When I started streaming on Twitch, I never imagined that I'd be going back to any game enough to actually finish it on stream, but lo and behold, I finished Cubivore on stream! This is one of those games I never thought I'd actually ever play because the American version is SO hilariously expensive, but apparently the Japanese version is WAY less sought after and more common, because I picked up my copy for a little less than $10 USD at Book Off. It took me about 6.5 hours to beat the Japanese version with the good ending over the course of 3 streams (so 3 sessions over about a month).
Cubivore is a game with a simple story but a very odd concept. The world of cube-shaped animals is peaceful and animals live with no worries until the day a group of mysterious, colorless animals come and begin eating everything in sight and taking all the color from the world. The world is on the brink of utter destruction until you, the player's animal, are mysteriously born from the sky one day. Outside of that, virtually all of the text in the game comes from the player avatar themself as they narrate from their perspective between stages. All the player avatar really cares about is eating, evolving, and mating, and the fate of the world is only sort of a tangential concern of theirs beyond their own quest for power XD. It's a very silly story that really doesn't take itself seriously at all, and the silly, almost childlike way the main character talks was thoroughly entertaining for me to translate for people watching the stream.
The gameplay loop of Cubivore is going through stages eating to get more powerful so you can battle the head animals of each stage to gain their special ability and move to the next stage. As you eat, you assimilate the colors of the cube animals you're eating. There are a variety of colors of animal with different intensities (strengths) and which combo of which colors will give you new evolutions, and you need to have had 100 unique evolutions in order to fight the final boss of the game. Different evolutions and different color types play a bit differently, and some quite differently, as they add little panels of locamotive body parts to your Cube with each evolution. Most are fairly straight-forward as you lock on to attack, charge up, and lunge for the kill, but some prioritize evasion or blocking instead of pursuit and offense, and some even configure the head in different directions (like sideways or even backwards) or use wider turning circles to make you fight very differently. You also collect love points to mate and grow another "limb" (another panel that makes up your body) and be able to get way more powerful forms. Those are all at pre-determined points in the story though, so it's not like you even could choose not to mate if you wanted to (although the scenes for them are pretty funny).
The controls, as one would expect of a Nintendo game, play quite well. The only real thing to get used to is the camera, which can take a LOT of getting used to as it very much feels like a game from the mid-90s in that regard. You even need to tap the C-stick one tap at a time to reposition the camera in 60 degree increments, like you're pressing C-buttons on an N64 controller. But outside of that, the game has a lot of cool ideas and other things that make it feel older. The way the game isn't super hard, but also doesn't really hold your hand is cool, but won't be for everyone. There are some evolutions that it will be very hard to get used to, but the game DOES, in a way, give you an idea of how to use them by the animals you eat to become that evolution fighting that way in the first place. It's a neat idea that you have to analyze the way your enemies fight because soon you too will be that enemy and will need to fight like they do.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. You'd definitely have to emulate it, as the price tag for the English version is utterly unjustifiable, but I ended up loving Cubivore a lot more than I ever thought I would. It takes a while to get into the swing of how the combat works, but once you do, getting new forms to mess about in is really fun and creates a neat risk-reward of getting new forms but also still being able to fight well enough to get more forms after that. It is absolutely a hidden gem on the Gamecube well worth emulating
Cubivore is a game with a simple story but a very odd concept. The world of cube-shaped animals is peaceful and animals live with no worries until the day a group of mysterious, colorless animals come and begin eating everything in sight and taking all the color from the world. The world is on the brink of utter destruction until you, the player's animal, are mysteriously born from the sky one day. Outside of that, virtually all of the text in the game comes from the player avatar themself as they narrate from their perspective between stages. All the player avatar really cares about is eating, evolving, and mating, and the fate of the world is only sort of a tangential concern of theirs beyond their own quest for power XD. It's a very silly story that really doesn't take itself seriously at all, and the silly, almost childlike way the main character talks was thoroughly entertaining for me to translate for people watching the stream.
The gameplay loop of Cubivore is going through stages eating to get more powerful so you can battle the head animals of each stage to gain their special ability and move to the next stage. As you eat, you assimilate the colors of the cube animals you're eating. There are a variety of colors of animal with different intensities (strengths) and which combo of which colors will give you new evolutions, and you need to have had 100 unique evolutions in order to fight the final boss of the game. Different evolutions and different color types play a bit differently, and some quite differently, as they add little panels of locamotive body parts to your Cube with each evolution. Most are fairly straight-forward as you lock on to attack, charge up, and lunge for the kill, but some prioritize evasion or blocking instead of pursuit and offense, and some even configure the head in different directions (like sideways or even backwards) or use wider turning circles to make you fight very differently. You also collect love points to mate and grow another "limb" (another panel that makes up your body) and be able to get way more powerful forms. Those are all at pre-determined points in the story though, so it's not like you even could choose not to mate if you wanted to (although the scenes for them are pretty funny).
The controls, as one would expect of a Nintendo game, play quite well. The only real thing to get used to is the camera, which can take a LOT of getting used to as it very much feels like a game from the mid-90s in that regard. You even need to tap the C-stick one tap at a time to reposition the camera in 60 degree increments, like you're pressing C-buttons on an N64 controller. But outside of that, the game has a lot of cool ideas and other things that make it feel older. The way the game isn't super hard, but also doesn't really hold your hand is cool, but won't be for everyone. There are some evolutions that it will be very hard to get used to, but the game DOES, in a way, give you an idea of how to use them by the animals you eat to become that evolution fighting that way in the first place. It's a neat idea that you have to analyze the way your enemies fight because soon you too will be that enemy and will need to fight like they do.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. You'd definitely have to emulate it, as the price tag for the English version is utterly unjustifiable, but I ended up loving Cubivore a lot more than I ever thought I would. It takes a while to get into the swing of how the combat works, but once you do, getting new forms to mess about in is really fun and creates a neat risk-reward of getting new forms but also still being able to fight well enough to get more forms after that. It is absolutely a hidden gem on the Gamecube well worth emulating