The essence of bullet hell is embodied by the flow state, the merging of action and reaction into a cohesive whole. Unburdened by self-consciousness and doubt, the player becomes one with the work, a metatextual intertwining between the self-insert protagonist and the player themselves. Weaving effortlessly between spirals of malignant neon, one brushes against certain death versus overwhelming odds, limited not only by the mechanical functions of the game, but by the stress inherent to seeing a wave of fluorescent fire flung in your direction. Success is found not in fighting the game’s systems, but instead in embracing the chaos and cacophony of bullet hell: Seeing bullets rain down on your self-insert of choice, and cutting a path through the onslaught, with obscene firepower, unbroken grace, or by sheer determination.

Hypothetically, the experience of a shoot 'em up is antithetical to a metroidvania; One encourages complete adherence to the rules, the other constantly pushes you to go beyond the expectations of the game, the former rewards finding surefire paths to a concrete goal, the latter is defined by meandering detours in the service of securing a step forward on a path. It’s a dichotomy that builds an uneven foundation. When paired together, both sides struggle to become the defining “face” of the work, as the focus inevitably wavers between the explorative core of a metroidvania, and the breakneck action of an STG.

It’s a nightmarish endeavor to create something that scratches the itch of two divergent genres, and when I initially started Rabi-Ribi, that ingrained conflict was immediately apparent. For the first handful of hours, my experience was relegated to enjoying a perfectly fine, if mortifyingly shameless, exploration game. Hardline three out of five… you know the type. But after crashing against the initial wave of bosses, delving into the ways of Big Combo, and making a difficult decision to drop the difficulty to normal… Something clicked. It wasn’t until around Aruraune’s boss fight, half way through the game, that Rabi-Ribi's elegance in design finally revealed itself.

The hyperfocus… The loss of anxiety… The full acceptance of the game’s mechanics… At the halfway point, Rabi-Ribi re-attunes itself, subtly shifting from a smart metroidvania to an ingenious STG. As if fully accepting this genre shift, the final fights of the game embrace the concept of flow state, celebrating it as the final, ultimate end-goal of the genre, beyond victory, beyond aesthetic value, beyond even being “good” at the game. Your reward isn’t a high-score, breathtaking GCs, or even further mastery of the game, as much as those are all parts to find joy in. Your reward is the sense of perfect alignment with the game: Of full focus, complete immersion, and functioning at your peak doing something you love, regardless of winning or losing. It’s the soul of bullet hell condensed to a beautiful ending fight.

Rabi-Ribi is a game I struggle to recommend with a straight face: the main character might as well be the protagonist of the Daicon IV Opening Animation, But With A GunFairy; that, and the very-subtle-and-not-at-all-on-the-nose Nekopara allusions, do wonders in souring public perception toward the game. It's deeply, deeply upsetting that the most beloved representative of two of my favorite genres is going to be a game I’ll be mocked to the ends of the Earth for loving… But I adore this game. It’s flawed, for sure, and your tolerance for Anime™ has to be decently high to not be rightfully filtered for the abundance of otaku-bait character designs, but looking past that, on a pure mechanical level, Rabi-Ribi represents what I love in two genres that exist at odds with each other.

Bros will buy the game with scantily clad anime girls plastered all over it and complain that there are scantily clad anime girls plastered all over it. I just wanna ask what the fellas in the backloggd reviews were expecting when buying said game. This is the equivalent of some fella lookin at a war shooter and getting upset that it's indeed a war shooter but buying it anyways and complaining about that fact as if they didn't know exactly what they were getting into. I don't care how good the reviews are for said game, people should be able to recognize when something is clearly not made for them. (and also recognize that steam reviews normally don't mean shit in the first place)

Ignoring the weirdos that are upset about this and bought the game anyways, the gameplay here is good, very good, my favorite gameplay in fact. As someone who adores both platformers of the metroidvania variety and bullet hells this becomes something special with how it blends these two genres together perfectly. It really says a lot about a game's quality when I ACTUALLY want to go through the entire "beat difficulty to unlock higher difficulty" fiasco, something I didn't even do in something as good as DMC5. Also the boss fights are kinda phenomenal, they're very distinct from one another, have an absurd amount of attacks which constantly keeps them fresh, feel very fair despite the difficulty, and there's more than 30 of them lmao. The ost is also great with "Finale" being one of my favorite final boss tracks ever. overall a good time.

tldr game is very good but it attracts animephobic weirdos despite the very obvious exterior, obviously don't play this if you are for some reason scared of scantily clad anime girls like so many people in the backloggd reviews clearly are.

Edit after playing the Tevi demo: ANYBODY who likes this game needs to hop on Tevi, it's a spiritual successor to Rabi Ribi and is a perfect evolution of it. I very easily see it dethroning Rabi Ribi as my favorite game ever if it even matches the quality of the demo. The wait for Tevi's full release will be a difficult one... November 29th bros...

Finally, an aesthetic that panders to ME.

I am going to be real with you. Rabi-Ribi is honestly the most fun I have had in metroidvania, bar none. Yes, that includes Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. I’m not quite sure what it is about it, but it’s just so much fun.

The game’s main objective consists of recruiting cute girls to help you power a magic device in your town. To this end, you explore the big wide world of Rabi-Ribi Island to find (and fight) these characters. And holy FUCK was it fun. From the moment the prologue ends, the game’s world completely opens up. While the game points you in the direction of a few girls at a time, you can practically get most of them in any order. It was great, wandering around to see what new areas I could find and searching every nook and cranny for upgrades and items. Getting stronger and seeing my moveset and attacks slowly expand was so satisfying as well.

The game’s got a pretty cute art style and a nice and happy atmosphere and the music is real nice, but my favorite part of the game were the bosses. I was a bit skeptical at first when I heard that the game had heavy bullet hell elements, but I quickly realized I had nothing to worry about. The bosses felt like a combination of Mega Man Zero/Gunvolt fights and Touhou or CAVE patterns, all four of which I am quite fond of. Learning and dodging the patterns and using your various skills to pump as much damage as you can on the boss was fun as fuck.

I don’t know what I expected with this game, but it definitely far exceeded anything I could have had in mind. I still have 100% completion to finish up, and lots of optional superbosses to fight, and this will be the first metroidvania where I actually feel compelled to do everything in it. Besides all the achievements, theres like, over 200 of those. I love the game, but I don’t love it THAT much.

Pretty great metroidvania here! Really fun to explore with some great bosses and good combat/movement. I love all of the characters (they are so cute and have all my love and affection) and how adorable everything is every conversation no matter how cheesy kinda warmed my heart. It's a real shame that the character designs are gonna stop a lot of people from playing, cause there's tons here to love. Logging now because the postgame is absolutely filtering me in terms of difficulty, bosses and some enemies in postgame areas go from moderately difficult to absolutely brutal after the main story. But from the main story, Rabi Ribi was an adorable, fun adventure!

So I found a bullet hell metroidvania themed around cute girls, bunnies, and sweets. Fearing the loss of my trans license, I of course chose to play Rabi-Ribi.

To be honest, the metroidvania elements are pretty light. They have the structure, the abilities-as-keys, etc., but the quest markers and general simplicity of the world makes the exploration which defines that genre not all that necessary, though it will reward you with additional items. Being my first time really playing through a bullet hell, I'm not really sure how to comment on that end of it. I can say that it's difficult trying to process the millions of projectiles on screen while also trying to account for the arc of your jump. I imagine that's a large part of the appeal and what makes it stand out against other examples of the genre...it's kind of mind-bending. This game also has systems on top of systems on top of systems, to the point where it's kind of silly and confusing, but it does give the player more room to tackle difficult sections through optimizing their loadout and what abilities they use, which I do appreciate as a newcomer to the genre.

A poor translation really fucks with what is already a convoluted and ridiculous plot, which is actually too bad because I could absolutely see myself getting attached to these characters. The designs, particularly the pixel art variants, are absolutely gorgeous and adorable. The visuals are what brought me into this in the first place, and they do not disappoint.

As a noob to bullet hells, maybe I shouldn't have played this on normal when easy was suggested for a first playthrough. To be completely honest, I used the assist mode on the last two phases of the final boss. Grinding out the third was rapidly becoming unfun (and I'd have to go back several fights to go buy more stuff) and by the fourth I didn't give a shit. I don't hold it against the game, I just lost patience with it. I think I've had my fill and while the postgame looks to be extensive, I probably won't get to it.

I had a great time with this one :)

this isnt a metroidvania. this is an open world 2d platformer

holy shit, i did not expect the fucking bunny cunny game to be genuinely fantastic. almost everything about this game is extremely well done and in depth enough to remain fun the entire time.
my only real gripes about the game is the bad indications of where... anything is really, and that boss attacks like to think that theyre more readable than they actually are.
i did NOT do the postgame, nor did i find every character. idk if i will do so, but i did buy the 2 content dlcs. most likely will do all the postgame shit after a break to play another game (ace attorney investigations 2).

Super underrated Metroidvania game. The movement mechanics of the game and the exploration were the highlights for me. It was so cool stumbling upon each hidden tech and using it to reach areas super early. Best of all, there's even more sequence-breaking that can be done. The story and character aesthetics were definite lowpoints. Characters yak on too much, the ending gets all overly melodramatic, and some of the character portraits (esp. Ribbon and Miru) are FBI-inducing.

If you can get past that though (I can't blame you if you can't), this is a must play if you're a fan of Metroidvanias or bullet hells.

Was gonna do the post-game before reviewing this, but I think I'm good for now.

Surprisingly fun metroidvania that is clearly heavily inspired by Touhou. Exploring the world is fun and, for the most part, never gets too difficult other than a few obnoxious areas. Boss fights are clearly where most of the focus went, and they're all pretty memorable. I do think the game has a similar problem that many other metroidvanias have where it takes a few upgrades for things to really open up. Once you've gotten more abilities, the game gets much more addictive as both movement and combat improve quite a bit.

This game does have a bit of a weird, inverted difficulty curve. I was getting a bit frustrated with the bosses at first, but as I unlocked more stuff and got more upgrades things became a lot more manageable. That healing staff weapon was a goddamn lifesaver for a few battles.

I do think there are some boss attacks that are a little too unclear on how to avoid them (that and sometimes bullets are a little too difficult to make out against the backgrounds), but for the most part they're all well designed and unique. I do wish they were a little less spongy once you get close to the end. It can feel like it's taking forever to whittle down their health bars sometimes, although it is satisfying pulling off massive combos.

The game's very colorful art style and peppy music also help in making the game not feel too frustrating as well. I guess there's the cutesy story as well, but I honestly kind of stopped paying attention to it after a certain point. It's mostly kind of just dumb anime bullshit where despite beating the shit out of everyone with a hammer, you all become friends and everything's happy.

I do find it funny that so many people complain about the character designs. It's a game where the main character is wearing a playboy bunny outfit. What the hell were you expecting? Other than a couple characters, none of them are even that lewd. Sometimes I wonder how people like this would react if they went to a beach. Probably have a brain aneurysm.

Anyway, Rabi-Ribi is very good. Much better than I expected it to be. I'd even say it's one of the better metroidvanias I've played. Unironically better than Hollow Knight. Don't @ me.

When sorting my Steam library by Steam reviews, I always forget to account for the fact that any sort of anime girl aesthetic results in significant ratings inflation. It's not that Rabi-Ribi is a bad game, it's just an eyebrow raise to see such universal acclaim. The character designs are skeevy and the dialogue and plot are childish resulting in me feeling like I needed to take a shower after playing this game. The gameplay itself also wasn't for me, I don't find bullet hell too engaging and I didn't like the combat mechanics. I will say that it's impressive how non-linear this game is, it may be the most open Metroidvania I've ever played.

This was recommended to me by a friend on hearing that I was interested in dipping my toes into the waters of Metroidvanias - a genre that always seemed like something I would enjoy but I never got around to trying.

First things first: like many people, the character designs nearly put me off trying the game entirely. If I'm being charitable, I could say that the game is trying to poke fun at stereotypical anime girl designs as well as people who go crazy for them (you even spend an entire section of the game beating up weebs who are trying to take pictures of you), but it doesn't lean into the satire heavily enough to be convincing. Another thing that nearly filtered me was its clunky translation and clumsy storytelling, which caused both the mystery elements of the story as well as the potentially heartwarming plot elements to fall flat.

Underneath all of that, though, is a package with enough fun to keep me playing all the way through to the end of the postgame. I had mixed feelings on the exploration elements; it was quite fun unlocking new areas and discovering hidden items, but some of the level designs tend to loop within themselves, 'rewarding' exploration with lots of backtracking. In addition, many of the differences between locations are purely cosmetic, leading to a bit of 'sameyness' and making exploration feel like a chore at times. The character progression is stronger though, with the steady drip-drip-drip of finding new abilities and powering up existing ones not only being a great source of dopamine but being a great way to gradually expand the player's moveset without overwhelming them with too much information at the beginning.

One only need to look at some of my other reviews to know that I can sometimes bounce off difficult games, but the boss fights are the strongest part of this game for me; they are examples of difficulty done very right. The waves upon waves of projectiles that you face are absolutely brutal, but they're mitigated by the tools you have at your disposal: crisp and responsive controls, a versatile moveset, a very small hitbox, as well as other anti-frustration features like autosaves and the ability to change the difficulty whenever you want. (I started on the easiest difficulty, turned it up once I got a bit more used to the mechanics, and I'm not ashamed to admit I dialled it all the way down to 'casual' for the postgame final boss who kicked my tail more times than I can count)

I started on this game thinking it would be the first of many Metroidvanias - but I had enough fun that it might also be a gateway into the world of shmups for me. In the end, it earns a high score because it takes a special kind of game to absolutely slaughter me, but have my thought at the end be "yeah, I'll definitely come back to this again later!" I'll definitely revisit this, perhaps on a higher difficulty level, but in the meantime I'm off to play more Metroidvanias and shmups. Hopefully those will be less awkward to play in front of my wife.

I get the impression that most people scoff at this game because all the characters are cute moeblobs drawn by artists who appreciate the anatomy of the female body a liiiiittle too much, and the writing is so pumped full of tropes that it would probably make some puritans gag. I kinda threw my dignity in the trash half a decade ago though, and I'm here to tell you that this game is completely worth it.

Rabi-Ribi's a game about Metroidvania exploration broken up by absolutely raw bullet hell boss fights. You'll find a variety of items hidden about the overworld, including new powerups and moves, and badges that modify your abilities in various ways. While you can collect more moves, the game also has a decent amount of hidden tech that's useful for combat and exploration. You can sequence break the hell out of this game if you understand its mechanics. And on the topic of combat, the bosses in this game are fucking insane. Every single one of them has their own unique bullet patterns to dodge, usually matching the boss's own appearance and demeanor.

Rabi-Ribi looks excellent. Regardless of what you think about its art, the quality of it is really good. The pixel art that surrounds the game is great as well. The soundtrack is all memorable, even having some more atmospheric tracks for exploring certain areas. Music during boss fights is upbeat, electronic, and frantic, perfectly matching the image of dodging absolutely insane bullet patterns.

The writing is definitely going to be a deal-breaker for some people. If you're looking for a logical story, look elsewhere. The game plays most of its tropes up for laughs, and most of it got genuine laughter out of me. Not all of it though. Even I have my cringe limits.

Listen, it's really easy to judge a book by its cover, and this cover is...particularly horny. But I promise you, there's an extremely good game for bullet hell and metroidvania fans alike in here. If you skipped this game solely due to the character art, I implore you to give it an honest shot.

Incredibly unique game being a mix of a bullet hell and metroidvania.

Great level design with lots of variety that's just super fun to explore. The bosses are very difficult like any Touhou styled bullet hell would be, but they're still a lot of fun to fight and they're quite creative too. There's a lot of dialogue, a bit too much and it can get annoying at times for a game like this, but it also has great moments where it can be pretty entertaining with some solid comedy and unexpected 4th wall breaks too. The character designs certainly aren't going to be for everyone, but they fit the style of the game so it doesn't bother me much honestly. Lots of little pop culture, anime and visual novel references in the game to enjoy too.

Hungry bread and butter hustle
You've been doing it a while, it is only fair
Words should be like station
Words that aren't required for your help
Quit hating on my new perspective
But hurrying along with meal is ever done
You could win a rabbit
You could have a rabbit or
With the fast child is gonna have a dead hand
We can get it strong again
But mine let meats (?) put on good habits
Been working and put on good habits
Sometimes I can't find my good habits
Oh, Spanish babies all the echoes
Heard she's getting better stay out of the train
Let you wipe your feet off
Eat it like it's gonna get away
Your coffee sure is getting colder
Your teeth are getting fewer spaces in the way
You could win a rabbit
You could build a rabbit with a rib
Wabbit or habit, habit or real
Wabbit or habit, habit or real
Rabbit or habit