Bunny girl with a hammer, what could go wrong. Well, a lot, I suppose. Somehow all the bunnies have disappeared and Erina, our protagonist, has turned into a bunny girl instead of a bunny? Whats going on? Whats this bunny phenomenon thats making every other girl on the island try to capture you? Guess you’ll just have to play this game to find that out.
Rabi Ribi may look like a cute metroidvania, but the main gameplay element is its boss fights, of which you’ll run into between 20 and 60 on a run. These boss fights are more akin to bullet hell games than just regular bouts, the boss character will throw bombs at you, streams of bullets, from themselves or the side of the screen, forcing you to figure out how to navigate through patterns to survive. It’s gonna take some memorisation and grit to get through this game. You can reduce (or increase) the difficulty any time before Chapter 2 by talking to a girl in the forest. Like any bullet hell game, your damage box is a lot smaller than it seems. At the start of a fight, a small diamond appears on your sprite, that diamond is your hitbox to everything except stage hazards, everything else on your sprite doesnt matter.
I recommend for your first playthrough using Standard mode instead of Alternative mode. Both modes scale the boss level based on the number of bosses beaten and your progress through the story, but Standard also scales the boss level on how many items you’ve collected, whereas Alternative essentially forces you to forgo the story until you’ve collected as many items as you can or else the bosses will outpace you. A good starting difficulty would be Novice if you don’t have experience with platformers or bullet hells, and Normal if you do. Casual is for when you want to facetank through the story, and Hard is for when you want to be repeatedly stepped on by an all female cast.
Oh and if you enjoy and get good at the game, there is a whole lot of challenge achievements you could try going for. Shoutouts to No/Low hit runs of each level 50 boss, reaching a certain end-game boss with no items, reaching a certain mid-game boss first, beating the post-game boss with no HP upgrades, and beating the whole game without touching any spikes, check out the steam achievement descriptions for more details on those.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/400910 £13.59 (£27.29 for bundle with all DLC)
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Rabi-Ribi-1651288.html £26.99 (Includes most DLC in base game price)
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