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.

With an aesthetic that's arguably distasteful at worst and barely twee at best, a narrative that is forgettable and burdened with a poor localization, and no interesting atmosphere or worldbuilding, Rabi-Rabi is carried by the sheer strength of its gameplay. The boss fights in this game are some of the most fun I've had in recent memory: the movement and combos all feel good to execute, and your move-set is constantly tested by an impressive variety of bullet-hells which create a dynamic state of play and force you to engage with all of the game's mechanics.

I understand that its impossible to talk about this game without addressing its uncomfortable aesthetic, but I found that it never really got any worse than what you see in the promotional art. It's very much a mechanically inclined game first, and I found myself forgetting that there was anything supposedly suggestive about it as soon as I became immersed in its gameplay. There is absolutely a much better game that could be made if you took this game's mechanics and did...something else with the rest of it, (I actually kind of like the cutesy bunny-girl aesthetic on paper, but there's no denying it could've been executed a lot better) but I really enjoyed what we got.

É um metroidvania não linear mt bom em questão de gameplay e um conteúdo praticamente infinito (+30horas fácil) para um jogo barato e pouco conhecido. O charme desse jogo é as boss batlle q vem num estilo bullet hell e traz mts chefes diferentes e criativos, tendo o nivel de dificuldade bem balanceado de acordo com o quanto tu explora o mapa e acha item pra upar seus status (mas q tbm se tu for mt hardcore tem mt conteudo de dificuldade elevada) e outro ponto forte dele é a grande variadade de ataques, movimentos e build de gameplay, dando mt espaço pra se especializar. O grande ponto negativo nesse jogo é a história e enredo que é mt fraca (nivel sessao da tarde), apesar de ter um ou outro personagem 'legal'.

This might be the ugliest game I've ever played and it's not cause of the "Anime Fan-Service" Aesthetic.
Rabi Ribi suffers from the worst case of style inconsistency imaginable.
The quality, the art-style and even the pixel size feels completely randomized.
And i'd generally say this is worse than when a game consistently amateurish in it's art, cause at-least it's consistent.
For a Metroidvania it kinda loses a lot of the fun in exploring cause of it being such an eyesore.

But I gotta say the combat is pretty fun even if the animations are really awkward.
And the boss-fights are quite fun even if they can be quite dragged out.

(this is a repost of my Steam review for this game with some modifications. you can read the original review here: https://steamcommunity.com/id/huuishuu/recommended/400910/)

This is a game I played in Christmas of 2018. And I very quickly fell in love with it, putting in about 20 hours in a mere 2 days.

There's so many things I want to talk about with this game, but I'll start from the most fundamental part - the gameplay. It's just fantastic. It's a metroidvania platformer mixed with a bullethell game. And it's so good at being just a great game. The controls are super good - they are responsive, accurate and satisfying in every sense of the word. While at the start of the game you may be limited in terms of movement options, by the time you hit the late-game - you'll basically be going anywhere you want, whenever you want. It's that kind of gratifying feeling that makes exploration in a game like this really fun. Thanks to this, backtracking to previously completed stages never feels like a necessity or a drag because the game properly rewards you with new areas to explore alongside with new items to gain, new enemies to fight and even new characters to discover. It's never over until the game says it's over. And even then it's probably still not over.

On top of the solid controls, the combat is also very satisfying. While invincibility frames & slight knockback can be a minor annoyance, nothing in this game felt cheap. The game gives you a fair chance but also requires some degree of precision to dodge if you don't want to constantly lose health. Although this being heavily inspired by bullethell shooters, especially during boss battles, visibility can sometimes be a problem, as stuff tends to blend in with the background or with each other even and it may feel like you get hit by something you didn't see. But if you do pay attention while the boss is attacking then it's absolutely not a problem.

The story is a bit weird. Overall I did like it, but I didn't like the inconsistencies between the main game and the post game. I'm not gonna spoil anything here, but you may notice narrative inconsistencies from time to time. Besides that, the story doesn't try too hard to take itself seriously and that's for the better - you're a bunny girl running around with a fairy and a giant hammer. If this game tried to be ridiculously serious with its narrative then I'd find that pretty jarring for a game of this nature. Aside from that though, there were a few nitpicky quirks with the story, such as a couple of spelling mistakes that made themselves pretty obvious. While I never really outright laughed at this game's comedy, it never bored me and always kept me engaged, which is a good thing since that means it doesn't get very repetitive. Although some of the achievements in this game definitely are funny, I liked the sense of humor of the achievements, especially some of the references.

The soundtrack is just on another level for me. Well done by all the composers of the soundtrack, especially 3R2 with amazing tracks such as cyberspace.exe, Get On With It, Bounce Bounce and more. I also really liked songs like the Volcanic Caverns theme and Exotic Laboratory theme. But as stated - every song in the game is just incredible. It's rare for me to say that I didn't dislike any of the songs. I ended up buying the game's soundtrack for listening outside of the game.

Although one thing I will mention about the game that I feel is a bit of a negative is that the boss battles can feel a bit repetitive. Almost always you'll be placed in a wide open area with the boss you're fighting and it's really just a case of "dodge, attack, wait, repeat". Not a lot of the bosses in the game felt like they really challenged your skill otherwise. I do understand why they designed it like this - so speedrunning the game didn't feel like certain items were crucial in order to progress but because of that, the final result ended up with some repetitive boss battles. The best battle in the game was the main game's final boss because it was the closest thing in the game that ended up being even a little bit mechanically challenging for the player. A close second would be the boss battle in Natural Aquarium due to the higher jump that you get from being underwater, allowing for some flashy combos to be made.

There is still an entire OCEAN of content I haven't covered - badges, the item shop & how simple its integration is, new game+, speedrun mode, boss rush, etc. but that should be a testament to just how much stuff there is in the game. Overall it's a really solid metroidvania bullethell platformer. If you're at all on-the-fence about this game, just get it. It's absolutely worth it and I loved every second of it. In fact, I'll probably give this game repeat visits just to see how much stuff I missed.

Out of the haze of pixiv fever dreams comes one of the standard bearers of the "explaining to your Steam friends it's a real game with gameplay and it doesn't have a one-handed mode" sub-genre. It's hard not to take note of this one, with how often it's championed as one of the very best metroidvanias on the market. Having played it... I think that's somewhat fair, with some caveats.

The aesthetic takes a specific taste, but I can mesh with it. A constant stream of bright, colorful pixel art and a soundtrack teetering between pounding electronic and sickly-sweet j-pop demands a specific kind of upbeat optimism I found refreshing. The anime illustrations are also, in a word, cute, even if the constant malaise of vague horniness gives the entire proceeding a slightly creepy quality, like the game is a sexually frustrated aunt at a wedding making googly eyes at the groom cake topper. Another thing worth mentioning in passing is the visual clarity, if only because such a thing is critical for a bullet hell.

Exploration, as one would hope for in a Metroidvania, essentially involves finding a high ledge, a watery sinkhole, and a realization of the crushing weight of a conscious existence, before running back and forth over the map, searching for the double jump, swim ability, and indomitable human spirit to bypass such obstacles and progress further along the map. Exploration tends to be functional, but rudimentary; aside from one (very fun) section consisting entirely of platforming, few areas offer any unique environmental challenges. Instead, downtime between boss fights means boffing your giant-ass hammer against hordes of bunny girls coming at you with all the piss and vinegar of a baby sparrow, while simultaneously stopping every four feet to kick every rock and pull every blade of grass to make sure none of them are hiding a health potion or the entrance to the secret kingdom of the mole people. In this way, exploring becomes tedious, especially when the map notably omits pathways you haven't tried yet, so opening locked routes feels less like putting your new skills to use and more like a German tourist wandering around trying to find the best schnitzel in Bangkok.

At various locations throughout the map come the boss fights, which are easily the highlight. The combination of side-scroller combo attacks with bullet hell mechanics make these fights as much a test of platforming / maneuvering as they are actual combat. In addition, there is a staggering variety of different patterns, putting you through energy zig zags, spinning electricity wheels, arcing fire pillars, a sprite construction of La Pietà made entirely of bubbles, each with a specific dodge pattern before you can get in a couple of meaty bonks. Or at least, for the most part; when the game vomits out projectiles in every direction across the whole screen like Mr. Creosote, it feels like kind of a cheap shot. Regardless, these sequences are what make the game worth playing, and there are plenty of them, with your ever-increasing tool kit of carrot-themed demolition equipment providing added depth as you progress. By the end, you're swinging, rolling, and sashaying through 15-minute boss fights that really get the blood pumping.

From the best part of the game to the worst part of the game, I don't even know if I want to attempt to explain the story. It's probably one of the most incoherent plots I've ever experienced in a game. It's hard to communicate, however, because so much of it comes in the form of random non-sequitur pieces of information. For most of the "main game", you are a bunny who has been magically turned into a human girl through the power of weird fetishism, tasked with locating your owner's sister trapped in another world. This is achieved by scouring the land looking for magic users. The hands-off approach to how / where you locate these people was appreciated, encouraging exploration. The main thrust of the plot here is supposed to be the personalities of the various magical characters. If you've ever seen an anime before in your life, you've seen every one of these characters, and you've seen them written more interestingly. After four separate attempts to open this portal, the grand villain is introduced, her backstory is rapid-fired straight at you like a lawyer reciting the last deposition before lunch, she dies, and the game ends. Except, it doesn't end? It picks up again on a completely different one of the many plot threads introduced and poorly elaborated on. Then, the next chapter starts over again, before the game actually ends. Or, I should say, you arrive at the open lego peg the endless stream of DLC can slot on to. As much as the game likes to propose conflicts, it's less keen on actually showing any resolution to them. The sister is returned, but every threat concerning their connection to this other world, the main character remaining transformed into a marketable mascot, what precisely the deal was with bunny Cortana, is all just capped off with a big question mark. The horrible writing is equal parts frustrating and amusing, so I suppose it's not the worst thing to be the major bug bear.

EDIT: Now that I've played the free and paid DLCs, I'm bumping this to five stars.

My original gripe with sequence breaking and not being able to progress in the non-Volcano area was my fault because there actually are ways around those "roadblocks", to the extent that there's actually a 0% Item/Ability run you can do that you can get achievements for in both the main game and postgame. You can actually play the entire game without your weapon and still beat it in a non-pacifist manner. In fact, the game was designed with so many different ways to approach it that the devs added in achievements for each scenario that you could pull off and encouraged you to break the game as much as possible, while still making it manageable for anyone who wants that challenge.

The volcano thing is still weird because you needed to have a particular conversation and then have a couple cutscenes to progress that exploration because of story, and this happens with a few other postgame sections, including a post-postgame (yes, there is one).

I'd say that my only real standing gripe is the buttons being listed as numbers in the movelists because yes, I do enjoy experimenting with controls, but sometimes I would rather just look and see a familiar button list to know how to do things. Everything else is essentially golden, with some very excellent boss fights on top of that exploration and sequence breaking that the game unabashedly showcases.

Original review follows.

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If you like Metroivanias with non-linear exploration and bosses that are fun bullet hells, this game is made for you and you need to play it.

I have only a couple gripes.

1) Although the UI itself is absolutely lovely, text instructions for abilities that show up in them are unintuitive because it doesn't account for the names of controller buttons, so explanations of moves will be things like, "Press (down arrow) + BUTTON 4." Sometimes when I'd learn a new ability/move, I'd just mess around with all buttons and directions until I figured it out. Not a big deal, just a small thing that makes you burn a few extra seconds to figure stuff out.

2) The non-linearity of this game is mostly excellent, and it's the "mostly" that's come back to haunt me a couple times in one form or another. There's an area I found early on that I couldn't proceed through because the game wants you to clear the first chapter before you're allowed to go do it.

At another point, I used hidden moves to get myself really deep into the volcano area and found myself eventually at a long shaft that seems to repeat infinitely with a save point in the middle of it. I was looking for hidden ledges to drop onto while falling infinitely because the map overlay on the save screen shows a separate-colored room at the bottom.

After spending about fifteen minutes wandering slamming into walls with my face or hammer or magic (and the brief opening that has some spikes on the ground in one section), I checked a walkthrough, only to find out that this area was inaccessible until MUCH later in the game and I had to use my hidden-tech skills to work my way all the way back out of the volcano to the teleporter (which was much more difficult to get back to than it was getting in from). This one was a little more frustrating because the non-linearity encourages exploration, but I was also penalized very thoroughly for exploring in this instance, to the point that I had to check a walkthrough to see I was wasting my time.

Those are minor issues, though -- the walk back from the first area I mentioned wasn't that bad (even if I did it twice) and if you're reading this and haven't played it yet, you're now aware that you shouldn't go too deep into the volcano using hidden tech abilities once you figure out how they work. It's essentially an extra 30 minutes I tacked onto the game for walking back from places and if nothing else, the volcano situation was good practice for honing those skills, even if it was frustrating.

I used all of this review to talk about these things because frankly, I don't want to lay out all the good things this game has going for it because they're innumerable. It's beautiful, non-linear, mostly encourages exploration, lets you progress story at your leisure for the most part, and the soundtrack is nice. There's a postgame and I haven't started it yet, but I will soon. There's also a free DLC that is suggested to be played in postgame and two other DLCs that add more areas/content and I intend to check those out eventually, as well.

Easily in the Top 20 and possibly Top 10 best Metroidvanias just for content alone.

Allora, Rabi-Ribi è oggettivamente fatto parecchio bene lato gameplay. Il level design a mio avviso non è praticamente mai particolarmente buono, rimane sotto la varietà e qualità generale di quello in Blasphemous II, ma rimane funzionale alla libertà dell'esplorazione

Vado a specificare che l'esplorazione in sé non m'è piaciuta poi tanto fatta eccezione per un paio di stage. Come dicevo, lato gameplay Rabi-Ribi è ben fatto ma a causa del level design stesso la maggior parte delle volte l'utilizzo delle proprie abilità per attraversare una sezione è quasi ininfluente - mi sono trovato a usarli quasi solo lì dove sono obbligatori. Infatti, teoricamente il gioco si potrebbe praticamente completare senza aver ottenuto nulla (forse eccetto le scarpe che permettono di saltare più in alto, ma dovrei controllare).
Poi, non ho mai percepito alcuna distintività: trovarsi nell'area vulcanica è più o meno la stessa cosa che trovarsi nella foresta o nelle grotte ghiacciate. Belli invece i background, in genere. Forse un'eccezione a tutto questo è il livello ambientato nel cyberspazio

Lo stesso discorso lo applico alle creature nemiche: anche laddove c'erano delle creature luogo-specifiche, erano sempre di una bruttezza e, per il moveset, di una banalità disarmanti.
Mi fanno cagare anche i NPC, per character design e scrittura

La scrittura, per me, è atroce e disprezzo anche la storia in sé: non posso neanche scendere nei dettagli perché molte cose le ho direttamente skippate. Poi magari a causa di questo atteggiamento mi sarò anche perso certe istruzioni, perché ho capito come fare per consumare oggetti di cura solo a 5 ore dall'inizio.

Le cose buone da dire sono comunque molte. C'è un sistema di progressione più vicino a certi giochi di ruolo, per cui l'utilizzo costante delle proprie armi ne comporta il miglioramento e level up: questo ha come esito un aumento del danno, della velocità, l'acquisizione di una combo a seconda del livello raggiunto. In giro per la mappa è possibile trovare tutta una serie di oggetti che, come in ogni metroidvania che si rispetti, permettono di semplificare l'esplorazione e di accedere a nuove aree: che si tratti del doppio salto, di un aumento dell'altezza raggiungibile con lo stesso, della scivolata, etc.
Per i completisti poi questo gioco sarà una manna dal cielo. Io non ho nessuna intenzione di collezionare manco la metà degli achievement ottenibili (o meglio, a me degli achievement non frega in nessuna maniera), ma credo che per farlo durante la prima partita bisognerebbe investirci almeno una trentina di ore

Particolare nota di merito per quanto mi riguarda va proprio alle boss-fight: diversissime, numerosissime e molte di queste difficili in culo, con moveset che ci si aspetterebbe da un bullet-hell. Nonostante la difficoltà, c'è sempre la possibilità di rinascere esattamente fuori l'arena di combattimento (che non è mai nulla di particolare, tutta l'attenzione è stata data esclusivamente al moveset dei vari boss). Inoltre, dopo alcune sconfitte, il gioco stesso chiede se si vuole abbassare la difficoltà. Apprezzabile.
Non intendo fare una seconda partita e non ho letto cose a riguardo, ma credo che, data la libertà di approccio all'esplorazione che si raggiunge da un certo punto, sia anche possibile affrontare molti boss seguendo le proprie preferenze in termini di priorità

Per il resto non ho molto da dire. La grafica, animazione, audo design e ost mi sono tra l'indifferente e il disprezzo. Un'altra nota positiva è la hurtbox, molto piccola come accade in molti shoot 'em up e molto precisa: lo sprite del personaggio è ingannevolmente molto più grande della hurtbox vista l'elevata quantità di sezioni bullet hell, e per ovviare a questo problema la hitbox delle creature generiche è più grossa dei loro sprite così da avere l'illusione di una effettiva collisione nel caso ci si dovesse finire addosso

It’s a shame that a game with this much potential is this game instead.

Metroidvania + Bullet Hell is an inherently good idea for a game. And even better than that, this is actually great execution on that idea. The map is large, non-linear and full of secrets. The boss battles are challenging but fun and rewarding. The soundtrack is also great.

Unfortunately, in between all the great stuff, the map is littered with uninteresting enemies and worst of all: cutscenes. The writing in this game is truly terrible. The overall plot ranges from nonsensical to purely bad, but the dialogue is consistently atrocious. On top of that, the character design is a a parade of adolescent girls and your reward for beating them in a fight is a full screen drawing of them slightly sexier than normal. Also, the final boss is devastatingly hard to the point where I was no longer having fun.

Overall, I can’t say if this was worth it for me. If the negatives don’t put you off, there is excellent gameplay to experience here.

Honestly, this game kind of took me by surprise. I wasn't sure just what I was expecting but this is an incredibly fun and lighthearted metroidvania style game. The big barrier to entry for some is probably going to be the bullet hell mechanics as each boss unloads waves and waves of magical bullets at you, sometimes to the point that they seem impossible to dodge.

But honestly, if you stick with it, you start to see how simple it is to just, dance around the bullets without taking a single hit. Not to say there weren't some moments you won't struggle with, but the game allows you some flexibility with the difficulty options and you never really feel overwhelmed by just how intense the battles can get.

On top of that, the music is incredible and the visuals, while perhaps not the best part of the game, are fun, bright and adorable to look at. Probably the weakest aspect is the story, but even that is fun in just how simple and lighthearted it is.

If you're looking for something to scratch your metroidvania itch, give this a try!