If you enjoyed a commercial video game in the last seven years, you probably haven’t played Cave Story.  It’s an exceptionally polarizing indie game, either the greatest game of all-time, or a transcendent work that transcends all transcendency.  It’s made enough of a name for itself that I decided it was worth six hours of my life.  All I can say is “Really?  This is the game that got everybody worked up?”

I initially threw two hours into the game and decided to reserve judgment about the overall product.  Alex Kierkegaard’s unprecedented review (Spoiler: He didn’t think it was flowers and sex) spurred me to find out the second half of Cave Story actually lived up to its hype.  I’m not looking to puppet his line of thought, I’m just not sure where “polished platformer with no core flaws and a good weapons system” became code for “classic”.

Apart from two bosses, the game is a cakewalk.  The backtracking is completely obnoxious.  The in-game events that define progressing from point A to point B are completely illogical.  The dialogue is not very good.  Not that these flaws keep the game from being on the sunny side of “good”.  The problem is that my vote has now doubled the amount of people who do not think the game is perfect.

Search any gaming message board, and people will disagree with your opinion of any game.  Warcraft III is my favorite game of all-time, and that didn’t stop people from throwing their copy in the garbage when it got home after killing all the creeps in the neighborhood.  Not this one.  By virtue of “single developer busts ass to make playable Metroid game”, Anthony Burch of Destructoid can channel shared sentiments:

Honestly, if I found a way to put Cave Story on an SNES cartridge, go back in time to the 90’s, and sell it as if it were just your regular big-budget game, nobody would hesitate to call it one of the greatest games of all time.

…

…there’s literally nothing not to like in Cave Story.

…

This is Cave Story, and it is perfect.

It probably doesn’t surprise you I have beef with a game designed to honor 8-bit gameplay, considering I just got off that tangent.  Simply by being the fetish of the indie gaming community (that is, one of the five-hundred best games to ever come out of Japan), it’s worth downloading, if simply to educate yourself.