Stefan 4/12/22 Stefan 4/12/22

A Belated Adaptation of A Non-Existent Animated Series: Freedom Planet

I came to possess a Sega Genesis by eminent domain.

My parents owned a Nintendo Entertainment System. They gifted me a Super Nintendo for Christmas in either 1991 or 1992 (my memory is imprecise and I haven’t found family photos supporting one date over the other). The Genesis, however, was a gift for my younger sister.

I don’t know why my parents thought it was a good idea to give her a Genesis. I don’t ever remember her expressing interest in one. She rarely played it once she had it. In time, it migrated to my bedroom by the curious process through which one sibling’s possessions become another’s.

“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.”

— Samuel Johnson

I came to possess a Sega Genesis by eminent domain.

(That process has worked the other way too. My sister now has in her possession my original Super Nintendo, while I play my SNES games on the Analogue Super Nt.)

It was a Genesis Model 2. It included a pack-in copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I always treated it as a second-class console. I acquired 3-4 Super Nintendo games per year for the life of that system, either received as gifts or purchased with a quarter’s worth of accumulated allowances. I supplemented that catalog with rentals from the nearby Food King, and later from Blockbuster. Conversely, I don’t believe I ever acquired another Genesis game past Sonic 2. I played Sonic 2. I occasionally rented Sonic 3 or Aladdin or Comix Zone, because it was the mid-1990s and I was a child and I read comic books. I never played Gunstar Heroes or Streets of Rage 2. I never heard of Phantasy Star.

I do not have Genesis nostalgia.

There was a Genesis in our home but I did not grow up with it. I couldn’t even say what happened to it. All I know is that it is gone.

I discovered the Genesis’s virtues later in life. I now have a better appreciation today for what made a Genesis game a Genesis game.

All great games have a rhythm. Rhythmically, I find that the Super Nintendo’s games swing while the Genesis’s pulse. On the Super Nintendo, there is room to breathe. On the Genesis, there is only forward momentum.

Freedom Planet pulses with the feel of a Genesis game. In its bones, it desperately wants to be one.

Freedom Planet began life as a Sonic fan game. Iteration begins with imitation.

To begin life as a Sonic fan game is not unique. Sonic fan games have been around since right about the time the Genesis began to fade from public view. What makes Freedom Planet worth examining is that it is actively trying to not be a Sonic fan game.

Freedom Planet is built on nostalgia. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. It tries to transcend its inspirations and find its own voice. When a game tries this, it raises several questions for the player, including whether the game succeeds on that level, whether the game succeeds on any level, and if the player’s answers to those and other questions are more a reflection of the game’s merits or the player’s relationship with both the game and its inspirations.

Reflect on these questions for a long enough time and you find yourself considering the merits and limits of any fandom and their roles in shaping your life. And consider that long enough and you are forced to reckon with just how far you have come and just how far you still have left to go in your own journey as a human being.

Is Freedom Planet good? Is that beside the point? I’m thirty-five years old. Shouldn’t I have outgrown this by now?

“Shouldn’t I have outgrown this by now?” is the question at the heart of my experience playing Freedom Planet.

I do not have Genesis nostalgia. But Freedom Planet has more than enough for both of us.

Sonic spoke to people. The connection was undeniable. Sonic did not speak to me. But I still like him.

If there was no Sonic, I don’t know if I’d miss him. But I am grateful that we have had him at all. I enjoyed Sonic the Hedgehog 2 when I played it. I have enjoyed it every time I have played it. When a new Sonic game is released, I always consider playing it. I rarely do.

I think people loved Sonic because he was perfectly calibrated to be loved by children between the ages of five and nine in the year 1991. I think those people have continued to love Sonic because once we love something between the ages of five and nine, it is difficult to ever stop loving it completely. All it takes is the right push to reactivate that carefully planted affection.

I do not have Genesis nostalgia. I do not have Sonic nostalgia.

I am not a Sonic fan.

I do not want to be a fan of anything.

As young fans, we internalize media as we search for our own identities. The media in question exerts influence on us even as we outgrow them. They cling to us as we once clung to them. We will never be able to shake them.

In one way or another, we are all running away from things we used to love. Gotta go fast.

Freedom Planet began life as a Sonic fan game. It is running away from that as fast as it can.

Its creators at GalaxyTrail Games intended to use the fan game format as a means of learning development within an established construct. When the game threw off its predecessors’ trademarks - ostensibly to allow for greater freedom in development, possibly to avoid any potential legal issues that might arise down the line - it did not obfuscate the influence those predecessors.

Freedom Planet is an imitation of a late-period Sega Genesis game. The question I pondered as I played was if it would become anything more. The narrative can be skipped in the game’s “classic” mode, but it’s clear that the narrative is as important to what the game wants to be as is the gameplay. Without the narrative, Freedom Planet is a true Sonic-like. With the narrative, Freedom Planet tries to find its own voice.

Never before has a game felt more like a 2014 remaster of a 1994 game adaptation of a 16-episode 1993 animated series. At least, at first.

Freedom Planet is the story of a trio of adventurers originally created by Chinese artist Ziyo Ling and used with permission by designer and programmer Sabrina DiDuro. The trio - determined Lilac, mischievous Carol, and naive Milla - do not map exactly to established Sonic stereotypes, but each of them could appear next to a Blaze the Cat or a Rouge the Bat and not feel out of place.

The trio quickly becomes involved in a war spearheaded by an alien creature called Brevon, who is attempting to steal a mystical artifact called a Kingdom Stone to power his incredible interstellar army. The narrative turns dark as three rival nations ruled by pandas find themselves caught up in Brevon’s plot.

And how dark it is. Palace intrigue, shocking betrayals, brainwashing, torture, decapitation, body horror, and more color a plot told in surprisingly lengthy fully-voiced cut scenes. And I think there’s something interesting in understanding that darkness, and why a game featuring colorful animal characters and that on the surface reads as a belated adaptation of a non-existent animated series would try to find its voice in that darkness.

Nostalgia is about trying to get back something that was lost. There are feelings that we associate with particular moments and experiences, and if we feel them strongly enough, we will go out of our way to recapture them. For people of my generation, many of those feelings are associated with video games. And Sonic in particular had a way of inspiring a certain feeling in the young people who played. Hence, the Sonic fan game scene.

The essence of nostalgia is loss, and loss is inevitable. We change as we move through time. We cannot go back to the things we loved when we were young and expect to find the same feelings there that we had when we were kids. We are not the same people we were when we loved them. We can react to this in different ways. We can accept that we have changed and the games have not, and we can allow our relationship with them to change to reflect who we are now.

Great art should work this way. We should find different things in it when we revisit it through our lives. Those new things should illuminate our understanding of the work and allow us to grow into more complete humans beings. In this way, the nostalgia that motivates us to reengage dissipates, and a new appreciation can take root and give us something new to take forward with us.

But nostalgia is a dangerous tool, especially in the hands of a creative person. Creatives will tend to be more in touch with their feelings, more mindful of their past experiences, more sensitive, more introspective. A creative person may desire to recapture that old feeling. Perhaps they pull their old Genesis out of the closet and insert their original Sonic cartridge. And perhaps they find that the old feeling just isn’t there.

A creative person may be so desirous of recreating that original feeling that they take it upon themselves to modify or recreate the original work. If they are unable to go back to it in the same way because they have changed, they will do everything in their power to bring the work forward to where they are today. They will attempt to realign the work to their current existence so that they can find that feeling again.

I know this because I have lived it. I have written fan fiction. I have spent hours crafting scenarios in which familiar characters would carry forward the stories that I had engaged with in a way that I myself could still engage with. I posted those stories online under an alias. I took great pride in the clever twists I contrived to find ways to put those characters into situations that spoke to me as a fifteen year-old in the same way that their original adventures had spoken to me as an eight year-old.

I did this because I thought it would let me hold on to those characters a bit longer.

Eventually, I moved on to writing original fiction. I let those old characters stay in their old games. And when I did, I found that I didn’t have to give up those games forever. I could still play them. I could still find new things in them. I didn’t have to hold on so tight.

For all of its pretensions towards letting go, Freedom Planet is holding on very tight to the spirit of Sonic fan fiction. Freedom Planet superficially moves on from the characters that inspired its creators, but its narrative darkness speaks to that same impulse that drives adolescent fan fiction and ill-considered updates to the characters that people fell in love with. Sure, Sonic and his friends were fun, but aren’t they a little too kiddie? Wouldn’t it be cooler if they dealt with darker, more mature themes? If they endured real tragedies and trauma and experience real depth of human emotion? Wouldn’t we connect with it more deeply if they felt the feels the way we feel the feels?

Freedom Planet tries to force stand-ins for its favorite childhood characters to grapple with an adolescents’ perception of an adult’s world. Lacking depth, it conflates darkness with maturity and in doing so reveals its own immaturity. It twists itself into grotesque forms in an attempt to find its own voice outside of its inspirations. It does not use its childish aesthetic in contrast with its darker themes to say anything about either its inspirations or its own ideas. It uses it as fashion, as a way to brand itself as something that is almost - but not quite - Sonic.

It is a game made almost entirely in Denmark and the United States and features a visual design deeply influenced by Chinese culture, yet its title screen subtitles “Freedom Planet” with the Japanese hiragana spelling out phonetically “Freedom Planet” because _Sonic_ is from Japan.

Freedom Planet is an immature game, and I don’t say that because it features colorful cartoon characters collecting trinkets across a series of whimsical stages. I say it because it tries so very, very hard to hang drama and stakes and darkness on that colorful framework without using that framework as a way of meaningfully commenting on or raising those stakes. The choices are entirely aesthetic and motivated not by a desire to communicate any ideas but rather by a seemingly pathological need to maintain proximity to an influence that the game desperately wants to get away from. It does not achieve that feeling of nostalgic whimsy to which it aspires, nor does it transcend it to say to anything meaningful that a player can carry forward.

And yet for all of that, I still think that Freedom Planet is actually pretty good, especially when played in its “classic” mode, which removes the voiced cutscenes and lets the gameplay shine. Its trio of playable heroes all control similarly enough for a player to switch back and forth between them with minimal disruption yet distinctly enough to justify each of their inclusions. The levels are designed with the classic Sonic concept of multi-tiered paths, making it impossible to see all of them in just one playthrough. Boss fights are challenging but learnable. Enemies are well-placed and force creative moment-to-moment thinking. Levels continue to introduce new mechanics right up until the end, and those mechanics do not overstay their welcome. The game runs smoothly and the soundtrack by DiDuro and collaborators Leila Wilson and Shane Ellis pulses appropriately.

Freedom Planet is a good game.

Yet as I played it, I found myself wondering: what would I think of Freedom Planet if I have never played a 2D _Sonic_ game?

Everyday, there is someone born who hasn’t seen The Simpsons.

What is Freedom Planet to this not-at-all-hypothetical person? It’s a colorful, fast-paced platformer with a fun soundtrack and moments of surprising darkness. It’s not the kind of game that will knock your socks off if you’ve been playing games for a little while, but it has enough personality that it might get its hooks into a young player. It’s the kind of game that the successors to vloggers on the successors to YouTube might make videos about, expressing their nostalgia for the material and how much it meant to them when they were twelve in the same way that today’s video literati wax poetic about Rocket Knight Adventure or Cool Spot or even Sonic the Hedgehog.

What will be the feeling this game inspires that they’re trying to get back to?

Part of growing older is reckoning with the reality that the things that inspired you were themselves inspired by other things. I watched The Hidden Fortress for the first time recently. Star Wars is not a remake of The Hidden Fortress, but its predecessor’s influence on it is is obvious if you’ve seen both films. But if you’ve only seen Star Wars, you’re not thinking about what it took from The Hidden Fortress. You’re just enjoying Star Wars. And even if you don’t understand what feeling it’s trying to recapture, you find something in your viewing experience that you will try to recapture yourself as you grow older.

If all I have to say about Freedom Planet is that it’s close enough to a Sonic game to remind me of a Sonic game but not close enough to a Sonic game to come off as anything but a derivative of a Sonic game, then my entire relationship with a new work of art is defined by its relationship with its inspiration as filtered through my relationship with its inspiration.

I think I have Sonic nostalgia.