Cave Story 3D is a real thing.

Joystiq reports that Nicalis, NIS and Pixel are bringing one of my all-time favourite games, Cave Story, to the 3DS as a full-retail project, replete with fancy-looking 3D graphics.

On the one hand, this is going to be freaking awesome because Cave Story is a legitimate masterpiece, and the artistic design looks pretty spot on. On the other, the 3DS is becoming pretty burdened with remake after remake – I'm guessing it's to sell people on the system, and the original stuff will come out later, but who knows?

I'm also a little bit afraid about this losing some of the charm of the original, but we won't know until we see it in action.

Of more interest is that Daisuke Amaya, who made the first game all by himself, has been thinking about a sequel. Of course, between Cave Story's original release in 2004 and now, he has been making a number of small, experimental games, but Cave Story has always been his magnum opus. It'd be interesting to see, now that Cave Story has had three very distinct looks, how Cave Story 2 would look and work.

And finally, with all this being said, Cave Story 3D just became my most anticipated 3DS game, and if it is actually going to come out in the launch window, I might be picking one of these things up a lot sooner than I expected to.