we are ALL Daisuke Amaya on this blessed day :)
i remember having had to go to like, a toys R us and get a dsiware points card in order to get this game. i think cave story represents such a formative experience to a lot of folks simply because it was the only thing that existed at such a distinct scale, like a feature-length single player indie game, for a very long time. i didn’t really truly get into indie games until the advent of the minecraft alpha finally pushed me towards getting a computer, but gosh did i play a lot of cave story :)
i think the game represents a type of spirit that is still just incredibly hard to replicate. i think some folks are talking about how ‘animal well’ was made in it’s own custom engine or such, but even then, having the whole custom software stack like cave story used is just inimitable. and yeah a lot of that probably was just necessity of the time, but still. props to pixel
bad dog. no. down, down boy
cave story was one of the first indie games i was able to download on my own (on dialup!), it was really eye opening!!
christ same here. i wasn’t really able to try a lot of indie games for a long while bc i was on dialup for a stupid long time but cave storys tiny file size was a blessing i was deeply appreciative of
it’s a weird thing - for some reason i somewhat prefer the bad endings of cave story slightly over the good one.
…granted that may just be because i’ve always been terrible at video games, and the final challenges of the game were a nightmare to me?
the difficulty was definitely part of it and another thing that was probably pretty ahead of its time. i don’t think cave story ever had that rage game sensibility but stuff like the final fights definitely recount that level of ‘viral’ frustration
I don’t remember a lot of the context when I first found Cave Story but I remember it was probably an early Youtube thing for me, probably something I learned about from early Let’s Plays maybe… I think it was a really liberating game sort of just to think about being able to play and make and whatnot. There was such a mystery and depth to it and it was really unique. The funny thing is that despite all the influence it’s had on the world I’m not sure I’ve played another game that felt exactly like it. I remember being super into looking on the website and learning about all the other stuff Pixel did that used similar art and feeling like I was looking at secret levels… and trying to use pxtone being one of my first introductions to making music lol. To this day the Core battle’s intro is one of my favorite cutscenes in games.
aa welcome
i keep trying to dissect why this is! i feel like really the simple answer is that the indie definition for ‘metroidvania’ has sort of solidified itself, and by whatever chance it just didn’t land close enough to cave story. and i think it does have some legacy, but a lot of it is stuff that’s pretty lost to time compared to other bigger metroid vania (or “search action” if you prefer) things. i feel like the simple explanation is that it was much more in fervor closer to when cave story was actually released, or when it started getting commercial releases.
i think there is a demo of this game ‘the underside’ floating around somewhere, and all of the earlier momodora games (before reverie) were much more in line with cave story, at least aesthetically
i think just maybe cave story’s design is pretty antithetical to the stuff that saw a lot of success after it? not that you should have to commit to studying the most successful things but there are a few pretty specific choices it makes that just dont mesh well with the more prototypical stuff, and it would really take committing to cave story faithfully to deliver. i guess its hard to do that without being so painfully obvious like the above video too