Rabi Ribi Irisu Fight Thoughts

8 12月 2023

this is a post vomiting thoughts on how much i adore the mechanics of rabi ribi's postgame boss, irisu, on hard difficulty because this boss fight is now embedded in my brain ever since i finished it a week ago or so. there will be epic mechanics and plot spoilers for this bunny danmaku game.

irisu is the final boss of the postgame and there's nothing prior that matches the demand needed for this battle of attrition. successful attempts take 15-25 minutes depending on how aggressive players get.

it's highly unlikely a player is going to beat her at first try because the first thing that irisu does is stack debuffs (including instant death) on you. they'll likely die from the first bullet irisu spews. these debuffs can only be avoided if the player correctly buffers their super carrot (a niche attack that gives the player character i-frames) and then times all their amulets (a command that is used for i-frames). to put it another way, the player has to use up all their i-frame items in the beginning and become themselves to be vulnerable to irisu's attacks for a bit.

irisu has three phases (100% health, 66%, and 33%) and each phase has a different set of danmaku patterns that requires their own strategies to mitigate projectiles. the player will have to air dash between gaps of bullets, guide targeted projectiles through streaming, and even push irisu away from them through charged shots in order to avoid getting nuked. at the same time, they need to attack irisu in order to whittle down their health and hopefully make the fight shorter. to do that consistently, the player needs to get used to navigating the entire screen and the pixel hitbox of their player character.

what makes the irisu fight so daunting compared to other boss fights in other games is that it's an endurance match. even if you're hitting irisu hard by doing jump attacks here and there, you need to basically outlast her. you can't be a "perfect player", but you do need to be a patient one. every phase becomes more manageable the more you practice and know where irisu is going to strike. i entered into a fugue state when i know how exactly she'll attack, when i'm likely to get hit, when is the perfect time to whip out your hammer, etc. and i started to understand irisu as a character.

one of the most interesting things with gemayue's games is that the stories are pretty bad. rabi-ribi has some bizarre story about bunny extinctions and tevi's no nonsense, no fun story makes it hard to appreciate. however, every boss in each game is expressive and features bullet patterns that make them memorable.

i'm reminded of how ZUN started naming his bullet patterns with "spell cards". to quote from my own translation,

One big shortcoming in shoot em’ ups is that enemy attacks often lack a distinctive identity. I tried my hand in naming these attack patterns. After doing so, the bullets started to gain meaning and I thought they became more interesting.

And that’s what the spell card system is about. It feels like those special moves from fighting games.

for ZUN, spell cards/named bullet patterns have their own narrative meaning especially if there's a story and character integrated to them. they give a purpose for players to overcome these bullet hells.

what makes irisu as a boss battle so interesting is that she's framed as an introvert character who is guilty of committing some heinous crime and cannot embrace the affections of erina (the player character). at the same time, she wants to possess erina and is jealous of everyone else. all of her bullet patterns are a push-and-pull match of her feelings. she pushes erina way with her screen-filling bullet patterns and then is pulled away when she tries to catch erina with a net. this contradiction of her gay feelings toward erina is very much the boss fight.

so when the player is trying to master these three phases of irisu, they are constantly appreciating the full spectrum of her emotions. this mess of bullet patterns is the only way for irisu to express her feelings and the player/erina has to endure the twisty and turning projectiles if they want to help reconcile irisu's feelings.

but there's also a catch. after the player is decent enough to drain irisu's health to near 0%, irisu takes one last stab in rejecting being accepted: she pathetically leaps to erina's position with her net and it is easy to avoid her. but all of a sudden, her health goes back to 100% health and she summons her final spell card inspired by dodonpachi daifukkatsu's true last boss: you must avoid a sequence of long bullet patterns that feels like forever and that's all you do -- it's a straight up avoidance/survival session.

this last moment of the boss battle is exhausting. i've reached this phase so many times and then lost my cool, losing very good runs to a bullet that can be jumped over. even if i was consistently reaching this phase, each attempt wore on me. it's draining to see twenty minutes gone down the drain every session. but that's the kind of herculean effort erina has to take in order to accept irisu.

when i finally survived this boss fight and saw the white screen and rank clear, i let out a sigh of relief.

but more importantly, irisu is embraced by erina and erina says "i caught you and i'm not letting you go!"

this silly line made me sob. this was the most emotional boss battle i've ever experienced.

i must stress again: this game's plot veers on nonsense and ultra-thin characterization at times. however, the demand placed on the player to understand irisu through her bullet patterns is so immense that there's meaning in "catching" irisu. i know the effort to "catch" her. i spent days thinking about the boss battle, watching videos on how people mitigate irisu's bullet patterns, and so on. irisu's psychology is her bullet patterns and i've come to know her very well, so it tugs on my heartstrings to see that line where communication is finally achieved.

one of the best things about rabi-ribi is how gemayue knows how to communicate complicated feelings through the player grinding bullet hell patterns. he may be a poor writer, but he is a storyteller: the letters just happen to be projectiles targeting you. irisu may just be a character inspired by gochiusa, but her actualization as a character comes from her boss fight demanding you to pay attention to how she expresses herself.

this fight is really what made me fall in love with rabi-ribi as a whole. while i enjoyed traversing its open metroidvania world, i think this fight kinda captures the power of storytelling in games. you don't need that many words (or even a story that makes much sense) to capture people's minds; all you need is to entangle them with your game rules and make them struggle to see the game eye-to-eye.

i like it when games demand recognition and appreciation from the player. games can create meaningful experiences if we give them the feedback it needs. this may result in friction and pain, but as the rabi ribi irisu fight showed, it can be the most powerful form of communication: we accept every element (abrasive or fun) in their own terms and let the game guide us to what it wants to say about something. i think this is the potential of games in general.