Furyu is a funny developer. While some of its games are developed internally, many of them are actually made in collaboration with other studios. As such, many big names tend to get attached to the games Furyu has its name on, though this isn’t always an indicator of their quality.
Indeed, there’s not a single Furyu game that has been received with unanimous acclaim, though in equal measure it has not dissuaded them from making more and more games. Many of them pull from and earlier style of game, while some have unique mechanics all of their own. Regardless, here are all of their games ranked to the best of our ability.
While Furyu has many more games than those listed here, we chose to focus exclusively on its internationally-published catalogue for this article.
The very first game Furyu made that actually got released internationally, it was a dungeon-crawler that focused on story on a massive party. Along with recruiting enemy monsters you came across, Unchained Blades let you have a party of up to 20 characters at once.
It got middling reviews, like the majority of Furyu games. It had some unique aspects for itself, but they weren’t quite enough to keep it memorable.
13LogiKing
LogiKing is a relatively simple game. It is somewhere betweena card battlerand Guess Who, where you have to try to deduce the hidden card that your opponent has based upon your own cards. That’s it, but it works as a small party game.
It’s not a game with an exceptional amount of depth and it definitely runs out of play value pretty quickly because of that. It does feature online play though, which might be a fun diversion, even if the game is a bit random.
12Heroland
Heroland is a game that, at first glance, looks genuinely quite enticing. A Paper Mario-inspired artstyle set in a fictional theme park where legends have come to life and you need to manage a royal succession. Very interesting!
Except the game doesn’t do much with its gameplay, with the majority of encounters offering little in the way of strategy and the game running much longer than it has any right to.
11The Legend Of Legacy
The Legend of Legacy is a game that, like many of Furyu’s games, looks stunning.It is styled as a storybook, with the terrain jumping to life as you move closer to it. It’s an enticing appearance, combined with some unconventional leveling mechanics.
In Legend of Legacy, you didn’t gain experience. Instead, you gained more powerful abilities or upgraded versions of them as you used them, alongside random stat boosts. It doesn’t explain any of it though, giving the game a very steep learning curve.
10Cardfight!! Vanguard Dear Days
Furyu’s specialty is making games of different genres, with basically no consistency. Cardfight: Vanguard Dear Days is another of its games, a dedicated card battler based on the OverDress series, featuring a story in that world with many of its characters.
It’s one of the more involved Furyu games, with hundreds of cards and associated animations. It’s not the most complex game in the world, though it offers a bit more than the average Furyu experience.
In sharp contrast to the typical Furyu affair, Crystar puts a much stronger emphasis on storytelling than just about any other Furyu game, it’s own sequel excluded. It deals with some heavy themes to, ones it mostly does justice to.
Where Crystar starts to fall is in its gameplay. Plenty of content repeats, from combat encounters to environments, which is a pretty major issue in a game that wants you to achieve multiple different endings.
8Monark
Monark is one of the Furyu games that picked up a bit more international attention because of the marketing around it.The Persona influence was obviousfrom the get-go, while key ex-developers from the Shin Megami Tensei games joining only made hopes grow even higher.
Except it wasn’t stellar. It had a unique art direction, and aspects of its storytelling were interesting, though the repetitive, dull environments failed to let it rise above its own inspirations.
Reynatis made a big splash with its announcement. The spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Versus 13 with a dash of Kingdom Hearts, written and composed by Kazushige Nojima and Yoko Shimomura respectively? How could it possibly go wrong?
Quite easily. While there’s clearly a heart to Reynatis, and it does have some flashy animations every now and then, it doesn’t have the quality to uphold its length, while its themes of societal oppression tend to fall in favor of the status quo in many ways.
The Caligula is one of Furyu’s most well-known games, and coincidentally one of its better games, too. Pulling from similar games like Persona and other visual novels, The Caligula Effect has you straddling the line between reality and the otherworld, all while maintaining your school life.
Featuring over 500 students to befriend in an Xenoblade-esque Affinity Chart, the game had some genuine ambition but was let down by a weak combat system and somewhat stale story. Still, it was a step in the right direction, with the Overdose remake fixing many of those issues.
The Alliance Alive acts as the spiritual successor to the previous Furyu game, Legend of Legacy. While it doesn’t retain the picture book aesthetic of its predecessor, it takes on a look all of its own, more watercolour mixed with some traditional chibis.
Featuring a story written by Yoshitaka Murayama and a similar leveling system as Legend of Legacy, it put more focus on the exploration of its overworld. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a marked improvement over the game it was building upon.
