Here we have another game I have some history with. Many years ago, I had tried to play Cave Story on the Wii until a specific boss proved exceedingly hard. Looking for help, I found instead that by taking an upgrade to my gun, I had screwed myself out of much more powerful ones later. Annoyed with the very "ha ha gotcha" feel of such a design choice, I quit. But here we are, years later, and giving it another try. And while I certainly can find some good in the game this time, it's only one of the issues that mars what many consider a classic.
You just woke up. It might as well be the first day of your life, as you have absolutely no memory of how you got here, but here you are. All you can be sure of is you are a robot and there is literally no reason to stay. So it's time to begin making your way through this cave and see what's out there.
It won't take you long to find, however, that you are not alone. For a little ways in you will find the village of the Mimiga, a rabbit like race of intelligent creatures. In normal times, their may be a lot more of them, but now there are only six remaining. An unmet person known to them as "The Doctor" has been sending his minions to kidnap them one by one. At this time, it appears they are looking to collect the one named Sue and their leader is willing to give her up for the good of the remaining. But where is she? Can you save her? What about the others?
This will be the basic position you start the game in. From here it will be up to you to explore the village as you find out more about this place and what is really going on. And while there are no real twists and turns to cover on your adventure, the flow of discovery and story telling is smooth and natural, complimenting the gameplay itself very well, even as it clearly plays second fiddle to it.
But it's this gameplay we have to spend some time with and for several reasons, both good and bad. First, you will find that the game is not quite what it's made out to be. It is often described as a "Metroidvania" which, if you are unaware of the genre, is a game based around exploring mazes and the world itself with branching paths that become more available to use as you get upgrades for your character. This really isn't how I would describe Cave Story though, so I'm afraid if you came for this you are going to be disappointed.
Rather what this game offers is more of a platforming experience. Yes you do get upgraded powers as you go, but most of them are simply other weapon choices and there is nothing like doors or obstacles you need any special weapon to get through. If you are so inclined (and admittedly a bit of a masochist), you could technically finish the game with the same basic weapon you get at the beginning of it. In fact, the only abilities that help you reach knew places are boosters and there are two of them in total in the entire game. Rather, this game opens up areas to you as the story demands via teleporters you will find and will be programmed to give you access to the places you need.
Nor are these places particularly complex to navigate. In fact, most of them are straight lines of rooms and corridors. You will have much more challenge with platforming and combat then you will figuring out where you need to go since there are maybe two hub locations with the rest being that straight forward.
But despite the mislabeling, I have to give a lot of credit to the design within these places. Combat is not hindered by the location itself and all of it gives the feeling and challenge intended. Even the save locations are used to amazing effect, be it to show you that you really are in a safe place so feel free to look around, or that you are in enemy territory so be thankful when and if you find the next one. And all this with very little in the way to slow down the game itself. Simply astounding.
But that does not mean this game is perfect. It is far from as I can sum up roughly four issues that blemish the game pretty harshly, especially when considering what modern games offer. Now do not get met me wrong, they do not stop it from being good in it's own right. But they do limit just how good it will be for many people. I think my single biggest complaint is that this is not a game to take on in a blind play-through. The developer saw fit to include details you can easily miss but need to catch to find the better gear you will likely want or need to have fun with the later game. At the same time, they also include options to take advantage of without a hint that doing so will also screw you out of said equipment. For example, you will be given several chances to upgrade your base gun by replacing it with another weapon, but doing so will deny you access to one of the last weapons in the game and one of the few that do not have the next issue I will describe. But that is not the most egregious example of these problems. To explain that I will have to give you the dreaded spoiler warning. If you wish to not get the spoiler, please skip the indented italics text below.
Later in the game, you will find yourself stuck in a "labyrinth" where there is a chasm that has a door and save point on the other side, but you will see a rocket dive down the center and crash. If you go down there you will be stuck beside a friendly scientist you will now have to assist to progress and doing so will get you the lesser booster that lets you "fly upward" a bit. But if you ignore the rocket and manage to jump across the chasm without meeting him, he will meet you later with a much better version that can also fire off left and right as well giving you extra dodging ability AND is required to get that top weapon I mentioned above. So trying to be the hero will handicap your maneuverability for the rest of the game, and you will want that for the last 3 bosses. That is not to say it's impossible without them, but the lack of maneuverability will hurt you even more then missing the best weapon in the game. And if you manage to get access to the secret ending, it will be outright impossible to complete without it.
What this ultimately boils down to is this is not a game I can recommend playing without either someone who has played through it before, a youtube walk-through, or at the very least a play-through guide by your side since it's way too easy to miss things that are fairly important to get a good ending.
But to get back to the weapons, that is the second major issue I had with this game. There is a level system in this game, but it is not for your character. Instead it's for the weapons. As you kill monsters, one of the things they can and often do drop are yellow triangles that add experience to your weapons, which generally can level up from level 1 to level 3. Each weapon has a different form depending on this level and in most cases, the power and usefulness of each weapon gets exponentially better with each one. But they can also lose power and drop levels when you take damage while equipped. This would not be such a huge issue if either the weapons dropped at the same pace as they level up or were at least somewhat useful from the get-go. But they almost all basically boil down to short-range pea-shooters at level one and while you have to work at leveling them up, can lose levels quite quickly. This gets especially true with the last few bosses due to how much damage they deal vs how much experience their summoned support generally offer you, but in some cases one or two small hits is enough to undo 15 minutes of preparing a weapon, rendering it useless in all but the most perfect of runs no matter how good it should be. It's frankly infuriating especially when trying to learn a new boss.
And should you die learning a boss, you are likely going to hit issue number 3: cutscenes. Cave Story is designed to emulate the 8-bit days of gaming, but this is a quality of life update that probably should have been included anyway, but if you die and have to reload a save, any cutscenes between your save and you will have to repeat. And this is old-school cut-scenes that basically involve hitting the button on your controller to move between every single line of text. Yeah, you can hurry the text along rather then wait for it to print at it's normal time, but you have to mash that damn button the entire time rather then simply skip the text and try again... and that's assuming it's not the last bosses which happen in a chain with no chance to save between them.
And finally we have the least of the issues as it isn't too bad to get used to it, but this is a very floaty platformer. Expect to have issues aiming when you need to land on single blocks from time to time, as you will have to adjust to the game's rather weird timing and gravity mechanics.
Bugs: This game ran perfectly, so I wouldn't worry about bugs, at least for this version. I have heard there are (or were?) bugs in the version on Steam, but I can not verify that.
Overall: I will never call this game a bad game, but I wish I had been warned just how deep "necessary secrets" went in a game I expected to relax and enjoy. Without knowing the end became more frustration then anything else, especially as I had no idea I had missed the most important details and my equipment only amplified the downsides of this game at that point. If you like a challenge, but don't mind having a guide by your side while you play you will have fun with this one. But for me who likes to go in blind and at best use a guide for a clue or two, it was a bit more of a let down.
Score:
6/10
Source: Unfortunately with the Wii store shut down early 2019, there is no way to get this particular version of Cave Story anymore. However that is not to say the game is gone. In fact the original release is a freeware game available at www.cavestory.org. However this version may take some work to get running in a language you can use and, as always, NEVER run anything you download without scanning it first. For those who want a more updated and official way to play, the game is available for download on 3DS (although this version is adjusted for wide-screen on the handheld and to use 3D backgrounds) with an enhanced version (Cave Story +) available on Steam and an Switch.
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