If you are like me, you love boss fights. Good boss fights make average games good and elevate great games to legends. The thrill of beating an enemy, to put to the test all the skills you’ve honed during your time with the game. They can be used to punctuate narrative and to bring a climax to the game before either finishing or moving on. So what if you eliminate the fluff between these intense, defining moments and do a game that is nothing but boss fights? All killer, no filler. That seems to be the question Furi set out to answer.
Furi is a third person action game that pits you in a series of boss battles against powerful opponents with the goal of escaping a sort of undying, eternal imprisonment. There is more to the plot though details are scarce enough to make any other plot point be essentially a spoiler. The plot is really a vehicle to allow for the boss fights to happen. A rabbit man, or man in a rabbit suit frees you from your prison, and you immediately start fighting your captor and tormentor. The first fight is a tutorial, but Furi doesn’t have time to mess around. So, the first half of the fight with the boss will be a tutorial, but after that the gloves are off and you are expected to best him in combat.
Combat in Furi can be divided into two big types: Meele and ranged. Melee means attacking with a sword, dodging and parrying. Ranged means dodging attacks and using the right analog stick to shoot. Both the melee attacks and the ranged attacks can be charged to deliver devastating blows. In your defensive arsenal you have a dash, which goes farther the longer you hold the dash button, and a parry, which not only allows you to avoid damage but if done correctly unleash counterattacks. It also replenishes a small amount of your health bar. This encourages you take risks in the most dangerous moments and to stand your ground in hopes of healing… or in many cases, just die faster.
Below the bosses health bars there are a series of squares, which represent boss phases. Deplete the health bar, and you will enter a small melee duel where you must deplete the bar again and you will get rid of the square, which will make the boss enter a new phase, usually with a cool cut-scene showing what changes. This often changes the way the boss behaves altogether, with one phase being focused on melee, another one on gun play, and all of them have at least one bullet hell phase where you have to dodge projectiles while shooting in the general direction of your enemies. This keeps the bosses fresh and challenging, but results in long battles that can feel drawn out, despite the game clocking in at about three to five hours.
You have small boxes underneath your life bar too that essentially work as lives. When your health bar is depleted, you will lose one those lives, and your bar and the boss’s bar will fill up. Which means that when you lose a life you’ll start a the beginning of that phase once again. Once you are out of lives, you have to start the whole boss fight over again. I am of two minds about this system, on the one hand it is annoying to essentially have no check points, but on the other hand it makes for some very tense battles. If capturing the rush of a boss fight was the intent of this game, then they nailed it.
The game has some great aesthetics. The soundtrack has been the subject of much love, but I’ve found it mixed myself. Some songs are superb, some are just ok. However, all of the songs fit thematically between the boss you are fighting. One of my least favorite tracks is the one in the sewers, however due to the nature of the fight the tune fits. Had it been something more high energy like other songs in the game, it would have felt strange. The cell shaded style fits the game perfectly, and it allows for gorgeous, colorful, and varied environments.
There are two issues that keep this game from being a 5 for me. The first one is the price. At $25, I am not sure there is enough here to justify the cost. It is about five hours your first playthrough, and much less your second. The discovery of a harder difficulty mode upon completion might extend its longevity, but not much, at least for me. If you managed to not pick up as your free game in PS+ for July, I’d wait until it is on sale to do so.
The other issue is pacing, and I think it is an issue that the game might not have been able to mitigate, just by the nature of its premise. Boss battles are the main event because they are supposed to be grueling, high tension affairs. They are a climax. But a climax needs a build up, and in the case of video games, it also needs some quiet time to balance it out. Furi does try to give you some quiet time by having you walk from boss to boss in these fix camera environments that can be quite pretty. They are just not very interactive, and can be triggered by pressing a button and just letting your character walk. But going from grueling battle to grueling battle just didn’t work for me. It’s too much intensity too close together, to the point that I enjoyed the game more when I turned it off between these fights and did something else. Still this is by not means a deal breaker, and the game is still great. If you think you can look past the short length and little content, then go ahead and give it a try.
