Rabi-Ribi is perhaps my favorite game that's impossible to recommend. It proves that you can make an excellent Metroidvania while being completely unbeholden to any of Metroid or Castlevania's aesthetics or conventions. But most people will take one look at the box art and screenshots and immediately disregard the game, waving it aside as a "gooner game." And it's easy for me to say that those people are wrong, and that the game's aesthetic has no bearing on its amazingly-executed exploration, fun and well-designed bosses, and incredible replayability. But, yes, this is a game filled with attractive female characters, most of whom have a personality the depth of a puddle, that it likes to flaunt repeatedly, and it's reasonable to be skeeved out by that.
However, Rabi-Ribi is not solely defined by its copious amount of anime boobs. It is, as I have alluded to, the best-designed Metroidvania you can play right now. Many people like to praise the genre for its nonlinearity and freedom of exploration, and this game maximizes on that quality. If you know what you're doing, you can go just about anywhere as soon as you're past the tutorial segments, and it's extremely gratifying to feel like you're breaking the game by being somewhere you're not supposed to yet. It's possible to beat the final boss with every item collected, or none at all.
That, of course, brings us to the bosses, which are also excellently constructed. Given that you can tackle most of them in just about any order, their attacks are designed so that you can make do with whatever moves you've acquired up to that point, and even if you're well prepared, you can still get crushed. But it never feels like you lost without putting up a fight, since you get a fair amount of hits you can take before going down, and there are healing items you can stock up on (if you'd like). The end-game bosses, however, pull no punches, and require you to use your entire moveset to the fullest to have any chance. The game uses its bullet-hell elements well here, using tons of projectiles to box out where you can and can't move to make problems with specific solutions in a way that a game without these elements couldn't.
The graphics and sound on display are... they're fine. The pixel-art is importantly always readable, but none of the sprites or compositions really stand out, and with how sprites are stretched and squashed, there are often pixels of different sizes next to each other, which can be distracting. The music, for the most part, is memorable, but not something I paid much attention to in play, or that I'd listen to on my own time, outside of a few strong tracks (usually the final boss tracks).
As I made mention of in the introduction, the story and character-writing are definitely the game's weakest aspects. Most of the characters don’t have any identifiable traits, and exist just as objectives, bosses to be fought. The story never gets much more complicated than the opening suggests: Erina has turned from bunny to bunny-girl, figure it out. I think there was supposed to be some deeper stuff in the later chapters, but the writing is so muddy that it was hard to tell. Neither of these aspects hamper the game much; it is squarely about the gameplay, and the narrative exists just to further that along.
Overall, though, Rabi-Ribi is truly a triumph of novel ideas in a genre that’s beginning to become oversaturated with so many games that are content to remake the classics without much re-interpretation, to stick to the template put down by SM and SotN so closely that they become unmemorable. Just another game to be played and forgotten. But Rabi-Ribi, and its developers, have not left my mind even nearly a decade after this game’s release. I was extremely hyped for TEVI, and I’m extremely excited for whatever it is that they’re working on right now.
9.5/10