This week’s You Might Like It concerns the Japanese freeware adventure game Doukutsu Monogatari, known in the West as Cave Story. It’s excellent for a lot of reasons, but I’ll get to those in a minute. First I have to set the stage. I might as well get the Quick-and-Dirty out of the way before the break.

Well, this isn't the worst place I've woken up with a hangover...

The Quick and Dirty
- Cave Story info, walkthrough, and downloads for the game and translation patch at
http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/
- A platformer in the vein of Metroid or Castlevania
- Freeware, made single-handedly by one-man team Studio Pixel
- Other draws: emotive and adorable characters, original weapons and power-up system, holds its own against classics in the platformer genre. It’ll also be coming to the Wii via Wiiware in the future!

Now, I’m going to get a bit…scholarly.

I consider myself something of a conoisseur of the third-person platform shooter. It’s a tough genre to give a name to (and I disagree significantly with how Wikipedia defines it), though I can rattle off my favorite titles and series in the genre with ease–Metroid, Mega Man, Ratchet & Clank. In an earlier era I think the games might have been uniformly filed under “action-adventure,” but with the advent of the first-person shooter, there’s a need to distinguish. I can articulate without too much trouble why I find the genre so compelling–when it’s done well, the same elements contribute to its success, regardless of whether it’s a decade old or this month’s top seller. The controls are tight, the guns and enemies get bigger and badder throughout the entire game, and the player has to feel like a badass. The Metroid games are a perfect example of this–the franchise has had a decade to hone the gameplay from charge beam to missiles to ice beam to super missiles to the point where the formula is predictable but the player still feels like they’re kicking ass like ass has never been kicked before.

You’ll notice I left out any mention of plot or story in my description of what makes a great platform shooter. I don’t think it needs it–the Mega Man series has been popular from its inception, but in my experience has never been big on intricate plots or deeply sympathetic characters. By and large it’s been about having Mega Man go fight eight bosses and then Wily or Sigma or whoever. By the same token, Psychonauts fell flat for me. The characters were great, the plot and concept were amazingly inventive, but the controls were wishy-washy and hampered my enjoyment significantly.

The big draw of Cave Story isn’t that it has an out-of-this-world amazing plot. It’s a good plot, no mistake–I’d put it on par with, say the GBA Metroid games. Your character, an unnamed robot, awakens deep within a floating island, and ultimately must escape, but in the process learns how to be a hero. The Doctor, a mysterious and evil man, is capturing the Mimigas, innocent rabbit-like folk, for nefarious purposes. The characters are strong, for as little as some of them talk (namely our protagonist, who isn’t actually named unless you complete several of the steps en route to the good ending). There’s a real tear-jerker moment about halfway through the game, and the cast is by and large sympathetic, if not flat-out adorable. Perhaps most confusing to me as a gamer is that the bulk of the plot is never seen by the player–there’s an entire section of backstory that’s only related if you get the good ending, and to do that you have to go through a nightmarishly hard zone at the end of the game, en route to a second, substantially harder final boss. Most people will give up long before they get the whole story, but settling for the second-best ending isn’t awful.

All that stands between me and the plot is Kid Icarus?

What Cave Story’s creator understood is that gameplay comes first, and though he falls back on a few tropes here and there the gunplay gameplay is fresh and the handling on the player character is dreamy. By “dreamy” I mean there’s a bit of a floaty feel to the platforming element–think of how the original Super Mario had sort of a strange jump arc and you’ll get the idea. You can do some light flying, too–either with a jetpack you get mid-game or by swapping out your first gun, the Polar Star, for the Machine Gun, which has recoil powerful enough to send you skyward if aimed down. The rest of your arsenal ranges from the functional to the fanciful. The Fireball shoots a rolling, bouncing projectile along the ground; the Missile launcher is particularly powerful against swarms of flying enemies; the Bubbler shoots…bubbles?

Most interesting is the mechanic by which weapons level up. Enemies will drop glowing orange triangles when killed that fill your weapon’s power gauge. With one exception, every weapon has three power levels, and with another exception, the third kicks the most ass. When you take damage, your weapon power also takes a hit, which becomes a real consideration in boss fights–it promotes strategies of careful evasion over sitting still and unloading everything you’ve got.

Speaking of boss fights, there’s both variety and challenge–the final fight in the “normal” part of the game took me numerous tries to beat, and there were several other bosses that stymied me for a short while. I should also mention the most famous character from Cave Story: Balrog! The gray, toaster-shaped henchman leaps into action repeatedly with a trademark “Huzzah!” and is memorably bizarre. Anyway, speaking more about difficulty, there’s an area or two where the save points are spaced a little bit thin and the terrain between is pretty tedious to journey over, but this doesn’t dampen the experience significantly. If you’re an accomplished player you might be able to beat Cave Story in as little as five hours, maybe as little as four on a second, efficient play-through.

I feel before I give some sort of summary I need to stress how impressed I was that the entire game was done by a single man. Particularly the music–a game being coded by one person is impressive, but to also have a catchy, professional-sounding score with several dozen tracks is another achievement that speaks to how Cave Story is a cut above most freeware. It provided me an enjoyable nine-hour first playthrough and I even went back a second time to take a stab at the good ending (though sadly I fell short). I’m proud to give Cave Story my hearty recommendation and let you know that You Might Like It.

One more freeware title next week before You Might Like It branches out to discuss some other odds and ends, but this next one is one you’ll be sure to see at the end of the year on freeware “best-of” lists. From the the man who answered Jack Thompson’s call for a murder simulator with the pee-on-the-brains romp “I’m O.K.,” YMLI will review Derek Yu’s Spelunky!

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