Rabi-Ribi

This is a strange game to recommend because it has a presentation style that can easily turn people away in a sea of Metroidvanias that won't concern you with getting weird looks. If you can look past that, what you end up with is one of the most thrilling collections of boss battles I've ever experienced. An absolute plethora of unique, interesting and just spectacular patterns with plenty of difficulty tuning that you really feel (it's not just 'oh, this does more damage', but more 'oh, I was comfortable with dodging this and now it's making me work for every bit of positive momentum'). It's a game that will beat you down into submission until you finally accomplish something you never thought you had in you.

i lost my virginity while playing this game

I wanted to play this game more and more, but on the Hard difficulty level, it became a grind with zero progress. Overall, in short, it's one of the most fun games I ever played, and at the same time of the most annoying. Bullet Hell: This game is bullet hell, but the icy movements, MCs hitbox that is invisible outside of focus mode that is hyper uncomfortable to use, and for some reason delayed jumps after landing on the ground, are completely incompatible with the bullet hell genre. Why all bullet hell is not fun and unfair, because about half of the bosses attacks are simple homing attacks. Homing attacks almost completely disappear after Chapter 5, but before that, the game is unfair from a bullet hell perspective and can't called a Bullet Hell. I am sure it is how it is because it's impossible to create a newbie-friendly bullet hell that won't be boring for veterans. So, to make life hard for veterans and create POSSIBLE problems for newcomers, the developers decided to add a ton of homing attacks, which are terrible in standard bullet hell games. If bullet hell would be everywhere like in the end-game then I would enjoy this game much more. World exploration: Incredibly…

Easily one of the best bullet hell metroidvanias I've ever played.

i heard this was the monogatari of the genre and honestly couldn't think of a more accurate description. one of if not the best metroidvania game but most people won't realize this because the game gatekeeps itself with fanservice and by being very difficult (played on hard idk how standard is but i imagine it's still way harder than 99% of metroidvanias, late game is insane). map design and exploration aren't as good as in other metroidvanias but the gameplay is and it has some of my favorite bossfights. also great ost and bunny girls play it.

Rabi-Ribi is a metroidvania that is HARD AS BALLS yet somehow manages to feel fair all the way to the end. You can spend hours on end trying to beat up a boss, and it is really fun figuring out how you tackle specific bullet hell patterns and coming out of them alive... and I played on normal difficulty (You know, there are 3 or 5 harder difficulty settings out there). Expect maybe 20-25+ hours for your first playthrough depending on your skill and difficulty level. The exploration part is largely non-linear where you can really just go almost anywhere and beat at least a dozen bosses in any order beyond the prologue. In fact, it's so non-linear that if you look at achievements carefully you'd see that it's entirely possible to beat the entire game with no items (including the main attack weapon). The story and writing is meh, and this game actually has less sexual content than what you might expect (The most you'll see is sprites of anime girls not wearing pants for some reason, which you can remove with a workshop mod if you feel icky about it). The game looks really replayable (with harder difficulty runs, sequence break runs, 0% item runs, etc.) but I haven't done a second ru…