The first installment of the Afro Samurai 2 video game is horrible. The Game Bakers’ newly-announced Furi, featuring character designs by Afro Samurai creator Takashi Okazaki, looks like it might help us forget that other game ever happened.
We’re off to a good start, what with Afro Samurai 2 removed from PSN, unreleased on the Xbox One and mention of it removed from the developer’s website. Now those of us that played it just need something to wash the taste away. This looks like it might do the trick.
So Okazaki has a thing for animal heads.
Furi (pronounced fury) is a one-on-one brawler arriving on PC and PlayStation 4 in the spring of 2016. Here’s the story behind the game from creative director Emeric Thoa via the official website.
The story of Furi starts ten years ago, on a plane, as I was headed to a game show. At the time I was a junior designer for a big videogame company (guess which one :P). Indie development hadn’t really taken off yet, so the idea of making my own console game was nothing more than a pipe dream. But the person travelling with me (my boss!) asked me what I would do if I could make my dream game, and I told him about this game that would be one long boss fight. A boss fight against an opponent similar to you, not a gigantic creature or a demon. A boss fight that felt like a duel— a tense, exhausting, and utterly rewarding duel.
That sounds perfect. And that art style, man...
The Game Bakers is a studio best known for its series of Squids RPGs for mobile, Wii U and 3DS as well as the excellent mobile brawler Combo Crew, not to mention one of the few good things to come out of the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. We’ll see how they handle console combat when Furi hits the PC and PlayStation 4 this coming spring.
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