Managed to S-rank all bosses in Furi on Furier difficulty, including DLC
I had a lot of fun with this one, despite its flaws. It nailed the right amount of atmosphere, personality, music and difficulty in a cohesive whole to make me want more and is one of those few stripped-down but pure video games which take full advantage of what little there is present. It's an isometric boss rush game, featuring elements from bullet hell and hack 'n slash games. You face them in one-on-one duels in fights consisting of several phases, with most phases being divided into a freeform and a melee segment, up to the last phase of the fight where the boss turns invincible and fires a last desperate barrage of attacks at you which you have to survive after which you can finish the boss off.
Your moveset is quite basic. You can shoot projectiles in similar fashion to twin-stick shooters, you can charge your shot to deal more damage which knocks the boss down and/or interrupt their attack, you have a standard combo of four melee strikes with the fourth one knocking your opponent down, your melee attack can be charged to stun your opponent which lets you follow up with a Punish attack, you can dash through projectiles and attack and charge your dash to dash over longer distances, you have the ability to parry melee strikes to heal yourself and reflect projectiles back to the boss, and during melee segments you can boost yourself so your next attack deals much more damage, which also gives you something to do while the boss is down. There are no fancy combos here, no additional weapons, no RPG unlocks, no different movesets, no real scoring systems, and no normal enemy encounters. It's just you and what the bosses have to offer. And what the bosses have to offer is quite varied.
Though your moveset isn't particularly deep, the bosses are so varied in terms of personality and how they draw out different parts of your moveset that each boss fight truly feels like its own unique fight. Some bosses are more focused on shooting while others are more focused on close-quarters fighting, and on top of that each boss has their own unique gimmick to really spice things up. Aside from a fight where you fight two enemies at once (that would have been brilliant), it's wringing every possibility and unique approach to challenging your moveset.
Most attacks consist of projectiles, unbreakable projectiles, wave attacks, lasers, and melee attacks, all of which have many variations. Most bullets can be canceled by shooting them with your blaster, but the more transparent bullets can't be shot through and need to be dodged. There are also green bullets which drop an item which restores one segment of your health bar, but these are mostly absent on Furier difficulty for obvious reasons. Wave attacks must be dashed through (or circumvented entirely if possible). Melee strikes you can only parry (or run away from, but because melee attacks in this game have a tendency to home in when you attack, it's a safer bet to just parry). Each melee strike is telegraphed with an obvious white flash and a piercing sound effect, and the delay between the telegraphing and attack is almost always the same. This is not too big of a deal considering there are many other attacks you can't avoid by simply parrying, however during certain phases where boss attacks mostly consist of melee strikes, it mostly becomes a challenge of memorization with little to mix it up.
Furier mode revamps most boss patterns to be more challenging, as the window of opportunity you have to strike bosses becomes smaller, so pulling off full melee combos becomes much harder as you have to rely on finishing off your combo with a half-charged slash to deal the most DPS. Many attack patterns have been subtly tweaked to be more challenging, and green bullets only appear during The Line. Waves have been added to certain attacks, the space you can move around in has been tightened during certain attacks, the amount of bullets fired on average has increased and some attack also feature homing bullets, many destructible bullets are now indestructible, and so on. It's probably worth it just to get the 'you played the game the way it's supposed to' message from the developers during the credits sequence (I wish more developers did that). One of the extra bosses can only be played in Furier mode as well.
The first boss, The Chain, is more or less a tutorial boss and thus doesn't really have any unique attacks (compared to other bosses), but he does fit the tough warden stereotype to get the idea across that you're in a prison. The boss does a good job of teaching you most of the core mechanics through gameplay alone and a button prompt on screen showing you that you can indeed to this action, without resorting to intrusive THIS IS A BULLET WHICH CAN'T BE CANCELED tutorial prompts, but just letting you experience it for yourself. You are given enough health to mess around with the controls during the boss fight to get acquainted on your own pace before the other bosses will have you bend over. I can't stress enough that The Chain is an excellent tutorial boss, the attack where he slowly swarms the screen with bullets you have to shoot through only for indestructible bullets to appear later, whose existence and purpose in the game slowly becomes obvious to the player.
After the tutorial phases the boss starts getting serious with more aggressive melee attacks and wave attacks, but nothing particularly special. The tutorial phases are removed on Furier difficulty so you can get right to the good stuff, which largely consists of basic applications of what you've just learned but cranked up even higher with more aggressive attacks, so in a sense The Chain also functions as a tutorial for Furier mode. Overall, The Chain is pretty decent, what he lacks in attack originality his personality mostly makes up for it.
The second boss, The Strap, is where the game really begins. Your opponent is a woman strapped to a Swedish jacket on wheels, and the mask strapped to her face can fire giant lasers, but as the fight goes on she slowly breaks free and gets progressively more crazy as she starts to use her scythe to cut you down. She frequently fires her laser at you which has a massive reach, but can be avoided easily if you dash behind her when she fires it. Later on she starts firing bullets which dissipate into clusters of smaller slow-homing bullets, but you'll be fine if you stay close, though. She's also rather infamous for one of her melee combos which initiates the final attack of the string immediately after the previous one which no human being can react to in time without beforehand knowledge, yet there's no other boss in the game with that kind of attack string.
What strikes me as odd the most is the arena design of the fight. It consists of three rings of destructible walls with a pit in the center, and four floorplates and pillars which prompt The Strap to stop attacking you and attack what you just triggered instead. The destructible walls don't really play a big part in the fight at all, I can only imagine them being there if you want to safely take potshots or get the bullets to collide with the walls instead, but other than that they're more of a hindrance when you're trying to get close to The Strap.
The floorplates/pillars are especially weird since there's nothing like them later on in the game, and only serve to distract The Strap for free damage, which in itself is already questionable why you'd even include that in the game. If it's intended to be a handicap to smooth out the difficulty curve (considering The Strap is only the second boss of the game and all), it's still an odd inclusion considering it's still there on Furier difficulty as well. It's just free damage, and not really a skill you learn considering the arenas of later boss fights are mostly flat surfaces with barely any gimmicks attached to them.
I do like the build-up of the fight, both from a visual and gameplay perspective, where The Strap's laser attacks get progressively more varied and dangerous as she manages to free herself from her jacket more and more, only for to end up being (visibly!) tired during her last phase when you can see her attacks coming from a mile away. The start of the phase where she finally breaks free only to run around the arena doing whatever as you can wait around until she comes out of hiding and performs a QTE attack (thankfully the QTE's in Furi are rather minor and don't appear too often, though they all have the same input for some reason), but you can also just activate the floorplate/pillar to bait her out of hiding and save some time. There they do make sense, but if that was the sole reason for their inclusion in this fight, it's a rather forced speedrunning trick that's out of place with the rest of the game.
Overall the boss can be quite challenging and has some pretty interesting attacks, though I feel this was one of the first bosses being developed, so the developers were mostly experimenting with shit around this stage.
The third boss, The Line, is probably one of my least favourites for reasons which I don't know whether it's just irony on the developers' part. Namely, it's an old man capable of controlling time who takes a long time to defeat, even though he has the least amount of phases compared to any boss in the game. The jokes write themselves. To begin with, the old man surrounds himself with three rotating layers of mirrors you have to shoot through to end the phase, and the mirrors reflect the bullets back to you. While I do like his lines and character a lot (as he says "Can't you see you're fighting yourself?" when you're dealing with your own bullets he reflected back) given that most of them can also have multiple meanings, most his attacks do make you feel rather constrained with little means of improving your personal best time. The first phase completely ends if you sneak in only one bullet through his mirror circles to the center, but taking apart the mirrors with charged shots takes a damn long time and usually takes less than one minute of shooting charged bullets through gaps in the mirrors, while trying to get the timing right and dodging the reflected bullets, on top of filled wave attacks on Furier.
His second phase revolves around being able to shoot the core as much as possible while dodging a rotating wave and a contracting circle of indestructible bullets which is probably the first hurdle in the game to get you better acquainted with the finnicky dashing of the game, but once you've destroyed the core, he teleports away and the arena is being slowly filled with bullets, as time stops after a while and The Line attacks you with focused wave attacks while teleporting around. When time is stopped, you bullets don't travel at all and actually form a hazard to you, so you have to use your sword to beat the old man. The third phase is (once again, ironically) about getting the time right between parrying an inevitable circle of bullets centering on you, and wave attacks, something he also remarks on. The final phase fills the arena with bullets and the occasional wave attack as you have to destroy the pillars in each corner of the arena before moving in for the kill.
I don't like this boss at all because it doesn't actually showcase Furi's strengths because of the constraints applied to you throughout the fight. For one half of the fight you're restricted to solely using your blaster whereas for the other half it's an extended melee phase. Even when you have to slice The Line up when time is stopped in a freeform phase yet you have no way of shooting The Line and must melee him, there's still an additional melee phase after that! You don't mix up your blaster shots with sword strikes here, it's purely call and response with barely any opportunity to play aggressively and end the fight quicker. For a game which prides itself on speedkilling and tricky speedkilling strategies, The Line barely has any, and only ends up being an affair of rote gimmicky call and response attacks which is a pain when replaying the game, or retrying the boss. The first phase can be solved quickly, but with some rather strict timing and beforehand knowledge, as you have to predict which mirrors to shoot first to create an opening in the three layers as quickly as possible. The second phase is mostly just about holding your fire on The Line as much as possible and slicing him ASAP when time is stopped. The third phase is more of the same as the second one, and the fourth phase is just trying to survive the bullet hell as you destroy the targets. It's a bit too gimmicky and constrained for its own good.
The fourth boss, The Scale, has you fight against some insane dude muttering about revenge in some kind of diver's suit, but his design is striking. This one is a tough boss to learn, but once you know how to deal with him he becomes a piece of cake. During his first phase he'll move away from you and fire a massive spread wave at you, however, with clever positioning you can get him to not move towards the edge of the arena, and dash behind him as he launches his wave while you keep shooting him. If he moves towards the edges, you can't get behind him and will be forced to take damage if you do try to dash near him. If you are too slow in shooting down The Scale, he'll perform an attack where he temporarily becomes invincible and does more expanding circle wave attacks. But being able to skip them by playing aggressively is a nice touch, as a lot of bosses have a similar structure in their phases where at the end of each phase they initiate an attack where they become invincible or teleport to one end of the arena where they fire a dozen bullets at you, but by dealing a lot of damage in the first half of the phase you can avoid most of the ensuing difficulty.
The first melee phase does highlight some of my annoyances, as The Scale here attacks by telegraphing a kind of pie chart on the ground which indicates an upcoming sweep attack you have to avoid by dashing into the not-covered area of the circle, but depending on your position and the relative inaccuracy of eight-way dashing when it comes to dashing in a pie chart, it might seem like you were fucked from the start by having to cross an impossible distance within a short span of time. I suppose this is made more avoidable if you move closer to the boss instead of dashing from the edges of the circle. But even though the two pie-chart attacks are fast, he always does so in a left-right motion, where if one attack has you dash left, the second will always have you dash right. Usually if the circle is obstructed when you stand near the edges of the arena, the boss repositions himself towards the center of the arena so you can move around the circle without anything blocking you, but sometimes this doesn't happen, and the safe part of a pie-chart attack is situated in the edge of the arena where it's impossible to move towards.
Even though I enjoyed being able to skip entire attacks if you speedkill hard enough, it gets a wee bit ridiculous in the second, fourth and fifth phase of The Scale. Namely, in these phases all you have to do is stand in one position, keep shooting at The Scale, and parry the telegraphed easy-to-parry bullets. It's all you have to do, and it's fucking ridiculous how easy it is. Sometimes The Scale will try to melee you during these phases, but that's not too much of a problem because you can keep shooting while parrying bullets and melee strikes anyways. I seriously doubt whether this was an originally intended strategy considering the only controller layout on release made it difficult to pull off, and it invalidates most boss phases into the simplest exercise possible. Yet the strategy which lets me deal the most damage per second requires the least bit of effort, as all I do is hold the right joystick in the direction of the boss and press the parry button when necessary. Had melee strings during freeform phases been mixed up with other attacks like with The Flame (I'm fairly sure The Flame was designed like that to avoid things from becoming simple parry+shooting considering it's a boss added later to the game) it wouldn't have been a problem, but as it stands this boss stands in a weird spot where you are playing like the developers intended you to, but it eliminates most of the effort that went into designing the actual boss fight, kind of like several bosses in ALLTYNEX Second where you move in and just melee slash it before the boss can do anything else.
The melee phases for the later phases are somewhat mixed up though. The only difference the fourth and fifth phase to the second phase is that during the freeform phase you only need to move closer to parry the bullets before they splits into a zillion smaller ones. During the fourth phase the fired trailing bullet expands into a wave, so dash closer to the boss and parry it before that happens. During the fifth phase the boss fires two purple bullets which expand into several smaller ones, which you can both parry at the same time by standing right in front of the boss once he fires them as you keep shooting them, which completely lets you circumvent the clone part of this phase. I did forget to mention the third phase where the boss creates a ripple wave by diving underwater and another where he randomly teleports out in the arena on top of several directed waves towards you once he teleports out, which can be quite challenging.
The final phase has him cover one or two-thirds of the arena with giant waves as destructible bullets are fired at you, so you have to dash from one third of the arena to the safe part while shooting down the incoming bullets. Here I should point out another weird little thing about the dashing, considering it's more accurate if you use the right stick (for shooting) to determine the direction of your dash as opposed to the left stick. For calculated dashes against slow attacks you want to confirm the direction of your dash by shooting towards wherever you want to dash, whereas with the left stick you move a little while charging your dash and may accidentally miss wherever you're supposed to dash towards, like into the damaging waves, for example. But I feel this is still rather cumbersome considering you will mostly be dashing with your left stick, like during melee phases where the right stick is solely used for boosting.
The second part of the final phase has the boss fire several trailing bullets so that the arena is divided into several squares, but you can parry some of the bullets to reduce the amount of damaging trails on screen. After that you get barraged by several ripple waves at once, which is a neat attack which tests your prediction skills. The Scale is an alright boss, marred down by the fact that some of his attacks become borderline redundant if you figure out how they work, with barely any challenge attached to them in future playthroughs.
The fifth boss, The Hand, has you fighting a viking father with his magical shield which reflects your bullets back at you. He's pretty cool. Since you can't continuously shoot at him without eating just desserts, you need to bait him into attacking first and shoot when he's vulnerable. So the trick is to shoot while he does a combo and finish the last one with a perfect parry for maximum damage, and shoot him while he's in a Punishable state. If you don't Punish him immediately, you can do this twice in a row before he runs away to perform his wave attacks. The melee phase also sees the mix of normal melee attacks with heavy unparriable strikes which are telegraphed with pie-slices, which is neat as well. If you attack him while his shield is up, he'll either counter with a melee strike (which plays a variant on the normal incoming melee strike sound to inform you something urgent is about to come up), or grab your shield and lock you into an (easy to do) QTE. The annoying thing is that he can raise his shield mid-combo with next to no telegraphing and reflect a bullet at you while you are shooting at him, which is rather annoying.
The second phase has him do more of the same, but he starts with several ripple wave attacks at once, and his ranged attack is replaced with a double expanding wave with a thicker edge which can only be dashed through with a half-charged dash. The third phase has him start with four rotating waves as he repeatedly fires a ripple wave from the center before moving on as usual. His ranged attacks are now replaced with four wave attacks of the first phase in quick succession, or two of the wave attacks of the second phase. In the fourth phase he throws away his shield to kick your shit in with his sword, which means you're safe to blast him away continously. He'll either strike with a combo where the third strike has a neat delay from the second to fool you into thinking the combo is over, and an attack where he runs to the edge of the arena to fire a massive beam at you on top of an additional ripple wave on Furier. This is one of those trial and error cases where a guy running to the edge and holding up his sword doesn't exactly translate to 'sudden beam at your last known position'.
During the final phase the outer part of the arena becomes hazardous so you have less breathing room, as the boss assaults you with more laser attacks and combos. This is all neatly finished off in his final melee combo of the last melee phase which is a constant flurry of melee strikes finished off with a ripple wave, which really nails that feeling of a final desperate attack. The overall pacing of The Hand is quite great, with him slowly becoming more aggressive over time. I should also note how much I like the touch of the arena darkening when any of the bosses are about to do their final move. The Hand may not be terribly imaginative and is not all that difficult, but the presentation does make up for it.
The sixth boss, The Song, is an angel MILF with double crossbows, and is a boss similar to The Line where you mostly have to do either shoot or strike, but in this case the boundaries of what you can and can't do feel much less artificial and so do your approaches to speedkilling the boss. Even so, The Song is largely focused on shooting her considering her first few phases have her flying all over the place where you can't reach her with your sword. The first phase has her mostly shooting either a double intersecting ripple wave combined with a ripple of indestructible bullets, or two thick waves of indestructible bullets. For this boss, I have to talk about the dashing. Unlike most games where you can dodge or block, in Furi your dash is only initiated if you release the dash button, as opposed to pressing it, something most likely done to accomodate the dash charge function. This usually results in you getting hit by things like waves even though you technically responded in time by pressing the dash button and the correct directional input, you get hit because you didn't release the button in time, which is plain ridiculous and to put it in a single word: cumbersome.
This makes lightning fast attacks like the blue waves The Song shits out with minimal telegraphing a pain to dodge, it's actually easier to dash backwards and THEN forwards when you have the time and space to dash through it, which is the most unintuitive thing I've ever experienced in the game. There is no reason why there can't be separate Dash and Charged Dash buttons, the controller layout wouldn't have any problem accomodating that. Alternatively, you don't charge your dashes all that often in the game, and the game didn't have to be designed around obstacles you have to charge dash through in the first place. Sometimes it's hard to gauge whether a certain attack must be dashed or charge-dashed through, like with The Song's waves of indestructible bullets. When you dash through them right as they've been spawned you can maybe do so unscathed, but when they've already traveled a minor distance you can't dash through it with a normal dash and will end up hitting the first row of the bullets, so you have to stay back and charge-dash if you want to be 100% sure not to get hit. The sudden blue wave and the bullet waves give me the idea that I shouldn't stay close to The Song at all if I don't want to get hit, but that's no reason why I can't dash through the aforementioned attacks like normal.
Anyways, during her first phase The Song can also initiate a rush attack which you can perfect parry for sneaking in more bullets and an additional Punish. She ends the first phase by flying to the top of the arena and covering the parts of the arena to her left and right in hazardous waves, while sending thick waves at you where one part of them is completely covered. If you deal enough damage in time, you can end the phase before she even begins covering the arena in waves.
In her second phase, The Song can fire a rotating two-pronged laser, which you can usually easily avoid by dashing behind her and sneaking in more damage, but dashing directly through the laser isn't too hard. Though I should also mention that shooting while trying to dash with your left stick is a bad idea, sometimes the game interprets the direction of your right stick where you want to dash, so if you are shooting upwards and want to dodge left using the left stick, it's possible you can dash upwards instead which usually gets you damaged. The rush attack of the first phase also returns, but this time The Song fires two laser to her left or right which span the entire arena, but you can't parry it unlike the first phase for some reason, probably because of the lasers. If you want to deal with the attack without getting damaged, you have to shoot her with a charged shot which interrupts her attack and knocks her down. The telegraphing wasn't particularly clear about it either. Much like the first phase she ends it by covering herself in waves and the arena with bullets, but instead of sending waves after you she fires her two-pronged laser. Much like the first phase, you can also avoid this by dealing enough damage beforehand.
At the start of the third phase she will fly to the center, cover herself in hazardous wave and fill the screen with bullets as she also fires ripple waves. The only annoying part about this is again the blue wave attack which is too fast and rather difficult to dodge with all the bullets surrounding you. After that it's mostly ripple waves and the normal rush attack. Things start getting interesting with the fourth and the fifth phase where the arena gets expanded. The Song will perform regular melee strikes and send in airstrikes, while firing a huge wave of indestructible bullets at you where you must move in the gap and dash at the end when the gap ends (or you could just interrupt this attack by firing a half-charged shot or attacking with your sword). The final phase is similar to that of The Line where you must destroy a certain amount of targets before you can hurt the boss, but here there's less bullet spam and more build-up, as another attack gets added for each target you destroy, as she finishes things off with a massive wave attack.
The Song is alright, it's kind of a problem that a large part of the difficulty in this fight is derived from struggling with the controls, but overall I do like it.
The seventh boss, The Burst is a huntress trying to play a game with you who is probably also the hardest boss in the game. This boss also features other enemies aside from the boss in the form of drones who shoot a spread of bullets at you, which are indestructible on Furier, on top of mines which create a ripple wave when triggered by standing close to it, as The Burst herself tries to snipe you from afar. The first three phases have you chase her around the massive arena as you try and trace her position using the incoming line of fire. I don't really like the randomness involved in what end of the arena The Burst will snipe from. In a game about speedkilling, this randomness seems counterintuitive unless you can somehow control her by predicting or abusing her AI, but I've not really found how to do it or whether it's possible to begin with. Even though positioning can be used to set up the boss to be more vulnerable to your attacks, the arena here is too large to have any idea how to really control The Burst.
But if you do chase down the burst and attack her right after she fired her sniper rifle, the fight shifts to the arena you're standing on as The Burst peppers you with a stream of purple bullets you can parry through, or red bullets which turn into wave zones but can also be parried back (the first one at least). After that it's mostly shooting up until she initiates another massive wave attack, but as usual you can skip that one if you dealt enough damage. This repeats for the first three phases, but later phases also see mines and white drones which fire homing bullets. If you hit The Burst during the third phase, she will instead run towards the center where you're encouraged to run towards as well, as she tries to snipe you down. It's mostly bullets you have to parry back, but there's also a neat trick where you can shoot The Burst in her face as she's lining up a shot and interrupt her charge with a sword strike before she shoots you, which would normally result in an instant KO.
After the third phase the running ends, and everything is confined to just one part of the arena. However, the fourth and fifth phase suffer the same problem The Scale had, as you can sit in one corner here and keep shooting at The Burst while parrying her incoming melee strikes since she doesn't really do anything else, which is a shame considering some of the other attacks at her disposal which she can't even perform anymore. At least the phases after the third one have melee phases to spice things up. What's interesting is that The Burst will taunt you into attacking as she's talking which would normally signify that the boss is vulnerable, but here it's the opposite as she will counter-attack immediately.
The final phase is probably the main contributor for why the fight is so damn challenging, as you're barraged by shockwaves from the top, left and right, while having to move behind walls to avoid incoming sniper shots. Though I don't like the dashing in Furi, it's actually fair in this phase when they aren't quick attacks you have to reflexively dodge and built around dashing being an on-button-release function. The waves have a good amount of space between them as dashing at the wrong moment will also leave you vulnerable to other waves.
The Burst is bretty gud aside from some annoyances, has the best song playing from the soundtrack too. It's largely challenging in the right aspects and the presentation is top notch, but is brought down by some core problems like the running around involved in the first three phases and the oversimplification of phase 4 and 5.
The eighth boss, (ow) The Edge, is Musashi Miyamoto redesigned by Ozaki (boat paddle included) and is a melee-only boss. While he's made up to be a giant badass, he comes over as a giant pushover since his fight can be cleared in 50 seconds. Despite this, he does take the melee phases of Furi to their extremes.
Unlike most bosses, The Edge isn't a boss you can beat by passively attacking him once his combo is over. You're expected to constantly attack him mid-combo to find the weakpoints and take him out quickly as possible. The thing is that the vulnerability states of a boss in Furi is fixed depending on what he's doing, so it kind of feels like a case of trial and error as you're poking everything trying to find the hole in his defenses. The windows of vulnerabilities are even smaller on Furier. However, as this is a melee phase, you can skip the first three phases entirely if you strike The Edge with a boost attack, as striking The Edge once with a boost attack will deplete his entire HP bar. But with a boss as aggressive as The Edge, finding the right time to boost can be difficult. But the speedrun records for The Edge involve boosting right at the start of the phase and ending the phase immediately by striking him after one parry. But if you try to do this yourself, you'll run into some problems.
The first is the attack pattern of The Edge. The Edge can perform either a string of melee strikes, or one single heavy strike which can also be normally parried. Which one he does is completely random, but for speedkilling you want him to do the single heavy attack, as the other attack will force you to restart. This also has to do with how boosting works. Unlike charging your attacks, when you start a boost there are wind-up frames where you can't parry at all. You can parry one strike, but if you have the boost input still held down, after each parry you have to rewind the boost during which you're vulnerable and can't parry. What this means is that you can't parry a string of attacks while boosting because of the vulnerable state you're put in after each parry, but you can parry a single strike safely at the very least. This does make sense, as otherwise there'd be no point to charging attacks when you can do the same thing by boosting and deal even more damage. But this also means that being able to successfully speedkill The Edge comes down to RNG, because you're hoping for him to do the single strike for the first and second phase after which you can follow up with a boost attack, else it's a restart. This is a rather major oversight on part of the developers, RNG shouldn't be such a major deciding factor on what constitutes a successful speedkill or not, especially not when I'm able to immediately restart.
At the start of the third phase The Edge will ditch his sword for a boat paddle and switch arenas to a pier where you can only move in two directions, attacking you with fire waves or a string of attacks which continue even if you do hit him, unlike other bosses in the game. Unlike most melee phases, dashing can be more preferable to parrying as you try to find some room to boost safely. During the fourth boss The Edge starts to boost himself (even subtly telling you to do the same) as the onslaught continues, and your boost attacks only reduce 1/3rd of his HP bar. You can either dash back and forth through his fire waves, or do so close up while striking him with each dash.
The Edge is an interesting boss, but unfortunately underwhelming because of the prior build-up and short length of the fight, and could be considered a highlight how limited the melee phases are compared to the freeform phases when a melee-only boss only has four phases to experiment with the concept. The boost attacks being able to skip entire phases is too much, yet their viability being dependent on RNG can't be considered good either. It's also unfortunate that learning the weakpoints mostly comes down to trial and error. While the same can be said about most Furi bosses, at least you know that they're always vulnerable after finishing a combo. Though this has largely to do with how Furi handles vulnerability states as fixed windows which is rather antithetical to aggressive play. It's understandable why it's present since you don't want the player to deal ridiculous damage while the boss is essentially doing nothing, but it feels like a concession nonetheless.
The ninth boss, The Beat, has you hunt down a little girl and beat the shit out of her. It's kind of easy for story reasons, though the platforming sections can be challenging if you're going for an S-rank since you don't have the luxury of not having to redo the platforming sections since you aren't thrown back on KO. But that's what the boss is about, platforming and cutting little girls. It fits the narrative well, instead of having the biggest baddest brute at the end, they put an inexperienced noob at the end who nobody thought would ever be reached and only has tricks and traps to make up for her weaknesses. So it's about dashing from platform to platform through waves of bullets which become lasers and ripple waves later on. On Furier it does become a case of 'how the hell am I going to get through this unscathed?' with all the waves and sweeping lasers, but the core idea is to go fast. After each platforming section The Beat will try to stop you herself by firing cold waves and circling indestructible bullets while homing bullets are shot from cannons at the edges of the arena. During the last phase not even a giant laser is stopping you, and The Beat is too tired to even provide a challenge anymore, after which it becomes a one-sided smackdown, unlike most bosses putting up one last desperate struggle at the end.
It's not the hardest boss in the game, but it certainly is memorable considering everything you just went through, and can put up quite a challenge if you are going for a no-knockdown run. After that you're free, and you can see for yourself how things turn out with you down there. After some walking about and the credits rolling, you can access the hidden (final?) boss, The Star.
I'm not sure what the thought process was for this boss. It's just not 'final' boss material. While I enjoy the player receiving one last power-up during the final boss fight, that doesn't mean changing your entire moveset. For The Star fight your sword is gone, your blaster now has double power, and your main means of attack is a chargeable laser which can pierce through the many indestructible bullets and lasers The Star fires at you. It's just weird to end the game on a note of pure bullet hell when you had a melee-only boss two bosses ago. You usually want the final boss to be a test of everything you've learned, not a sudden shift in gameplay where you're suddenly playing an on-rails shooter. It's what makes the final boss feel 'final'. Now, the pacing and build-up of The Star is excellent for a final boss, especially the dialogue and the music synced up for a final confrontation, but mechanically it's like ending Bayonetta on the Space Harrier minigame (though the argument usually goes Balder and Jeanne would be better final boss material than Jubileus). To its credit, The Star is a damn challenging boss and quite interesting in terms of being a bullet hell shooting-only boss, but not the best FINAL boss.
The Star is a big head at the top of the screen as you're mostly spending your time shooting her giant mechanical hands down. The first phase is like usual where you parry incoming attacks and focus your beams on the hands as much to deal as much damage as possible before the boss shifts to a different and more difficult attack pattern, as phase two is more or less a repeat of that. The third phase is about repeatedly micrododging a certain pattern while dealing as much damage to the hands as possible, while reducing the amount of time you have to spend during the attack when several lasers start sweeping across the arena in odd directions and require you to predict the safe spots, which is still a neat attack pattern. The visibility takes a hit with your laser attack as it makes those transparent indestructible bullets harder to see, though.
The fourth phase is rather anal since you're given a very small amount of space to dash through thick waves in. It's doable on Furi, but the space is shrunk even further on Furier and it was a massive pain in the ass for me to get used to because of how the dashing works. It's almost like the Gradius syndrome where it becomes impossible to recover if you mess up the rhythm once as you get hit by wave after wave. However, here there is an interesting element of threat prioritization where you can damage the options at the sides of the area which are firing attacks at you while simultaneously damaging the hands with your laser beam. The second part of this phase has the boss fire constant ripple waves while homing bullets are being shot at you, but you can disable the homing bullet options during the first phase to make things easier and the options reponsible for firing the wave attacks during the second phase, so you can make it easier for yourself once the boss cycles through her attacks again by reducing part of the incoming attacks.
The final phase is damn hard, where it goes full Treasure and throws all kinds of different types of attacks at you, from dodging lasers through patterns of indestructible bullets, to sweeping lasers and intensifying wave attacks, to curving bullets and wave attacks and one final attack similar to the first attack of The Scale's final phase. It's great. While The Star might be a weird choice as a final boss for a game like Furi, it does succeed at making the battle feel climactic, and it's good at what it does, at least.
In the mean time The Game Bakers also released a DLC, One More Fight, which adds 'one' more boss to the game, called The Flame. This foxy grandpa might be my favourite fight in the game, not counting Bernard. I'm guessing they've learned over time how to nail the bosses, which really shows in this DLC. The Flame is a bundle of aggression, can be speedkilled without trivializing the difficulty, and does challenge the tried and true technique of shooting+parrying. The first phase has him moving around like a boxer, sometimes he can fake attacks to throw your timing off, and can cancel out of melee combos into new ones. I'm not too keen on the swarm of bullets he releases when dodging backwards though, those should have been destructible at the very least. The attacks where he backs off and fires huge waves of bullets and waves can be controlled by standing at the corner of the arena before he does so and dashing behind him right after he initiated his attack, otherwise there's no space behind him to dash in. The first three attacks of each melee phase of the first three phases are the same, but can be tough to consistently pull off given the nature of dashing, but it's the second and third attack strings of these melee phases you want to reduce.
There's a trick involved where you can knock down the boss with the final hit of your melee combo during a freeform phase when the boss is stunned and has to be attacked once to initiate the melee phase. By striking them with the final attack you can create a time window where you can boost yourself before the boss gets up, and charge your next strike as well to deal double damage. Though it can be tricky to pull off since you have to slash in the air like a moron and prevent the third strike for connecting, since the third and fourth strike of your combo have homing properties. But things do change up during the second phase. Instead of the usual abusable melee combo, here it will consist of only one strike and a directed shockwave. What's also interesting is that the hitbox changes when The Flame is charging up his shockwave, so you have to move a little backwards to be able to hit him with your blaster since you can't hit him if you're just standing still. Intentional, maybe? Here he also attacks with sweeping lasers and an aimed straight laser similar to that of The Hand, but is actually telegraphed with a pie-slice unlike The Hand.
The third phase has him start off with a rush attack which becomes a damage-mitigation QTE if you fail to parry it, which is IMO a better start of a phase than the start of The Hand's third phase and his invincible carousel ride. One of his attacks involve firing three bullets which expand into ripple waves, but you can parry them if you stand close, much like with The Scale. But unlike The Scale there's more to this phase than standing close and parrying while shooting. His double red-blue ripple wave attack isn't something you can avoid dealing with at all. It should also be mentioned that during the first three phases The Flame will become briefly invincible to charge up an ultimate attack if you take too long to kill him as well, so that element remains. At the start of the fourth phase The Flame fucking rips off his third arm to use it as a bludgeon (he's that mad) as his melee combos now become a mix of normal strikes and simultaneous pie-charts+ripple waves. The same goes for the melee phases as well. I like this a lot because with most bosses the act of parrying strings of attacks mostly came down to remembering the proper parry timing and the amount of incoming strikes. Here it's constantly being mixed up. If you take too long to kill him again during the fourth and fifth phases, the arena will expand as he starts to attack with massive pie-chart attacks, but things should be okay if you keep shooting him.
During his final phase he will launch every wave attack imaginable at you, but on Furier difficulty there's also walls which partially obstruct your line of sight to The Flame. But these walls change positions over time, so you have to reposition yourself amidst the wave attacks if you want to keep the heat on The Flame. What's also interesting is that The Flame's lasers can also be blocked from the inner center by the walls, but if you rely on the walls too much to block the lasers, the walls might change again as you receive a fresh batch of energy in your face. Once he's down you dash inwards, and The Flame does one final desperate combo of melee attacks, pie-charts, and waves, as you cut him down. Also neat is how the three names he mentions at the end can tie in to the primary color scheme (red-blue-yellow) of his attacks.
The boss is excellent. It allows for speedrun tricks without the challenge being trivialized, the attack patterns are challenging and varied, you don't feel artificially constrained in terms of playstyle, and it's a bloody joy to fight. It's only brought down by the elevator music playing in the background and the unpolished feeling of the cinematics.
Once you beat The Flame, you also get access to another hidden boss, which can only be fought on Furier difficulty, and his name is Bernard. I consider Bernard to be the true final boss of Furi, he deserves the spot way more than The Star for obvious reasons. However, I get the feeling that the developers had to rush things and couldn't push The Flame and Bernard in the main game, which is why THe Flame was only really integrated in the main story in the Xbone version for leaderboard reasons, and Bernard uses the same body rig as The Flame with no textures at all. It's just a gray stick-figure which looks like a FFVII model with a weird filler background and no voice acting or any kind of line, but he's one of the best bosses of the game.
Bernard is the true final exam, every single one of his phases take after each of the previous existing bosses (with the exception of The Flame and The Star) as each skill you've learned is going to be tested. During Bernard's The Line phase he will *teleports behind you* and assault you with melee strikes from everywhere, during his The Scale phase he will fire trailing bullets and fire bullets which can be reflected right back at him before they detonate, the phase before the last one is a mix of The Beat and The Edge where the freeform phase has you fight ice waves similar to that of The Beat and during the melee phase his behavior is similar to that of The Edge. He even has two Punish animations, unlike the others which only have one unless they change in form somehow. Bernard also sports the most phases out of any boss, as there's one phase for each boss and during the final phase he goes apeshit where all his previous phases go into a blender, and provide a mix of everything you've learned at once. It's crazy and I love it. It's unfortunate that the best fights had to be DLC, but I guess that's because they were mostly learning for the main game.
I also should mention that the S-rank requirements are way too lenient. All you need to do is not get knocked down, as an S-rank requires zero KO's. It's way too lenient with the amount of hits you're allowed to take (over fucking thirty), and the time limits barely pose any threat once you know what you're doing. It's great that they want you to git gud, but for the highest rank they should have upped the requirements by a large margin.
Furi is by and large an amateur attempt at a stylish action game, but an ambitious one which mostly succeeds. It doesn't excel at any particular area of the gameplay, but what it does offer is strongly varied which should be one of the main reasons to keep you playing. The presentation (aside from the unskippable walking segments, those are gay) is also top notch, with striking character designs, a great soundtrack and excellent animations which make combat feel cinematic without being too intrusive, on top of the sound design adding additional weight to each hit and strike. The challenge on Furi difficulty is just right despite the imperfect controls (don't tie vital functions such as dodging to on-release inputs, kids), and most importantly the camera is almost never an issue, which is something that plagues these kind of games often. It's not a Devil May Cry and it's not about mastering a deep combat system or getting scores, but it's simply about being aggressive and speedkilling things. So give it a shot if you can.
