Tevi is a great metroidvania in its own right, with strong level design and great combat. But the game's much greater focus on story did not do it any favors. Every boss and ability is locked behind plot progression, which resulted in a very linear experience, with little-to-no sequence breaking, and unrewarding backtracking. Worst of all, it wasn't even worth it as the story is so thoroughly unengaging it's unreal, tanking the game's pacing with copious amounts of infodumps.

It's pretty tough to follow up an act as phenomenal as Rabi-Ribi, but Tevi sure did try.

I come back to the game properly after all these years and now 40 boxing is a cinch. Took me a couple hours of attentive grinding every day for a week straight in the past, and now it took me a few hours of pressing one button. God bless powercreep.

Granblue IP has been winning too hard lately for me to ignore, between Relink standing tall after 7 years of tumultuous development, and Rising commanding the accursed FGC's respect. Eased myself back into it during the 10th (that's right, 10 years) anniversary festivities, read some dissertations that would make an FF11 player tremble to get myself caught up, and then boom, it was like I never left. Hit 1b honors of my first GW back, gave a gold ring to Sakura Kinomoto, and I still have every version of Narmaya. There is great peace to be found in doing the same thing over and over and over again.

Time to physically and emotionally prepare myself for the next Guild Wars. This one will be a doozy.

It might be extremely derivative but at least it chose great games to learn from. It plays almost identically to a Mega Man Zero/ZX game, and you can't go a level or boss without seeing a reference to an Inti Creates or Capcom game, but I'd be lying if I said it bothered me much. Level design was pretty strong; it consistently felt pretty purposeful and I hardly ever found myself just going through the motions. Your toolkit is fun to mess around with too, between the versatile EX skills and the powerful ultimate skills you get from bosses. Speaking of the bosses, they're great to fight too. Even the music is decent and the visuals are nice and easy on the eyes, as opposed to the likes of Gravity Circuit. But despite taking so many pages from MMZ, I really wish they took the "the saber is the best weapon in the game" page. It hits like a wet noodle and doesn't feel nearly as good to use. I found myself using the buster way more than I'd like.

Regardless, it's a great, and surprisingly polished game. Perhaps if Inti Creates-inspired games were a dime a dozen like roguelites and metroidvanias and boomer shooters, I'd be more critical of how unoriginal it is. But that's just not the current indie game climate, so I can't help but feel appreciation more than anything else.