Rabi-Ribi Reviews

lesbians

bnnuy

bnuy

When metroidvania met Touhou

My hands are shaking.

somehow the best metroidvania and it's not even close

Great mix of platformer and bullet-hell. A lot of areas to explore with many hidden treasures.

Rabi-Ribi is a delightful anime-styled Metroidvania with bullet hell combat. For context, I purchased the two relevant story DLC that contain extra super hard boss battles, as well as more plot and the "true ending" and I just wish this game was about 10 hours shorter or had the plot wrapped up in the base game as I did not have enough fun mashing my head against the wall in the DLC battles, so to YouTube I shall go for the true ending. Base game - Gives me that same feeling playing Cave Story or Astlibra: Revision for the first time...exploring a vast, interconnected world with great combat, a story with memorable characters and plot with more depth than first appears and all from a Japanese perspective. There is so much content here for anyone who wants to dive deep into the bullet hell end of the combat pool will have a lot to master and enjoy. For me, I hit my enjoyment ceiling before clearing the DLC and decided to play their follow up, TEVI, instead of slogging through to see a few more cutscenes.

Just to get it out of the way first, the character designs are weird. Luckily they don’t come up often so it’s easy to ignore if you’re really put off by them but it is still a needlessly weird thing to include. Your only real interaction with the characters (and their artwork) comes from their introduction before/after fighting them and some brief moments during the story. These sections are brief and the story itself is pretty unimportant so you could even skip it if you really wanted. It's all just an excuse to keep pushing you forward through the game rather than anything crucial to understand. The greatest strength of the story is how it allows you to proceed at your own pace. You don’t unlock anything substantial through story progress and nearly everything you need is found directly on the map. There are bosses scattered throughout the overworld and the story unlocks new chunks each time you defeat a specified amount of them, but there’s little to stop you from going well past the required amount and fully exploring the map before you’ve even finished the 2nd chapter. So you can just ignore anything not immediately gameplay related until the very end and skip most of that anyway. Rabi Ribi prioritized its gameplay over everything else and given how the final product turned out this was easily the right call. I haven’t played many bullet hell-style games so my opinion might diverge from the genre’s more dedicated fans, but I thought this was a pretty well-designed game overall. There’s plenty of variety to the fights and they strike a good balance between being difficult enough that you can’t relax mid-fight without being so overwhelming as to make the experience mentally taxing. I’ll confess there are still a good number of moves I struggle to deal with or don’t see a clearly reliable way to avoid, but most times I experienced this I could eventually find the tactic the game probably had in mind. So I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt for those where I couldn’t find anything similar. What helps Rabi Ribi work compared to other bullet hells is the combat. You’re not just sitting back and shooting from afar or avoiding the bullets until a timer runs out. You need to be at least a little bit proactive, moving in to hit the boss whenever their attack ends or, if you can tolerate the risk, jumping in mid-attack and getting some extra hits in exchange for making it more difficult to avoid whatever they’re throwing at you. The melee combat forces a much greater degree of interaction between you and the boss compared to other game’s I’ve seen and helps raise the skill ceiling without throwing more and faster bullets on the screen. There are only two noteworthy complaints I have about the combat system. While it does add a lot to the fights, there isn’t much depth to the melee attacks themselves. Bosses don’t respond much to being hit apart from a brief stun period, making the melee feel secondary to the rest of the combat mechanics. Enemies won’t try to avoid you, they don’t move after taking damage, nor do they have any melee attacks of their own to complicate your moves. The damage you do through your own attacks is valuable, but the skill ceiling for your offensive moves is much lower than the defensive aspects of combat. It’s only when you take on the extra risk and attack at the same time an enemy is attacking you when the skill ceiling reaches its peak, but the game often makes this impossible through moves that can only be avoided from a certain distance away from their starting point. The second issue I have is with the visuals during combat. They’re fine most of the time but there are a good number of times where the color of the bullets blends in with the background in a way that makes them frustrating to track and avoid. But that's something which could have been fixed a lot more easily so, while frustrating that it wasn’t fixed, it's not worth spending much time on to explain in detail. Rabi Ribi’s combat is its main strength while the exploration was a lot weaker. While it worked as a bit of downtime between bosses, there was very little about the map itself that stood out as particularly engaging. It's just the standard 2d Metroidvania fare but without the strong visuals or level design typically used to keep traversal interesting. Movement is relatively simple and the platforming sections are rarely challenging nor do the generic enemies pose much threat. While I had a decent enough time with the exploration and the marginal upgrades scattered around various nooks and crannies was decent encouragement to pay attention while moving around, the map is still the weakest part of the gameplay. It would have been nice for the environment to play a greater role in fights (To my memory, none of the bosses were fought in anything but a normal rectangular room with no platforms) but I suppose it's not a huge loss. Overall, I enjoyed my time with Rabi Ribi quite a bit. Its a surprisingly engaging game once you get the hang of it and I’m definitely interested in checking out Tevi next time I have some time available. The core gameplay here is already pretty solid but I see quite a few areas where a spiritual sequel has the capacity to improve it even further. But even as-is, this is still definitely worth playing.

Fully explored movement techniques in a deeply non-linear world that never reveals itself as such. The bullet-hell-style combat tests both reflexes and adaptability, while only turning from difficult to frustrating in some optional post-post-endgame battles in the game's 25+ hours long campaign. The music, marrying catchy electronica with cinematic leitmotifs, shines especially during boss fights. The game mixes pixel art and cel-shaded portraits in a charming (and unorthodox) way, but most character designs fail to be particularly memorable. The biggest glaring flaw is the ridiculous, meandering plot: while all dialogue can be fast-forwarded and ignored, every scene feels like a lost opportunity that barely justifies the events of the game and sprinkles in the occasional unnecessary fan-service CG. While the meaningless but light-hearted story could be much better, Rabi-Ribi doesn't get lost in it, managing to hatch as an unparalleled Metroidvania and a testament to the genre.