It's the last week of the month and that means a new episode of the Comic Commish! As you may already know, this is a little Let's Play/Quick Look doodad I put together for various games that people have gifted me in the past, either on Steam or elsewhere. It's meant as a thank you for their generosity and, tacitly, an acknowledgement that I've actually gotten around to enjoying their present. Well, "enjoying" is sometimes a stretch, given how many of these are gag presents intended to exasperate and discombobulate in various measures. Still, the Comic Commish makes no distinctions. A freebie is a freebie.
Today's game comes courtesy of Wiki Wizard @bobafettjm, who procured a spare key for this throwback 2D platformer in a bundle during his quixotic quest to accrue every uninspired hidden object game and many other Steam also-rans for the sake of a comprehensive wiki. Few have sacrificed as much as he for this great Giant Bomb wiki of ours.
Freedom Planet is a 2014 retro platformer from GalaxyTrail Games that wears its numerous influences on its sleeve, not unlike Yacht Club Games's stylistically similar and homage-heavy Shovel Knight. While Shovel Knight dabbled in 8-bit Nintendo nostalgia, however, Freedom Planet is far more interested in the 16-bit Sega era: odd and colorful and wonderfully animated games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Ristar and Treasure's Genesis output such as Dynamite Headdy and Gunstar Heroes. I bring up the Shovel Knight connection because while Freedom Planet draws from many sources, it is itself a wholly unique thing: because it doesn't ever get too close to any one game it feels both original and familiar in turns. It's easy to lift a game wholesale and put your own paint job on top of it, as so many imitations have done in the past, but you evidently get better results by constructing an amalgam out of the many.
As is usually the case when describing a game it is better to show than to tell. (Though, really, it's best to do both simultaneously. That is what elementary school taught us, after all.)
Already this game looks incredible. Much has been said about Indies and their dependence on pixel-based art direction, but there was a point around the mid-90s where we all but reached the pinnacle of what a pixellated artstyle could manage before the aesthetic beauty of video games hit a big "restart" button with the ugly but brave early adopters of polygonal graphics. I'm glad Indies have jumped right back to that time, for as often as we tend to be inundated with those little squares. (Seriously, just look at the pixel art for Valkyrie Profile or Chrono Trigger or Legend of Mana or SaGa Frontier 2. It can be intensely beautiful.)Anyway, some bad shit's going down in this Shuigang Palace place. The robo-samurai guards are getting mowed down by "War of the Worlds" over here.We're introduced to this guy on the left, later given the name of Lord Brevon, who is definitely giving off some "final boss" vibes. Also surprising? This game is fully voice-acted. Some VAs are a little better than others, but I didn't expect to hear such clear voices from what is attempting to be a 16-bit game. Usually they're a bit, well, "sample-y".Man, this game doesn't mess around. Lord Brevon chops the King's head right off and installs a brainwashed Prince Dail to rule as his proxy. It's a showy intro, and a curious one given the amount of story details it reveals. I daresay any other game would present Dail as the antagonist and reveal this Brevon character in a late-game "I'm the real bad guy!" twist. Perhaps it's for the best that it doesn't.Anyway, that brings us to the title screen. Welcome to Freedom Planet! It was originally "French Planet" until the US release inexplicably renamed it.Here's our protagonists: on the left is Carol, some kind of green cat-lizard thing, and the right thing is a furry. I honestly have no idea. Its name is Lilac.Part of the game's charm is in how it presents its scenarios with characters that control very differently. I'll be playing as Carol for this truncated screenshot LP, but I did try Lilac for a bit. She's considerably faster, though I tended to run into enemies a lot more often. The Sonic fan's option, I suppose. She does kinda look like Blaze the Cat.Carol, meanwhile, feels a little more Knuckles-ish. Slower, but tougher. Both characters enter Dragon Valley at different points, allowing them to - canonically - progress through the area separately and meet up later on for cutscenes where they're both present. Works a little better than the usual system, which is to have one character walk inside the other and stay there until they're needed. That always weirded me out.Getting used to the controls. Carol has two attacks: a light one and a heavier "special" that drains that blue bar, which quickly regenerates. I can imagine that's a boss consideration: use the short and quick ones for fast-moving bosses where you can never be guaranteed a hit; use the heavy ones for when the boss reveals its vulnerable point temporarily and you need to take advantage with as much firepower as possible.There's also Carol's double jump, which isn't so much a double jump than a jump and a sort of pounce. The pounce gets her a little further horizontally speaking, but her vertical movement is pretty much capped to however high her first jump got her. We also see the game's primary collectible: these blue crystals. I got a little OCD in the first stage trying to locate what I thought was a stage total: there's a number at the top left next to the lives count that counts down each time a crystal is collected. Rather than showing all the crystals on the stage, however, it's simply indicating how many more you need to earn an extra life (i.e. every 200 crystals).Well, you can see the Sonic influences already, if they weren't already clear. The game shares the blue hedgehog's sense of speed, and many of the obstacles and mechanisms are familiar as well.There's even sparkly invincibility effects and a jazzy tune. I was still in exploration mode here, so I pretty much squandered it.Carol's also unique in that she has a motorcycle that she can acquire with the right power-up. It increases her speed, but oddly enough does not diminish her combat output. She'll continue to slash her claws while riding.The motorbike can take a few hits before it vanishes. It also appears to be the only way to break through walls as Carol: I imagine Lilac has her own means of breaking through them. These walls seem to have the best hidden power-ups and other collectibles behind them.The bike can... also climb ladders, I guess. Best not to think about how that works. I've played a lot of MGS this year, so nothing about ladders surprises me any more.Here's a mystery that I wouldn't discover the solution to until much later: these chests reveal colored orbs when opened, the color of which is contingent on the color of the chest's lock when it is broken. Apparently, they're tied to a bonus stage that shows up after the end of stage 2 (and, presumably, every other stage thereafter).There are also these things. Cards. They're better hidden than everything else I've been picking up. It wouldn't be until I dropped back to the main menu before quitting that I discovered their purpose......they're unlockables. No concept art, at least that I could see, but a lot of the game's music and some character sound clips. The music in this game has been uniformly excellent, so I'm certainly not opposed to having a library of them here.As well as the usual jumping and running through loop-de-loops and across slanted runways, it has typical Sonic mechanisms like this pushing block and switch puzzle, and the red pad back there will spring me past a series of similar red platforms but only if I jump to the right rhythm: any later and I'll simply fall off the last one I reached.Continuing our tour on "what the shit is that?", these glowy crystals can confer shields onto (unto?) you. The shields work like they did in Sonic 3 to some extent: all will absorb a hit or two, but some have additional functions, like drawing crystals to you from further away or doing damage to the enemies it touches. I opened a blue flower thing too, which is just free crystals. There's a red variant for health.We're accosted by this snake thing as our first boss. It's very Treasure: I know how much like they liked their segmented monsters. Actually I guess that's most developers back then, including Nintendo and Capcom. Knocking the armor off its segments is enough to scare it off. A nice touch? These holes had useful geysers that tossed you up until now, so I instinctively stood on top of one and got hit by the snake's first attack. Teaches you to be a little more cautionary about strange holes in the desert, if nothing else.The next bit through logs in a waterfall (which I feel are to platformers what cargo elevator sequences are to brawlers) isn't that remarkable, but for the snake guy who returns to poke his head out to snipe at you like a coward.The game also has underwater sequences, with the requisite bubbles to restore the oxygen meter. I didn't wait around long enough to hear if it still made the Sonic drowning music. Frankly, it still terrifies me.A rolling boulder sequence out of nowhere. It's exciting, I suppose.Dickishly, that sequence immediately segues into another (proper) boss fight with the snake. He's trickier this time, occasionally rolling into a ball to bounce around the screen and summoning boulders to splat you whenever you score a hit on his head.I barely survived this one. Did you see those little red segments under the blue stamina gauge in earlier screenshots? Notice how there aren't any now? Skin of my teeth stuff. And this was just the first boss! That's why I feel this game owes its fair share to Treasure games, since they always made their bosses memorable (and memorably tough). The boss wasn't just a fat man who bolted a flail to his hovership, let's just say.Carol does a little victory pose when the stage is complete, and I get my time (this was a long stage! Almost 20 minutes on the clock. I'm sure it's like 5 minutes if you're speedrunning and ignoring everything). I also notice that the blue crystals I'd collected got added to some grand game-wide total. Interesting, that. Maybe I will find a use for them later.We meet Torque, who is some kind of duck turtle, and Serpentine, who is sort of a vicious Boba Fett bounty hunter type. I'm not sure what Orville's done to piss this guy off, but he seems like bad news.Anyway, Lilac's the one who saves him. I guess Carol is the one who keeps showing up late despite having a motorcycle.Anyway, I'd best end it on these interstitial cutscenes. I'd captured the whole second stage (it was like Aquatic Ruin Zone! Traps and mechanisms everywhere!) but I think this is more than enough.
That's Freedom Planet, or at least the first stage. Apparently this game has ten of them, if that card unlockables menu was any indication, so there's clearly plenty of game to get through even excepting the fact that there are two (well.. three. So far) protagonists to choose from. The original Sonic games felt decidedly short, especially if you were blasting through them as fast as Sonic could run, though it seems this one's a little meatier. Talking of meatiers, we're still in pursuit of the guy that fell down from space and it looks like there's plenty more plot and characters to be introduced to.
Actually, if anything, the game reminds me a lot of Dust: An Elysian Tail, and not just because all the characters are anthros. It's not the tone either, as Dust's was far more grim: it's more in how it presents its cutscenes with full (if charmingly low-rent) voice acting; a lot of the pseudo-Asian imagery; how boss fights tend to pan out (both you and the bosses move very quickly, so it can be tense to stay on top of them); and the clear amount of effort put into the visuals and sound. It's not quire as exploration-heavy as Dean Dodrill's one-man SpaceWhipper but it scratches a lot of the same itches with its fast-paced platformer/brawler gameplay.
Usually this would be my moment to bow out and leave you all with the comic I prepared for this game, but instead I'm going to rail against Sonic for a bit and why it's a fundamentally broken series and perhaps not the ideal source of inspiration for any fledgling Indie developer who might base their own projects on the Blue Prince's blueprints.
Y'see, Sonic the Hedgehog began as a means by Sega to show up Mario: by making everything fast and exciting to watch, focusing on one of the few advantages the Sega Genesis offered over its rival the Super Nintendo, it left Mario in the dust. He now resembled one of the many languid tortoises that he regularly stomped into paste. Yet Sonic is still built on the same platformer core that Mario helped establish back in '85 with the original Super Mario Bros., the most overt of which was how carefully exploring one's surroundings usually led to greater rewards. In this case, finding lots of rings (at least 50) and completing a stage allowed the player to reach the special Chaos Emerald bonus stages. In order to acquire all the Chaos Emeralds (most of which aren't even green, by the way) you had to play every stage thoroughly to find those fifty precious rings, and then subsequently play very cautiously in order to hang onto them until you reached the end of the Zone and the bonus stage that awaited. In order to play Sonic the Hedgehog "properly", therefore, meant maintaining a deliberate pace through each of its Zones. This runs (or strolls, as the case may be) completely counter to how the game is promoted; how in the commercials and in the game's attract mode Sonic would be speeding through each Zone with a blink-and-you'll-miss-him celerity, showing up his portly rival Dr. Robotnik time and time again with his attitude and alacrity. It's in more than just the advertising too: the game is designed specifically so that speeding through Sonic as quickly as possible just feels so right. When you're informed at the end of it all that you got the sucky ending, watching Dr. Robotnik as he stands on the final screen juggling those Chaos Emeralds with a big grin on his face, you feel misled. The game was lying to you. You ran through it as fast as you could, but by doing so you missed a lot of very important details. You failed.
This jarring dichotomy continues to this day. Every new Sonic struggles with the decision to either focus on exploring wider spaces, or to focus on barely interactive rollercoaster rides through pretty scenery at 300mph, or both somehow. It's why, even though those early Sonic games were a lot of fun, the franchise is defective on a fundamental level and can never be repaired. Take out the speed and you kill what Sonic is all about. Take out the Emeralds or any reason to explore stages and you might as well make it a linear racecourse (and we all know how Sonic R panned out). Leave them both in and the game tears itself apart with its contradictory objectives. It's not a good scene.
I think we're done here. I'll leave you with the comic I prepared especially for this entry of the Comic Commish (I mean, it wouldn't be a comic commish without one...):
Saving it as a .gif was deliberate, I swear. It's a Web 1.0 joke! Geocities! You believe me, right?
