General_Norris wrote:jfrost wrote:I share your misgivings about the last "ultra-difficult" Cave Story level. I just didn't care at that point and gave up.
And it's not as if I don't like hard games.
That's the thing. It's not difficult, it just...painful and boring. It reminds me of Kaizo Mario Bros and that's ugly.
What I wonder is, what does the average gamer think of it? The game has such a terrible difficulty spike when you reach the Last Cave that I can see most of them getting bored with it at that point. The rest of the game is pretty easy, hitting them like that is awful.
Yeah, I don't know what it was. I enjoyed the rest of the game, even though it wasn't anything mindblowing (I had played for a while the freeware version years before, but I hadn't stuck with it).
Then we get to the last cave and I'm absolutely unprepared to deal with it. The game up to that point hadn't required very precise platforming and all of a sudden I'm supposed to go between very narrow spikes and time my button presses almost perfectly. I didn't care enough and stopped playing.
I compare it to, say, levels in Super Meat Boy, which have a very steady progression. Each time the difficulty went up just a little bit in a way I thought "well, this must be the difficulty ceiling, finally". It almost never was and the game does get progressively harder up to the last dark world. I knew it was like that I was equipped to deal with the challenge.
To me, the last cave in Cave Story feels almost like a deus ex machina in fiction in general. It was a device they pulled out of nowhere to beat the player (or otherwise conclude the story) and because of that it feels cheap and not worth my time to be played (probably in the same way I would just drop a book that had made logical leaps that were too ridiculous and not for comedic purposes, for instance).
