Furi is so close to being amazing, but it slips up on the most crucial step to making it there. (To note, I played this game on Furier mode my first time through, as I wanted both the developer's intended experience, and I love a good challenge.)
Furi has some of the best, most engaging and challenging bosses I've seen in an action game. Each boss carries their own personal flavor and style, tackling different parts of the games mechanics and combining uses of them together in continuously interesting ways. Even in the fights themselves, there's constant variation going on, such as constantly changing and evolving attacks or unique arenas, while still keeping true to and expanding upon the bosses core theme and mechanical focus. I think it'll be a long time until I see an action game with bosses this good. That makes it all the more disappointing to say that this game is taken down by a health system that's far too forgiving. Leniency and making things easier not inherently bad, but the way they implement it is what does it in.
Think about how Dark Souls handles health and healing. Every fight, you only have a very limited amount of health. The only way to gain it back is via health vials, which gives back a limited amount of healing and stops you dead in your tracks. This creates a risk reward system to using vials, while also adding an extra layer of strategy. When is it safe to use it? Should I wait to take a bit more damage so I get to use this vial to it's fullest potential? Should I heal now that a phase change is coming up I've never done? Etc. This is constantly going through your mind each step in battle in Dark Souls. The vials make a system that creates strategy, resource management, and forced mastery of every boss. You have to learn all the bosses by memory to get past them, which helps lift up its admittedly repetitive boss design.
Now, compare to Furi. You start every fight with 3 lives. Every life lost fully heals both you and the boss, but the boss stays on the current phase they're on. Every phase beaten will replenish your health and give you an extra life back. Parrying also grants you some bonus health. See the issue? When the game gives you health (which you could theoretically heal infinite of) and lives, it creates gameplay that focuses not on mastering the bosses, but on getting to the final phase at the same state you were in at the beginning. You can die on each phase in this game but suffer zero actual punishment by the final phase. This sadly undermined most of the combat in the game for me, and turned bosses into just getting past the fluff to get to the real challenge. The fix is so easy too, it could literally be made in a patch.
I can't hate Furi on the whole because, even despite the major flaw, pretty much everything else is perfect. I mentioned the boss design before, but the music, story, visuals, writing.. all of it is really fucking good. I could never not recommend the game because of just how good those aspects are. And at the end of the day, I still had fun. I just wish it could've made that final step.
Furi has some of the best, most engaging and challenging bosses I've seen in an action game. Each boss carries their own personal flavor and style, tackling different parts of the games mechanics and combining uses of them together in continuously interesting ways. Even in the fights themselves, there's constant variation going on, such as constantly changing and evolving attacks or unique arenas, while still keeping true to and expanding upon the bosses core theme and mechanical focus. I think it'll be a long time until I see an action game with bosses this good. That makes it all the more disappointing to say that this game is taken down by a health system that's far too forgiving. Leniency and making things easier not inherently bad, but the way they implement it is what does it in.
Think about how Dark Souls handles health and healing. Every fight, you only have a very limited amount of health. The only way to gain it back is via health vials, which gives back a limited amount of healing and stops you dead in your tracks. This creates a risk reward system to using vials, while also adding an extra layer of strategy. When is it safe to use it? Should I wait to take a bit more damage so I get to use this vial to it's fullest potential? Should I heal now that a phase change is coming up I've never done? Etc. This is constantly going through your mind each step in battle in Dark Souls. The vials make a system that creates strategy, resource management, and forced mastery of every boss. You have to learn all the bosses by memory to get past them, which helps lift up its admittedly repetitive boss design.
Now, compare to Furi. You start every fight with 3 lives. Every life lost fully heals both you and the boss, but the boss stays on the current phase they're on. Every phase beaten will replenish your health and give you an extra life back. Parrying also grants you some bonus health. See the issue? When the game gives you health (which you could theoretically heal infinite of) and lives, it creates gameplay that focuses not on mastering the bosses, but on getting to the final phase at the same state you were in at the beginning. You can die on each phase in this game but suffer zero actual punishment by the final phase. This sadly undermined most of the combat in the game for me, and turned bosses into just getting past the fluff to get to the real challenge. The fix is so easy too, it could literally be made in a patch.
I can't hate Furi on the whole because, even despite the major flaw, pretty much everything else is perfect. I mentioned the boss design before, but the music, story, visuals, writing.. all of it is really fucking good. I could never not recommend the game because of just how good those aspects are. And at the end of the day, I still had fun. I just wish it could've made that final step.