Mar 23, 2009 at 6:09 AM
Join Date: Mar 23, 2009
Location:
Posts: 4
Hello, greetings, and salutations, assembled Cave Story fans.
I don't do this terribly often, but every once in a while I play a game that garners such a reaction from me that it requires me to spit out a bunch of words.
Cave Story is one of those games.
Below is... well, an expanded version of what was going through my head during the moment the game finally sublimated - for me - from a terribly fun 8-bittish shooter-platformer to an astounding narrative experience. I bring these words to you and hope you enjoy.
Spoiler Alert: While I have some speculative doubts that many of you are here without actually have having beaten the game, an unnecessary warning seems a much more forgivable transgression than ruining the experience for anyone. Therefore, it should be noted that the below contains A Whole Friggin' Bunch Of Spoilers.
Accuracy Alert: I also probably got a bunch of stuff completely wrong, too, but these were my impressions during my initial playthrough. Do forgive massive deviations from known and fan-agreed Cave Story canon.
Field Log, Timestamp: -76:24:19 Cleboctubuary 62nd *Internal Clock Data Corrupted; Please Resynchronize with Main Server*
Subject: The Mission
Unit Designation: *File Corrupted Or Missing*
Unit Type: Android Soldier, Experimental
Unit Location: Floating Island, Coordinates: *GPS satellite uplink not responding*
The moon is wide and full, as if even it cannot not help but stare in stunned silence as it bears witness to what happens beneath. The only other things to light the side of the sky island this night are the bursts of blue phosphorescence that pour from my plasma assault rifle into the screaming beasts that seek to impede my moonlit ascent, my mission.
I feel no remorse for them. For anything. I lock all such feeling away, compartmentalize it into a little coded box, shove it aside, then drop it into the recycle bin. If I do what I am sure I have to do to keep Humanity safe, they would all be dead anyway; this was just a little faster.
Life is, when broken down to its base elements, nothing more than a series of self-sustaining chemical reactions. This is why there is a Darwinian imperative for survival in the first place - The most successful reactions will do whatever is in their power to continue self-sustaining; the ones that don't try won't keep doing it. Some will develop deadly claws; others, fast reflexes and keen senses.
Humans, on the other hand, built me to preserve themselves.
They built me to prevent a storm of rage-filled bullet-resistant mutant lapine ogre-beasts from scouring the Earth of human life.
What were a few rabbits compared to that goal?
I hadn't always thought like that, even in what short span of memory I possess. Earlier today I'd wanted to protect who I could; the rabbitlike Mimiga are harmless, after all, unless fed the red flowers. I, like my fellow combat android Curly Brace, had wanted to save the genuine innocents in the horrible scenario set up by the malevolent Doctor responsible for raising the army of Mimiga and the biohazard flora that make the adorable bunny-creatures into crazed killing machines.
I don't know when my mission parameters changed back to their original setting – when I shed the white knight’s dream of preserving all life as a staggering statistical improbability - but a few theories occur to me as I clutch the next stone up with my left hand, aim at the ledge above with my right, squeeze the sleek metal trigger with one ghost-white finger and blast the next bouncing puff-monster into a twitching heap of scorched meat.
Maybe it was when Curly died; when I saw her shorted-out casing lying next to me as I awoke to find that the only thing that had kept her alive and un-waterlogged in the reservoir was now squarely in my hand.
For you uninitiated humans reading this record - likely to be found only in my scorched and battered wreckage, if at all - it wasn't love that caused her irrevocable deactivation to mess with my mind. Couldn't be love. Androids don't go in for that - not unless they're the kind that's programmed to do so, and... That is about as far from my evident function as a Professor Booster was from the top shelf. Besides, our first meeting was less 'love on sight' and more 'she fired a damned plasma machinegun at me,' the very one I now clutch and kill with.
What was odd about her was that due to some quirk of coding she believed the bunny creatures could be saved and protected and cared for – really believed - and while she was there, she made you believe with her. So strongly that she fought like a wildcat – furiously, though not well - the moment she even possibly began to think they were threatened. She as was full of passion, fire, cheer and hope as any automaton I've ever seen…
Now she is dead, for all intents and purposes. Probability is negligible she will ever be reactivated; a deep-sea repair team seems unlikely to be dispatched at this juncture, and especially not before I send the island up in flames.
Even as she lay there, she was still wearing that smile…
I wondered, over and over, why she did it. Again, it couldn't have been love - She was android, as much as me, the same product line if not the same model. The most likely conclusion, I eventually reasoned, was that she'd seen me fight, did the math... and determined that I could accomplish what she could not.
In that calculation, she was right. Not only had I proven the better combatant in single confrontation, but she wouldn't be able to exterminate the Mimiga if all other options had been exhausted. I certainly won't delude myself into thinking she would have wanted it that way - I know she wouldn't. She would have believed to the end that there was a better option, some way to stop the Doctor's plans without destroying the island and everyone on it, and maybe, as her processes began shutting down, imagined I would find it; if I can't, she didn't ever want to know.
Yet even that alone doesn't seem enough to account for my change in parameters. Was it Toroko? Frightened and as genuine an innocent as you could get amidst the chaos? The fact that I had to gun her down with the very weapon Curly passionately wielded to protect the Mimiga race?
Professor Booster, his broken and aged body tossed to the bottom of a pit, breathing his last right in front of me as his decrepit organic shell failed to sustain his mind?
Mimiga Chief King, who bravely drew a line in the sand and came screaming after the augmented Doctor with nothing more than a sharpened blade; who was killed for his grand but futile gesture?
It might all be affecting me more than I calculated possible. After all – with plasma and missile at my disposal, it certainly isn't for tactical reasons I am still carrying King’s blade, or for that matter, Toroko’s pendant…
Maybe it was the sky dragons. They were supposed to be majestic beasts, each egg that lay within their incubation chambers a pocket filled with hope, a womb birthing our only likely way off this island. To see over a dozen of them them dead, stillborn, or - worse - the ones that lived, bleeding from malformed eye sockets as they screamed in agony and breathed fire at anything they could hear approaching...
Kazuma Sakamoto, one of the few human survivors of this tragedy, found the only one to hatch without complications. I could have left; there was a spare seat on it. But that would mean abandoning the mission. That would mean letting the Doctor make his army of ogrish, mutant rabbits, unleashing them on the world.
There really was no choice, in that. The stakes are far bigger than one nameless experimental combat android. They are far bigger than the lives of everyone who had died around and because of me as I'd explored this adorable nightmare world, fought the beasts spawned in the Doctor's vile wake.
I can’t timestamp which was the final straw, and not just because my clock isn't working. Each death, each horror, had taken a little more; now there's nothing left but grim determination, and my objective, buzzing over and over in my HUD:
Preserve humanity: By any means necessary.
And I will. If I have to personally kill every living thing on this island with my bare hands to make sure Humanity sees the next year, I will. If I have to sacrifice my existence to keep the species safe, I'll face permanent deactivation with a smile.
I will accomplish my mission, whatever the cost.
End of file.
I don't do this terribly often, but every once in a while I play a game that garners such a reaction from me that it requires me to spit out a bunch of words.
Cave Story is one of those games.
Below is... well, an expanded version of what was going through my head during the moment the game finally sublimated - for me - from a terribly fun 8-bittish shooter-platformer to an astounding narrative experience. I bring these words to you and hope you enjoy.
Spoiler Alert: While I have some speculative doubts that many of you are here without actually have having beaten the game, an unnecessary warning seems a much more forgivable transgression than ruining the experience for anyone. Therefore, it should be noted that the below contains A Whole Friggin' Bunch Of Spoilers.
Accuracy Alert: I also probably got a bunch of stuff completely wrong, too, but these were my impressions during my initial playthrough. Do forgive massive deviations from known and fan-agreed Cave Story canon.
Field Log, Timestamp: -76:24:19 Cleboctubuary 62nd *Internal Clock Data Corrupted; Please Resynchronize with Main Server*
Subject: The Mission
Unit Designation: *File Corrupted Or Missing*
Unit Type: Android Soldier, Experimental
Unit Location: Floating Island, Coordinates: *GPS satellite uplink not responding*
The moon is wide and full, as if even it cannot not help but stare in stunned silence as it bears witness to what happens beneath. The only other things to light the side of the sky island this night are the bursts of blue phosphorescence that pour from my plasma assault rifle into the screaming beasts that seek to impede my moonlit ascent, my mission.
I feel no remorse for them. For anything. I lock all such feeling away, compartmentalize it into a little coded box, shove it aside, then drop it into the recycle bin. If I do what I am sure I have to do to keep Humanity safe, they would all be dead anyway; this was just a little faster.
Life is, when broken down to its base elements, nothing more than a series of self-sustaining chemical reactions. This is why there is a Darwinian imperative for survival in the first place - The most successful reactions will do whatever is in their power to continue self-sustaining; the ones that don't try won't keep doing it. Some will develop deadly claws; others, fast reflexes and keen senses.
Humans, on the other hand, built me to preserve themselves.
They built me to prevent a storm of rage-filled bullet-resistant mutant lapine ogre-beasts from scouring the Earth of human life.
What were a few rabbits compared to that goal?
I hadn't always thought like that, even in what short span of memory I possess. Earlier today I'd wanted to protect who I could; the rabbitlike Mimiga are harmless, after all, unless fed the red flowers. I, like my fellow combat android Curly Brace, had wanted to save the genuine innocents in the horrible scenario set up by the malevolent Doctor responsible for raising the army of Mimiga and the biohazard flora that make the adorable bunny-creatures into crazed killing machines.
I don't know when my mission parameters changed back to their original setting – when I shed the white knight’s dream of preserving all life as a staggering statistical improbability - but a few theories occur to me as I clutch the next stone up with my left hand, aim at the ledge above with my right, squeeze the sleek metal trigger with one ghost-white finger and blast the next bouncing puff-monster into a twitching heap of scorched meat.
Maybe it was when Curly died; when I saw her shorted-out casing lying next to me as I awoke to find that the only thing that had kept her alive and un-waterlogged in the reservoir was now squarely in my hand.
For you uninitiated humans reading this record - likely to be found only in my scorched and battered wreckage, if at all - it wasn't love that caused her irrevocable deactivation to mess with my mind. Couldn't be love. Androids don't go in for that - not unless they're the kind that's programmed to do so, and... That is about as far from my evident function as a Professor Booster was from the top shelf. Besides, our first meeting was less 'love on sight' and more 'she fired a damned plasma machinegun at me,' the very one I now clutch and kill with.
What was odd about her was that due to some quirk of coding she believed the bunny creatures could be saved and protected and cared for – really believed - and while she was there, she made you believe with her. So strongly that she fought like a wildcat – furiously, though not well - the moment she even possibly began to think they were threatened. She as was full of passion, fire, cheer and hope as any automaton I've ever seen…
Now she is dead, for all intents and purposes. Probability is negligible she will ever be reactivated; a deep-sea repair team seems unlikely to be dispatched at this juncture, and especially not before I send the island up in flames.
Even as she lay there, she was still wearing that smile…
I wondered, over and over, why she did it. Again, it couldn't have been love - She was android, as much as me, the same product line if not the same model. The most likely conclusion, I eventually reasoned, was that she'd seen me fight, did the math... and determined that I could accomplish what she could not.
In that calculation, she was right. Not only had I proven the better combatant in single confrontation, but she wouldn't be able to exterminate the Mimiga if all other options had been exhausted. I certainly won't delude myself into thinking she would have wanted it that way - I know she wouldn't. She would have believed to the end that there was a better option, some way to stop the Doctor's plans without destroying the island and everyone on it, and maybe, as her processes began shutting down, imagined I would find it; if I can't, she didn't ever want to know.
Yet even that alone doesn't seem enough to account for my change in parameters. Was it Toroko? Frightened and as genuine an innocent as you could get amidst the chaos? The fact that I had to gun her down with the very weapon Curly passionately wielded to protect the Mimiga race?
Professor Booster, his broken and aged body tossed to the bottom of a pit, breathing his last right in front of me as his decrepit organic shell failed to sustain his mind?
Mimiga Chief King, who bravely drew a line in the sand and came screaming after the augmented Doctor with nothing more than a sharpened blade; who was killed for his grand but futile gesture?
It might all be affecting me more than I calculated possible. After all – with plasma and missile at my disposal, it certainly isn't for tactical reasons I am still carrying King’s blade, or for that matter, Toroko’s pendant…
Maybe it was the sky dragons. They were supposed to be majestic beasts, each egg that lay within their incubation chambers a pocket filled with hope, a womb birthing our only likely way off this island. To see over a dozen of them them dead, stillborn, or - worse - the ones that lived, bleeding from malformed eye sockets as they screamed in agony and breathed fire at anything they could hear approaching...
Kazuma Sakamoto, one of the few human survivors of this tragedy, found the only one to hatch without complications. I could have left; there was a spare seat on it. But that would mean abandoning the mission. That would mean letting the Doctor make his army of ogrish, mutant rabbits, unleashing them on the world.
There really was no choice, in that. The stakes are far bigger than one nameless experimental combat android. They are far bigger than the lives of everyone who had died around and because of me as I'd explored this adorable nightmare world, fought the beasts spawned in the Doctor's vile wake.
I can’t timestamp which was the final straw, and not just because my clock isn't working. Each death, each horror, had taken a little more; now there's nothing left but grim determination, and my objective, buzzing over and over in my HUD:
Preserve humanity: By any means necessary.
And I will. If I have to personally kill every living thing on this island with my bare hands to make sure Humanity sees the next year, I will. If I have to sacrifice my existence to keep the species safe, I'll face permanent deactivation with a smile.
I will accomplish my mission, whatever the cost.
End of file.
