Freedom Planet

Every once in a while, as I play through a set of games for Quick Reviews, I stumble on a game that I feel deserves a full-length article rather than a short one. I always knew this game would be one of them. In all fairness, it’s one of those names I had heard aplenty, owned in the collection (it’s been sitting there, waiting to be played, since June 2017), and even talked about in the past. One of this game’s main characters, Sash Lilac, is playable in Indie Pogo, a fighting game I covered back in 2019. Yeah… This one was a long time coming.

The characters and the style really carry that
"Japanese import platformer" feel...
even if the setting is closer to medieval China.

A creation of studio GalaxyTrail, Freedom Planet was released to Steam on July 21st, 2014, though it already existed prior to that. A Kickstarter campaign was also created in order to help its visibility and make it available to as many platforms as possible (the game would be released on Mac, Linux, Wii U, PS4 and Switch as well). Its creators openly admit to have been inspired by multiple gaming franchises, and that inspiration can be felt throughout. The main one? Sonic the Hedgehog (this project began life as a Sonic fangame before gaining a life of its own). Notes of Mega Man and Gunstar Heroes can be felt as well, with the end result giving equal ground to speed and combat. It’s a platformer rendered in gorgeous pixel art from start to finish with endearing and comical characters, with an interesting plot to boot (that you can play without if you don’t feel much for story). In fact, not unlike the Sonic Adventure games, you can play through the story with three different characters, and the stages they go through will change based on the events of the story – therefore, it’s worth playing through thrice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s dig in, shall we?

A Tale of Three Kingdoms… And A Universe

Long ago, a giant dragon, a creature of great might, landed in the world of Avalice. Amazed by it, the denizens of the world built three kingdoms in its honor: Shuigang, Shang Mu and Shang Tu. In thanks, the dragon transformed into a large pearl known as the Kingdom Stone, an artifact of immense power and energy, to be shared among them.

Considering this is how the game starts, some of the more
brutal scenes later down the line don't feel that out of place...

Cut to the present day: Galactic conqueror Lord Brevon, who has taken over multiple worlds across space, has crashed his vessel on this world. Seeking a way to leave and hearing about the massive power of the Kingdom Stone, he sends out his army to attack the castle of Shuigang. He kills the King and brainwashes the son, Dail, into doing his bidding. The panda son swears to find his father’s killer, while actually working for said killer. Geez-us, that starts DARK. Dail sends machines out into the other kingdoms to steal their energy for his new boss, and war seems on the horizon between the three lands.

Every adventure has to start somewhere, even for a
Little Miss Heropants (again, Carol's words).

Three days later, a flying vessel assaulted by Brevon’s mooks crashes in Dragon Valley. This happens over the heads of our heroes, the water dragon Sash Lilac and the wildcat Carol Tea. Lilac, a Little Miss Heropants (according to her friend), heads out to make sure whoever was in the ship is doing okay, while Carol heads off on her motorbike. We choose who to play for the remainder of the game: Lilac or Carol. Player characters have paths that are slightly different based on story events; as an example, one stage in the second half can only be played as Lilac, while she has been split from her friends, who have a level on their own.

Also – damn, that sprite art. Everything here looks incredible, no small feat for a game trying to replicate the graphics of 2D platformers of the PlayStation era. It’s a real treat to the eyes. Not just the sheer amount of detail on all the sprites and the platforms, but the sheer number of elements – it’s more noticeable in later stages, where a lot of things move around, both in the stage itself and in the background. In fact, so much that sometimes it’s almost distracting.

Carol pounces, swipes and kicks. Real feline, that one.
As for the sprite art... during this boss battle, the
waterfgall behind never stops moving.

The boss battles in this game are all pretty
impressive. Even the early ones!

Lilac and Carol arrive in time to rescue the pilot, a duck wearing a turtle shell for some reason, from a snake with robotic arms working for Brevon. They trick the snake, named Serpentine, into thinking he's defeated them and leaving. Lilac brings the new guy, Torque, to the treehouse she shares with Carol in Dragon Valley. Torque explains that the Kingdom Stone is now at the center of a scuffle between the kingdoms, each trying to take it for themselves. When our heroines try to warn General Gong and Neera Li, who guard the temple where the stone is kept, they turn the girls down… just in time for the forces of Shang Mu to blast in with a huge-ass truck. Level 2, Relic Maze, is all about getting to the Kingdom Stone. However, Spade, a panda mercenary working for Zao, gets there first. He flees with the jewel, forcing the heroines to fight the place’s mythical defense mechanism, a giant robot grasshopper, in his place.

Warring World

Well, that explains why his disguise was a mix of two
different creatures. Including a lifelike duck beak!
Must've been expensive to make. Must've been quite the bill.

As Lilac and Carol flee the temple, Carol gets trapped under boulders, but comes to on grassy ground. She was rescued by a dog girl named Milla Basset, who is mesmerized by Lilac the dragon. The orphaned girl needs a home, so the two friends take her in. Carol later makes a strange discovery about Torque: He's an alien! The shell and bill are fakes! He explains his situation: He’s part of an alliance of planets fighting against Lord Brevon. He came down to Avalice to keep an eye on the stranded conqueror, knowing such a monster would be up to no good. (And indeed he is, brewing a war between kingdoms to get easy access to the Stone, which he'll use to power his fallen mothership.)

I'd say the Stone isn't our worry, but Brevon wants it too,
so yeah, it IS our worry.

General Gong enlists our protagonists as a neutral party to discuss with the leader of Shang Mu, the diminutive Mayor Zao. The heroes land by Shang Mu’s Fortune Night mall just as Brevon’s forces arrive, forcing them to fight the threat. Despite the team’s best efforts, Brevon’s army, Serpentine at the head, steals the Stone. Zao arrives afterwards to complain about losing the artifact. The heroes manage to tell him about the real villain at play here, and convince him to send them to the other two kingdoms to unite them against this foe.

This battle with a galactic conqueror
is really driving her up the wall.

An aside on gameplay: Many platforming elements seen throughout the game will remind you of the classics Freedom Planet is inspired by. The most obvious one being that characters can run on walls and around loop-de-loops, similarly to Sonic. If you collect a yin yang symbol, at the end of a level you get a bonus screen where you can kick a die and earn either a new power-up for the start of the next stage or some extra lives. Also notable are the collectible cards, 10 of which are hidden in every level, and some of which can only be obtained using a certain playable character’s skills; these unlock various things in the Gallery, be it music, sound, concept art of the characters or various voice clips they use throughout the story.

And yes, all three playable characters’ movesets are different, forcing you to approach stages in new ways. Lilac is the most agile one; she’s the fastest and her moves give her the most mobility. The Cyclone gives extra air, and her special C attack is the Dragon Boost propelling her in the direction you send her to, inflicting damage on top of it all. Oh, and due to being a water dragon, she can hold her breath twice longer than her friends.

Of course Carol goes "Nya!" as she pounces.
Of course she does.

Carol's second air move is replaced by a pounce-like claw attack. However, unlike Lilac, she can wall-jump, can use special pads to get flung around a stage (since I first played as Lilac, I first had no idea what these pads were for), and upon collecting a gas can, she summons her bike, which tremendously increases her speed and can literally mow down enemies in her way. Instead of the Dragon Boost, her C attack has her throw a flurry of kicks. Makes her decent in combat, but when speed is needed, she’s badly outmatched.

Milla is the hardest character to use, having less Hit Points than the other two and being mechanically different from them. She does not have a gauge, though she makes up for the lack of a special move with a shield she can trigger at will and use as an attack, while she can also summon energy cubes that can be used as weapons. Oh, and she flutters with her ears.

Jury's still out on whether using ears to flutter
is better than using tails. Cool cubes, though!

I'd ask where does Prince Dail get all those crazy
machines, but..... yeah. Brevon. Right.

Zao provides an airship for the heroes. We get some sweet moments of bonding between them, like Milla seeing a shooting star and wishing to see her parents again, or Torque opening up about his heroic life and the many sacrifices it entailed. However, mid-flight, the airship is attacked by three ships from Shuigang. They take each ship down, one at a time, and even fight Spade as a mini-boss. They are then attacked by Prince Dail himself piloting a flying robot peacock. They defeat him, but their ship goes down. Thankfully, they land close to Shang Tu, home of the Royal Magister, who I swear is the only goddamn reasonable authority around here.

This did NOT go the way they were hoping.

They make their case to the Magister, with Torque even showing a piece of alien tech to prove Brevon’s origins. However, due to Lilac and Carol having a past with a notorious thieving group known as the Red Scarves, the same group Spade belongs to, they aren’t believed and are imprisoned instead. They try to escape, but their best plan only leads to Torque being freed while they stay behind. In a blatant plot hole, after it’s been said the three girls’ possessions were taken away, they still manage to escape by Carol (somehow) going through the wall with her bike.

Taking the fight to Brevon

The next stage, Jade Creek, has them on the run from Shang Tu’s authorities. On top of all that, Torque is successfully kidnapped by Serpentine. Lilac and Carol have a huge argument over Lilac’s constant need to be a hero and endangering her friends in the process, so Carol leaves. Lilac decides to continue alone, leaving Milla with Carol.

That Syntax bot is really good at finding new bodies.
...Really good at using them, too.

Holy Jesus f- ...tapdancing Christ!

Lilac infiltrates Brevon’s temporary factory, the Thermal Base, on her own. At the bottom of it, she fights the conqueror’s right-hand bot, Syntax, which has the ability to take on a multitude of robotic forms. Sure, she beats it, but is then captured AND TORTURED graphically alongside Torque by Brevon. Yikes! That’s freaking dark! Meanwhile, her (ex?-)friends learn of this and decide she’ll need help, so they go to the Red Scarves for assistance. They arrive at Thermal Base in time to rescue a badly hurt Lilac and Torque. After a short shootout with Brevon’s forces, the four flee thanks to a teleporter, with the base imploding (…somehow?) behind them. Not that it helps much, as Lilac is split from her friends, again, and is captured by Neera.

Thankfully, this time, the Magister had Torque’s fragment studied, and recognizes the alien threat. He is willing to pardon Lilac, if she accepts to complete a mission for them first. She agrees and gets to stop by a special bath to heal her wounds. A Lilac good as new is taken to Pangu Lagoon, where she must find other remnants of technology made of the same material. At the bottom of a temple at the end of the lagoon, Lilac fights… an honest-to-God giant dragon.

...Uh oh.

And now it's their turn to go "Uh oh". (Fun fact:
I thought for a while that Mayor Zao, the one
with the big hat, was a fox. Nope. Red panda.)

Hey! Brevon! Say hello to my "little" friend!

…Oh, wait, no, not so honest. It turns out to be a hologram made by an ancient machine that happens to be friendly. (Rebooting its systems with a kick seems to have helped.) Its creators were a race of ancient dragons stranded on Avalice, and whose gift for this world was the Kingdom Stone. Thanks to the new robot’s Holodragon form scaring the ever-loving crap out of them, Lilac manages to unite the kingdoms of Shang Mu and Shang Tu against the Brevon-controlled Shuigang. This includes an unexpected shmup stage where the Holodragon, “piloted” by Lilac, tears through the conqueror’s forces. A stage follows in the warzone of the Battle Glacier, where Brevon’s mothership, the Final Dreadnought, landed. Standing between the heroes and the ship is Prince Dail, here for a final confrontation with yet another incredible boss battle.

Seriously, each time I think I’ve been astonished enough by the creativity of this game, more astonishing scenes happen.

Final Dreadnought

Yes, Brevon sends literal armies at you. In some
rooms of FD1, your only chance is to run away.
There's just too many enemies at once.

The final four stages all take place within the mothership, which is about to depart, using the Stone as its energy source. Four grueling platforming levels in which Brevon throws everything he has at the heroes. Every type of enemy and hazard. Meanwhile, the ship has taken off into space, and there’s a section where Brevon cuts off the ship’s oxygen since neither he nor his troops need it, forcing Lilac and Carol to find ways to survive – by finding bubbles or a special oxygen shield that can be supplied by Milla. The entire thing is a genuine test of skill and was incredibly tough to beat on Normal difficulty.

Cutting off the oxygen, and forcing an "underwater" scenario
in the middle of the final dungeon... it's pretty genius.

It took me everything to get to the end on Normal,
no thanks, I ain't trying on Hard!

For the record, the game has 4 difficulties. On Casual, enemies do half damage, and do full damage from Easy onwards. Heroes regenerate health on their own, quickly in Casual and slowly on Easy, but not on Normal and Hard. The elemental shield power-ups are weaker at every harder difficulty. Lastly, on Hard, boss attack patterns are quicker, and whereas you needed to collect 200 Crystal Shards – the setting's Mario-like "coins" – to gain an extra life before, now you need 300. Good thing the system doesn’t change: Lots of checkpoints, and if you lose all of your lives, you can choose to continue on the Game Over screen to return to the nearest checkpoint. It’s basically like having infinite lives masquerading as a finite number!

BREVON WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THE
LITTLE MILLA OH YOU'RE GONNA SUFFER
LILAC'S GONNA TEAR YOU APART.

Bosses? Lots. A fight against Syntax, Brevon’s right-hand bot, and a final showdown against Serpentine in a full snake mecha. At the end of Final Dreadnought 3, our character uses a device created by Torque to turn off the machine using the Kingdom Stone’s power. However, Brevon appears, dropping Milla to the ground. The dog girl turns into a monster that must be fought by either Lilac or Carol. Once defeated, Milla returns to normal, and appears… dead. (She turns out fine in the final scenes, but our characters’ outrage at Brevon forcing them to fight her fuel them in the fight across Final Dreadnought 4.) Oh, Brevon, you’ve done it. This time, you’ll freaking pay.

Let's be clear. After Brevon attacked her with his ship, and
when he attacks her on foot afterwards, he makes it clear he
does NOT need a mecha on top of it all. Guess he does three
phases to make sure Lilac really is dead.
....If he beats her, that is!

"Fun" fact: If you lose against Brevon's last phase but Lilac
or Carol's body wasn't destroyed, he will personally tear it to
shreds, even though the character's already dead.

And what a final boss it is, too. Three phases, with checkpoints between them. First is a fight against Brevon’s battleship. Phase 2 has Brevon aboard a mecha that we must take down. At last, Phase 3 is against the real deal, and he’s every bit as dangerous as his status as a galactic conqueror implies. One swipe of his poison knife cuts down half of Carol or Lilac’s health, his aim is mad good with a laser gun, and he’s fast as Hell. Took me a while to finally beat him. But damn was it satisfying.

It's okay Milla, you weren't in control.

The Dreadnought implodes. Our quartet of heroes manages to make it out in Torque’s ship, but another green ship also leaves, Brevon peacing out after he's lost everything. Milla is revealed to be back to normal. And the Kingdom Stone, thought to be destroyed, instead morphed and left behind a vortex of particles in the night sky. The future is uncertain (…well, until the 2022 sequel), but for now, the world is at peace. Torque leaves and gets some warm goodbyes, with everyone hoping he’ll return soon. Roll credits.

Group hug! (Or the closest thing this spritework will allow!)

Final words

Took me long enough to get to this, but here we are! And the first word I think of with this game is: Impressive. It’s genuinely impressive. Freedom Planet would try, by the time of the sequel, to distance as much as possible from its roots as a Sonic fangame turned into a fully original IP, and I definitely understand why that decision was made. That said, the inspiration is clear, between the gameplay mechanics and some of the art style. Still, this one deserves to stand on its own.

Most boss battles are jaw-dropping.

Three playable characters with very different movesets going through 12 long stages, with the last ones getting downright BRUTAL, and loads of mini-bosses and bosses. On the topic of movesets: Lilac's is the most versatile, Milla is the one that's hardest to learn (but very rewarding), while Carol's... well, everything she does the other two can do better, the wildcat's got the short end of the stick. The difficulty is more on the “hard” side overall, but at least the game is plenty lenient with lives, continues and multiple difficulty settings. If you want to see everything the game has to offer, then you need to see all three of the girls’ campaigns. Stages are designed to account for both speed and combat, each being given relatively equal footing. And all of it is conveyed in hands-down some of the most gorgeous pixel art I’ve ever seen. The sheer level of detail here, both in gameplay and in every single cutscene… I could’ve sworn I had to pick my jaw off the floor more than once. The music is also excellent, perfect for each stage. In the same vein, there are plenty of boss battles with great concepts behind them that I’ve seldom seen in other 2D platformers.

Carol tends to get tossed aside because she's
not as agile as Lilac or Milla, especially by the
speedrun community, but the sequel tried
to correct that apparently.

The story is, for the most part, pretty decent. Of course there are some artistic liberties taken through the existence of three storylines happening at the same time, but things tend not to get too muddled. There's a few plot holes, which is fine, as well as moments that are left unexplained. As an example, why did Thermal Base self-destruct? it's implied that those would have been covered in the Torque and Spade storylines promised in the Kickstarter. The former is available in the game's beta mode only, while plans for the latter's story as DLC were dropped when work on the sequel began, and it's unclear if either will be a part of future projects by GalaxyTrail. Some tonal inconsistencies are notable here and there, going from cuteness to "one characters gets brutally tortured". That particular scene is divisive, to say the least.

A lot of recurring bosses here - Serpentine,
Dail, Syntax... All in impressive fights.
I repeat, this game's a pixelated treat for the eyes.

The mythology of the world is pretty interesting and it’s also nice to see how the society of the three kingdoms operates, especially in regards to that alien invasion. Brevon is an effective villain, whose sole starting motivation is to leave the damn planet, and whose conflict with the heroes gets personal only when they start meddling. Also interesting to have part of the story be about Lilac’s chronic hero syndrome and its consequences. Good stuff, though the voice acting is a mixed bag. Lilac's voice actress, Dawn Michelle Bennett, is great; some of the others, not so much. And hey, worst case scenario, if you don't like the cutscenes, you can always play without the (admittedly quite lengthy) cutscenes.

Freedom Planet is definitely worth checking out if you need a fix of 2D platforming. It deserves the praise it gets, and though I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever check out the sequel, I can at least say I really liked the original. It’s no wonder Lilac is popular even outside of the game. What else is there to say? It good!

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