Cave Story Review

I've played Cave Story for the first time on my homebrewed 3DS XL, after I saw it being heavily recommended on a Reddit comment section. I also later played it on my laptop (with the doukutsu-rs engine, unfortunately made with Rust).

Mostly, the gameplay consists of a robot, Quote, using guns to fight enemies that have contact damage (and sometimes projectiles) in order to progress with the story. You find more weapons throughout the game and you have 5 slots, so you may be forced to give up some weapons in exchange for others permanently. I love the fact that every weapon has great and versatile use-cases for each scenario so that you constantly switch up slots every now and then depending on the enemy, boss, or projectiles you're trying to ward off.

There's a unique weapon level system too; each weapon has a separate "energy" meter (except for the rocket launcher which has limited ammo refilled at save points in addition to enemy drops sometimes), and picking up "energy cystals" (dropped from enemies on death as well) fills the current weapon's meter, severely upgrading it. The downside of this system is that weapon level is capped at 3, and taking damage downgrades it, so it's not a permanent upgrade system so much as a "weapon health" system. This is the main point which makes the game so hard, because it creates a positive feedback loop where taking damage cripples your offensive ability as well as your defensive ability (since weapons can destroy most enemy projectiles).

For the movement (including jumping), I think it's horribly flawed because everything is so slow (but still manageable once you "master" it):

1. The inertia is everywhere, and the screen scrolls very slowly. It can barely be predicted.
2. The jump ascends extremely slowly, giving an exaggeratedly unneeded precise control over its height.
3. Underwater movement (especially jumping out of the water) is the worst thing I've ever seen in a game.
4. The movement itself is slow, and you only get a way to get slightly faster very late into the game.

Another big problem is that most boss fights are always far away from the nearest saves. This forces you to spend quite a while getting back to the arena for each try (oh no, he used the red font... calm down Ayari!). But the worst thing while retrying boss fights is the fact that there's no way to fast-forward dialogues or cutscenes unlike many games; most boss fights have conversations before them that you have to sit through for each try, sometimes longer than the actual boss fight itself. I can't overstate how much this sucks the joy out of the game experience. Some engines (like the aforementioned doukutsu-rs) allow skipping cutscenes but I had to suffer this problem on the original game.

The endgame requires you to go through 4 insanely hard bosses in a row without saves (he did it again!). Mind you, there are absolutely no health regeneration consumables anywhere on the game (except for one, which is a one-time use), so you have to rely on enemy and projectile drops to refill your health (as well as "leveling up" your weapon). This is unforgivable! I thought maybe I'd put up with the 3rd boss (as it seemed like the final one), but when I saw its second phase and I didn't beat it on my first try, I deleted the game immediately.

Well... it didn't end at that. I've reinstalled it few weeks later (and went through everything again) because I have nothing else to play on the 3DS other than boring stuff. I did beat it after hours of trial, error, and metaphorical self-harm, only to realize that there's a "true ending" that I missed because I didn't do a compilation of obscure shit. You have to make a hard jump to skip Dr. Booster's death scene, find a hidden rope in the corner of the room before the Core boss fight, tow the other robot Curly to your back to save her from drowning after the boss fight, drop her in a place that you also have to make a hard jump to reach, learn how to drain the water from her, take her again with you to drop her in the Waterway, get the Booster 2.0 from Dr. Booster (who didn't die), find Curly again in the Plantation, and cure her dementia with a mushroom hidden in an obscured room all the way back in the Mimiga cementry. What the hell!?

I did it again. I played the game again only for this ending, and went through another 3 horribly difficult bosses in a row without saves after those 4 insanely hard bosses in a row without saves. Complete masochism!

"It was worth it though, no?"

Well, compared to the efforts I made, I find myself reclutant to agree. In fact, the story itself is very primitive and not developed enough to have much detail or implicit lore over what the game explicitly makes clear, inviting no thought or further consideration on it, which is such an unfortunately wasted potential for a game whose concept is so interesting.

Plus, I find its uses of character death in the story progression quite manipulative. It kills off all the cute and awesome characters for no reason and with little fanfare. Not much dialogue, they just... get killed... sometimes by the player being forced to kill them (...), and then the game moves on immediately. Their deaths don't even get any special attention, they just die and disappear. It's cold and horrid. I thought about this throughout the entire gameplay.

Regardless, it has great pixel art, a great soundtrack, great character design, and a great set of challenges, so it's a B-tier!