This game is incredible. It's one of the best games I've ever played, if not outright the best game I've ever played. There's just so much good here. The exploration aspects are the best I've seen in any metroidvania styled game, providing you with insane freedom of movement the second you beat the prologue. Some bosses are locked behind others being beaten and a handful of areas are gated by story progression, but aside from those exceptions and some prologue railroading, you can get to any area on the map whenever you want. There are a number of achievements available for doing things in weird orders, whether that's heading to the furthest area from the start first or beating one specific boss while maneuvering around the other boss you're "intended" to fight first. There's even an achievement for sequence breaking into the postgame! This nigh-unprecedented level of choice in terms of direction provides a huge amount of replay value, as simple choices regarding which area you go to first will have you getting your upgrades in a different order. When pretty much all the upgrades are both incredibly useful and fairly unique, this means that your pathing through the game will heavily affect your playthrough. Since the best upgrades are usually on completely seperate parts of the map, the routing adds a new level of depth to a game that was already filled with phenomenal exploration. And the bosses. Oh my god the bosses. There's like twenty bosses in this game, and even though they're all just anime girls who jump around and shoot a bunch of projectiles, they all manage to feel distinct from one another, whether through their bullet hell attacks, their movement patterns, or their gimmicks. The bosses are all pretty lengthy, most of them taking a good two to three minutes with postgame bosses easily taking ten , but they never feel boring, as they all have a crazy variety of attacks (15+ per boss) to the point that you'll probably never see a repeat attack even during a long fight on the highest difficulty. They're also super engaging, as the balance between melee damage being higher and ranged damage being easier to hit bosses with means that not only will you always be attacking the boss (no waiting around for openings here!), but you're also incentivized to weave through bullets in order to get up close and maximize damage between attacks, which makes for a really fun ebb-and-flow gameplay loop. They're definitely the highlight of the game, and slowly learning to overcome each of their patterns and maintaining enough HP to dig in further is the exact kind of experience I look for in video games. The higher difficulties offer similarly fantastic replay value, as the bosses getting denser patterns and doing way more damage forces you to really learn their patterns and sharpen your gameplay as well as exacerbating the importance of routing to good items early. And on top of all that, there are no-hit achievements for every boss (with much appreciated leniency that allows for one to three hits for some of the super long lategame bosses), which will really have you branding their patterns into your brain. Working to collect the no-hit achievements is one of the most fun things I've done in this game. I really must emphasize over and over how incredible these bosses are. They're obvious love letters to the Touhou series, with a few of them being adaptations of existing spellcards and most of them exemplifying Touhou's ideal of patterns that are both really pretty and interesting to dodge. Rabi-Ribi's bosses are the best translation of Touhou's game design style that I've ever seen. If you're looking for a Touhou metroidvania, this should be your first stop, accept no substitutes. Some metroidvanias can be cleared with a pseudo "0%" item completion, which is more of a low-item run where you still have to pick up a couple movement upgrades. Rabi-Ribi instead has a true 0% achievement, as you can complete the game without ever picking up a single upgrade (aside from your ranged weapon and the Bunny Amulet ). This includes skipping your melee weapon . The maingame is explicitly designed to facilitate this while still being engaging on a regular playthrough, and although the postgame is less charitable to a 0% toolkit, the game adds some extra springs here and there to make it possible to beat the postgame final boss on 0%. It's a really cool challenge to have in the game. Nothing is perfect, and this game has a few failings. They're primarily focused on its writing and art, the former being occasionally incomprehensible and the latter being kinda horny (though there is absolutely nothing explicit). However, the story is comprehensible enough to function as an excuse for the gameplay (which is all it really needs to do), there's a workshop mod to turn off portraits in dialogue, and most importantly, if you really don't like the art or the writing, you can just mash the "skip cutscene" button and the game will still mark up your map with notifications of where you're supposed to be heading off to, so you won't miss anything on the gameplay front. Honestly, I wouldn't worry at all about writing or art. This game could have literally no plot and flash game tier graphics and it would still be better than half the games on the market because the gameplay carries it so hard. The cast's writing may not be memorable, but their boss fights absolutely are. Item cleanup is iffy though. I can't really excuse that. The itemfinder is not great and there's no way to mark up the map. Even so, there's so much good in this game that I'm willing to give it a pass here, and a lot of the unique items can be found with an average amount of intelligent exploration and due diligence. Plus, the [url=https://rabidb.com/]fan-made RabiDB site is so good at helping find the more generic items that the lack of of a good itemfinder / map pins hurts way less than it could've. Oh, right, the music is also fantastic. The [url=https://youtu.be/3-VvBITKNys?si=bGyhBFH8uDE5LHEX]boss themes most of all, but even the [url=https://youtu.be/aruhzf6fS1c?si=GzaA3Yj2aqCok3tS]area themes are really good. Seriously, this game is amazing. I genuinely believe that Rabi-Ribi is better than 99% of the games I've ever played.
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