Furi: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Furi is a 2016 action game by The Game Bakers that strips a boss-rush down to its purest form, nothing but a sequence of unique, one-on-one duels against distinct opponents, with no regular enemies or exploration to pad the space between them. This lineage is a comparison drawn by this site in outside critical commentary, not a connection stated by any developer whose games trace back to it here; it is the origin of the idea that an entire game can be built out of consecutive boss fights alone, where the choice of who to face next is the whole design.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
Kuro Rekishi Fighters Buried gem
Per Steam's own listing, this is an action game built around nothing but a boss rush: choose freely among 36 playable characters and fight your way through 36 consecutive boss battles to clear it. New characters are drawn through a summon system paid for with tickets earned by winning battles, and pulling a duplicate of a character you already have levels that character up instead of going to waste. It runs 2 to 6 hours to a single ending, set in a world where humanity's brains learned to interface with dark matter before science ever explained it, an ability people came to call 'magic,' turning modern society into a sword-and-sorcery fantasy centered on a boy named Saja who may save this chaotic world or push it further into ruin. Per 4Gamer's own coverage, the character reveal posts from the creator's own account read like the kind of over-the-top, self-consciously edgy designs that feel like they belong in someone's own embarrassing teenage notebook (their words for it: 'kuro rekishi,' or 'black history,' Japanese slang for a cringeworthy personal past), and in a separate feature, veteran indie reviewer Teruwaka Yoshida of Game*Spark drew his own comparison to the original characters he used to sketch and write profiles for in his notebooks as a kid, though that specific framing is his own nostalgic reading of the cast, not an official backstory stated by developer ジェッドム (Jeddom). Made and self-published solo, it released October 23, 2025 at ¥500, and is Positive at 100 percent over 13 reviews (13 positive, 0 negative per Steam's own review API), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with Steam Achievements, no AI-generated assets, and per Steam's own content descriptors, nothing sexual. It supports Japanese and English, yet none of its 13 reviews are in English, leaving it, with a review count this small, genuinely unfound rather than simply overlooked.