Sometimes you see a game like Rabi-Ribi for sale on Steam with overwhelmingly positive reviews and pause to consider the kind of zealous fanbase it might have attracted and how that may have obfuscated the game's actual quality. The game's icon, on the left there, suggests a world of nubile anime bunnygirls and fanservice out the wazoo: the kind of aesthetic a certain subset of the internet gaming community, that particularly unpalatable one who tend to have ahegao avatars and show up on message boards to decry "virtual signalling" and "SJWs", often drops all pretense of rational critique to fight in its favor because they perceive any criticism against it as a slight against their heterosexuality and the continued rightful place of the male gaze in the video game medium.

Eeeeeeeven so, my intent is to check out any and all Indie spacewhippers of noteworthy status eventually, so any and all reservations were quickly set aside to see what this game had going for it.

Rabi-Ribi has the same kind of can-do low-budget spirit and evident adoration of cute girls doing cute things that the Touhou Project franchise regularly displays, and is on the whole very reminiscent of a lot of "doujin" (the Japanese version of Indie, usually focusing on niche otaku qualities like moe and maid outfits) I've played in the past, in particular Cave Story and Pharaoh Rebirth. The Touhou comparison is more than skin-deep, however: the game's many boss fights - and it has a commendable number with an equally commendable amount of variety, if only in the attack patterns and not visual design - all have a danmaku or "bullet hell" aspect to them where the boss will frequently send out waves of difficult-to-avoid projectiles that the player must focus on evading before they can carve out a moment for their own counter assault. The player is equipped with a ranged magical attack, courtesy of their fairy friend Ribbon (the "Ribi" of the title, the "Rabi" being the rabbit anthro protagonist Erina), which can be used to keep the pressure on enemies and bosses until Erina can get close enough for her more damaging hammer combos. This loop of skating around avoiding bullets and then using the downtime between waves to lay in stronger hits is highly reminiscent of bullet hell shoot 'em ups and other action games with that same conceit (like Outland, NieR, or Cuphead), and it's compelling enough alone to figure out these waves and strike back when an opportunity presents itself. In true bullet hell form, your heroine has a tiny hit-box around her center mass rather than one that encapsulates the entire sprite, so avoiding the sheer mass of bullets on-screen isn't always as intimidating a prospect as it first appears.

While the boss fights are the clear centerpiece, each of which features a different anime lady with their own quirky personality, the game's no slouch when it comes to the more traditional aspects of the spacewhipper genre. Rabi-Ribi is going for a more substance over style approach, so while the massive game world can be a bit plain it is filled with bonus areas, secrets, collectibles, new traversal abilities, upgrades (both in the common incremental stat boost sense and an opt-in "badge" system of which only a finite number can be equipped at once), and other mysteries to uncover. The general gameplay loop is that Erina and Ribbon intend to travel to a strange alternative universe (ours, naturally, and it's filled with grabby otaku trying to take low-angle shots of the heroine) to find a missing friend of theirs - to do this, they need to find special people in their world with enough magical power to temporarily open the gateway, and meeting each of these people for the first time invariably leads to a boss confrontation borne of a misunderstanding. However, as you continue to explore and find new traversal abilities, the amount of linearity the game exhibits starts to drop away and suddenly you have this enormous world of non-critical areas to explore.

Tied into this is an ingenious second difficulty modifier: in addition to the game's standard difficulty slider - the higher you go, the more proificient you'd better be with bullet hell platformers - there's an additional toggle that lets you choose between an agnostic boss difficulty and one that's been tweaked to consider all the power-ups the player could acquire at that moment in time. In other words, if you don't regularly backtrack for power-ups that have since become accessible since the last major story milestone, the bosses will begin to outclass you. It's a way of, if not necessarily rewarding dedicated backtrackers, ensuring that they'll never need to worry that they've overdone the side exploration to the point where they can effortlessly trounce whomever the next story boss might be. if you prefer to have an edge, you can simply stick with the default setting and steamroll the latter half of the bosses with all the power-ups at your fingertips.

As I keep playing Rabi-Ribi - I'm close to the end of the story, but barely over 50% on the item and map completion trackers - I find that it continues to impress me at every turn. While at first the combat felt sort of spammy and basic, acquiring all these abilities and power-ups and alternative elemental magics for Ribbon has built up quite the arsenal of options to fall back on, and I've even started to show improvement dodging the writhing mass of kaleidoscopic nonsense being tossed my way at every interval. The visuals and story beats, while still vaguely fanservice-y, are sweetly wholesome to the point of diabetic shock. The music's been super catchy in some areas, and inoffensively bland in others. Like many Indies, it doubles down on what matters most to its creators - tricky boss fights, cuteness, vast environments to explore - to the detriment of other elements that couldn't be afforded the time or resources to polish to a fine sheen. Even so, I can't find fault with the choices these developers have made. Even if I still kind of suck at it - I'm glad I'm playing on the recommended difficulty for newcomers - I'm having a blast.

Rating: 4 out of 5.