Cubivore (2002, Gamecube)

 

Cubivore is the most unusual of all of the games Polygon Not Forgotten has so far addressed. That it came to the US at all, even during the salad days of quirky games, is a miracle and testament to the courage of Atlus, its US publisher. Its developer, Intelligent Systems, is better known for the Fire Emblem series without which we would not have the rocks-paper-scissors balance of contemporary turn-based strategy games. Cubivore innovated as well. Without it, we would not have Katamari Damacy or certainly not 2012's Playstation 3 cult hit Tokyo Jungle.

 

Cubivore is a game about adaptation. Your animal adapts to its environment, changing its attributes and conforming to what it kills and eats. Eating enough of a given animal means inheriting its legs or horns. Legs (and number of them) affect movement, essentially changing the rules of movement periodically as you defeat enemies. Horns affect attack speed, changing the rules of attacking. In addition to the animal, another entity is forced to adapt to changing environments: the player.

 

 

Cubivore never lets you get comfortable. What works against some enemies soon, diet-depending, will not work on others. Like in copycat Tokyo Jungle, the do-I or don't-I when it comes to eating an animal whose attributes you'd rather not inherit while low on hunger/health is a major source of tension. That the emphasis is on the environment and the obstacles it presents is evident in the Japanese title for the game, which is not Cubivore (emphasis on character and the act of fighting and eating), but Animal Forest. The forest gets top billing because the environment--not the character--is this game's star.

 

This willingness to subvert character emphasis was at its height in the '90s and '00s. The slew of Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon games symptomize this willingness to defer from a central avatar. Does the shift back to character-driven games, or perhaps even the switch in from Animal Forest to Cubivore say something about American egotism? I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that we've not seen anything like this part beat-em-up, part virtual pet, part dungeon crawler since.