Yes, I wrote that in the very next paragraph. But I also wrote that it allegedly didn’t really work, and can now confirm that. Even with the seasonal graphics off the equipment crates are now gift packages, one of the rabbits is wearing a Santa costume, the rocketbike in the Bushland area is a sleigh, etc. The only way to properly turn these off is to use the original rather than remastered graphics.
I couldn’t find my save but replayed from the beginning a bit further than I remember getting last time, beat the first boss after getting the machine gun. Compared to the few modern Metroidvanias I’ve played (e.g. Outland, Guacamelee), Cave Story just feels really dated in all the wrong places. Much more so than you’d expect from the release date. Makes sense if it’s a 8/16-bit console homage, but I completely lack the gaming background to appreciate that. So I’ll probably give up at this point, but will continue following this thread. Clearly people really love this game, maybe this discussion can help me understand why :-)
The good:
The music is great. The pixel graphics are charming. The weapon leveling system is cool.
The bad:
I don’t like the movement physics at all. The jumps are really floaty, and the movement is kind of slippery. At least so far all the items are pretty boring. There’s been 5 weapons, no new traversal options, and a bunch of items that just gate content but have no mechanical significance. And the game doesn’t do a very good job of respecting my time as the player.
Hey, how about killing those same trivial trash mobs again with exactly the same weapons, so that you can get another copy of a consumable item? Fun, fun, fun. Or how about killing them for the 10th time just due to needing to traverse through the area. Now, at least on easy and early on you could just mash the fire buttons and run through the area with the assumption that on average you’ll regain almost as much weapon XP and health as you lose. Except that there are instakill hazards around, and if you just try to power through the area rather than play carefully, you a badly timed hit might throw you into one of those hazards.
I hate the the text dialogs in the game. Keep a button pressed to see it slowly scroll by, and scroll by, and scroll by, with no option to skip to the end. And what’s up with that save system? If you want discrete save points, fine. If you want to hide most of those save points in little rooms to force a full enemy respawn after saving, fine. But if you’re anyway going to respawn all the enemies on every single area transition, how about autosaving at those points? The current system feels like the worst of all worlds.