Freedom Planet - Not a Sonic fangame. Really. I promise.

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My final stats with Lilac, for those that want to take a look:
2lEYTVt.png

Nice! I don't have a fancy screenshot, but my save file for Lilac tells me:

Time
173:55:12

Crystals
3716

Deaths
53

That was my first playthrough of the game. Somehow, my Carol playthrough took even longer and had many more deaths (80 total). Milla took as long as Carol, but had the same amount of deaths as Lilac.

I guess overall I'd say the game is hardest as Carol, but she's also my favorite character to play as, so it's a fair trade-off.
 
Nonsense! Have you never heard of Wall-Clinging? 2OP4bosses
In all honesty I found Lilac to be the hardest one as she doesn't have the DPS of Wild Kick and the OPness of Wall-Clinging, making most bosses harder when compared to Carol.


In fact, the only thing I could potentially not like about this game is how obnoxiously hard a handful of bosses are (Spade and Neera, I'm looking at you), but admittedly, what with the seemingly infinite attempts (Lol, Game Overs with infinite Continues that bring you back to the boss), it's really just a moot point.

Otherwise, the music is very much spot-on, with memorable tunes like Boss 1, Sky Battalion, Thermal Base 1, Final Dreadnought 1 and Boss 7 that hit you in that one special corner of your brain and never leave.
The story is also very endearing: not to spoil anything, but I felt very compassionate towards Lilac at one certain point in the game, and I became attached to her through and through, until the very end of the game. And that's not something many games can accomplish; this feeling of absolute empathy towards a character.

All that said and done, Freedom Planet is the best 15€ I've spent in a long while, if not ever, and I'm glad it managed to reach most of its goals during its kickstarter phase.
As for the soundtrack being available to buy, while it is silly indeed when they have their own folder on your PC for "free", I would definitively pay for it because, well, supporting a successful company leads to more success amirite?
 
Nonsense! Have you never heard of Wall-Clinging? 2OP4bosses
In all honesty I found Lilac to be the hardest one as she doesn't have the DPS of Wild Kick and the OPness of Wall-Clinging, making most bosses harder when compared to Carol.


In fact, the only thing I could potentially not like about this game is how obnoxiously hard a handful of bosses are (Spade and Neera, I'm looking at you), but admittedly, what with the seemingly infinite attempts (Lol, Game Overs with infinite Continues that bring you back to the boss), it's really just a moot point.

Otherwise, the music is very much spot-on, with memorable tunes like Boss 1, Sky Battalion, Thermal Base 1, Final Dreadnought 1 and Boss 7 that hit you in that one special corner of your brain and never leave.
The story is also very endearing: not to spoil anything, but I felt very compassionate towards Lilac at one certain point in the game, and I became attached to her through and through, until the very end of the game. And that's not something many games can accomplish; this feeling of absolute empathy towards a character.

All that said and done, Freedom Planet is the best 15€ I've spent in a long while, if not ever, and I'm glad it managed to reach most of its goals during its kickstarter phase.
As for the soundtrack being available to buy, while it is silly indeed when they have their own folder on your PC for "free", I would definitively pay for it because, well, supporting a successful company leads to more success amirite?

I never really took advantage of wall-clinging in my Carol playthrough, though now that you bring it up, it's probably something I should try. However, the reason I think Lilac is a bit easier to play as is due to her higher mobility and invincibility frames. Carol's Wild Kick makes her immune to a lot of attacks, but Lilac's rocket burst last much longer and ignores all damage. It makes it a lot easier to use hit-and-run tactics, whereas you have to be pretty up close and personal with Carol.

Agree about the lives system being useless. I'm fine with the game having infinite continues, but having lives is completely redundant at that point. I suppose they need to justify those blue gems with something, tho.

Kind of surprised you have trouble against Spade. I've only fought him three times so far, but I've never lost to him, and he's definitely one of the easier bosses, in my opinion. Neera gave me problems, but only until I learned not to jump into her attacks. The boss balancing patch made her fight even easier.
 
Spade gave me problems as well. To this day, he's the boss responsible for probably 70% of my deaths. He never has an open window for attacking because he just dashes away after he attacks and then uses explodey blue card missiles with hitboxes that are much larger than the actual cards.

Neera on the other hand, I have yet to ever die to. She's pathetically easy. She only has 1 move; throwing a projectile that ricochets off at a 45 degree angle when it hits a wall. All you have to do is get behind her when she throws it and attack her.
 
Spade gave me problems as well. To this day, he's the boss responsible for probably 70% of my deaths. He never has an open window for attacking because he just dashes away after he attacks and then uses explodey blue card missiles with hitboxes that are much larger than the actual cards.

Neera on the other hand, I have yet to ever die to. She's pathetically easy. She only has 1 move; throwing a projectile that ricochets off at a 45 degree angle when it hits a wall. All you have to do is get behind her when she throws it and attack her.
Pretty much this for Spade.

And I said Neera because I burned like 6/7 lives against her in my first run, but admittedly a better example of the bosses' difficulty would be Brevon's Ship.
Goddamn that thing; if it isn't for its green lasers that shave off 1/3 of your HP on hit, it's the gooey rockets that are just a bit too many to avoid.

I mean, I managed to find a way to avoid the rockets, but christ it was a real cryptic one.
 
The extended OST is missing a couple of tracks that I had mastered early on in the soundtrack's development. Enjoy:

http://sapphirecontrol.net/music/freedomplanet-1-2R1.mp3
http://sapphirecontrol.net/music/freedomplanet-2betaR1.mp3

I have been trying to find the MP3 of the second one for a while, thanks for posting it, BlueWarrior. It's still a very iconic, catchy take of the track, even if it wasn't used in the final. When I get the game myself, (Waiting for it to hit GoG.) I might swap out the file a few times with OGGs of these versions.
 
I beat the game with Lilac on Normal, and here are my final results:
9iZylGd.png
Notice my huge death count. Most of those came from Sky Battalion's and Battle Glacier's bosses. But I got really fucking lucky and beat the final boss's three phases without losing a single life. My favorite boss has gotta be Pangu Lagoon's, mostly because of the presentation, and it has attacks that aren't cheap (unlike a lot of other bosses). Overall though this game was a blast to play through, and I'm definitely going to be playing this game again as the other two characters.
 
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I have to agree. Pangu Lagoon's boss is hands-down my favorite one in the game. When I first saw it appear I'm like UHHHH... I THOUGHT THOSE WERE EXTINCT BRO. OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT. It's a shame only Lilac gets to fight it though.
 
I'm happy to say I just bought the game last night! It's now available on GoG.com as well, for anyone who hates over-glorified DRM clients as much as I do. The free DLC might hit some time next year, so we'll get Milla, Spade, and Torque's stories once they're ready. (I may avoid Story Mode until then, unless curiosity gets to me first.)

http://www.gog.com/game/freedom_planet

I had a slight headache from beating Classic Mode as Lilac after four hours straight of blasting through the levels, but good heavens are the levels something I've been craving since the SNES's heyday; it was worth it. Why 2D Sonic games never went in an epic direction on such an large scale, I'll never figure out. The bosses are easily half the enjoyment of the game itself.

Strife and the rest of the team at GalaxyTrail made it worth every penny. I'm not surprised they did well enough from the sales of this game to become an actual company in the near future. Things are looking up for a sequel and new IPs. I'm hoping console ports of Freedom Planet release eventually.

Milla's game play is also breaking my squee box, it's so enjoyable and different. Her voice outranks Cream in cuteness, and that's a hard thing to top. Lord knows I'll be running through the game as her tonight as well. I'm loving her as much as Lilac.

I beat the game with Lilac on Normal, and here are my final results:
9iZylGd.png
Notice my huge death count. Most of those came from Sky Battalion's and Battle Glacier's bosses. But I got really fucking lucky and beat the final boss's three phases without losing a single life. My favorite boss has gotta be Pangu Lagoon's, mostly because of the presentation, and it has attacks that aren't cheap (unlike a lot of other bosses). Overall though this game was a blast to play through, and I'm definitely going to be playing this game again as the other two characters.

Wow, I thought my death count was high. =P (87) I managed to get through most of the bosses in the game pretty okay. They're like any boss in Dark Souls, they're only hard if you can't adapt to their patterns quickly enough.

The final boss, however, has so much going on, I couldn't telegraph anything ahead of time. So I wound up dying an embarrassing amount of times trying to defeat each stage of the boss fight. I'm amazed you went through it unscathed.
 
The game was also available on the humble store(as far as I know that one doesn't need a DRM client too) and is now on GOG since some weeks.

I wouldn't avoid story mode until then, Lilac and Carol's are finished and you are probably going to play their story modes first once the DLC launches anyways.

There have been some news about the DLC and some Torque gameplay screenshots which look very interesting this far.
 
The free DLC might hit some time next year, so we'll get Milla, Spade, and Torque's stories once they're ready. (I may avoid Story Mode until then, unless curiosity gets to me first.)

I wouldn't worry about holding off on story mode, from the way the story panned out the new characters will get some new levels to accompany the old ones. So it's not like you'll somehow spoil everything plot related in the DLC.

Wow, I thought my death count was high. =P (87)

Worth mentioning, at launch a few of the bosses were absurdly tough :P The bosses in the last level mainly. They were nerfed a few weeks after release, but their old behaviour patterns are still present in hard mode if you want to suffer through randomized pattern Brevon. ;D
 
I've been following the Sonic Retro topic about Freedom Planet since the thread was first posted, so I saw lots of people raging about the bosses during launch. I'm kinda glad I waited until later to buy the game, it meant I avoided lots of odd launch bugs and insanely hard AI.

Also, I'm legit scared to play Freedom Planet on Hard. It's giving me a hard enough time on Normal, (Hence why I died so times!) since I never play Easy modes on games.

Whackjood said:
I wouldn't worry about holding off on story mode, from the way the story panned out the new characters will get some new levels to accompany the old ones. So it's not like you'll somehow spoil everything plot related in the DLC.

From what I heard, the story has some holes in it, which I'm assuming the DLC is intended to fill, so I didn't want to have to wait until later to see everything wrapped up. There's no estimated date on the release yet.

The game was also available on the humble store(as far as I know that one doesn't need a DRM client too) and is now on GOG since some weeks.

Yeah, the game's been on GoG for a while, so I feel bad for not mentioning it here sooner. I had also entertained the idea of buying it on Humble Bundle, but that would've been one more password to keep up with, so I waited until it hit GoG, where I already had an account.
 
In other news, Freedom Planet is coming to the WiiU, possibly later in the year! Strife hired a programer to port the game over to C++, so it will be possible to port it to other consoles this way. Hope that C++ code makes it way PC side, the game gets a little heavy sometimes, especially when bee hives are involved.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/20...ging_its_brand_of_sonic-style_action_to_wii_u

This is great for people without decent PCs to handle the game, (There are still quite a few people stuck with Windows XP, sadly.) or little kids that can't get on the family PC often enough to enjoy it properly. Not to mention playing Freedom Planet on a game console period, who wouldn't want that?
 
The game looks so good even still, but I'm scared of being caught hearing that voice acting in public... especially on the big screen... D:
 
The game looks so good even still, but I'm scared of being caught hearing that voice acting in public... especially on the big screen... D:
Awh man, I can already picture myself sitting in my living room hearing Lilac scream. On that note however I'll probably stick to Classic Mode.
 
Lilac, Milla, and Brevon's VAs are excellent at their parts, so it's not all bad; the acting in Freedom Planet ranges from amazing to serviceable. What kills the acting of everyone else for me are the horrible mics they had to work with. Some of their kickstarter funds should've been used to mail the whole cast better microphones to record their sessions with.

For instance, Carol's VA is adorable at her lines, but God help her that background noise is irritating. Even putting some pillows around the mic before recording would've went a long way.
 
Just bought and played the game. Good to see you guys have been as positive about it as I am! Honestly, throwing the nostalgia goggles aside, I think this is a better game than any of the Sonics, and here's why:

All the classic sonic games (I haven't and don't wanna play the modern sonics) had a bunch of flaws that I could never quite put my finger on until I played this game. And I think it's mostly a contradiction between a bunch of its mechanics. See, I think the old sonics had kind of an identity crisis between being a game about speed, and a game about platforming and exploration.

I recently replayed sonic3&k after playing this and I realized that 90 percent of the time the gameplay isn't even that fast. And that's okay, slow gameplay is fine, but the reason it DOESN'T feel fine in sonic is because the game wants to be fast, and those few moments where you can actually speed by without interruption feel really good. And those moments are sparse unless you have ESP, or have played through enough times to know where everything is. Then yeah, I bet the game is a blast. Even after playing sonic 2 my entire childhood I never got that good, though, and sonic 2 is sometimes considered the "flowiest" of the bunch. There are a bunch of elements (springs, loops, slopes, rolling into a ball, spindashing, etc) that encourage speed, but also a ton of elements that slow you down, and not in an interesting way either (slow moving platforms, sliding block puzzles, painful underwater sections, and nearly-unavoidable hazards if you're going at high speeds.) This is especially big in the later levels where hazards and enemies and pits are ever-more prevalent. You find yourself slowing down out of fear of death and doing that awkward speed-up slow-down thing to progress because there's no other way to walk in the game without gaining deadly momentum.

You know what games do flow well? Classic mario games. That's because you would only run when you wanted to, your top speed wasn't downright deadly, and most importantly: the field of view large enough for you to anticipate obstacles. This by itself was perhaps the biggest sonic problem - the screen is too damn zoomed in! Seriously, go play the games again! Maybe all my points would be moot if you could see in front of you significantly more!

But let's say that you DO have ESP and can blast through these levels on the first few tries like the hyperactive hedgehog the developers were selling, then what happens? You miss out on what is probably the best part of classic sonic games - the exploration. I had this problem with SRB2 as well, when I used to design and play levels all day. No matter how beautiful and well-crafted an area was - the design of the game encouraged me to zoom past it. Playing through earlier today I found that I could speed through most of Angel Island Zone comfortably enough, but I was missing tons of stuff. So I'd break my flow ON PURPOSE just to go see what I was missing. So it felt like a weird compromise, where I was happy to explore complex levels but I was constantly breaking my flow. And there's just something about those games that really really make you wanna flow. "GOTTA GO FAST!"

That's where this game comes in. You accelerate, stop, and switch directions a lot faster than the fat blue hog, and your top speed is not comparable to sonic's unless you've sped up intentionally by your ability or a large slope - which the level design rarely punishes you for. Additionally, the screen shifts slightly to the right as you accelerate to the right so you can get a better idea of what's ahead. Awesome! The screen is still a bit too zoomed in, which bugs me, but the game somehow doesn't manage to suffer that much for it. Exploration feels like it's part of the core gameplay and not just slowing you down.

And that's not all, since you don't just jump into enemies to kill them, and enemies have to attack you to hurt you, combat is a lot funner. You have multiple attacks to do the job so interacting with the enemies feels a lot more meaningful than simply jumping or rolling into a robocrab. Combat encounters in general are a lot more satisfying because of this - it just feels good to kick flying enemies in midair or uppercut the weakspot of that boss and watch it explode. This game knew exactly what was wrong with sonic's gameplay, and in my opinion, fixed it. I felt like a small child playing the ol' genesis once more when I played this.

Although the core gameplay is stronger in Freedom Planet, there ARE things that the classic sonics do better. The story, for example, is WAY better done s3&k style by silent in-game scenes rather than those cringy cutscenes. Part of my soul finds those cutscenes really endearing, however, as much as it pains me to admit. Additionally, art in the sonic games is a lot more consistent and less cluttered-feeling than Freedom Planet's. FP has some really good art direction for sure, but nothing compares to those sonic skyboxes (yes I know they're not really "skyboxes", whatever). Go replay Marble Garden 1 & 2 again, just ignore the level and watch the skybox scroll by. Those things captivated my dreams as a child and even now make me wanna go abandon my life and set off on a quest for somewhere like those beautiful forests and mountains. Anyway....
Sonic also has more interesting level shapes. I know they're all technically oblong rectangles with paths carved through them, but in Sonic you wouldn't just progress through them left-to-right. The main path would sometimes snake up then left then right then down and around town. Despite the sometimes-sprawling levels of Freedom Planet, the progression has exclusively felt left-to-right, which is a shame considering that they're working with such good assets and hardware. Whatevs.

So I wrote a lot more than I thought I would.... I really like this game if you haven't noticed. Go buy it! This is my first visit to the forums in a long time lol. Hope you enjoyed reading this!
 
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Interesting perspective. I played through a few levels of S3&K and the Freedom Planet demo to see what you mean, and I will say that S3&K is definitely less consistent in terms of flow. Freedom Planet's faster acceleration and less punishing physics allow you to maintain a decent speed a lot of the time, although its level design still causes the occasional awkward slip-up, like in the case of Relic Maze's rotating zoomtube-wheel that can send you right back in the direction you entered it from if you don't have enough momentum going in. The level features in Freedom Planet are generally bigger in proportion to your character, which gives you more time to react to them, but sometimes they're a little too big for your slower top speed, like the large flat area right at the start of Relic Maze that sort of breaks the flow by not having anything interesting in it. S3&K, by contrast, is slower than Freedom Planet's consistent base speed about 75% of the time at my skill level, and that's when I'm ignoring all of the goodies just off the main path.

One thing I think you've neglected to mention, however, is that part of the reason Freedom Planet is faster and flowier on average than the classic Sonic games is because it largely does away with one of their central mechanics: rewarding the player for knowing how to skillfully manipulate their momentum. In Freedom Planet, speed is not a valuable commodity, as it can be easily gained by the quick acceleration and Lilac's press-once-to-go-fast button, and it's not easily lost either due to the lack of enemy collision damage and the physics of running up slopes, which never really let you slide back down as long as you keep pressing forward. In contrast, the classic Sonic games are stingy with speed and expect you to earn your flow by using the environment to gain, keep, and cleverly employ momentum. Unlike the Freedom Planet characters, Sonic and friends have rolling physics that allow them to boost their speed on a downward slope even more than they could by simply running, and they can bounce off of enemies and monitors in order to make the most of the momentum they've built up while falling. Even the Fire and Bubble Shields in S3&K are far more useful to the player if they have a good sense of their physics. The Fire Shield's air dash, unlike, say, Mega Man X's, doesn't reset your vertical momentum when you use it, which means you have to time it right to get the most out of it. The Bubble Shield's bounce, like a bounce off of a destructible object, doesn't do much if you attempt it from a standstill, but using it with enough existing speed behind it allows you to dodge considerably sized grounded hazards or fly right over small ramps.

Note that this doesn't mean I think classic Sonic is more 'hardcore' than Freedom Planet, as the latter's levels include a diverse assortment of clever platforming challenges, and its treatment of enemies as more than just a way to threaten the player with momentum loss warrants a more complex combat system, which in turn makes for more challenging boss and miniboss encounters. I do think that classic Sonic's strategy of using your desire to go fast to make you git gud is perfectly legitimate and not inherently worse than what Freedom Planet does, although it may make the game experience less appealing for new players. Freedom Planet's use of flow as a baseline rather than a reward makes for compelling gameplay as well, however, and anyone who dismisses it for having 'Sonic 4 physics' should consider that it isn't about exactly the same things that classic Sonic is, and it doesn't have to be.
 
Not only is Freedom Planet not like the classic Sonics, the only thing they really have in common are slope physics. Beyond that, they're totally different games with very different movement systems on top of the collisions. It's like Apple and Orange comparisons; both can be classed as fruit, but both are different species from each other. People who go into Freedom Planet expecting a Sonic-like experience are usually horribly disappointed at (most) forms of momentum being stripped away.

In other news, one of the DLCs that includes Torque and Milla's Adventure Mode may be coming up as a Steam beta soon enough. So if you bought the game on Steam, keep your eyes peeled for that. If you bought it elsewhere, (Like me.) the public release will come in its own time. Strife gave no solid dates, and that's a good thing.
 
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