I just finished my AP English Literature class, and my teacher's idea for a final project was to have us write anything we wanted, demonstrating how we have grown as a writer over our school career. Now, AP English Lit is all about analyzing book after book after short story after poem, and basically the entire year I thought it would be really cool if we could, instead, analyze a different type of media that wasn't written on paper.
And so, for my final I decided to write an analysis on the awesome video game Cave Story.
Fair warning: now only will this analysis have substantial spoilers but it will also probably be a little bit different from my, er, typical diction. I was going for a more "professional" tone while writing it, so it may be a little dry in that sense. It will also have way less jokes, so there's that.
So without further ado, I present my analysis of Cave Story!
Single-handedly created by Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya, Cave Story stands as one of the most well-known and cherished of all indie video games. Pixel’s fantastic world of floating islands, anthropomorphic bunnies, sky dragons, and red flowers has gained a progressively larger following and presence as it has been translated, retranslated, ported, and reported many times over. Cave Story’s popularity is in no small part to its gripping story, one of morality, lust for power, and companionship in its purest form. Perhaps most striking, though, is Cave Story’s innermost discussion of free will and control.
Many of the characters throughout Cave Story have issues with being controlled. From the beginning, the player is introduced to Toroko, a rabbit-like “Mimiga” who finds herself frustrated by the strictly protective attitude of King, the leader of the Mimiga Village. In turn, King has adopted this attitude out of fear of a mysterious figure known only as the Doctor, who is controlling the Mimigas through violence in hopes of finding Sue Sakamoto, a human girl who he has transformed into a Mimiga. The Doctor sits as a key figure of control throughout the game: he has taken possession of an artifact called the Demon Crown that gives him extraordinary power and full control of two minions: Balrog and Misery.
Balrog is a strange robotic entity who seems relatively carefree, but due to being controlled by the Doctor he is forced to attack the player and do much of his dirty work. Despite this, though, Balrog eventually betrays the Doctor and assists the player in working against him, finally joining the player’s cause in the last moments of the game’s “good” ending. Balrog shows that even when someone is in a position of being controlled by another, they can still break free and do what is right. In contrast, Misery is also being controlled, but she has her own agenda: she attempts to get the Doctor’s power for herself and regain her free will through means of threats, but ultimately is outdone and turned into a monster by the Doctor. While Balrog shows the possibility of using free will to do the right thing, Misery shows the threat of allowing yourself to lust after power yourself, ultimately only becoming a slave to it instead of becoming free. To an even greater extent, the Doctor himself becomes a slave to the power of the Demon Crown, and is destroyed both physically and mentally by his own folly. In the “good” ending, Misery is freed from the power of the Demon Crown and realizes her mistakes, but the Doctor goes so far, abusing and manipulating people for nothing but his own insatiable lust for power, that he becomes beyond redemption and finally destroys himself.
The two main protagonists even more clearly demonstrate the themes of free will and control. The player’s character, Quote, and his companion, Curly Brace, are both robots who suffer from amnesia through the majority of the game, or through the entirety of the game depending on which path the player, as Quote, decides to take. Whether he realizes or not, there are a handful of key decisions that Quote can make that will ultimately have incredible consequences. Near the end of the game, Quote has an opportunity to leave behind the island with Kazuma Sakamoto to live out his days in peace, but doing this will clearly leave the rest of the Sakamotos, and the entire world, in the hands of fate and the Doctor’s newly built army. This sort of “bad end” is nothing new to video games, but the fact that the player can make this choice demonstrates how Quote, even though he is a robot, has control over his own destiny.
More importantly, because he has control of his own destiny he has control over the destinies of others – the world works in delicate weaves of fate, with the decisions that each person makes having deep impacts on those around them. This is shown most prevalently if the player triggers the sequence of events to see Cave Story’s “good” ending. These events begin with a seemingly-negative action: Quote must ignore a hurt friend, Professor Booster. If Quote chose to help Booster he would leave Quote with a final invention of his, and with his dying wishes ask Quote to get Sue and Kazuma Sakamoto off the island. If Quote instead ignores Booster, Booster will live, presumably in a last attempt to fulfill his wishes himself instead of trusting them to the player. If Booster lives, he will later find the player to give them an item that is vital for the game’s final ending. With this sequence of events begun, Quote gets a chance to rescue Curly Brace, who would otherwise die after sacrificing herself to save Quote, and is eventually granted the ability to save the entire island from its otherwise deadly fate.
Curly Brace also demonstrates one of the most admirable qualities of free will: the ability to repent and make amends. When the player first meets Curly, she explains that she was originally a killer robot sent by the humans of the surface to seize the Demon Crown and exterminate anything in their path, which included slaughtering countless Mimiga. However, now she has chosen to forgive herself and do what is best for everyone: she has taken up an outpost in the Sand Zone to care for several Mimiga children who are without caretakers, no doubt due to the Doctor’s cruelty. Much like Quote, she wants nothing more than to save the inhabitants of the island from their fate, and she is willing to go to any lengths to help them. In one of the most emotional scenes in the game, Curly gives Quote her air tank to allow him to breathe underwater and survive a flooding, but in the process drowns herself. For many players, the want to avert Curly’s fate is what drives them to attempt to find Cave Story’s “good” ending, and if Curly is saved she continues to stick with the player through all odds to assist him in the final battle to save the island.
Cave Story is a game about choices that people make, both positive and negative. Because of this central theme, it seems surprising that the characters who make the best choices throughout the story and the characters who fight the hardest to make a difference in the lives of others are robotic in nature. Perhaps this is fitting, though: free will and the ability to choose to help others is one of the best qualities of humanity and one of the qualities that define sentience. As humans are the ones who would create artificial intelligence, it makes sense that the most advanced artificial entity would be programmed with the qualities that are most valuable to humans. Though Quote and Curly are robots, the emphasis they put on choosing to help others reflects their roots in humanity, roots that form the base of all people, but roots that are sometimes obscured by the negative aspects of free will. Cave Story gives its audience the chance to make decisions for the sake of others and help the world, possibilities that can sometimes be forgotten in our daily lives.
~ C.O
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