Rabi-Ribi

• Genre: Exploratory Action Platformer (Metroidvania)
• Time Played: 17 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Too long. It should have ended at the "fake out ending" which is definitely not the real ending because nothing is resolved, it literally tells you there is more to play, and you don't get any of the "post game" content until after the second, "true ending".
• Pleased/Disappointed: Kinda disappointed.
• Why I played: I thought the sprite art was cute and this gets a lot of praise from people who like metroidvanias, and it sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with over 9000 reviews. 
• Recommend to others: Not really. There is better of... everything this is trying to do. Even, very specifically what it's trying to do/be; there are better kawaii shmup metroidvanias.

Rabi-Ribi didn't impress me much. A lot of people really like it, but I just found it to be kind of a mess. The controls are messy, the maps are messy, the enemies are just kind of chaotic and go at you, the dialog/writing is... poor at best. It tries to employ a kind of coy titillation that I feel it's not even appropriate to say is only for "teenage boys" but rather, a certain kind of person who just really likes when things are surrounded with obvious innuendo but it's okay because there isn't any REAL sexual content? I dunno exactly how to put it, but it's the kind of stuff that makes the Neptunia games look like a form of high art. It just an excuse to have several girls run around calling each other "master" and do dumb anime trope stuff.

And there are games that do it better, at that. If that's what you're into it. It would be more forgivable if the game was genuinely good outside of that, but like I said, it's a mess. It's the kind of game you say "This was clearly made by one person" (derogatory), not "I can't believe this was made by one person!" (non-derogatory). That said I'm not even sure it's made "by one person" it just feels like it. It feels like someone's little pet project they worked on to practice game design. Everything is just so sloppy, and having fully played through it now, I just can't believe how much praise this game gets. I know my tastes are not always the same as the greater voice - I don't think Hollow Knight is that great, but I wouldn't call it a bad game and can definitely see why people are taken with it. This I just don't get.

I do REALLY like the sprite work, and if I am being completely honest it wasn't a completely terrible game. It was just messy, sloppy, and felt amateur in many ways and my expectations were higher. It also was unnecessarily long and has you go through quite a few grueling gauntlets. Which I may not have minding as much if the game was more polished, had tighter controls, and more direction with how it's enemies deal damage and how you avoid damage. You get a moment in each boss battle where it reminds you where your hitbox is, like a bullet-hell shmup where you only have a little diamond hitbox. But many of those you can press a button to always see your hitbox, or there is a clever indicator in it's design like the blue window on a red ship design, or a necklace's pendant on a character sprite. But none of that in this. That wouldn't have been enough though. It needed a lot.