This article contains SPOILERS for Cave Story. Read at your own peril!
No one person’s story stands in isolation. There are always interwoven strands from the past informing everything in the present. And, in that present, a plethora of stories play out in tandem, a seamless chain of action and reaction. The world is in constant motion.
It is something that most video-games portray poorly. Too many video-game worlds are lifeless and vapid, existing only to react to the will that the player imposes upon it. When I played Cave Story for our podcast, I was quick to dismiss its primary story as incoherent nonsense. But that slice of narration is only a small piece of a much larger picture. Cave Story is better thought of as Cave Stories, layered upon one another like the mounds of bones that exist deep in Ballos’ lair.
The first story begins where yours ends: Ballos. Ballos was a beloved sorcerer of his people, using his magic to help and heal the citizens of his nation. Ballos’ brother, who happened to be king of said nation, grew jealous and resentful. He ended up going full Danerys on his brother, deciding that imprisonment and torture was the logical way to resolve this problem.
Unsurprisingly, this went poorly. Ballos went insane under the torture, lashing out wildly with his magic, destroying the kingdom, and those he loved the most - his wife and child. In the process, a huge chunk of land was ripped from the ground. His sorceress sister Jenka, who we later meet in game, raised that chunk of land into a floating island with a device to keep it there, and imprisoned Ballos at the heart of it. He deserved death for what he had done, but Jenka could not find it in her heart to kill her own brother.
This is the tragic background of cave story, and this tragedy does a lot to inform the tone of the game. Ballos’ family tore itself apart and Ballos himself tore his own family to shreds. Later we find out that Misery, Jenka’s daughter, sought to control Ballos’ power by creating an artifact called the Demon’s Crown. This backfired, and she became the slave of whoever currently wore the crown. This leads to many expeditions to the floating island with different parties vying over the crown and its power.
The most recent expedition led to gruesome slaughter. Squads of humans and killer robots descended on the island, slaughtering the innocent mimiga population with complete indiscretion. They tried to take down the core that kept the island afloat (and failed), but one of their number did seize the demon crown and prepared to use its power to descend upon the earth. Luckily, there were two plucky robots there, named Quote and Curly Brace, who were able to save the day. They were both knocked into states of amnesia, only returning to consciousness 10 years later.
Note this, and note it well - Ballos’ story is not a pleasant one. It reeks of death, and corruption and human frailty. It is not amusing - it's a mythos of darkness that exists just 30 years before your own. This is the tone of history that the game wishes to impart upon you. If only the primary story had any consideration for it.
It starts off well enough. You play as Quote, an amnesiac robot that looks like a human child. You awake from your deep slumber, and drop into a village full of Mimiga, harmless looking rabbit creatures. Before you have a chance to do much of anything, a couple of nefarious villains swoop in and kidnap a child, in a case of mistaken identity.
And then you start doing stuff to move the plot forward?
There’s a problem with the character of Quote. He has amnesia. He doesn’t speak any lines of dialogue. He has no clear motivations or goals. He has no clear alignment to any faction. And you have no control over his actions - this is a linear game with one path to follow. You might say that he’s a cipher for the player, but that only works if he takes actions that logically the player might take.
In practice, he kind of loosely follows the orders of whoever happens to be standing closest to him at any given time. Except when he doesn’t, and there’s no clear rhyme or reason as to when he considers someone’s words worth following, versus considering it worth trying to shoot and kill them with his gun.
Quote has no problem with heading to the sand zone to directly confront the Doctor and destroy the red flowers, but he refuses to try to rescue Sue when she gets imprisoned to be taken by the same Doctor. Quote refuses to directly steal a sprinkler, but is happy to participate in the elaborate charade of pretending to be a mimiga and exchange a broken sprinkler for a working one. And then you have the bit with the dogs.
I think the bit with the dogs, more than anything else, ruined the story for me. Your mission in the sand zone is to destroy the red flowers. Multiple characters tell you how vital the red flowers are to the Doctor’s plan to wage war. This is it, your best chance to stop the Doctor’s nefarious plans before they can properly get off the ground. So when you find the old lady with the key to the warehouse with the red flowers, naturally you get it off her right? You persuade her of the importance of your mission, and if she refuses, you use force, so that you can save the world?
Well, no, actually. Instead, you spend about 20 minutes collecting her dogs, one by one.
As I went from spot to spot, collecting those dogs, all I could think of was how stupid this whole situation was. Wasn’t there something important going on? Wasn’t I meant to be stopping the destruction of the world? Didn’t the people who I seemingly aligned myself with tell me of the critical importance of my mission? At one point the old lady says that even if you do get all her dogs that she won't give you the key regardless. It made me frustrated and angry.
So when the Doctor beats you to the warehouse, because you were wasting all that time collecting fucking dogs, I was glad. The stupid lady gets beaten up and the key taken from her, and all I could think was ‘serves you right’. And then, when King valiantly dies trying to attack the Doctor, because you were stupid enough to run around collecting dogs, and the game wanted me to feel sad for him, I stopped caring. No-one points out the stupidity of the mission, no-one says you should have physically attacked the witch to get the key, no-one says anything - but the truth is that Quote is directly responsible for all this shit happening.
You can’t put something tragic and depressing side by side with the stupidity of the dogs and expect me to care. There’s a deep incongruity here; is the game trying to be a fun and quirky adventure where idiots collect dogs for no goddamn reason, or is it trying to tell a deep and dark tale about the dark lure of power and a hero rising up to combat evil? Is it Star Wars, or is it Family Guy’s rip on Star Wars?
And let me preempt you, because there is one game that bears obvious similarities to Cave Story in this regard - Undertale. And I think that Undertale succeeds where Cave Story fails, mainly because of its morality system. It empowers the player with choice, and lets you choose the sort of tale you want to experience. The quirky and fun story is tied to being empathetic and merciful. The dark and tragic tale is tied to being a ruthless killer, determined to wipe out all life. If I was given the choice to fight the grandma and take the key from her in order to fulfil my mission, all of a sudden my problems go away. But when this character is a self insert with no emotions and they do the literal opposite of what makes sense and I become apathetic to the deep and meaningful feelings the game is trying to make me experience.
But I won’t end on a negative note. As I said earlier, Cave Story is about layers of story, and I’ve saved the best for last. The story of the Sakamoto family is the best told in the entire game.
The Sakamoto family consists of Momorin and her two children, Sue and Kazuma. They are joined by another scientist (Professor Booster), an engineer (Itoh) and finally a Doctor. They head to the floating island as a research expedition. The Doctor secretly planned to find the demon crown for himself, and use its evil powers to take over the world. He succeeds in finding the crown, and begins to go mad with power, experimenting on Sue and Itoh and imprisoning others. The family scrambles and escapes to different corners of the island. Quote wakes up shortly after their getaway.
What is brilliant is exactly how this story is unfolded to the player. We don’t have all this information at the start of the game. We get bits and pieces as the different family members begin to connect with one another. Their lives exist outside of Quotes - they’re psychologically scarred; trying to survive and escape. You end up uniting them and helping them throughout your journey, but in a lot of ways its their story and not yours.
One of my favourite minor storytelling moments surrounds a teleporter that Professor Booster uses to reach Kazuma. He’s just escaped from the Doctor, and they catch up on each other’s situation. Later in the game you reach the plantation, where the Doctor is keeping his captives, and you discover a random teleporter in a corner. You use it, and lo and behold, it takes you straight to where Kazuma was originally trapped. It's a small thing, but consistent with the world building - if the professor was able to escape via teleporter, why not include the location from where he escaped?
When you come back from the wilderness area to find Sue no longer imprisoned, but in a seeming alliance with King, it doesn’t feel like you’re at the centre of the story. When you escape from the labyrinth and wind up in the now deserted Mimiga village, and this track starts to play, you realise that events have happened, and that the Doctor is much closer to enacting his evil plan. The people in Cave Story won't wait for you to come back before taking action, they do it all on their own.
This is how you build up the fabric of a believable video-game world, this is how you immerse the player. Stories need to exist outside of your personal one. The strength of the individual’s story is irrelevant if I can’t hold faith in the context in which it exists. Cave Story is a shining example of world building done right. And, unfortunately, it's also a shining example of nonsensical tonal failure. I wish Cave Story’s main narrative made more sense, but at least I can be satisfied that the games other stories stand strong.
