TEVI Mini Review

Bunny girls, busty angels, alarmingly kawaii demon boys, and bullet hell Metroidvania gameplay - it's TEVI, baby! And it's finally out on Xbox after a few delays. It's a follow-up to Rabi-Ribi, but it's way, way, way more polished than this team's previous effort. It looks and sounds great and the gameplay, which combines 2D Metroidvania exploration with bullet hell elements where you avoid bullet patterns during boss fights, is undeniably solid. 

But it's equally undeniably generic. It doesn't really do anything new in the 2D Metroidvania genre in terms of movement abilities or combat or exploration or anything else. It's all pretty standard stuff. It does have a cute bunny girl and lots and lots of other very cute girl characters, and that does make up for deficiencies elsewhere, but I still walked away from the game feeling pretty underwhelmed. 

I also feel like it's too long, but that isn't really accurate. It took me under 20-hours to beat the game, which is only about half of the time I spent with Afterimage (my favorite game of 2023, you should play it ...), but with TEVI I couldn't wait for it to be over. I attribute that to the story being pretty horrible - to the point I skipped most of it towards the end - and there's tons and tons and tons of VN-style storytelling, but also the overall generic-ness of it I mentioned earlier. I just wanted to be done with it. That isn't a good thing.

Anyway, here's the video version of my thoughts on the game.