Zodi Plays: Furi (Time To Wake Up)

[LaZodiac]

It’s time.

Zodi Plays: Furi [9] Beat Of The Heart

Video Length: 16:01

A snowy mountain range, with wind howling. The location of our final fight. The Voice seems upset that she’s even allowed to be here, angry she’s allowed to even be a Guardian. He calls her an idealistic child, but foolishly so. When we meet her, it’s clear just how accurate that is. She’s barely a teenager, and she’s locked her life away for what, to stand against us at the last moment, after everyone else has fallen? That’s actually kinda sad. We cannot do anything but continue, so continue we shall. She is the last Guardian. The jailer is the key. Kill her, and you will be free.

The Beat is an interesting fight. She knows she can’t take us head on. We just finished cutting our way through The Edge and The Burst, there’s nothing she has that could match us. But what she lacks in skill or practice, she makes up for in quantity. She runs, along one massive floating bridge, and an endless supply of speaker like cannons fire at us. The first phase shoots a wave of void shots at you, the second shoots clusters of medium bullets that are pretty tricky to avoid, and the third phase sweeps laser beams across the area. The Beat herself just runs to each connecting bridge hub, and once you get to her she releases an AOE wave around her using her shoulder speakers. She’s too loud, so all you can do is pelt her with gunfire as the defense speakers at each platform shoot at you, the first with large homing shots, the second with AOE wall grenades. The Beat herself in phase one rotates narrow waves around her to try and catch you off guard, while in phase two she lets out a wall AOE that you’ve gotta dodge in time with the grenades her defense speakers shoot. Like with the last two bosses, she only has singular health bars, but in the third phase…we finally catch up to her and fight her on our terms. She’s tired, her ultimate weapon has failed, and all she can do is hope to convince us not to fight.

She tells us that with us, the world will wither and die. That we can’t be let into the Free World, no matter what. But we must escape the prison. It is the only way. In what is…probably one of the sadder moments, as she dies she asks us to hold her hand so she doesn’t just feel the coldness of death taking her. The Stranger refuses, he either cannot understand her request or doesn’t care. The Voice thanks us, and tells us that…we’re not the person we were when we first landed on this planet all those years ago. An interesting thing to note. And with that he leaves, us following one last time.

The following has been spoiled for a reason! Watch the video first!

And it is here that we finally reach The Free World, and find that for the first time in the game, our ability to Auto-walk has been removed. Because we no longer have a goal to pursue. We no longer have a direction to follow. We may go as we please. And so we do. And we see just how true The Beat’s words where. How true everyone was. By the time we fought The Scale it should be clear we’re not entirely in the right here, and each successive fight has shown us that no matter how malicious or cruel or corrupt our jailers are…they’re keeping us in her for a reason. A reason that becomes clear the moment we choose to walk upon The Free World. When I first played this game, I had suspected we were The Bad Guy. I wasn’t sure in what exact fashion that was, but I was sure of it. But still, seeing it play out like this. Seeing just what it all meant. What The Scale meant by “my creator”, what The Line meant by “look to the stars”. What The Beat meant by “with you, our world withers and dies”. This was a powerful moment to me, and I’m glad I got to share it with you. It helps that the credits music is…so melodic and somber in tone, it fits the mood so powerfully. Seeing the world seem to burn around us, the same size as our little “circle” that we fought people in when we take the advantage. Watching the very world crack, grass die, even buildings decay around us. It’s amazing.

The thing that really gets me is that, because of how the game functions, you can always look back and see the direct path you choose, thanks to the withering corruption. This is a game about how you cannot walk back your choices. This is why choosing to stay with The Song ends the game outright and makes you start over, because it’s a CHOICE. An important one. All choices, ones we make every day, they’re all important. And even if it means we gained our freedom, it may be that we’ve made the wrong one. As the credits roll, I want you to think about all we’ve done. Nine people have died, of which only really one was actually all that bad a person. The Burst was rude sure but being cocky isn’t a sin. The Song was manipulative but she believed it 100%. The Hand was stupid for bringing his son to the prison worlds but heroes like him are always bad parents. Every single one of these people have died to stop us. Was it right? Who can really say, the world is complicated like that. But the one thing we know for sure is a bleeding wound on the face of the Free World follows us as we walk, and that’s a powerful imagery. As the credits end, The Stranger, legs now stretched, can run. There are not a lot of places to go here, but thankfully I know the path. We head to one of the last actual places left in this area. We meet an old friend.

The Voice did what he did for a reason. A petty reason, an awful reason, but a reason none the less. He had hoped maybe we’d be changed by cutting our way through the nine guardians. Maybe we have been. As he holds his daughter’s hand he tells us the one important thing. What we’ve done is bad, yes, but that’s okay. I mean it’s not okay okay, but…it’s in the past. We can move on. What matters next is what we choose to do. See you guys next time, for the end of Furi.

[LaZodiac]

And so it ends…

Zodi Plays: Furi [10] [FINALE] Look To The Stars

Video Length: 16:49

What matters is what we are going to do. With that in mind…there’s only one larger tower in this field we can explore, and for some reason we feel drawn to it. Inside we…well, nothing really much happens, though there WAS going to be a boss fight with someone called The Flame, which I have rendered for your viewing pleasure. I’ll talk more about The Flame next time in the bonus video, but suffice to say he is someone who honestly isn’t all that missed in this game, for pacing reasons. Beyond him, we find it. A flying machine, built for us. It identifies us by our true name. The Rider. Lotta symbolism in this given we’re from the stars and bring ruin to a world. But for the Rider, all it means now is a way to leave the Free World and find out what his purpose in life should be.

And so we head into space, just like that. And head towards the spot in the sun that The Line spoke of. Look to the stars for our answers. We didn’t know what the questions where until now. As we fly to the massive space ship, we see it’s arms are full of Riders in storage, though with short hair since they haven’t spent who knows how long lingering in a prison. Further into the ship we fly, until finally we meet The Star, the being responsible for all of this. The collected consciousness of thousands of worlds, housed within a server with a holographic face. They ask us what we, just a simple scout, have learned of the Free World, and if it’s suitable for assimilation into their whole. Here we are given a second choice. What matters is what we are going to do. If we choose to assimilate, the game ends. The Voice’s gamble failed. But if we choose desertion, destruction, defiance…we get our final boss.

Aaaand this is the part where the game, mechanically, falls apart. Something about the Rider vehicle that we’re in is DIFFERENT then controlling the Rider by himself. He does not have the speed of his dashes you’d expect from the rest of the game, and you have less invulnerability frames. Additionally, there is no positive feedback when you parry, and the timing is slightly different. Additionally, though you can do physical attacks…none of them matter. This is entirely a ranged boss, where your turning radius for shooting is not as fast and your dash is clunky all of a sudden and, perhaps the worst of it, the depth of field is off from every fight in the game so it just feels WRONG to play. This, THIS is the worst boss in the game. It is unfun, it plays badly, it’s tediously long because the only action we have is shoot and charge up gun for a larger laser which they kinda expect you to do but also don’t because you have to break the laser firing constantly to dodge. It’s an awful, awful fight and the first time I played this it was…such a step down from the rest of EVERYTHING. I went from this amazing emotional experience of the ending, the combined feeling of despair and utter badassery due to fighting The Edge and then The Beat back to back like that, it was such a good experience. The Voice’s speech is amazing, and then you go to the tower and we get in our fancy suit and it’s like, cool this might mean we get to do everything we do, enhanced by a mech suit sort of thing, that’s rad! And then in practice it sucks A TON! This is honestly…the saddest part about this game. It literally fumbles it, right at the finish line.

So, lets talk about The Star. They’ve got large drones throughout the fight, and four massive hand machines. Our goal is to destroy the hands so we can eventually get to the holographic core of The Star. The drones don’t matter, though you can defeat them temporarily. And I do mean temporarily they come back WAY too quick. The front two drones shoot homing purple shots, sweeping lasers, and try to melee you during Phase 1, while the drones in back lay down covering fire with a constant stream of spread shots. Eventually the front two drones start a weird curtain of void shots while the back two shoot sweeping lasers, but by this part in the phase you should be nearly done with it so keep on the pressure. In Phase 2, the two sets of drones effectively switch places, the back drones doing the melee attacks and sweeping lasers while the front drones shoot a wandering pattern of medium sized bullets. They also do homing shots! Mid way through this they change up as well, the front drones shooting large bullets that split into void orbs to cut off chunks of the arena, while the back two shoot wave after wave of…well, wave attacks. They’re thin so they should be easy to dodge, but sense the Rider scout vehicle is clunky and awful it becomes far harder to actually do. then it should be.

Phase 3, The Star starts getting serious, using it’s hands for attack instead of defense. You still can’t hurt them directly though, gotta wear down those hands. The hands shoot void shots, creating circle AOEs of them…but the back hands shoot special BLUE void shots forward in a specific wave pattern to make dodging the circles harder. This sucks because again, the dash is bad now so you’ll get clipped a lot, especially since the Void Shots being transparent means it can be hard to judge them at times. There is nothing unique about the blue shots by the way they’re only blue to help differentiate them from the orange ones, the one saving grace this bullet pattern has. Mid way through this, the hands and front drones all together will start a massive network of sweeping lasers, and you’ve gotta dodge between the openings to avoid them all. This is again very hard because the dash has an awful garbage weird as hell delay on it that it never has in any other moment but here. If the fight lingers too long, and I think also once you beat one of the two front hands, the pattern gets harder, the back drones adding lasers as well.

The next phase has The Star being out her back hands, now that the front hands are destroyed. These ones are…extremely annoying. This is probably my least favorite phase, and that’s saying a lot since I hate all of them. The hands start shooting out blast after blast of tri spread void orbs, while the front drones shoot wave after wave of those narrow wave attacks. This is nearly impossible to dodge. Luckily, there is a very minor hiding point in the bottom left corner. You can use this to avoid the waves if you’re quick enough, and the dash even agrees to help with this though he’s still very stuffy and causes us to get clipped by the left side drone’s waves occasionally. And of course this is…not at all viable on the RIGHT side of the screen, it’s only on the left. After The Star gets tired of that they start punching the battlefield, creating AOE walls you need to dodge through, but these walls are the worst and most finicky walls in the game thanks to the dash being unreliable on start up. Also the back drones shoot a vast volley of purple homing shots, meaning you can barely get any damage in during this part. Once you beat the first hand (around half of the health bar) The Star switches things up again. The back drones add their own wave attacks to the initial pattern, making your safe spot not quite as safe anymore and making it far easier to get edged by the leftmost drone’s. Additionally since we’re no longer focusing on the left hand hand (it’s better to focus on the left hand first since doing these dodges from the left side while the attack leans left without a right hand isn’t really viable, ignoring that that’s how I beat it this go around) we’re no longer able to clip the drone with the laser, meaning we can’t even take some of the edge off this attack.

With all the hands destroyed, it’s time for a desperation attack. Three sets of blue void shots, packed together, start rocking back and forth across the screen, as The Star lays out an unending chain of orange void shots, a wave we’ll have to carefully maneuver around. They even throw in the occasional cluster of slow purple homing shots to make it even more troublesome. Eventually this runs it’s course, and they begin quick firing medium shots at us as red AOE walls start blasting up out of nowhere. Even as the firing gets faster, I’ve found the easiest way to avoid this is to run a figure eight pattern. Eventually the red aoe walls stop and are replaced with wave after wave of that thin sickly wave attack. This is far harder to dodge, not least of which because, again, the dash has a bad delay on it and it ends differently compared to the on foot dash, and has weird invincibility frame issues. Once THIS wears out, they start spewing a massive sweeping laser that gets faster and faster with each rotation. Adding to this is a series of spreading orange shots, though they’re normal so you can shoot them to get rid of them if you have the time. This quickly falls flat, leading to the final phase. A massive brick of void shots, with only the middle being vulnerable to shooting regular shots, followed by a full wave of orange shots, then the inverse of the first wave (so middle a chunk of void, the sides orange shots) and then a wave of orange shots. This continues for SOME TIME. All we can do is sew our way through this endlessly repeated pattern, hoping to find our way through. Adding to the fun is the occasional red AOE wall. It’s slower than the other walls, but because of the depth of field it’s hard to deal with. But finally, FINALLY, after all that…The Star runs out of shielding and becomes vulnerable. Get past the last AOE wall and lay into em!

The Star explodes, giving us the final parting words of someone who knows there are other things out their than themselves (and hoping for a sequel, too). But The Rider doesn’t care. He’s saved the Free World from this threat. With The Star destroyed it may even get rid of the subroutines that force him to wither the planet for analysis. We fall from the heavens, The Voice and his daughter watching. When all is said and done, we’ve completed Furi and chosen the path we’ve chosen.

We finish off with a grade. The grade we receive overall on the game doesn’t really matter as far as I’m aware, but the grade we get on each boss determines how much of their concept art we unlock. I won’t be showing this off since you need to S rank on Furi and Furier difficulties to show both the black and white and in colour versions. Consider this a challenge that you guys can look at yourself. Overall, I think I did pretty well, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the LP! I won’t really go over the game in full like I normally do since…lets be fair, I’ve kinda done that throughout the whole series. The game is good, amazing even, and then the final boss happens and it ruins the entire experience. Not enough to make me say “don’t play this” but enough to make me go “man it sucks that the final boss is so bad”.

But yeah, that’s the end of Furi. Join us next time when I take us through one last look at the game, with the DLC. One More Fight remains. Let’s see this through.

[LaZodiac]

And so, the furi fades.

Zodi Plays: Furi [Bonus] Flames, Up The Side Of My Face

Video Length: 17:34

And so we have reached the end. This bonus video’ll probably be the end of my time with Furi, due to a variety of reasons. Mainly that this is the end of the game. The DLC for Furi is…pretty alright, to be honest. It has some flaws, but overall it’s nice. There isn’t a lot of story here, which is sadly what I care most about for this game when all is said and done, but is interesting. Our first foe in the One More Fight DLC is The Flame, back for revenge…revenge that he never has a reason for doing since we didn’t actually fight him in the game proper but hey. Never let the lack of anything bad happen stop you from getting revenge on someone who did you wrong.

The Flame is an interesting boss in that while he’s very melee focused, he also just has a ton of guns as well to support him. He’s got four arms, and still has trouble holding all of his weaponry. In phase 1 he’ll lash out with the occasional punch, zooming across the arena to hit you, but these are relatively easy to parry. To start of what he can do with his guns, he has to charge them up a little bit for most of his more dangerous attacks. Within his repertoire of weaponry he can shoot out a wave of void shots that have a thin wave aoe linking all the orbs together, requiring you to dodge through it. He typically fires a bunch of these one after another. If he evades a shot you fire at him, he’ll shot gun out some void orbs too, so be careful trying to go gun to gun against him. His most annoying move is creating a DNA chain of basic blue shots and void shots, that you’ve gotta dodge through to avoid. This is an attack he keeps around throughout all his phases, making it faster and get better bullets as the fight drags on, which is pretty frustrating. The final sort of trick he has in phase 1 is getting in the middle of the arena and shooting large cluster shots at random, alternating between orange, and purple shots. The purple are of course the most dangerous since they split into many homing orbs. In close range mode, he’ll resort mostly to punching, though don’t be careless! He can shoot as well, and at this close a distance it’s hard to avoid if you’re not good at timing your dodge. His slickest move is to shoot out two wedge shaped wave AOEs, so you have to dodge…but his third arm shoots a homing shot at you just before the waves hit, so keep an eye out! He’s pretty dangerous, even if you know what you’re doing, and I barely know what I’m doing I’ve never really fought him before this.

Phase two starts fairly similar to phase 1, but herein lies the trick. His first three phases are all pretty much the same, except for the bullet type he uses. Phase 1 was the orbs, phase 2 is laser time! He sweeps a laser three times across the battlefield, each sweep switching from red to blue to orange, getting stronger and larger with each sweep. Keep those colours in mind as well, blue red orange is another theme with this fight. His big showcase move for this phase is to create three giant lasers and start rotating them around the battlefield from the center, meaning you’ve gotta be quick on your toes to avoid this. Either dodging through the lasers, or keeping up with the rotation. The void orbs with a wave through them is what he does when he dodges in this phase, funnily enough. His final real attack this phase is doing a thing dangerline that shows he’s going to shoot a max power laser right down at you. The only way to avoid this is to dodge at the right time, since the thin nature of the danger line is false, the laser’s actually pretty wide. I’m not a big fan of THAT, but I think it works given by this point in the fight you’re well aware that this is the laser phase. As you’d expect, the close range part of the phase is much the same as before, mainly melee attacks interspersed with laser sweeps.

Phase 3 is probably the most annoying phase, not the least of which because he starts doing QTE inducing charge attacks now. The real annoyance here is that it’s the grenade phase. Orbs that explode into AOE wall attacks, very annoying and very hard to deal with when a ton of them go off at once. When he dodges a bullet he leaves a grenade, and annoying this is also where he starts actually making the DNA chain of bullets more annoying by throwing out TWO grenades at the same time during it, making an already deceptively hard to avoid attack even harder. He also shoots two sets of these grenades! Like the laser pointing attack from last phase, he can also just shoot out three grenades in a row, which is troublesome but not the hardest thing to avoid. His final move this phase is to, like the triple laser sweep, create an AOE wave around him and attack at full force, launching three grenades that explode together, and doing this multiple times. The sort of L shaped dodge pattern I’m doing here is the most natural way to avoid this in my head, but it might not work for everyone. Doesn’t even work for me 100% of the time, even. In melee mode, he is at his most annoying, being able to fire out two grenades that explode together. This wouldn’t be that big a deal if not for the fact that the camera angle in melee mode makes it very hard to actually dodge through both of these wave AOEs at once! Luckily I was able to shove the damage through before it tore me to pieces.

The next phase, The Flame gives in to his rage! This is actually to our advantage since, as he tears off one arm to use as a club, he becomes significantly less of a threat. His new moves gained from doing this are way easy, even if they are devastatingly strong. He does more melee combat now, and can smash the arm into the ground to create a huge wedge wave attack. Also, speaking of ground, it’s gotten smaller! The arena slowly shrinks as the phases wear on, technically making it harder. But yeah, in this phase he’s far less prone to spewing a ton of bullets out, making him way easier. He does shoot homing shots, but they’re small ad easily avoided. The worst thing to look out for is a strange narrow but large wave attack followed by a thin but wide wave right at the end of it, which is just a little trickier to dodge than you think. Mid way through the fight he’ll get SUPER pissed and leap into the center of the stage, forcing it to extend open in odd angles, leaving pits in it but also giving him more room to swing massive AOE wave attacks that you’ve got to avoid. This leaves him open to a LOT of gunfire, so fill him full of whatever it is The Burst’s drones said our gun shoots. Melee range is of course much the same, you don’t rip your own arm off to use as a club if you’re not gonna be using it, after all. The fifth phase is…basically the same as phase 4, except now he’s got some leap attacks that cause wall AOEs. Like I said above, if you rip off your own arm to use as a club you’re GONNA be using it, and evidently The Flame has decided to use it exclusively. As easy as this guy IS, he ends up taking a life off me here since I’ve just never fought him before so didn’t know what to expect! This is also like, my first time getting to this phase if I recall.

Finally, we have his desperation move. A rarity, in that he’s not invincible during this one…and won’t be running out of ammo any time soon. We have to shoot him during this. The move itself is quite devastating an attack, creating wave after wave of AOE…waves, interspersed with attacks from his first three phases. A massive ring of bullets, sweeping lasers around the arena, and exploding multiple grenades on at a time in relatively quick succession. The laser sweep is the hardest, since it’s also mixed with wall AOEs, a combination I’m just not super good at. Once we wear him down it’s time for one last bit of close range combat, since even the many bullets to the chest couldn’t take him out. He lets out a storm of melee attacks and wave based shotgun attacks, finishing off with a really weird AOE blast that I have a LOT of trouble dealing with! I’d of cut out the more tedious repetitions of the desperation attack if I could, but there wasn’t really a good time to do it considering his quotes during it felt important. But yeah, once he lets out that final blast, you can lay into him for the finish. And that’s The Flame, not even a fancy end cutscene for him, this is just a score mode. And my score is uh…bad. But this was my first time ever beating him so it’s to be expected.

Our reward for beating The Flame is…further concept art, as you can see… Like the other bosses, on the regular difficulty you get black and white concept art, and on higher difficulties you get the high res coloured stuff. Chunks of the concept art unlock depending on the rank, get an S rank and you unlock the full thing. Makes sense. We also however, unlock another thing. As you may of noticed at the start of this post, I said The Flame was the FIRST fight of the One More Fight DLC. We unlocked…a further one more fight! A second one more fight! And this one against…Bernard.

Bernard is, effectively a staff ghost. Not to say he’s a ghost that fights the boss alongside you as a challenge, but as in he is the ghost of all the staff members who worked on this game, piling every last bit of sweat and tears into this one final challenge. This one, final, really stupid not fun challenge. I don’t know about you, but this one just…isn’t very fun. I’m here for the story first and gameplay second, and there’s no story and the gameplay for this boss is kinda bad. You can only fight Bernard on the hardest difficulty…and he has a phase for each boss in the game, except for The Star and I think including The Flame. You must, effectively, fight each boss in the game in a row without losing to beat him. This isn’t happening. I gave him the ole college try and all, trust me, but also keep in mind I’ve never BEEN to college.

But yeah. That’s the end of Furi. I hope you all enjoyed. It’s a really good game, with an amazing story and amazing gameplay…who’s final boss and final challenge really just aren’t that fun since they either alter the game’s mechanics just enough to make it bad to play, or are just too high of an ask considering the difficulty of the game. At least that’s my opinion on it. But yeah, as it says in the video, I’MMA TAKE A WEEK OFF. I’ve been very tired this week, and I’m glad I’ve been able to take a bit of a breather.

Once again, thank you for watching. Without you, and the amazing people who have decided to give me money to do things like this, I wouldn’t really be able to do this. I’ll see you all September 3rd for our noble (some would say ignoble) return to The Legend of Zelda, with the direct sequel to Wind Waker…the dreaded Phantom Hourglass.

---

@Admods this thread is done. Please leave it open for posts (just in case) but yeah, it can go into the completed LP area now. Thanks!

[LoakaMossi]

You did a very good job on this LP! I really appreciated the write-ups on each of the bosses, as well as your interpretation of how the game mechanics interact with the story and character motivations. I always enjoy that sort of discussion.

[LaZodiac]

Well thank you. I’m glad you liked it, that means a lot to me.

[Loquacious_Ghoul]

It was quite a fun one to watch through, particularly as i got stuck on the Line. I’d personally lean more towards handing over the planets information, but the interactions between the auto-walk or walking and how that actually factors into decisions was extremely interesting. Is it just me or did the Flame sound like the chain?

[LaZodiac]

He definitely sounds like The Chain, but is way more…angry gruff man compared to The Chain being baby’s first sadist. Might just be the same voice actor.