To me, Rabi Ribi is a masterpiece, and one of my favorite games of all time. It's hard as nails, has tons of fun secrets, a deep combat system, and freedom of exploration in a genre known for overwhelming players with what they can’t do. It's easy to see just how much it bucked traditional metroidvania trends from just playing it for a few minutes. You start the game with two wall jumps, you unlock most of your combat abilities very fast, and Quick Drop provides quite decent mobility from the beginning. What made Rabi Ribi stand out was that it was indulgent in a way that spoke to GemaYue’s particular design sense. It was confident -- it knew what it was and challenged you to get on its wavelength. As a result, it was often obtuse, with major mechanics being left up entirely to player discovery, a bold philosophy you can only get from a genuinely passionate capital G Gamer who wants to share his vision of fun to the world; one reminiscent of games before the Internet spoiled their every little secret.

Maybe you're expecting me to start bemoaning Tevi’s lack of ‘soulkino’ or whatever right about now, but really, even though it sacrificed the freedom and intentional jank for more curation and tutorializing, this is a great follow-up to Rabi Ribi from a gameplay perspective. There are more helping hands to accommodate new players, like Core Expansion, numerous sources of healing, bosses being more exploitable, and the existence of Golden Dodge, but it's still a challenging, and most importantly, FUN experience due to all of the new toys at your disposal. The combat depth, for one, is technically leagues above Rabi Ribi. The sheer number of Sigils, while cumbersome at times, opens up a plethora of builds to pursue, from pure melee to pure ranged to hybrid to bomb focused to combo focused, etc, and they always give you new things to think about when interacting with the mechanics. Rabi Ribi was also about the flow of dodge boss pattern > unleash big combo > prepare for boss’ retaliation > repeat, and I like that both games encourage you to keep the pressure up even during boss attacks for the sake of that all-important combo rank, but with Tevi, the moment you go in to do your thing while the boss is vulnerable, the world is your oyster. Do an airdash, smack them a few times, spanner ground pound, whirlwind spinny, airdash quintuple flash, big spanner whack, backflip, throw knives that inflict a debuff, unleash a few charge shots, whatever. This is like crack to my Rabi poisoned brain. It is every bit as gratifying as I expected.

So yes, the game was worth the wait for this combat system alone, but the movement is great too. It thankfully retains a lot of the same movement tech from its predecessor (as well as some new ones -- I hope Love Bunny retains the Quick Drop bounce idea), which makes exploring a blast. It helps that the map is freaking huge this time around, and the areas that comprise it are all quite varied and pretty to look at, with another banger soundtrack to boot. Rabi Ribi’s map was more a vehicle to connect the various bosses together, and if you found issue with that, Tevi has environmental hazards and devilish enemy placement in spades. The secrets aren’t messing around either -- it was rarely immediately obvious how to approach them (but they were still more fun to collect in Rabi Ribi due to its ‘jank’ and important gear like airdash accessible early on). Although Tevi's locales are more entertaining overall, sifting through such a massive map for items diminishes my willingness to 100% the game again, but it nonetheless gives players plenty of extrinsic motivation to explore, as not only does uncovering map tiles reward XP, but the potential resources are too useful to pass up especially on the hardest difficulties. I thought I would be annoyed by the crafting system, but it’s actually quite an elegant alternative to Rabi Ribi’s admittedly odd, loose idea of progression. You no longer need to look to enemy grinding for money, and the resources which gate item upgrades and Sigil crafting are supplied at a reasonably steady rate. If you just play through the game normally, it’s likely you will be able to fully upgrade everything well before its conclusion, though it’s not like you even need to outside of a few specific ones, as they’re mostly modular stat boosts. This heavy injection of Game Design™, for better or worse, makes Tevi feel like a more standard metroidvania experience. If you want, you can go out of your way to snag every buff potion available, equip all the powerful Sigils, upgrade your equipment, and craft all the strongest healing items, but if you want a challenge, you need to dip your toes into self-imposed handicaps. Rabi Ribi, on the other hand, never allowed the player to become too powerful due to its level scaling mechanic, which was a necessary evil to ensure the game was reasonably beatable on low item% runs while also allowing bosses to become unspeakable hellspawns when players have everything except excuses to fall back on. Tevi ditched this intense boss scaling and instead decided to tie only Bunny Potions to item%, which is a sensible move. However, because I autistically searched every nook and cranny, the game became a cakewalk around Chapter 5 (yes, on Expert mode), which kind of surprised me, but that's not to say it’s bad design, I mean, I was rewarded for my exploration. I’m just a weirdo who likes my games unreasonably hard, so Rabi Ribi’s approach is more my speed. Speaking of difficulty, Tevi unfortunately commits a similar error to Rabi Ribi by forcing players to finish the game before its hardest difficulty is unlocked, which I will never understand the point of. I guess I would want to die if I were forced to manually skip the million cutscenes before each boss a bunch more times.

Actually, on that note…

Tevi suffers from one major problem that Rabi Ribi doesn’t, and I feel it will ultimately be what strengthens my allegiance to that game as superior. Tevi doesn’t know when to shut up. Characters talk talk talk, going on and on about the lore, with endless exposition and meaningless tangents, and the dialogue is not well written enough to justify it. Neither is the story as a whole, unfortunately, despite the occasionally inspired idea. This makes it all the more frustrating because the game is entirely beholden to its story, resulting in poorer map design decisions. Sure, while a cute & charming vibe, Rabi Ribi’s plot was the furthest thing from a literary masterpiece, but at least it wasn’t an active hindrance, and the little dialogue it did have was straight and to the point. There were almost no gates between you and enjoying the game. To think that Tevi went through all this trouble to design itself around such a disappointingly barebones, subpar story is just sad, frankly. The silver lining to all this is the Free Roam and Speedrun options, which, personally, as someone who’s currently going through the game again on Speedrun mode, make the previous experience feel like a prison. I love Tevi -- when I actually get to play it, that is. Your first time through will be affronted with a plague of text boxes which may as well say “NO FUN ALLOWED” copy and pasted hundreds of times. I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Rabi Ribi has better writing than Tevi, and I will die on that hill.

GemaYue is a genius game designer, and next time, hopefully in a direct sequel to Rabi Ribi, his abilities can shine unrestrained by a story he is being compelled to tell. Until then, at the very least, I am enjoying the post-game modes more than the initial playthrough, and I trust that it will get several good DLCs in the future.