I'm going to spoil the majority of Cave Story here so I'd advise not reading this unless you've played the game if you have interest in it. For what it's worth, I do think it's a fun little game that's pretty cheap so if I'm not here to tell you that it's overrated trash that you should ignore - if you've been interested in it, don't let my opinion sway you away from the game (if it would for whatever reason lol).
This is going to be quite a different to the other pieces I've written here. I don't want to give my full thoughts on the game because I haven't actually played the full game - I know that there is a hidden "true" ending that you obtain for doing some bonus stuff during the game. While that hidden segment sounds really fun, I'm not going to go do it right now because I simply didn't enjoy the game enough to replay it from scratch and get the true ending.
I've seen the game described as a Metroidvania which, on the surface, makes a lot of sense. The game has floaty jumps, you run and shoot stuff, you collect health and missile powerups and you even cycle through weapons using the same controls. The inspiration from Metroid is clear - the game ends with an escape sequence as the island falls, similar to the endings of Metroid games where the planets explode. However, while Cave Story has clear inspiration taken from Metroid, it's still not really a Metroidvania. In games like Super Metroid, the player is given a new powerup and then forced to backtrack through an old area discovering all kinds of new things using their new powers. Cave Story is a much more linear game - while there are hidden objectives found by using new powers like the jetpack, the player is never forced to backtrack and discover things on their own. The game teases at this a little bit by giving you the Minigma Village as a "hub" of sorts - I expected this to be an area where I could use new powers to find new things in but I was let down.
I should clarify that not being a Metroidvania is not a bad thing at all. Super Metroid is my favourite game but I typically prefer my games to be as linear as possible with only a few exceptions. By all accounts, Cave Story should have been right up my street. And the thing is that Cave Story is still perfectly fun. Shooting things is great, they all drop stuff which is satisfying to collect and all the rest but I still have problems with it. I'm going to attempt to list my problems with the game in an objective sense to try and understand myself why I don't like this game as much as I should.
1). The controls
I played Cave Story+ on the PC which was its original release system as far as I know. The game gives you a small cutscene of somebody unrelated to you then drops you in the game. You have to press down to go through doors rather than up like I expected but I'm fine with this - down isn't really a commonly used button in these games so this works fine. The thing is that Cave Story isn't exactly altogether clear on which buttons do what.
To clarify, I do not think every game should have a tutorial and the less tutorials the better. Super Metroid doesn't have one. The thing is though Super Metroid was played on an SNES controller with very few buttons. A jumped, X shot things, L and R made you shoot diagonally. The game tells you to use B when you get the Speed Booster and Y is used when selecting weapons - due to the controller's simplicity, chances are that the player is going to press it at some point anyway and figure out what it does. Even if they don't, you can still select all your weapons with Select (another thing the game tells the player to do once they get missiles) so this is never a problem. Super Metroid, for a SNES game, has fairly complex controls with multiple different weapons and tools but is always extremely simple to understand.
For Cave Story, it has much more simple controls but doesn't tell the player anything. Like I said, I was playing on PC and the keyboard has a lot of buttons. I worked out that Z and X jumped and shot alright but when other buttons are introduced, the player is not told in that pop up prompt how to use them. You change weapons with A and S which I worked out by flailing at buttons around Z and X to work out how to do it but that's all. It took me a bit longer to work out how to open the map and inventory - for quite a while, I was opening up the inventory by alt tabbing in and out of the game because I hadn't worked out any other way.
So hey, maybe I'm just fucking stupid and everyone's going to go "really" at me but let me expand on this. The thing is that Cave Story was developed for a controller with way, way, way more buttons than a SNES controller but you still can't shoot diagonally in this game. This boggles the mind and I really can't think of any reason why this wasn't included. Fighting flying enemies in this game was much more annoying than it had to be because there was no way to shoot diagonally - I had to just run directly underneath them and hold fire or just jump from the side and hit every two seconds.
The layout of the buttons also doesn't really make much sense. I played with my index finger and middle finger on X and Z respectively. The other buttons that are mapped out are A, S, Q and W - all buttons that I'd have to move my middle finger or index finger to reach. Nothing is mapped to Space or Shift or Control for my other fingers to press which I also find very confusing. This was definitely something I could have just remapped myself, though, and I don't think pressing Select in Super Metroid is too comfortable either so I won't stress this point too much.
The final thing I found odd about the controls is changing weapons. In Super Metroid, weapons go in a fixed order - normal attack, missiles, super missiles, super bombs and then utility weapons. This was done for a very specific reason as these are in the order of strength and general usefulness. You're going to use the normal attack the most, then missiles and so on. When you press Y, you go back to the normal attack which allows you to quickly get an idea of where you are in the menu. In Cave Story, you go backwards and forwards with A and S in the menu. For me personally, I found myself having to glance up at my weapons pretty frequently to get an idea of where I was in the weapons menu - the weapons aren't really put in there in order of strength or usefulness or anything like that because there is no order. I found it pretty hard to remember exactly how many button presses it took to get to my exact weapon I needed. When the final boss was vulnerable, I felt reluctant to swap to my missiles in case I messed up and swapped too far.
Even though I spent a year on the controls, they're actually a very small part of it but I couldn't find a way to write about it without going into it way too much. The game generally controls pretty well even on a keyboard. The game wasn't detecting my controller, by the way, which is why I used a keyboard.
2). Deaths and respawns
The game's save system is identical to Metroid's. There are save points around the place that are separate to healing points but generally close together - if you die, it's back to the last save. However, there is a difference in design here. In Metroid games, the difficulty generally doesn't come in combat - you have a lot of health and you're typically much stronger than your enemies. The enemies are something to watch out for and you have to be careful not to take too many hits, of course, but you generally won't actually die as long as you're careful.
Cave Story, being a more linear game, has levels with enemies designed to kill you. There's another Metroidvania-esque game with challenges designed to kill you called Ori and the Blind Forest. It has save points too but it also has checkpoints that you can place anywhere so dying really isn't a big deal. I thought Cave Story was a much harder game than Ori was and Cave Story does not have such a system. Generally, games where you die somewhat frequently will have quick respawns to lower frustration but Cave Story doesn't attempt to do this at all. Too often, I was forced to go through the same part of a level over and over again because I kept dying towards the end of it.
Worse than that are the instakills you can't possibly see coming. After like three hours of not being in the game, a sandshark randomly just appeared out of one square of sand and did 15 damage (half my health) towards endgame. This forced me back a few minutes. Why? How could I have possibly known that? There's also a section completely in darkness that's designed to lure you into an area where a sandshark will kill you. If you attempt to explore in the Plantation and go up, you will instantly die in one shot. There are stalactites falling from the ceiling on the second visit of Egg Chamber that you can't possibly know about in advance. There's an enemy in the Egg Chamber which starts a countdown - I thought "oh, I must have to hide behind cover or something" and then it exploded and one shot me. Cheap instakills are always bad design but they're much more forgivable in games with frequent checkpoints - something that Cave Story does not have.
Cave Story also has a problem of putting save points too far away from its bosses. Super Metroid did this too with Ridley but the difference is that Ridley doesn't have an attack pattern you have to learn or something like that - he's an extremely simple boss so your first attempt is going to be similar to your last attempt. The bosses in Cave Story often have patterns or attacks that you're going to learn as you fight them more which becomes infuriating as you have to play through three minutes of enemies before you get to them every time. The first time I got to Monster X, I was running forward as you'd expect. The camera pans to the right when you're moving right so I couldn't see anything on the left and - oh. Monster X has appeared and has now run over me for 10 damage. The Sisters in the Egg Chamber are similarly bullshit in that you open a treasure chest and lol whoops here's a boss when the last save point was five minutes ago!
For the kind of game Cave Story is, it probably should have just had save points in every single room or something. I don't wanna say it should autosave because then you might autosave on 1hp and be in a load of trouble. Instead, I was backtracking to save every time I collected anything because I didn't want to bother with waiting through a cutscene again. Speaking of which...
3). Fetch quests vs exploration
Probably the best example of what I mean by this is the Plantation. When I got there, I had my jetpack and level 3 machine gun raring to go - actually, on a side note, I have to give praise for this machine gun which shoots you into the air when you aim down. That's the most fun thing in the whole game by an absolute mile and IMO the whole game should have been built around it. I would happily play another game with such a mechanic so if anybody knows any, please send them my way.
...Back on topic, I got to the Plantation and started exploring. If you've played this game, you know that's pretty much a waste of time. As I mentioned, I died when I tried to go up and two of the rooms were completely useless outside of one taking me to a healing point. What you're actually meant to do in this level is this:
-Go to the Rest Room and talk to the fisher
-Go down to the bottom and get the key from him
-Go to the teleporter room and get arrested
-Read the letter and break out of jail
-Go to the safe house
-Have your jetpack confiscated, get the mask and go find the broken sprinkler
-Go get a fixed sprinkler
-Bring it to the safe house
-Go get the dude who's transformed into a Minigma
-Use the rocket to go to the end of the level
If you start exploring at first, you've clearly just wasted your time because you're going to get all of the stuff you need anyway (outside of the health pack which is a good thing gj devs). This level is just fetch quest after fetch quest and, as somebody who explored the whole area before starting the chain of fetch quests, it was painfully dull. Unfortunately, a lot of the levels in Cave Story end up structured like this. The most infamous example (as far as I know) is the Sand Zone in which you have to go to an old lady's house, get a dog for her, bring it back, get a dog for her, bring it back and repeat like five times. Going back and forward to the same place over and over again in which you save and full heal each time is not a challenge, it's just padding. When you get down to it, Cave Story doesn't actually have that many levels so I get the feeling that the developers decided to just fluff out the game by having you go do more stuff. Check out the "to-do list" in the Bushlands:
-Go a quarter of the way into the level to get a key
-Go back and give it to a dude
-Go halfway into the level to get to a dude
-Go a quarter back, kill a jellyfish and get some stuff
-Go back to the second dude and use the jellyfish stuff to go through the fireplace
-Travel up until you find the dude stuck in the house who gives you a rusted key
-Use the rusted key on some door, fight Balrog inside (AGAIN)
-Talk to the robot who tells you get some stuff to make a bomb
-Go to the end of the level and get gum
-Go back and get jellyfish stuff
-Go back to the start and get charcoal
-Go get MORE jellyfish stuff
-Make the bomb
So much of this level is just walking back and forth. The thing is that I already said that this can be a good thing in a Metroidvania by using new powers to make older parts you've already visited more appealing but this just doesn't happen in Cave Story. There's no reason the game couldn't just say "hey, go get the Gum which is actually a Bomb and then we're sorted". Making you go all the way back to the start and then back again to the robot is just padding. Also, as happened in the Plantation, exploring the Bushlands is pointless until the end anyway because you'll end up having to visit most of the areas anyway. This is probably my biggest issue with the whole game and the reason I don't like it as much as everyone else. The Labyrinths aren't as guilty as this which I do appreciate but they have the save points miles away from the boss problem so RIP.
4). The gun levelling system
I don't have much to say here as this will probably be subjective but this system fucking blows. When you get hit, you are already being punished for that hit by losing health. Punishing me even harder by making my weapons weaker is just fucking infuriating. The only advantage I see is that it gives value to the experience drops but this is also annoying - you could get either health, missiles or experience drops when you generally only need one or two of the three. It's also really annoying to level down, have to go fight an enemy to level back up and get hit by accident so that you've basically just wasted your time. It's also infuriating because the level 3 machine gun is so god damned fun and having that taken away from you when you get hit so you plummet to the ground sucks hard. Fuck.
This has been way too negative an article for a game I still enjoyed so I'm gonna talk about a few things I enjoyed.
-The soundtrack is amazing (I listened to the Remastered version)
-This game feels very fluid to move around in
-The bosses are largely good
-The machine gun is ridiculously awesome
-The weapon variety in general is really good
-The game has a nice visual style that probably would have been really charming at the time it came out
-The final boss sequence is hard as fuck and spectacularly good
So yeah all in all Cave Story was pretty good/10. I wrote this piece mostly for myself to try and understand why I don't like the game as much as everyone else because it should be my exact kind of game. I have a much better idea of why now which I'm happy about and I hope it was enjoyable enough to read and didn't seem too nitpicky. In hindsight I should have started with the level design thing because it's the biggest problem but whatever, live and learn and all that KBAI
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