Rabi-Ribi

Rabi-Ribi is sold as both metroidvania and bullet hell. The story is about a rabbit turned human and her quest to find her owners lost sister. To do so you run around in the wilderness and find people to fight and invite back to the town so you can use a magical mcguffin to make repeated journeys to a strange dimension in an effort to save the sister. On the metroidvania side of things Rabi-Ribi has lots of little things to find that give you a nice little dopamine boost but in the end do very little to enhance the actual gameplay. A small percentile increase to your pitiful damage. Or how about a 1.5% increase to your stamina that is completely empty after one combo anyways? While actually exciting upgrades like slide or double jump are hard locked behind story progress. Trying to enter those areas leads to your character and company literally saying 'I don't feel like going there'. At least until you progressed far enough into the story and one of the people you beat up tells you about someone else to beat up in that formerly inaccessible part. Combat against regular enemies was kind of boring most of the time and frustrating the rest. Most enemies were no real threat as they deal little damage and die in just a couple of hits. Some others like to spam randomly moving shapes all over the screen which just made map traversal annoying. Enemy variety is also rather low. Most of the enemies are (fake) bunny girls, and a lot of palette swapped fish, fairies, mushrooms and the like. On the bullet hell side of things there is the boss combat. Initially fun with different bosses of course having slightly different movesets and their own personality in some of their attack patterns and choice of offensive weaponry. But these will start feel samey the longer the game goes on. Boss health and their damage dealt scales with either story progress + collected items or just story progress depending on your choice. And while the game tells us that items will always benefit the player more than the bosses, that doesn't stop it from giving bosses health in the thousands while you're well away from breaking triple digit damage. Due to cheap recovery items and a certain magic attack I was rarely in danger of dying but at a point these fights just start to overstay their welcome because of how long they take. Also this might just be an issue for me but I don't like that there is no indicator of Erinas hitbox. Especially since later fights turn into a mess of overlapping effects and stuff just happening on your screen I give Rabi-Ribi a thumbs down. Maybe I expected the wrong things from these tags. But for me it just falls flat in the exploration with items being locked because the characters refusing to go where I want. And while the boss fights were a welcome break from the exploration part of the game, they just got more and more tedious as time went on.