Our fates entwine, embarking on a journey to find the gears that can change the world.
In the vast and diverse continent of Az, three major races dominate a land scarred by conflict and teeming with danger, yet overflowing with mysteries, Magitek, and treasures from its wealth of history. At the behest of her father, Professor Zema, the bunny-eared engineer-adventuress Tevi embarks on a journey across Az to research the mysterious Astral Gears, encountering many friends and foes alike as she uncovers the land's many secrets and stories.
TEVI is an action-adventure Bullet Hell Metroidvania and a Spiritual Successor to Rabi-Ribi, developed by GemaYue,note WAERO,note and Ein Lee.note It released on the PC and North American and Japanese Nintendo Switch on November 30, 2023, with a European and Australian Switch release planned for December 21, and a Playstation 4/5 and Xbox release planned later in 2024. The game is receiving regular updates, and a full post-game DLC has been confirmed to be in the works with no estimated release date.
TEVI provides examples of:
- Achievement Mockery: There's an achievement for getting knocked out by a rabbit. For reference, rabbits always only do a single point of damage per hit while your health is measured in hundreds, meaning you'll generally have to do it on purpose unless you get supremely unlucky.
- Anyone Can Die: By the end of the game, Greasetrap, Frankie, Charon, Professor Zema, Cyril and even Sable are all dead.
- Arrange Mode: Games can have a wide array of modifiers added to them, which stack with each other and can lead to some ridiculous runs if enough are used at once. However, many of them will need a previous game to be cleared first before being unlocked.
- Speedrun: Automatically skips all cutscenes and story events, and adds a speedrun timer and completion percent to the UI.
- Free Roam: Alters the game map to make it as nonlinear as possible, removing story restrictions on most bosses and items, moving things around to make them more accessible, and restoring the hidden techs from Rabi-Ribi. As a result, it must be chosen with Speedrun mode.
- Turbo Mode: Significantly increases the game speed.
- Weapon Mastery: Causes Tevi to start the game with all of her melee skills pre-learned.
- Random Sigils: All sigils are randomized, no matter if they're crafting options, shop options, quest rewards, or found on the map.
- Fast Learner: Tevi starts with an Explorer's Compass and most crafting recipes already unlocked.
- Aggro Bosses: Bosses attack much more frequently and can use most attacks (including their Limit Break) regardless of how much health they have.
- Elite Enemies: All enemies and bosses gain the Elite modifier.
- Speedster: All movement upgrades are unlocked from the start of the game. Naturally, this requires both Speedrun and Free Roam enabled.
- Sigil Pass: Start the game with all equipped sigils from the most recent save file, although you'll still need to get the EP to equip them.
- Art Evolution: Compared to the peppy, often simplistic art style of Rabi-Ribi, TEVI has a much more elaborate and serious art style, with animations for players and enemies alike also being expanded on extensively.
- Assist Character: Tevi's companions Celia and Sable normally support her with fire as her Orbitars, but can be temporarily summoned to directly intervene through their Core Expansions.
- Bittersweet Ending: Tevi defeats Tahlia and the Revenance, saving Az, and Celia is finally given a promotion for her effort, with her even gunning for Tybrious' position with the possibility of her stopping his bloody pursuit of perfection. However, with the deaths of her foster father and extended family, Tevi is left all alone, and since Tahlia's power was the only thing keeping Sable alive after he was mortally wounded by Vassago, he dies too shortly after Tahlia's death, leaving both Tevi and Celia without their best friend. The final shot of the game has Tevi entering Zema's now empty lab before falling to her knees sobbing; depressed, broken, and completely alone.
- Blown Across the Room: Sufficiently powerful attacks can send enemies flying, with additional damage being dealt if you slam them into a wall or other enemies. This can also happen to Tevi herself if she gets nailed by a strong hit.
- Boss Rush: After clearing the game for the first time, entering the Colosseum in Valhalla allows the player to take on a boss rush where they fight every boss back to back with intermittent breaks to restock items and change sigils. In addition to the three base difficulties (Beginner, Standard, Master), there's also Library Boss Rush, for the three developer bosses in the Ana Thema Library, as well as the intentionally overtuned Xtreme Boss Rush unlocked after beating the latter. Beating them has some achievements, Rainbow Bunny Potions, and levels up for grabs, except for Xtreme, which instead gives you an achievement for just attempting it.
- Break Meter: Bosses have a meter beside their health bar which goes down when attacked with melee attacks (or ranged ones with the Ranged Break sigil). Completely depleting it will temporarily stagger the boss, providing a huge opening for damage while notably making them susceptible to juggling and knockback. Larger bosses tend to have extreme resistance or outright immunity to Break depletion, but will also offer alternative means of staggering them, usually by completing secondary objectives in the fight like destroying adds or counteracting a defensive measure.
- Bullet Hell: Enemies have branched out a bit in terms of ways to kill you (such as flamethrowers, telegraphed melee attacks, and Combat Tentacles, to name a few), but this is still the core of most attack patterns.
- The Cameo: Outside of Gema and Yue showing up in the demo (and a devroom), as they did in previous games, Erina and Ribbon are employed in the Tartarus casino, as every casino needs a Bunny Girl. Various other Rabi-Ribi characters appear as cameos in the Rabi-Smash arcade minigame, as well as in the "A Rabi Dream" secret achievement. There's also a poster of Team RWBY hanging over Tevi's bed.
- Cast From Hitpoints: Several sigils will drain Tevi's HP in order to provide their benefits, and some consumables will take away health instead of recovering it, but provide a different kind of buff instead.
- Cast from Money: The Gilded Exultation, obtained by obtaining the two golden hands in the desert and snow bandit bases and bringing them to the Mysterious Traveler at the deepest point of the Misty Maze, slightly buffs all damage output for every 10000 zennies obtained, and additionally adds a money-scaling chance to deal piercing damage when hitting normal enemies at higher HP.
- Collision Damage: Present on all enemies and bosses, but the latter can have their contact damage toggled off by equipping the 0-cost Metamorphose sigil given at the start of the game, which replaces contact damage with physically obstructing the player.
- Combos: Much like the previous game, TEVI has a rank-based combo meter that can be increased by chaining together different attacks. Although it doesn't give a damage boost without specific Sigils, certain moves or abilities will gain new effects at high enough ranks, while others straight up won't activate if you aren't styling hard enough.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: The bosses in the Master Boss Rush and higher will gradually become heavier during a break state, to make it considerably harder to put them in a Cycle of Hurting lasting longer than the stagger.
- Darker and Edgier: Compared to the previous game, which was almost permanently lighthearted and vibrant, TEVI brings a much more gritty atmosphere along with darker elements, and the more detailed art style offers as many graphic and grotesque depictions as it does beauty.
- Elite Mooks: Non-boss enemies can randomly spawn with the "Elite" buff that raises their stats and may slightly change their attack patterns, but causes them to drop more materials and/or health. The Mysterious Traveler's challenges consist entirely of Elite enemies, who are also buffed with Percent Damage Attacks, while the aptly named Elite Enemies modifier gives all enemies and even bosses the buff.
- Fantastic Racism: It's pretty obvious that Az's races have no love for each other.
- Humans antagonize and dominate the Beastkin due to their innate lack of magic among other things, while the Beastkin return the sentiment in kind and often view them as oppressors. Meanwhile, Magitech are treated with fear and suspicion due to their role in the fall of the human empire, and prime Magitech like the angels look down on all surface dwellers, while the demons are more lenient but partial to wanton kidnapping and killing of surface dwellers. While Empress Dahlia and later the Peacekeepers have done a lot to mend relationships with the three races (particularly Humans and Beastkin), old grudges are known to still fester, waiting to be reignited.
- Despite both being branches of Magitech that separated during the Rebellion, the angels of Valhalla and demons of Tartarus are also noted to despise each other, and clashed in the bloody Violet War before a peace treaty was signed. However, in present practice this is actually downplayed. While some angels do despise demons and they're ranked at the bottom of Valhalla's hierarchical caste, they don't antagonize them as much as one would expect - Cyril, who often goes to Valhalla as Vassago's agent, is noted to have quite a fan club among the angels. Meanwhile, the demons don't seem to treat the angels any different from any other race, and it's noted that angels often go to Tartarus to partake in the city's casinos and faires with no objection from the citizens or Vassago.
- Harder Than Hard: Expert is one full tier above Hard, and any difficulty can be further tweaked at Tevi's bed to add up to two "+" levels, making Expert++ the highest difficulty available by default. Then there's Infernal BBQ, only unlocked after finishing a game on Expert, which dials up enemy stats and patterns up to eleven and notably cannot be reselected if you lower the difficulty at Tevi's bed. It can also be stacked with several of the Arrange Modes like Elite Enemies, Aggro Bosses, or Potion Scale to make it even more challenging. Another update added a looping system that lets you increase the difficulty even higher after beating it for the first time (indicated by additional numbers after the difficulty indicator), which at higher levels can potentially make the game Unwinnable by Design.
- I Shall Taunt You: Tevi can gain certain cosmetic actions that she can use in both the passive overworld and active combat, some of which have unique interactions with other entities. If she uses one in the first 20 seconds of a boss phase, the boss will become Impassioned, making them take and deal significantly higher damage while becoming easier to build combo off of.
- MacGuffin: The Astral Gears are mysterious artifacts that are said to contain enormous amounts of mana, which Zema and several other parties are seeking out for various reasons. Charon's research proposes that they were once used to draw mana from within the earth, but he realized that doing so will also weaken the planet's ability to keep decay in check, and that the ancient civilizations learned this the hard way. They also turn out to be a Dismantled Macguffin, as the Astral Gears scattered after the Magitech Rebellion are pieces of the Key of Dust used to activate Charon's spell Elysium.
- Magitek: Az's combination of magical and technological development over its history has resulted in a lot of this, to the point where one of the three main races is a species of Cyborgs literally named after this trope.
- Meaningful Name: Even in a world where half the areas are self-descriptive name-wise, the Decay-infested human city of Ana Thema is a little on the nose.
- Mini-Mecha: A lot of the minibosses fall into this category. The Peacekeepers of Az led by Moxie use a bigger one in a semi-scripted battle, while Frankie brings it back for the first half of his proper fight.
- Multiple Life Bars: Bosses have these, with each one signifying a new phase.
- Platform Hell: The Circus in Tartarus is designed around tough platforming challenges, with players being scored based on how fast they cleared them. In addition to the platforming being far harder than anything in the normal game, it inroduces new mechanics like altered gravity, bouncy enemies, and dash/airjump refills.
- Poor Communication Kills: Just like in Rabi Ribi, quite a few boss fights end up happening because the boss initially accuses Tevi of some wrongdoing and will only hear her out after they're beaten.
- Our Angels and Demons Are Different: They're prime magitech constructs rather than divine or infernal beings. That said, they tend to behave much like angels and demons, though not always. Tevi's companions, Celia and Sable, for instance, act completely opposite of their natures. Sable the demon is kind and innocent, while Celia the angel is a schemer who joins Tevi with the intention of taking the Astral Gears to increase her status.
- Our Humans Are Different: While they're certainly human, in Az they're actually a bit more like the common fantasy depiction of elves. They can use magic freely through the manipulation of mana, something beastkin can only do using sigils. Their past glories are behind them after the Magitech Rebellion. And they tend to look down on other races, particularly the beastkin who are actually more like humans than humans are, animal traits notwithstanding.
- The Plague: Decay, a mysterious green miasma that corrupts living matter and threatens entire ecosystems at a time, and is considered the antithesis of mana. Those who succumb to decay are overtaken and transformed into diseased zombie-like creatures known as Spectres.
- Shoo Out the Clowns: Following the death of Professor Zema, the rather silly muscular sunglasses-wearing cactus men completely disappear from the game until the postgame.
- Smart Bomb: Celia and Sable's Core Expansions will have them put up a shield that erases most projectiles it comes into contact with, while also launching a magical counterattack. However, some attacks, such as lasers or melee attacks, will pierce this protection.
- Stance System: An on-guard target will alternate between an anticipatory yellow "submissive" state where they're still vulnerable to knockback and damage, and a red "dominant" state where they gain Super Armor and severe Damage Reduction against melee attacks. In general, an enemy preparing to attack will be susceptible to being attacked back, but an enemy actually poised to attack will be impossible to stop.
- Status-Buff Dispel: The Strip debuff, when fully stacked, will purge a random valid buff from the target. Tevi's Cross Bombs and Cluster Bombs can also consume regenerating charges to dispel Defense Up and Offense Up.
- Stylish Action: The game is advertised as having "spectacle fighter elements". Compared to Rabi-Ribi, which already had heavy emphasis on combos, TEVI doubles down on this by giving Tevi not only dramatically more combat tools and mobility, but also the ability to attack and combo in midair, something that wasn't possible with Erina.
- The Battle Didn't Count: Certain boss fights end up with the boss you beat to a pulp seemingly none the worse for wear, and some, such as Cyril and Charon, end up with Tevi worse off than she was before; in the latter two cases, she was about to outright die if it weren't for Cyril's Despair Event Horizon and Tahlia's sudden intervention respectively. Taken even further in the fights with Vassago and Amaryllis, where the last "phase" of their story fights are glorified cutscenes where the boss gets serious and instantly defeats Tevi.
- Wrench Whack: Although she normally fights with her dagger, Tevi's heavy attacks have her swinging a huge wrench instead.
