What will you fight for?
"The Jailer is the key, kill him, and you will be free."
— The Voice
Furi is an Action Game / Bullet Hell / Boss Game developed and published by The Game Bakers, released on July 5th, 2016 and featuring character and art designs by Takashi Okazaki and an OST made by an assortment of Electronica artists.
In it you play "The Stranger", a highly skilled and powerful warrior who is suddenly released from his torture chamber by a mysterious man wearing a rabbit mask. Your goal is simple. Escape. The problem? Everyone in your path is a full fledged badass dedicated to keeping you locked away, and they do NOT appreciate your jailbreak attempt. The solution? Kill your way past your jailers and descend your prison so you can reclaim your freedom.
On March 16th, 2017, a DLC was released, One More Fight, which adds another boss (actually two).
A surprise came on May 3rd 2022, with the announcement
of the Onnamusha DLC, which adds in the titular Distaff Counterpart of the Stranger as an alternate playable option who plays substantially different from him while bundling One More Fight within itself as well. It released on May 17th 2022. Another surprise came on November 30, 2023 with the free release of "Furi Demake", a Video Game Demake developed by the solo developer Sylph, including two difficulty modes and the first boss fight.
Furi contains examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: All the bosses have some fancy Meaningful Name, and then there's Bernard.
- All There in the Manual: The characters' names are only given in the credits.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Despite priding itself on being hard as hell, the game averts Trial-and-Error Gameplay:
- Successfully parrying a melee blow allows you to regain health, making it so that mistakes can be made up for if you're skilled enough.
- After being knocked to the ground by a combo, the boss will generally take a second to taunt you, giving you a free window to charge your sword.
- Beating a boss phase refills your entire health bar and recovers a life, allowing you to hold out much easier against the next phase if the previous one pushed your shit in.
- You have multiple lives per try, meaning that you're given a few tries to learn a phase and are not immediately punished for failing to grasp the new challenge that the boss provides.
- During the finale of the fight with the Burst, she will fire her one hit kill laser at you the moment you get behind cover, which is great considering all the other bullets flying everywhere, so you aren't forced to stay in place for a period of time before leaving cover.
- Astral Finale: While the jail worlds are technically in space, they are more akin to Pocket Dimensions than actually being in space. The game's ending and True Final Boss, if you choose to fight, however, takes place in the inside of a giant UFO floating outside the orbit of The Free World.
- Avoid the Dreaded G Rating: There is practically nothing in the game (aside from perhaps the blunt, if bloodless, violence) that would've warranted its M-rating except for The Voice's sole Precision F-Strike.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Charged shots with your gun do less DPS than simply firing your own storm of bullets at them and the bosses become progressively harder to hit with them in the first place. This is in addition to not being able to keep your gun charged between dashes like you can your sword, which often makes capitalizing on openings you otherwise could've had impossible. However, it does have its place during some bosses who they leave openings that don't last long enough for uncharged shots to outdamage a charged shot.
- BFS: The Hand has an energy blade nearly as long as he is tall and is an absolute monster with it. The Line takes this even further. His blade is even larger than he is! Though considering the Line is a Miniature Senior Citizen, this isn't quite as impressive as it sounds.
- Big Bad: The Star. She's responsible for kicking off the game's plot by sending The Stranger to the Free World to check if the planet is fit for assimilation. When confronted in her battle, she claims that the assimilation is necessary to save their race.
- Blocking Stops All Damage: Goes both ways. You even restore health if you block an attack!
- Blood Knight: The Chain and the Edge. The Burst is a downplayed example as well.
- Bloodless Carnage: No matter how vicious the fights get, not a single drop of blood is shed. Instead, blue electric shocks take the role of blood.
- Book Ends: The very last part of the fight with The Star is similar to the first part of The Chain's final phase.
- Boss Corridor: Almost all the spaces between bosses amount to this. The Voice uses this opportunity to explain the backstory of the prison and its jailers.
- Boss Game: In the vein of No More Heroes and Alien Soldier.
- Braving the Blizzard: The Beat's level takes the form of a mountain range with a powerful snowstorm. While autowalk works as normal, in the cutscene it becomes obvious that the Stranger has quite a hard time against it. The Voice is also struggling to stave off the cold, choosing to stick curled up on the ground rather than float around like usual.
- Character Development: It becomes increasingly evident that the Rider is affected by his encounters with the bosses. Whether this change is enough to redeem him or not is up to the player.
- The Line: The Rider learns that fate is not written in stone, possibly leading to his eventual revolt against his role in the planet's assimilation.
- The Hand: Some things are worth fighting for, and the Rider might eventually decide that the free world is one of them.
- The Song: She tries to show him mercy, and even if he rejects her offer, the Rider is clearly affected after their battle. He might even show mercy to the world he was meant to conquer.
- Charged Attack: Holding the fire button lets you charge up a powerful blast that has much more damage and penetration than a regular shot, often able to knock down bosses on a direct hit; charging up the melee attack also allows you to use a powerful dash-slash which will instantly stagger a boss if it connects. In close-combat sequences, you can also charge your blade to make your next hit deal massive damage if you aren't hit before it lands. All of these take time and can often be blocked or dodged if you aren't careful, so use them wisely.
- Counter-Attack: If you parry at the very last moment you'll briefly stun the boss and be able to respond with a special attack of your own. Some bosses can counter attack you if you attack them when their guard is up. These are generally very hard to block and don't restore health on parry, but not too painful if they hit you.
- Defiant to the End: The Chain, whose last words as the Stranger is about to kill him are thus:The Chain: You will be broken. You will go back to your cell.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Charging your blade during the melee phases of a boss battle. If you hold down the button, The Stranger will shift to a new stance and begin charging, signified by him glowing bright orange. If this charge is successful, his next melee attack will do significantly more damage, even possibly allowing you to completely drain the current HP bar for the boss in one attack. But if you take ANY damage before the attack lands you lose the charge effect completely. This combined with how long it takes to charge the blade up makes it MUCH more difficult to pull off as you get further in, but once you know what you're doing you'll shred through boss HP like it's not even there.
- Dual Wielding: The Scale, The Song, The Burst. The Scale uses Pile Bunker, The Song uses something resembling a mix of a Automatic Crossbow and a Rifle, The Burst uses a Pile Bunker and Sniper Rifle in opposite hands. The Edge averts it because while he does have two katanas, he only uses one of them at a time.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: Choosing Promenade will not only prevent you from unlocking anything (including achievements), the game also explicitly tells you that it is not the game's intended difficulty and warns you from doing so.
- The Ending Changes Everything: The revelations in the True Final Boss fight turn the events of the entire game on its head. The Stranger is actually a cloned alien from a distant planet; he was sent by his superiors to investigate The Free World to see if it was fit to be assimilated by the alien planet, but was defeated and imprisoned in the prison worlds to protect The Free World.
- Evil Plan: The Star, who wants to assimilate the planet. You can go along with this or you can refuse to give her the data she needs and get an extra boss fight. However, note that The Star considers this plan necessary for the survival of The Rider's species. It's up to the player to decide whether it's a Necessary Evil or just plain evil.
- Expy: The Voice is something of a combination of Kuma and Ninja Ninja, wearing an animal mask like the former and serving as a companion/exposition device like the latter.
- Fake Difficulty: While the game is usually pretty fair there are the occasional hiccups.
- In some positions some range indicators don't give enough info to show you where to move to dodge the attack due to overlapping with parts of the environment.
- In some fights projectiles with similar colors (typically various shades of blue or orange and yellow) blend in with each other or the ground, making it very awkward to tell where is safe and how to react.
- And finally due to the limited camera angles you'll often have a much harder time seeing beneath you than seeing what's coming in any other direction.
- Final-Exam Boss: Bernard, the last boss of the One More Fight DLC, use attacks of every bosses you've fought in the vanilla game. You are also forced to fight him on Furier difficulty.
- Flunky Boss: The Burst has some Attack Drones that will pester you depending on the phase of the battle, as does The Star.
- Foreshadowing: The game oozes this, and it becomes especially obvious on a second playthrough.
- Particularly noteworthy is The Chain calling The Stranger "a weapon. A bringer of death".
- Friendly Fireproof: A given. Only your attacks or projectiles you've deflected will damage an enemy. This does not apply to you, however. Any shot you make can harm you if you touch it. Usually by reflection, but The Line's time stop ability turns your shots into stationary bullets that damage you if you touch them.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: See Resurrective Immortality.
- Garden of Love: Implied. The Song will ask you to stay in her garden forever and try to prevent your escape. If you choose to stay with her, she will promise to take care of you and "be yours".
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: The Burst's main tactic is to snipe you from afar while having drones pester you, forcing you to chase her down.
- Chasing The Beat through an obstacle course is also a big part of her fight.
- The Strap has a tendency to run away and throw bullets of all kinds, as well as lasers. She uses melee attacks a bit more often later into the fight, but for the most part, The Stranger is the one who'll have to close in if they want to go melee.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Aside from the few unambiguously heroic characters, such as The Hand, who fights to protect his son and the Free World, or The Beat, who aspires to be a guardian of hope and believes in the best of others, a majority of the characters aren't truly good or evil, making them ripe for different character interpretations. The Edge becomes one of the Jailers not because he wants to Save the World, rather because he wants to find a Worthy Opponent, The Burst is an Arrogant Blood Knight, but she's affable enough to respect The Stranger as an equally skilled warrior, and The Voice claims that The Song is pretending to be benevolent, but her peaceful offer to The Stranger can be seen in a genuinely kind light. Some of the other Jailers may be Ax-Crazy, but they also have good reasons for imprisoning The Stranger, who's actually an alien scout that's checking if the Free World is fit for assimilation; an Alien Invasion in essence. Even The Voice can be seen in a muddy light for risking the Free World's safety by freeing The Stranger so he can see his daughter again. Should The Stranger fulfill his purpose, doing so will doom the Free World and its populace. Whether The Stranger stays faithful to his purpose or not is up to the player, but even if The Stranger chooses to defy it, the reasons for his defiance may or may not be entirely selfless. The only character who can be villainous is The Star for coming up with the Evil Plan of assimilating the Free World for the survival of The Stranger's species, but it's ambiguous whether she's a genuine Well-Intentioned Extremist or just a Manipulative Planet Looter.
- Harder Than Hard: Furier, which can only be unlocked after fully beating the game on Furi once. This dials the attacks of all the bosses up to eleven, adds new mechanics to many of them, removes sources of healing besides parrying and beating phases, and gives the bosses much more health as well as smaller opportunities to attack them.
- Heel–Face Turn: The Stranger can choose to end his violent escape by accepting The Song's offer, or defy The Star's Evil Plan by fighting her to save The Free World, but whether his actions are selfless or not is left ambiguous.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The three difficulty levels are Promenade, Furi, and Furier.
- I Just Want to Be Free: The Voice's motivation, and possibly the motivation for The Strap and The Stranger as well.
- Large Ham: The Chain, The Scale, and The Song.
- Last Ditch Move: Often the final HP bar for a boss will involve it turning invincible and turning the game into some variant of a Bullet Hell. Some of them also force you into a survival melee phase after their Bullet Hell is over. If you manage to make it through it all, the boss will usually be left wide open for you to finish off.
- An interesting case happens with The Hand and The Edge. Neither of them is particularly keen on the Bullet Hell, more so The Edge, which results in mostly physical survival phases. The Hand's real whopper is a monstrous sword combo (the biggest combo chain in the game by far) during the close combat phase, while The Edge's is more of a Turns Red power-up.
- Last-Second Ending Choice: The decision to assimilate or save The Free World, and by extension whether or not you fight the True Final Boss, occurs in the span of one single button hold at the very end of the game.
- Light Is Not Good: The Song, at least according to The Voice. This trope is played straight for The Star, especially if one thinks she's a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist.
- Luck-Based Mission: There's a trick to The Burst's first few phases, and if you don't realize it they will become infuriatingly luck-based. She'll run away from you if you start shooting at her and is extremely good at dodging bullets, but if instead you keep approaching, she'll stand her ground and keep trying to line up shots on you until you're in sword range, which she can't dodge.note
- Marathon Boss: The last Boss of the One More Fight DLC has 9 lifebars. And since you can only fight him in furier, each bar has abnormally high health compared to the usual difficulty. In the best case scenario, he takes roughly 10 minutes to kill, which is A LOT considering what he'll put you through.
- Mascot's Name Goes Unchanged: The protagonist is called The Rider even in the Japanese and French dubs. Lines that refer to him as The Stranger are translated, however.
- Mercy Kill: The Strap, who is completely insane, constantly screaming, and attacks anything and everything that moves. Finishing her off is essentially this.
- Possibly the Scale as well, as he's been driven mad with pain from The Corruption.
- Minimalism: The game is a straight-forward Boss Game where the Player Character has two Simple, yet Awesome weapons at his disposal: a rapid-firing laser gun for ranged combat and a Cool Sword for melee combat. Their only quirks are a Charge Attack, and as for the sword, the ability to heal the player with a successful parry.
- Mirror Boss: The Edge fights very similarly to you. He's even similarly styled, with Tron Lines of his own when he enters his final phase.
- Multiple Endings: After the credits, The Stranger makes his way to The Star and gets two options: Assist in the assimilation of the planet (which leads to its destruction) or rebel, leading to the True Final Boss..
- Additionally, choosing to stay in the Song's realm will end your playthrough there, as The Stranger abandons his quest to escape.
- The Musketeer: You are armed with a katana and an energy pistol. They might seem simple compared to other weapons, but they'll take you quite far.
- Nameless Narrative: No character is ever given a proper name, only a title. Moreover, their titles are only revealed once you finish a playthrough, in the credits, with the exception of stopping at The Song, in which case their titles will be hidden. And in the case of The Stranger, he may never have had a name in the first place.
- The DLC gives one exception: The last boss of the DLC is only known as "Bernard".
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Nintendo Hard: You will die quite a bit, checkpoints are only at the start and end of each boss, and you will need to know the basic mechanics of the game like the back of your hand if you want to get anywhere. It says something when the game grades you based not on how much damage you took, but on how many times you died and how many times you were hit. - Nigh-Invulnerable: The Stranger cannot be killed, only imprisoned.
- Non-Standard Game Over: If you stay in The Song's garden for long enough without trying to escape, you'll get a secret ending where you stop your crusade and agree to stay with her. While this nets you an achievement, it won't actually count as a game completion for the purposes of unlocking anything, and you'll need to replay the game to the end if you want to actually beat it.
- Oubliette: The whole game is The Stranger's attempt to escape one. Given the end of the game you cannot fault the jailers.
- Papa Wolf: The primary motivation of the man in the rabbit mask is to get back to his daughter. In order to achieve this, he betrays the jailers and knowingly potentially sets in motion the end of the world.
- The Hand is also an example, fighting The Stranger to protect his son.
- Perpetual Frowner: The Stranger never changes his expression from a sorrofwul scowl
- Prison Changes People: A running theme.
- The Strap has been driven Ax-Crazy by the effort of trying to physically tear her way out of a cell that constantly regenerates around her.
- The Voice claims that he's been psychologically damaged by his time inside the prison, as evidenced by his comments about how "being locked up fucks you up inside". And he's not even an inmate. He's the architect who designed the prison in the first place.
- The Voice believes that this trope applies to you, an immortal alien invader who had to be subdued by an army of hundreds, as well. He hopes that your time in the prison has changed your outlook enough that you won't destroy the planet once you're free.
- Puzzle Boss: Every boss has elements of this. Finding the order in the chaos makes defeating them orders of magnitude easier. Mashing away won't get you anywhere near as far as taking the time to think things through.
- Remember the New Guy?: The Flame, from the DLC (or the Xbox One port), apparently fought the stranger at some point before the events of the game and lost. He constantly taunt him about that, stating that, this time, he's ready and won't fail. Can also be interpreted as Breaking the Fourth Wall since the boss got cut for the release of the game because he wasn't finished in time. This time, he's ready to be part of the DLC. In-Universe, it's possible The Flame was part of force that subdued The Stranger to begin with (as it's mentioned The Hand merely led the battalion that captured him).
- Resurrective Immortality: The Stranger. Serves as a justification for Video-Game Lives, and for why the Guardians don't just kill him outright.
- Sadist: The Chain, who is completely content to torture The Stranger for the rest of eternity and looks forwards to the escape attempt because then he can really hurt his prisoner.
- Scenery Porn: The transitions between boss fights is essentially an occasion to enjoy the gorgeous, otherworldly environments along with the Voice's exposition.
- Sealed Badass in a Can: The Stranger can only be imprisoned, due to his Resurrective Immortality. Moves to Sealed Evil in a Can as his true history is revealed. Also a Sealed Evil in a Duel since The Stranger has to kill each of the prison worlds' Jailers, leading to the game's Boss Rush design.
- Serial Escalation: Bosses will gradually do this as the fights progress. Exaggerated when you fight against them on "Furier" difficulty.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the lines The Line can use to taunt the player asks him if he's waiting to see him die of old age. It's a direct reference to The End from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
- The protagonist is also one. A non-human humanoid, with olive skin, with weird symbols on his his armor, capable to run abnormally fast, who cannot be killed no matter how you try, only restrain, and considered as a literal killing machine... The Stranger shares a lot of similarities with SCP-076-2. Zigzagged as unlike him, The Stranger is more than a killing machine, being capable of human-like emotions beyond blood lust and a potential change of heart.
- Simple, yet Awesome: Your simple uncharged gun has a high rate of fire, breaks many kinds of bullets your enemies will fire at you, and has higher DPS than your blade. Its only real weakness is that it doesn't have any stunning capabilities, but even this contributes to why it does so much DPS due to averting Mercy Invincibility and each shot being weak enough that the Jailers usually don't bother to defend against them.
- Spanner in the Works: The Voice, who allows The Stranger to fight for his freedom. And The Stranger, should he choose to rebel against The Star.
- Stance System: The DLC player character, Onnamusha, has a play-style entirely centered on switching between Spark mode (fast but weak) and Storm mode (slow but strong). The severe limitations of each stance encourage frequent and quick switching.
- Stationary Boss: The Star, since she's a giant floating holographic head who solely fights you with Beam Spam and Bullet Hell with her floating robot arms. The Line also spends at least half his battle sitting on his rock or on top of a pillar while throwing a lot of bullets at you.
- The Stinger: Taken to its logical extreme; the game's entire ending sequence, which includes the game's major Plot Twist and potentially a True Final Boss fight, if you decide to fight The Star to save The Free World, takes place after the credits roll.
- Tailor-Made Prison: The jail worlds, which are implied to have been constructed specifically to hold The Stranger. This is especially apparent when you make it out and realize everything dies or rusts away in your presence in the normal world, unlike with the areas of the prison.
- Teleport Spam: You, The Chain (especially on Furier), and the Line. The Scale, The Burst, and Edge have lower grade versions as well.
- Non-fighting example : The Voice LOVES to do that during the walking sections. You never see him walk, he just... gets from point A to point B.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: You'll likely be blindsided by what the bosses can pull out, but that's why you have multiple HP bars per life.
- Turns Red: For every notch you take off a boss's HP the more complex and powerful its moveset gets.
- The Edge literally Turns Red (and black) when he enters his final phase, in a manner quite similar to The Stranger.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change:
- The first half of the Burst's boss fight is spent searching and chasing her.
- The Edge's two final phases are fought in only one dimension, akin to a 2D fighting game where you can't jump. Additionally, The Edge's whole encounter is this mechanically, as it is the only battle which is fought completely in close combat. The Edge himself only has two ranged attacks that he uses only during his last two phases, and sparsely in comparison to his melee.
- The fight against The Beat is the only one to focus more on platforming than actual combat.
- The Star is fought in a cybernetic armor that changes the moveset of The Stranger, taking away his blade and giving him dual guns and a laser beam as a charged attack. In other words, unlike every other fight in the game, it is almost solely Bullet Hell, with only the occasional melee attack thrown your way.
- The Unfought: The seventh jailer is gone by the time The Stranger reaches their realm, and is heavily implied to have been the man in the rabbit mask. The Song, as well as all the following Guardians, can become this if you accept her offering of peace. Finally, The Star if you choose to assimilate the world.
- Villainous Face Hold: While The Stranger is still restrained inside his cell, The Chain lifts his chin up and punches him in the face. Subverted, in that while The Chain's a sadistic brute, he is not exactly a villain and he has some very solid reasons for keeping The Stranger locked up.
- Walking Wasteland: When The Stranger sets foot on the real world, wherever he goes, all wastes away. The earth blackens, plants wither, cloth disintegrates, stone goes brittle and metal rusts. Moreover, the devastation of life seems to give rise to a black fog that can clog the sky and turn it dark and opaque. Incidentally, the sun will shine red through it, further adding to the ill omen it paints.
- Wave-Motion Gun: Many bosses can use these, particularly The Strap, The Hand, The Song, and The Beat's turrets. During the fight against The Star, The Stranger is wearing a weaponized flight suit that gives him access to a giant laser as his charged shot.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Depending on the phase of the fight many bosses have a tactic that can repeatedly be used against them that makes them much easier to defeat. Figuring out how to get a tricky boss from "hellishly impossible" to "probably painful but manageable" is a large part of the fun.
- Wham Line: A couple, here and there, most notable are "The architect gave up, and the father came up with a plan" from The Voice and "With you, our world withers and dies" from The Beat.
- Wham Shot: Once you're finally free and see that the land becomes withered and cracks, plants die, rivers dry up, and generally, The Stranger is a Walking Wasteland, you come to understand why all the Guardians were ready to give life or limb to keep you in the prison.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The Hand's son is never seen again after the scene before the fight with his father.
- Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?: Justified. The Stranger has Resurrective Immortality, and so imprisoning him is all they can do. Lampshaded by the Voice.
- A Winner Is You: If you beat the game on Furier, the credits will have an extra message at the end, commending you for your skill and efforts while congratulating you for playing the game "the right way".
- You Bastard!: All the bosses dabble in it, but most prominently The Beat and The Song. Considering who The Stranger actually is and his purpose, the player may be inclined to agree with them.
