Although Sash is the obvious star of the game, her Sparkster-esque ability to rocket around levels has the tendency to push her into peril. At the start of the game, players have a choice between the lavender-complected water-dragon Sash Lilac and her impetuous feline friend, Carol Tea.
While games of yore typically had uncomplicated move sets and printed instruction booklets, Freedom Planet has neither, leaving it to players to master the navigational methods of each of the three playable characters. For those with concern for a rag-tag team of affable animals and the chase after an energy-producing Kingdom Stone, there’s Classic Mode (if they don’t feel like skipping cutscenes) which forgoes the plot for a non-stop thrill ride of platforming mixed with pugnaciousness. For those that appreciate a bit of narrative-based impetus, Freedom’s Planet‘s Adventure Mode indulges, issues bits of exposition much like Sonic Adventure. Personality is better articulated through the game’s adorable sprite animations, where characters go bug-eyed when pushed into strenuous situations or perform a jubilant handstand after conquering one the game’s protracted stages. Although the game complements its text-driven dialog with serviceable voice-overs, it’s hardly needed. Like it’s source material, Freedom Planet‘s charm emanates from it’s anthropomorphic cast of characters. Where corporate groupthink might be blamed for decisions like focus-group fashioned sidekicks or episodic delivery methods, indie studio GalaxyTrail has deftly stripped away the feature-bloat excess, delivering an experience which feels like finding the unbeknownst warhead that could have conceivably tipped the balance in the fifth-generation console war.
Recreating the vibrant hues and parallax-scrolling backdrops of a late 90’s action-platformer, the title adds a dose of combat-driven physicality to ensure that it doesn’t feel like a toothless copycat.
Pleasingly, the recent Steam release of Freedom Planet strikes a virtuous balance. In retrospect, the publisher spent the succeeding decades trying to duplicate its Sonic-era glory, an endeavor as awkward as a middle-aged man trying to rekindle his high-school swagger. From Sonic Team’s eponymous series, as well as their work on Ristar, to Treasure’s string of stirring hits- Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, Alien Soldier and Light Crusader, players saw a succession of truly superlative titles.Īnd while the following generation’s shift to polygon-pushing hardware produced a number of memorable games, few of these would match the charm and effervescent vitality demonstrated by SEGA’s sixteen-bit output. There’s a very good reason why the Genesis/Mega Drive is so revered by retro gamers: the console played host to several prodigious programing teams.
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