Rabi-Ribi review

written 2025-11-26

Rabi-Ribi is a metroidvania I played in 2025-11, at a friend's recommendation. I'd previously played TEVI from the same creators, so although Rabi-Ribi was made first, my impressions of it are biased by that.

TEVI review

I played on Hard, and took about 25 hours (according to Steam) to finish the main story. This is far longer than howlongtobeat.com says, but I think that's because of the difficulty, since most of my time was dying at bosses. This game is actually pretty hard on Hard, which is refreshing! But my overall impression of the game is that it's just okay.

Combat

The player's abilities are very similar to TEVI, with a melee combo that commits to an animation and histstuns enemies, several different modes of ranged attacks (provided by a floating sidekick) that can be fired at the same time as melee, and invulnerability-on-demand which can be used a few times per battle. There's no free invulnerability or blocking; defense is based on positional dodging.

Though I don't dislike any of these mechanics, I'm disappointed that it's so similar. When I play a second game from the same devs I always hope for something very different, but it seems they rarely provide that. Of course, I realize this criticism belongs to TEVI rather than Rabi-Ribi.

Rabi-Ribi is much simpler than TEVI, which I much appreciate. It's like a version of TEVI that can be understood by a mortal. It still has more mechanics and abilites than most other action platformers I've played, but not too much.

I also think it does a better job than TEVI designing the ranged attack modes so that multiple are useful. Blue is the simplest and does good single target damage in a straight line. Yellow fires a continuous beam while charging which can hit multiple enemies and pierce terrain, and its charge shot has a slight spread. Green seeks making it able to more easily hit floating or jumpy enemies, but misses at close range. Red does the highest single target damage but has a max range and needs the target to stay in the hitbox for a while to receive full damage, which you can force by histunning them with melee. Rainbow's main thing is converting mana to damage faster than other types, so it's good if a boss disappears for a while letting you regen mana, you can unload a full mana meter immediately when they reappear.

Sadly, it has an ergonomic issue that TEVI doesn't have. Ranged shots need to be charged before shooting by holding a button, and because they're independent from all your other actions, this basically means you're holding and releasing that button in a rhythm for the entire time you're fighting, which makes my finger sore sometimes, especially during one boss that's completely immune to melee.

Normal enemies

Like TEVI, normal enemies are a joke. They can almost always be killed in a single combo or less, which often means they don't even get to attack before they die. And even when they do hit you, their damage is low enough that you can just not care.

Boss fights

Like TEVI, bosses have enormous movesets. I haven't counted but I think each one has at least 15 different attacks. And like TEVI, while it's a welcome break from many other games where bosses have only 3-4 moves, I think this goes a bit *too* far. When bosses have this many moves, I can't really learn them because I often see each move only once or less per attempt. This also compounds my biggest problem with the game: it's horrible about fairly telegraphing attacks. It's the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen some really bad cases. Often I was 10 attempts into a boss and still hadn't figured out how it's even possible to dodge some of their attacks. Sometimes I looked up videos for advice, only to find other players also didn't know and just tanked the damage. Sometimes I asked a friend who's very experienced with the game, and she also had no idea how to dodge them. Or she did, but it relied on knowing a behavior of the attack that I couldn't have reasonably figured out, for example knowing that certain projectiles can't hurt me while I'm in the air, when the attack seems to give you no reason to be in the air unless you already know this.

Once you do know how the attacks work, most of them are pretty fun to dodge. They involve navigating spams of projectiles with different movement patterns, which requires some improvisation, more interesting than the melee attacks with repeatable counters that fill many other action games.

Sadly, despite being a platformer, no bosses really use that. They all take place in flat empty rooms.

For most of the game you can usually fit exactly 1 combo between boss attacks, which made the fights feel sadly turn-based to me. But I felt this got better late in the game when my stamina meter got big enough to allow more possibilities than repeating the same combo all the time.

Whether you enjoy the boss fights is the big question here, because they are the vast majority of playtime. While I did largely enjoy them, I was disappointed by how little non-boss content there is. I felt like I only got to do 5 minutes of exploration inbetween each boss.

Exploration and level design

The little amount of exploration time the game offers is also not great. The map only shows rooms as featureless tiles making them hard to recognize, and doesn't always make it clear which rooms have unexplored exits, and you can't place markers or anything to remind yourself of places to revisit.

There are a few areas with environmental hazards that are:

Unreasonably hard to see (spikes are often very small and placed against a background with very little contrast)
Absurdly damaging (many of them take more than half your health in one hit, several times as damaging as any other enemy or boss attack)
Sometimes both! once I even got killed from full health by a spike in a dark room where it was literally invisible until I stepped on it.

There are a lot of hidden passages and breakable walls, which is a problem because there's no way to see them, so you're encouraged to try bombing every wall to find secrets. There are also several different kinds of identical-looking tiles that can be broken in different ways or not at all, so you have to try multiple things on each.

Autosave traps

There are multiple places where, with no warning, I got trapped with an autosave into a boss fight I was underleveled or underprepared for, unable to leave the area until beating them (except through loading a previous save and losing progress). Difficulty can only be lowered at a certain NPC, so when you're trapped like this, you can't even do that. It feels like a taunt when that feature exists but is inaccessible when you need it.

The final boss is one of these, and in that case, the autosave was actually *in the fight*, so I couldn't even change my equipment! And there's no chance to make a manual save after the 2nd-last boss, so if you get this bad autosave and have to load from earlier, you have to fight that again, unless you edit your save file like I did.

Grinding and consumables

TEVI has grindable resources but it's not a super big deal because it's usually not the limiting factor on acquiring permanent upgrades. In Rabi-Ribi it is. It's also the same resource used to buy consumables, which means consumables cost permanent upgrades, so they're never worth using. To be fair, I didn't mind that since I normally prefer games without consumables.

Story

The story is terrible. Its entire substance is basically "There's a bunnygirl! Isn't that cute?". Not every game needs a detailed story, but this game puts a ton of weight on story by having tons of cutscenes, so I expect more from it. Heck, several times there's even pauses for cutscenes *during boss fights*.

The plot is very repetitive. It mostly consists of 4 iterations of a cycle where you gather some characters, each of whom is a boss, and then get them to help you activate a teleporter. It leads to a boss, and then you return without having found what you're looking for, and have to go find 2 more characters to activate the teleporter again.

Nearly every boss fight takes place because of either a misunderstanding or a character being mind controlled to attack you. After about the 15th instance of this, I started skipping pre-boss conversations because I knew the outcome already.

I also dislike the lack of character diversity. I've seen a lot of gender-lopsided casts, but this is the first I've seen where literally the entire cast is one gender (except 1 optional side character who doesn't even have a cutscene sprite). And they all have the same body type and aesthetic. I struggled to remember who was who.

It also sexualizes some of its characters, both through their outfits, and through certain scenes and CGs. I'm put off by this (and would've been more if I hadn't been warned by a friend before playing). Speaking of sexual stuff, there's even one who's really gross, a character who tries to coerce the protagonist into some BDSM thing and then gets treated like a friend later.