Cave Story (Dōkutsu Monogatari)
By Thandi 24-May-2012 01:09 UTC+02:00
Cave Story is a relatively old game, released for the first time in 2004. However, I only discovered it recently.
The game takes place in a floating island. The player wakes up in a dark cave and has no idea where to go.
When I started playing this game I found it a bit uninteresting. At the beginning the main character has no weapons and there are jumping monsters that try to kill him.The only thing he can do is duck to avoid getting killed. There are some deadly spikes and bats that he must evade. Inside the cave there is an old man’s house. When the player enters the house, he finds an old man sleeping and steals his gun.
The gun is inefficient but helps him to kill the monsters and get out.When he got out of the first door, I thought there would just be a few more stages and then the game would end. I didn’t realize that it was just the beginning.
The mission of the main Character is to find an evil doctor and stop him from converting inhabitants of the floating island into aggressive fighters which he can use to attack earth. The doctor intends to use flowers to accomplish this. As the game progresses, the main character seeks the doctor and encounters dozens of monsters and finds more powerful weapons: a powerful machine gun with which he can fly, a missile launcher, blades, fireballs, etc. He becomes a killing machine.
Along the way he meets with different characters and talks to them. His decisions determine how the game progresses. There is a stage where he finds the egg of a flying dragon. He hatches it with a computer. This gives him an option to use the flying dragon to escape from the island. If he chooses to fly away, it is written on the screen that the doctor later launched his attack on earth. The game then ends.
However, if he chooses not to fly away and continue looking for the doctor instead, the game progresses to more advanced stages, with lots of thrilling battles. Eventually, he finds the doctor. After defeating him, the island starts falling. The main character and a few others escape in a helicopter.
I heard that there are three unique endings but my decisions during the game only led me to the two endings discussed above. I look forward to finding the third one. The game takes a very long time to finish. If you play it daily for the first time, you can expect to spend at least a month before reaching the end. I must say, this is one of the most exciting PC games. It’s even better than many commercial games I’ve played.
