended punish cutscene animation every time I pull off a successful charge slash or perfect parry. There’s also contrast inbetween the frenzied action sequences to accentuate the emotions, both during short downtime in boss fights when the boss is taunting you or staring you down and during the extended walking sequences inbetween boss fights. If Shadow of the Colossus has taught me anything, it’s that these careful moments of forced downtime are a necessary reprieve from the upbeat boss fights; players get to soak in the lore and the abstract and stylized corridors and spaces comprising the prison, while The Voice sets up the scene for the next incoming opponent, all at their own pace. The transition from quietude to an explosion in action through a build up of tension is reflected in the walking tracks to the boss themes themselves; just try and consider shifting from the dreamy and majestic “[A Picture in Motion]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUlAytznxn4)” to the more pronounced eargasm that is “Wisdom of Rage” or the sudden drop in “What We Fight For as you leave behind the blustery desert winds for a confrontation versus your most determined foe yet. The shifts in tone as well between the phases, such as the hurried accelerating beat in “Wisdom of Rage” as the Line tells you to “seek joy in these last precious moments” or how additional layers and volume pile up upon one another in Danger’s 7:53 as the Star piles up attack after attack to snuff you out at the end of the tunnel really highlight both the shifting moods of the fight and the personalities of those you must take down in your quest for redemption.
I’m not going to talk too much about the storyline of Furi, as I think overanalysis of its subtle and understated narrative notes would go against the spirit of its storytelling and ultimately become reductive. That said, I can’t help but notice the little things, both in conveying emotional moments and bleeding character personality in the battlefield. Like how there’s a blaring transition in the beginning of 6:24 that also serves as the sound of the alarm system set off by the Chain to warn the other guards of a prison escape, remaining steadfast to his duty despite his receding arrogance and faith as you systemically outmaneuver him. Or how the Hand grows more and more desperate as the fight goes on, throwing away his shield while he continues to taunt you of your emptiness, perhaps more as motivation for himself as less as hurtful words to tear you down, and in his final close quarter combat phase, hacking away at you relentlessly and eventually slowing down as he realizes that what he fights for will not be enough to claim victory over the stranger. Or how the Beat never once actually attacks you physically during the majority of the fight, choosing instead to run away from you as you approach past wave after wave of turrets, and how by the end, she is leaning on her stick as she begs you to turn away, knowing that her final moments may ultimately be in vain and barely even mustering up the strength to attack you unless you decide to throw her a bone and wait around for 20 seconds while she pleads for mercy. Finally, as the Voice leaves you and you step through that portal to the world, there’s a subtle use of player control through the videogame medium that I really appreciated; the autowalk button stops working. You’re forced to take your first steps in this beautiful, natural, world, and as you do, everything around you decays and turns to dust. So were you really the hero all along or just another classic case of protagonist syndrome, and what were you really fighting in the end?
Before I forget, I also want to use this time to gush about two boss fights in Furi that I didn’t give much props to at first, mainly because I found them annoying or forgettable, but really grew on me over time. The Scale is the first of these two; as the fourth boss you fight, he’s this fish-humanoid creature whose world has been torn to tatters by the stranger’s actions. Compared to the previous boss, a wise old man who could not give less of a shit and just wants you out of the way to “make his clocks tick again,” this guy radiates enmity. He’s given up on trying to better or out moral you, as he states “Don’t look so horrified: you’re staring at yourself.” As he laughs mirthlessly between attacks while he pulls out every trick in the book, including attempting to drown you in the muck and overwhelming you with clones and bullets, he is seething; he doesn’t care what it takes anymore or what it means, he just wants you dead even knowing that nothing will bring back his people or his civilization. The scale was a huge chump check during my Furier run, and my memory of his fight is forever embedded thanks to both his relentless attacks and the overbearing atmosphere of the arena. Lorn’s “Set Me Free” perfectly conveys this mood in my mind, as this mish mosh of dark and scattered percussive notes (distinctly different from the often melodic and aggressive synthwave themes of the other bosses) both reflects the sudden drops of water droplets from pipes as they echo across the sewers while displaying the frenzied and ruthless strength shown from the Scale. Couple that with the screen distortion every time you get hit by one of his bullets, and it’s hard to not feel a sense of oppression as the Scale descends upon you in his last, unfocused effort to seek vengeance.
My second pronounced moment of newfound appreciation comes in the form of the 7th boss, The Burst. Now on my first run, I found this to easily be one of the most annoying fights in the game, as I had trouble pinning her down while she constantly ran away from me, but upon later runs, after learning of a more consistent strat where ducking behind a wall would result in a vulnerability state where you could tag her, I can’t help but appreciate what I would consider as a very interesting videogame adaption of the classic short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” The line between prey and predator becomes blurry as the two of you have a dance with death, you as you attempt to discern her whereabouts (made easier because parrying is locked to an opponent’s general direction and her red sniper laser will show you her location) and she attempts to toy with you with every trick in the book. After all, she’s studied all of your previous fights and scanned you in your walk-up to the arena, and she’s got mastery of an everchanging arena filled with movable walls and gaps alongside an arsenal of drones & mines while she attacks you from the safety of her cloaking device; how could she possibly lose? The shift in tone as she begins to increasingly realize how bad of an idea it is to play with her ”food” is absolutely present in Carpenter Brut’s theme “[You’re Mine]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ5gtInauiI)” as the music becomes increasingly more dissonant and hurried; while you’re barely fighting for your life, escaping danger by the skin of your teeth as her sniper goes off while ducking behind walls (100% developer intended, by the way), she becomes more and worried, crying out in her desperation phase “I can’t fail, this is my game!” In the end, I beat her at her own game despite all her shenanigans, and it’s made all the more satisfying because as the Voice says, “she was a cheater anyway.”
Let’s get back to the original question, and tack on an additional follow-up for fun; I’ve played through this game maybe 5 times now if you include The Onnamusha, so how the hell am I not bored of it? Well, as I stated prior, there’s just something so damn satisfying about taking down a series of guardians that are sized and stylized just like you with a lightning katana and a plasma pistol, but there’s also a strong sense of personal progression for me. I went from getting my ass handed to me with a game over on the tutorial boss to S ranking normal mode on the Steam Deck and finally beating Furier over a year later. Because the mechanics remain relatively simple and the controls never “evolve,” there’s a strong sense of growth, not from gaining new skills or attacks necessarily, but rather from mastering the controls and understanding its ebb and flow. Tomkon’s video on this titled “Furi Is Pretty Simple But That's Exactly Why You Should Play It” says it best; “"If you had to relearn everything from one boss to another, you could still feel satisfied by mastering any particular one, but you'd lose that important feeling of progression at the macro level.” Moreover, I genuinely believe that simplifying the controls and mechanics in Furi allowed the developers to push their combat system to the limits and expand upon their ideals with their unchanging toolset. For example, you go from a tutorial boss that shows you the ropes of both close combat and bullet hell range combat, to a boss that actively runs away from you and sprays you with lasers and energy balls (The Strap), to a boss that reflects your own bullets and freezes them during the long range phase (The Line), all within the first couple of hours of the game. What if we introduced a boss that restricted the use of the plasma pistol and required careful interaction to bypass the shield that reflects bullets and focused more on constant vigilance of punishing dodged attacks? The Hand has you covered. And what if we flipped that on its side and had a boss that loved to fly off stage, so melee combat is not as prevalent and you had to focus on nailing your long range pistol shots or parrying back bullets? The Song comes right after The Hand. This experimentation within the seemingly simple system is perhaps exemplified by The Edge and The Star; the former is a boss that distills the game into an entirely close quarters combat fight who can take you down in a couple of hits and focuses on testing your execution of parrying, while the latter focuses more on a war of attrition where pulses, lasers, and bullets flood the platform and parrying + close combat becomes practically irrelevant when you must rely on your laser to systematically target the floating hands of doom while positioning yourself to carefully dodge all incoming attacks and quickly readjusting to pile on the damage. And finally, even within single boss fights themselves, just as the moods shift inbetween phases, the attacks themselves also shift to turn the tides of battle and keep you honest. These “twists” in the boss fights keep the often long and detailed encounters from growing too stale, because bosses are more than happy to bring in unexpected strategies to test your mettle. For example, as you progress in The Strap’s fight, she hacks away at her restraints and begins to gain access to a scythe melee slash at first, and then to an even more mobile on feet phase where she does the classic “come out of nowhere” attack and scuttles around you like an amalgamation of a killer crab and a gritty reboot of the Pixar logo lamp. Other notable twists that occur in Furi include the final two phases of The Edge taking place on a 2.5D plane as he beats you up with an oar in a homage to Miyamoto Musashi, and The Song abandoning her powers of flight and focusing more on overwhelming you with pulses and projectiles while chasing you down as pillars of light thunder from the sky. There’s so much variety that could be covered in such a basic combat system, and I was always kept on my toes wondering what the next crazy idea thrown at me would evolve into as I made my way through the prison.
Now, having played through almost all of the game’s modes and difficulties at this point (only haven’t beat The Flame and Bernard on Furier as DLC), I will acknowledge that there are a few flaws. Some of the bosses could be considered too by-the-book when playing on standard difficulty if you’re content with just parrying and counter attacking, and if you’re looking for a game with a crazy move list and need for precise planning (akin to something like say, God Hand), standard Furi may not be your ballpark. A couple of the bosses could be considered easily “cheesed” if you know the right strats; for example, if you keep attacking the Hand by chasing him down and sword slashing, you can prevent him from launching practically any attacks at all until he counter-attacks (at which point you parry) and essentially trivialize almost the entire fight. And finally, there are some noticeable difficulty spikes on both Furi and Furier difficulty; in my case, it was The Burst’s final desperation phase (which definitely caused some frustration, having come so close to ending her only for it to slip away) and The Star on Furier, which has some very tight execution tests with little reprieve for relaxing or making mistakes. Fortunately, I do believe that Furier difficulty is an excellent use of a new game + system, with tougher and more intimidating attack patterns that turn the already powerful bosses into behemoths, though it does have the unintended consequence of making the more straightforward bosses like The Hand and The Edge seem like a walk in the park after you’ve mastered the controls and mechanics.
But at the end of the day, does this really matter enough to me? I’ve already stated in the past that most crushingly difficult games are not exactly my cup of tea; not that I particularly dislike challenging video games, but I’m not inherently drawn to the challenge of grinding against difficult enemies and bosses as I am interested in an overall fruitful experience. Moreover, with so much to explore on the horizon thanks to stronger systems at my disposal, there are so many games I want to get to and cover that I rarely ever consider replaying games, even favorites of mine such as Okami and Ori & The Blind Forest. And yet, I somehow felt inspired enough to come back to Furi and beat it four more times, feeling just as enthused and enthralled as the first time when I cleared it last November. I can’t help but admire the decision making of the Game Bakers; they knew exactly what they wanted to make, and they set out to gather the best team possible to make that vision a reality. And even though they will admit upfront that difficult video games are not for everyone, and that perhaps a simply set-up system might not cover everyone’s tastes, they remained steadfast in their artistic ideals and committed their final designs, stating that “consensus leads to dull results” and that “… having a strong sense of consistency and focus are essential to [creating] unforgettable moments, whereas trying to please everyone is definitely not the key to success.” It’s an uncompromising yet inviting game of thrills and challenges, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
It’s fast. It's fun. It’s Furi. It’s fucking good.
I’ve already talked about how Furi’s tough but fair and inviting through its health and progression system, so I won’t go into too much detail about those systems and instead shift the discussion to the controls. Furi boils down your actions into four basic control mechanics: firing your pistol, dodging with your dash, slashing your sword, and parrying. Accessibility is 100% one of the biggest draws of Furi; the developers wanted to make a game that you could immediately pick up and figure out quickly how to play and exploit via its simple control scheme. To add on to this argument of accessibility, consider the melee attack signals; The spectacle of it all is absolutely a key selling point to Furi too. The developers were less concerned about realistic animations and more concerned about creating a fair system of mechanics that remained consistent between bosses, which is why there’s a noticeable speedy animation between the sound effect signifying a melee attack and the actual attack itself. That said, I will say that it is deceptively simple, because you can charge all of these actions and chain them together successfully to mix up strategy. Want to quickly get the drop on an enemy sending wave attacks at you? You can charge your sword slash and dash while holding down the charge so you can immediately release your attack to get that sweet, sweet punish, or if you prefer charge shots, you can do that too.. Need to get rid of a bunch of projectiles while dodging grounded waves? You can fire with the right joystick while dodging with L1, something that took me a long time to get used to in Furier. You can also parry while charging your slash (a much more difficult series of inputs in my opinion) and during close quarters combat, similarly charge your slash while inbetween enemy attacks so as long as you don’t get hit, you can deal much more damage on the counter attack. There’s also a degree of player control in that enemy attack patterns can often be interrupted with your own sword slashes or charged shots, while mixing in dodging and firing simple shots to avoid staggering or interrupting more favorable patterns. A friend who played through Furi’s normal mode recently had been telling me that he had no incentive to try any of this, since he was able to get by just fine with parrying and counter attacking, so allow me to provide a different perspective as someone who’s run through Furier and speedrun mode; you need everything you can get because bosses are far more punishing, both in their tougher attack patterns and aggression. In a sense, I find that the normal Furi mode is a great way to feel good about yourself by successfully pulling off the right inputs and mastering the basics while speedrun and Furier mode push those limits further, forcing you to find every opportunity to deal damage because every second spent not ending the fight is a second gone towards potential death. Not everything has to have a complicated system of long button presses and abstruse strategies; sometimes you just need that simple dose of dopamine you know? And if you don’t feel like that’s enough, then go for speedrun and Furier mode (and there’s even a cheat code to unlock Furier mode from the start if you just want everything thrown at you at once).
Let me expand a bit more upon my perspective due to these more difficult modes. Because combat’s relatively simplified already, combat gets pretty damn fast. Don’t even think about trying to coast by with “parry and counterattack” on Furier; bosses love to swarm you with so many projectiles that there’s no way you can parry them all, and have plenty of wave, laser, and AOE attacks that you absolutely have to dodge. Moreover, while Furi is generally a very fair game in giving you multiple avenues to solve a problem (i.e. avoiding damage while dealing damage), bosses have some degree of “RNG” in choosing when they want to block/dodge/parry your counterattacks as well as mixing up their patterns and mixing up how many times they choose to attack you with melee attacks. On regular difficulty, bosses will throw in the occasional green bullet to help you get health back, but these are not present on Furier, and many of the melee attacks I ended up parrying were blue counterattacks that didn’t grant me health back. As such, it was no longer good enough to just play defensively and focus on parrying all attacks then counterattacking, because it was too risky. It’s Furi’s frenzied push & pull combat at its core; you have to mix in charging attacks, peppering bosses with standard bullets, and parrying/dashing inbetween to avoid damage while interrupting unfavorable patterns with your own attacks, because when healing becomes that much more rare and damage becomes more deadly, the best defense happens to be a good offense. And before I forget, there's plenty of wrinkles to be found in the form of speedrun strats that can save tons of time in the Speedrun mode while saving you a lot of toil in Furier mode, such as shooting a wall alarm to bait out The Strap from her hiding place or targeting The Hand with shots as he taunts you or lays down beam after beam; in the thick of the fight, you'll need every advantage you can get.
The spectacle of it all is also absolutely a key selling point to Furi. The quick and often tough combat obviously sells to how over the top the game usually feels, as well as the flashy boss patterns filled with lasers and neon bullets/waves and the pounding, often relentless synthwave themes of each boss. The boss designs (from Takashi Okazaki, perhaps better known for designing the characters of Afro Samurai) and speedy attack animations are a huge part of this as well, and damn if it isn’t satisfying watching the fruits of my labor in the form of an extended punish cutscene animation every time I pull off a successful charge slash or perfect parry. There’s also contrast inbetween the frenzied action sequences to accentuate the emotions, both during short downtime in boss fights when the boss is taunting you or staring you down and during the extended walking sequences inbetween boss fights. If Shadow of the Colossus has taught me anything, it’s that these careful moments of forced downtime are a necessary reprieve from the upbeat boss fights; players get to soak in the lore and the abstract and stylized corridors and spaces comprising the prison, while The Voice sets up the scene for the next incoming opponent, all at their own pace. The transition from quietude to an explosion in action through a build up of tension is reflected in the walking tracks to the boss themes themselves; just try and consider shifting from the dreamy and majestic “[A Picture in Motion]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUlAytznxn4)” to the more pronounced eargasm that is “Wisdom of Rage” or the sudden drop in “What We Fight For as you leave behind the blustery desert winds for a confrontation versus your most determined foe yet. The shifts in tone as well between the phases, such as the hurried accelerating beat in “Wisdom of Rage” as the Line tells you to “seek joy in these last precious moments” or how additional layers and volume pile up upon one another in Danger’s 7:53 as the Star piles up attack after attack to snuff you out at the end of the tunnel really highlight both the shifting moods of the fight and the personalities of those you must take down in your quest for redemption.
I’m not going to talk too much about the storyline of Furi, as I think overanalysis of its subtle and understated narrative notes would go against the spirit of its storytelling and ultimately become reductive. That said, I can’t help but notice the little things, both in conveying emotional moments and bleeding character personality in the battlefield. Like how there’s a blaring transition in the beginning of 6:24 that also serves as the sound of the alarm system set off by the Chain to warn the other guards of a prison escape, remaining steadfast to his duty despite his receding arrogance and faith as you systemically outmaneuver him. Or how the Hand grows more and more desperate as the fight goes on, throwing away his shield while he continues to taunt you of your emptiness, perhaps more as motivation for himself as less as hurtful words to tear you down, and in his final close quarter combat phase, hacking away at you relentlessly and eventually slowing down as he realizes that what he fights for will not be enough to claim victory over the stranger. Or how the Beat never once actually attacks you physically during the majority of the fight, choosing instead to run away from you as you approach past wave after wave of turrets, and how by the end, she is leaning on her stick as she begs you to turn away, knowing that her final moments may ultimately be in vain and barely even mustering up the strength to attack you unless you decide to throw her a bone and wait around for 20 seconds while she pleads for mercy. Finally, as the Voice leaves you and you step through that portal to the world, there’s a subtle use of player control through the videogame medium that I really appreciated; the autowalk button stops working. You’re forced to take your first steps in this beautiful, natural, world, and as you do, everything around you decays and turns to dust. So were you really the hero all along or just another classic case of protagonist syndrome, and what were you really fighting in the end?
Before I forget, I also want to use this time to gush about two boss fights in Furi that I didn’t give much props to at first, mainly because I found them annoying or forgettable, but really grew on me over time. The Scale is the first of these two; as the fourth boss you fight, he’s this fish-humanoid creature whose world has been torn to tatters by the stranger’s actions. Compared to the previous boss, a wise old man who could not give less of a shit and just wants you out of the way to “make his clocks tick again,” this guy radiates enmity. He’s given up on trying to better or out moral you, as he states “Don’t look so horrified: you’re staring at yourself.” As he laughs mirthlessly between attacks while he pulls out every trick in the book, including attempting to drown you in the muck and overwhelming you with clones and bullets, he is seething; he doesn’t care what it takes anymore or what it means, he just wants you dead even knowing that nothing will bring back his people or his civilization. The scale was a huge chump check during my Furier run, and my memory of his fight is forever embedded thanks to both his relentless attacks and the overbearing atmosphere of the arena. Lorn’s “Set Me Free” perfectly conveys this mood in my mind, as this mish mosh of dark and scattered percussive notes (distinctly different from the often melodic and aggressive synthwave themes of the other bosses) both reflects the sudden drops of water droplets from pipes as they echo across the sewers while displaying the frenzied and ruthless strength shown from the Scale. Couple that with the screen distortion every time you get hit by one of his bullets, and it’s hard to not feel a sense of oppression as the Scale descends upon you in his last, unfocused effort to seek vengeance.
My second pronounced moment of newfound appreciation comes in the form of the 7th boss, The Burst. Now on my first run, I found this to easily be one of the most annoying fights in the game, as I had trouble pinning her down while she constantly ran away from me, but upon later runs, after learning of a more consistent strat where ducking behind a wall would result in a vulnerability state where you could tag her, I can’t help but appreciate what I would consider as a very interesting videogame adaption of the classic short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” The line between prey and predator becomes blurry as the two of you have a dance with death, you as you attempt to discern her whereabouts (made easier because parrying is locked to an opponent’s general direction and her red sniper laser will show you her location) and she attempts to toy with you with every trick in the book. After all, she’s studied all of your previous fights and scanned you in your walk-up to the arena, and she’s got mastery of an everchanging arena filled with movable walls and gaps alongside an arsenal of drones & mines while she attacks you from the safety of her cloaking device; how could she possibly lose? The shift in tone as she begins to increasingly realize how bad of an idea it is to play with her ”food” is absolutely present in Carpenter Brut’s theme “[You’re Mine]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ5gtInauiI)” as the music becomes increasingly more dissonant and hurried; while you’re barely fighting for your life, escaping danger by the skin of your teeth as her sniper goes off while ducking behind walls (100% developer intended, by the way), she becomes more and worried, crying out in her desperation phase “I can’t fail, this is my game!” In the end, I beat her at her own game despite all her shenanigans, and it’s made all the more satisfying because as the Voice says, “she was a cheater anyway.”
Let’s get back to the original question, and tack on an additional follow-up for fun; I’ve played through this game maybe 5 times now if you include The Onnamusha, so how the hell am I not bored of it? Well, as I stated prior, there’s just something so damn satisfying about taking down a series of guardians that are sized and stylized just like you with a lightning katana and a plasma pistol, but there’s also a strong sense of personal progression for me. I went from getting my ass handed to me with a game over on the tutorial boss to S ranking normal mode on the Steam Deck and finally beating Furier over a year later. Because the mechanics remain relatively simple and the controls never “evolve,” there’s a strong sense of growth, not from gaining new skills or attacks necessarily, but rather from mastering the controls and understanding its ebb and flow. Tomkon’s video on this titled “Furi Is Pretty Simple But That's Exactly Why You Should Play It” says it best; “"If you had to relearn everything from one boss to another, you could still feel satisfied by mastering any particular one, but you'd lose that important feeling of progression at the macro level.” Moreover, I genuinely believe that simplifying the controls and mechanics in Furi allowed the developers to push their combat system to the limits and expand upon their ideals with their unchanging toolset. For example, you go from a tutorial boss that shows you the ropes of both close combat and bullet hell range combat, to a boss that actively runs away from you and sprays you with lasers and energy balls (The Strap), to a boss that reflects your own bullets and freezes them during the long range phase (The Line), all within the first couple of hours of the game. What if we introduced a boss that restricted the use of the plasma pistol and required careful interaction to bypass the shield that reflects bullets and focused more on constant vigilance of punishing dodged attacks? The Hand has you covered. And what if we flipped that on its side and had a boss that loved to fly off stage, so melee combat is not as prevalent and you had to focus on nailing your long range pistol shots or parrying back bullets? The Song comes right after The Hand. This experimentation within the seemingly simple system is perhaps exemplified by The Edge and The Star; the former is a boss that distills the game into an entirely close quarters combat fight who can take you down in a couple of hits and focuses on testing your execution of parrying, while the latter focuses more on a war of attrition where pulses, lasers, and bullets flood the platform and parrying + close combat becomes practically irrelevant when you must rely on your laser to systematically target the floating hands of doom while positioning yourself to carefully dodge all incoming attacks and quickly readjusting to pile on the damage. And finally, even within single boss fights themselves, just as the moods shift inbetween phases, the attacks themselves also shift to turn the tides of battle and keep you honest. These “twists” in the boss fights keep the often long and detailed encounters from growing too stale, because bosses are more than happy to bring in unexpected strategies to test your mettle. For example, as you progress in The Strap’s fight, she hacks away at her restraints and begins to gain access to a scythe melee slash at first, and then to an even more mobile on feet phase where she does the classic “come out of nowhere” attack and scuttles around you like an amalgamation of a killer crab and a gritty reboot of the Pixar logo lamp. Other notable twists that occur in Furi include the final two phases of The Edge taking place on a 2.5D plane as he beats you up with an oar in a homage to Miyamoto Musashi, and The Song abandoning her powers of flight and focusing more on overwhelming you with pulses and projectiles while chasing you down as pillars of light thunder from the sky. There’s so much variety that could be covered in such a basic combat system, and I was always kept on my toes wondering what the next crazy idea thrown at me would evolve into as I made my way through the prison.
Now, having played through almost all of the game’s modes and difficulties at this point (only haven’t beat The Flame and Bernard on Furier as DLC), I will acknowledge that there are a few flaws. Some of the bosses could be considered too by-the-book when playing on standard difficulty if you’re content with just parrying and counter attacking, and if you’re looking for a game with a crazy move list and need for precise planning (akin to something like say, God Hand), standard Furi may not be your ballpark. A couple of the bosses could be considered easily “cheesed” if you know the right strats; for example, if you keep attacking the Hand by chasing him down and sword slashing, you can prevent him from launching practically any attacks at all until he counter-attacks (at which point you parry) and essentially trivialize almost the entire fight. And finally, there are some noticeable difficulty spikes on both Furi and Furier difficulty; in my case, it was The Burst’s final desperation phase (which definitely caused some frustration, having come so close to ending her only for it to slip away) and The Star on Furier, which has some very tight execution tests with little reprieve for relaxing or making mistakes. Fortunately, I do believe that Furier difficulty is an excellent use of a new game + system, with tougher and more intimidating attack patterns that turn the already powerful bosses into behemoths, though it does have the unintended consequence of making the more straightforward bosses like The Hand and The Edge seem like a walk in the park after you’ve mastered the controls and mechanics.
But at the end of the day, does this really matter enough to me? I’ve already stated in the past that most crushingly difficult games are not exactly my cup of tea; not that I particularly dislike challenging video games, but I’m not inherently drawn to the challenge of grinding against difficult enemies and bosses as I am interested in an overall fruitful experience. Moreover, with so much to explore on the horizon thanks to stronger systems at my disposal, there are so many games I want to get to and cover that I rarely ever consider replaying games, even favorites of mine such as Okami and Ori & The Blind Forest. And yet, I somehow felt inspired enough to come back to Furi and beat it four more times, feeling just as enthused and enthralled as the first time when I cleared it last November. I can’t help but admire the decision making of the Game Bakers; they knew exactly what they wanted to make, and they set out to gather the best team possible to make that vision a reality. And even though they will admit upfront that difficult video games are not for everyone, and that perhaps a simply set-up system might not cover everyone’s tastes, they remained steadfast in their artistic ideals and committed their final designs, stating that “consensus leads to dull results” and that “… having a strong sense of consistency and focus are essential to [creating] unforgettable moments, whereas trying to please everyone is definitely not the key to success.” It’s an uncompromising yet inviting game of thrills and challenges, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
It’s fast. It's fun. It’s Furi. It’s fucking good.