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...

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.