YMMV / Freedom Planet

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Lilac an All-Loving Hero who will do anything to protect her friends, or is she a well-meaning but impulsive Chronic Hero Syndrome sufferer who unintentionally puts innocent people in danger?
• Anti-Climax Boss: Milla can utterly dominate Brevon's second form. Since his attacks mostly consist of blasting, her shield can deflect all of them back at him, and can be further damaged with a Super Shield Burst. Fly away from his dashes, and she can take him out in under two minutes without a scratch. She also doesn't fight Brevon's third form, like Lilac and Carol do, making the final battle even more anticlimactic.
• Ass Pull: When the Dreadnought's power core explodes, the Kingdom Stone gets destroyed along with it. Just moments after the heroes returned to the surface of Avalice, the stone transforms into a vortex. Nothing mentioned prior suggests that it would be able to transform, and in fact, it was made clear that the stone had to be protected.
• Awesome Art: The colorful, expressive character designs, smooth and varied animations that convey a lot of personality, the detailed backgrounds, and varied environments with a strong Chinese flavor make it quite the pretty game. Even detractors admit the art looks great.
• Best Boss Ever: Special mention goes to Brevon's third and final phase with Lilac and Carol. No cheap tricks, no summoning minions, just Awesome Music and a nice, clean speed vs. skill fight.
  • There's also the fight with Syntax in Final Dreadnought, which serves as a loving tribute to Seven Force from Gunstar Heroes.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Few levels in the game come close to matching the sense of speed found in Final Dreadnought 1. Throw in some Awesome Music and an increasing sense of urgency as Brevon keeps throwing new obstacles your way, and you have a level that sets a high standard for the last three levels.
  • Final Dreadnought Round 3 is crazy as Brevon sends all the guns he can after you, filling the screen with mooks to blast through as you dash through boosters, bounce through pipes, and narrowly avoid an insane amount of laser cannons. Which makes the abrupt Player Punch all the more effective.
  • Jade Creek averts the usual hell water levels are known for by featuring several paths to take above the water, gorgeous lighting and backgrounds, some of the best gimmicks inspired by Mushroom Hill, Awesome Music, and a ton of long slopes to cruise down as the cops chase after you with increasingly elaborate obstacles. As Carol, there's also plenty of motorcycles to ride up walls and do back flips over.
  • Fortune Night is the most iconic level in the game for good reason. The beautiful Chinese aesthetic, the abundance of objects to play with, the godly music, the insanely fun boss fights, and the many easter eggs hidden around the level make it hands-down the best one in the game.
  • In between Acts 1 and 2 of Relic Maze, there is a pretty big and crazy setpiece, regardless of which character you play as. For Lilac and Carol, there is a fast-paced car chase where they work their way to the front to fight the mini-boss. For Milla, the floor collapses, causing her to fall into a Minecart Madness segment that feels like it's straight out of Kirby Super Star.
• Breather Boss: Syntax's second fight in Thermal Base is much easier than her first.
• Breather Level:
  • Final Dreadnought 2 is long and maze-like with plenty of Demonic Spiders, a deoxygenated section, and a tough boss. Final Dreadnought 3 is shorter with plenty of opportunities to speed through the level.
  • Pangu Lagoon is this from both a gameplay and a narrative standpoint. Being a Lilac-only stage, it represents for her a chance to clear her name and renew her determination after her horrible experiences in the Thermal Base. For the player, it's much the same, as Pangu Lagoon is absolutely stunning and is built from the ground up to cater to Lilac's high-speed gameplay. It's challenging in its own right (if you haven't yet mastered Lilac's Dragon Boost, you will by the time you've left), but has fewer difficult enemies than Thermal Base did, the traps are much more forgiving, and the boss has a fairly predictable pattern.
• Broken Base:
  • While the game has been praised by fans and critics, it was still incomplete with two out of the five playable characters missing from the lineup, several scrapped concepts promised in the Kickstarter, and cut lines/scenes not implemented in the final product. As of 2017, the game still hasn't been completed, with more focus put towards porting the game in its current state and working on the sequel. Needless to say, some fans are divided over the delays, with some citing their pleasure in playing the game on other consoles, liking the game as is which still contains a lot of meat and a great climax, and looking forward to the sequel, while others are frustrated at the lack of promised features. The dev addressed this point, admitting that she'd overstretched what she could realistically promise and offered full refunds, combined with the facts that the team felt that Torque and Spade's more unique gameplay wouldn't fit with the existing game, and the game's foundation straining to keep the game stable with so much content (mostly because of the utter relic that is the Clickteam Fusion engine, which is why the sequel moved to Unity when it became a viable engine to use since it was exponentially more modern and easier to work with).
  • The infamous Torture Scene is one of the most mixed-received scenes in Freedom Planet. Some say that it feels out of place, while some don't have many problems with the scene since Brevon is known for being ruthless.
  • People either enjoy the story (even if they might deem it far from perfect) or find it terrible, with comparatively little in between. The option to play the game with or without the cutscenes is this game's way of addressing this divide.
• Complete Monster: Lord Arktivus Brevon is a violent planet subjugator. On Avalice, Brevon seeks an artifact known as the Kingdom Stone, beheading the King of Shuigang in front of his son and brainwashing the child into becoming his puppet. Engineering a conflict between the planet's three kingdoms, Brevon hopes to take the stone in the midst of the conflict. Capturing Lilac for interfering with his plans, Brevon mercilessly tortures her; and when the heroes confront him, he sacrifices his men to stop their advance and painfully transforms his loyal general into a monstrous fighter, also using the innocent Milla as a hostage and then transforming her into a monster as well to fight for him.
• Demonic Spiders
  • DNA Cannons, so named due to the double helix shape of their lasers. They don't appear in too many levels, but when they do, beware! They can shave off a huge chunk of health with a single blast and are always placed in the most inconvenient of places.
  • Shade Troopers, first seen against the boss of Jade Creek and continuing to appear from then on. They take quite a bit of punishment to kill, move around erratically, seem to open fire at moments you are most vulnerable, and will chase you throughout the level if you attempt to flee from them. Worse, they tend to appear in groups.
• Difficulty Spike: Sky Battalion. The game tells you the gloves are off by pitting you against bosses where just throwing attacks mindlessly will get you killed fast. And if that wasn't enough, Thermal Base will make you rage with more traps and bosses that are even harder, and it steadily ramps up the difficulty from there.
• Disappointing Last Level: The first part of Final Dreadnought, Round 4. The final level starts with a vertical series of disappearing platforms, coupled with teleporters that send you all the way back to the bottom if you touch them. This results in some very frustrating Trial-and-Error Gameplay that can easily take ten minutes if you don't get the platform timing exactly right. The problem is even worse when playing as Lilac. Carol can skip most of this segment by simply jumping up the walls, whereas Lilac's air dash is much harder to properly control.
  • What doesn't help is that the game pulls a huge Player Punch right before this by having Brevon turn Milla into a Brainwashed and Crazy monster that Lilac/Carol is (seemingly) forced to kill in order to stop. Lilac/Carol is furious and naturally wants to rip Brevon to shreds… and then it cuts to a level where you have to take your time and make very precise jumps.
  • Fortunately, most of the issues with the level were addressed with patches. Annoying enemies disappeared, and the first vertical section was streamlined to avoid unnecessary frustration. Now, the stage is designed to be one last breather placed between the intense Final Dreadnought 3 and the Final Boss.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The bird guard, who appears in the background of a few cutscenes (and pilots the hovercraft in Jade Creek) and whose only line is a disgruntled "quack", has proven to be surprisingly popular. He even got a joke profile on the website for the sequel.
  • Neera Li, the boss of the first act of Jade Creek. Despite being a bit of a jerk and half the reason why our protagonists end up in prison, she gets a lot of fanart, some players even thought she would be a bonus character with her detailed animations, only to be disappointed. It probably played a part in making her a playable character in the sequel.
  • Mayor Zao as well. With his Large Ham tendencies and the Running Gag of gaining a +5 in whatever he's doing, he delivers many funny moments.
• Evil Is Cool: Lord Brevon, despite being a Complete Monster, has quite a few fans due to being a complete Knight of Cerebus, not to mention his snarky lines and his evil resolve in his boss battle. Brevon's monster tendencies is actually the reason why he is such a strong and memorable villain, and the game wouldn't be quite as effective without him. It takes a truly bad villain to make a truly good hero, and Lord Brevon's villainy makes Lilac, Carol, and Milla's heroism all the more stronger.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Don't call this game a Sonic clone, ripoff, or other derivative. It's fine to say that it's inspired by Sonic, but saying that it's just like Sonic will at best lead to more educated fans politely explaining its many differences in mechanics and level design; a Flame War is the more likely result. Also, Lilac isn't a hedgehog, she's a dragon^note though she was originally designed as a hedgehog.
• Fandom Rivalry: While this is by no means universal, fans of the Sonic the Hedgehog series tend not to think too highly of this game or its fans. This is due to some Freedom Planet players taking potshots at Sonic games, as well as a tinge of envy due to the critical acclaim that Freedom Planet received. Another cause of resentment is the fact that Freedom Planet took a good deal of attention away from the Sonic franchise. Younger fans and non-gaming fans of Sonic can get particularly angry, to the point where the issue can border on a Berserk Button among some — as Freedom Planet lacks the Mascot with Attitude factor that drew them to Sonic in the first place, and admittedly, is a lot girlier than Sonic, they see it as Sonic's Spiritual Antithesis. Not helping this is some fans using this game as a perfect opportunity to take deliberate potshots at the Sonic franchise. This has tapered off ever since Sonic Mania proved to be an unmitigated success, and you're most likely to find positive reception of this game from the Sonic fan-gaming community where Freedom Planet was birthed alongside Mania. It helps that the sequel's physics framework was coded by Christian "The Taxman" Whitehead himself.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Torque's previous missions chasing Brevon, all strongly implied to have ended in disaster on numerous other worlds.
  • The Coalition of Planets, where hundreds of worlds with intelligent life reside. And as hinted, might Avalice soon join now that they've officially had First Contact?
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some fans jokingly call Freedom Planet "The Best Sonic Game of 2014".
  • Fans call Milla's Phantom Blocks "Murder Cubes".
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Shovel Knight fans, as its 8-bit older brother. Both are indie-developed Retraux games funded on Kickstarter that came out within a month of each other, are throwbacks to the golden age of platformers, and have detailed pixel art and excellent gameplay.
  • With Spark the Electric Jester, as both are Sonic-inspired indie platformers with an emphasis on combat. It helps that Freedom Planet 2 and Spark the Electric Jester 3 were released a month apart from each other.
• Game-Breaker: Though not necessarily easy to play, Milla is well worth the patience as she can fly, has no special meter to get in the way of spamming Super Shield Bursts that do an incredible amount of damage, can use the recoil from said Bursts to do a Flash Step that accelerates to Lilac's, and can deflect many attacks that can make short work of the bosses. This is counterbalanced with a health bar that's only half the size of Lilac and Carol's, but if you're fast enough, this is rarely a concern.
• Game-Breaking Bug: A minor one in Aqua Tunnel is caused by pausing and selecting "Restart" immediately after defeating the mid-way boss, but before being swept into the next room by the rushing water. This results in you being started up again in the mid-way boss room, with the inactive boss visible on the other side of the wall, and no way to defeat it, progress, or backtrack.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the first demo of the game, Lilac could fly if she restarted the level while underwater.
  • In Relic Maze, it's quite easy with a bit of timing to jump off the handles that open staircases to land before it closes, letting you pass through walls. The handle at the top section in particular can be used to slide through the wall connecting the upper and lower portions of the temple since they occupy the same area on the map. Boosting through the correct wall will warp you to the miniboss, skipping the second half of the area entirely.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A couple innocent things in this game turn out rather poorly in the sequel.
  • Early in the game, Lilac tells Milla that she "wouldn't last a day without [her] tree house". By the time Lilac returns from Dragon Valley in the sequel, the tree house is completely destroyed.
  • Before she met Lilac and Carol, Milla had been looking for ingredients for a Super Feather potion so she can meet her parents again. Tragilariously enough, one of the potions you can craft in the game is that same Super Feather potion, which merely increases your jump height. Even worse, Milla is literally from another planet, meaning making a potion to travel to them was All for Nothing.
• He Really Can Act: While the voicework in Freedom Planet tended to have a mixed reception between people who thought its cheesy tone fit well or was just corny in general, very few players had anything to criticize about Dawn M. Bennett's performance as Lilac.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The creators deserve to be commended for having a very in-depth story that sheds a lot of light on the characters, but some people simply just don't care or don't like the story and want to run around Sonic-style and beat things up. The creators realized this and created Classic Mode, which gets rid of all the cutscenes and goes for level-by-level progression.
• Les Yay: Carol and Lilac, perhaps inevitably. They live in the same house together, have a Tomboy and Girly Girl dynamic, never seem to leave each other's side on missions, and are very close friends. The separation scene can easily be taken as a temporary breakup, Lilac is too worried for Carol and Milla's safety to put them at risk. And with Milla for all intents and purposes adopted as a child to take care of, she has two mothers.
• Love to Hate: Lord Brevon is so despicable and atrocious, it actually turns right back around in his favor. The game wouldn't be half as memorable without him. Players really hate this guy, and they love doing it, and those that actually do like him is because he is such an effective villain.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Poor Carol gets this reaction from speedrunners. While her bike is capable of some good speed, the fact is there's nothing she can do that Lilac and Milla can't do better. Their Dragon Boosts and Super Laser Bursts respectively push the cap to the limit, allowing them to keep a steady momentum with diagonal dives that let them zip through walls. Making it worse, Carol's only good with the bike, since it blows up in three hits she requires the bosses to be fought on foot to preserve it for as long as possible. The devs clearly noticed this, and her gameplay was retooled for the sequel.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Totally worth it." ^explanation When Torque wonders why it took the girls so long to get up, Lilac says he should blame Carol because in her words, "She sleeps for like, half a day.", to which she yawns and casually replies with the above.
  • Lilac's expressions have become a goldmine for emotes, especially her look of surprise after she sees the dragon turn into a robot, and a custom derp expression drawn by a member of the forums and is hidden in the actual game as a save file portrait. Also popular are Spade's smug smirk, Milla's innocent smile (and her hidden doge face portrait), and Carol's blank stare of boredom.
  • WTF is a Carol? ^Explanation A joke in competitive play about Carol's Memetic Loser status among speedrunners. This can go a step further with comments maintaining this Carol character doesn't exist, complete with edits that remove her sprites from scenes.
  • Ever since the Magister suggested a "Timtams currency exchange program" in one of the hidden bloopers, Timtams have become a recurring gag among both the fans and the development team.
  • "YOU BETRAYED THE LAW." ^explanation Neera Li says this before the fight with her. Became a rather memorable quote due to her status as a Wake-Up Call Boss, meaning new players are bound to hear this line over and over again when restarting the fight. Has seen a resurgence now that Neera is confirmed playable for the sequel, and it's even more amusing if you remember its similarly-memorable usage in the 1995 Judge Dredd movie.
  • Jokes about how Freedom Planet was the best Sonic The Hedgehog game of 2014, especially in light of the disastrous Sonic Boom: Rise Of Lyric, which was released the same year. Doubly hilarious when you know that it actually started life as a Sonic fangame.
• Memetic Badass: Milla, who with nothing more than a shield that covers half her body and energy blocks, can combine them into a laser, can Recoil Boost with said laser reaching speeds Lilac would be jealous of, deflects bullets, missiles, even Brevon's energy blasts, with a glitch can flutter infinitely while creating cubes that can be strung together with said boosts, all with half the health of the two main heroines and looking adorable while doing it.
• Moe: The girls are positively huggable. Milla is the obvious candidate with her inquisitive puppy behavior. Lilac with her peppy determination and maternal affection. And Carol who's sly behavior as a Wildcat and the tomboy of the group qualifies too, even if she'd not admit it. Torque, for the female players.
• Moral Event Horizon: If Lord Brevon didn't cross this before the game started, he definitely did after torturing Lilac via electrocution machine in the end of the Thermal Base Stage. And by the time he turns the sweet and innocent Milla into a creepy mutant monster, he hasn't crossed the line so much as he has catapulted himself over it. To be specific:
  • He uses Lilac as a means to force answers out of a captured Torque, threatening to activate the machine on her if he doesn't cooperate. Only a few seconds after the machine is turned on and Lilac is left screaming in agony, Torque is forced to reveal that he is the last of his crew. Despite this, Brevon activates the machine again on Lilac. He soon reveals that he was more interested in testing Torque's resolve than any answers he got from him.
  • By the time the others rescue Lilac, a good portion of her skin is burnt and charred; Lilac's screams during the torture do nothing to help this.
  • Even more horrifying about this is the fact that her long twin strands of hair that she uses to attack have been cut off before the torture even begins and are draped over a rail. The ends of the strands are red, suggesting that it isn't hair at all, but a part of her body, meaning that Lilac has already been mutilated beforehand.
  • Lord Brevon turning Milla into a creepy techno-organic monster. Doubles as both a Player Punch and a Tear Jerker. Especially if you are playing as Lilac, the scream she lets go after the battle is heartbreaking. And when she and Carol confront him, refusing to forgive him for what he did to her, he simply replies that he has no use for forgiveness from people putting his homeworld at risk for the Kingdom Stone.
  • Before that is the final fight with Serpentine, who has also mutated into a horrible monster. Whatever Brevon did to Milla, he must have also done to Serpentine, his own right hand man!
  • When you defeat both his Absolution and his mech armor as Milla, he completely loses his shit and breaks the depravity line again by attempting to strangle her to death in a murderous fit of rage. He would have killed her that way if not for Lilac showing up and preventing him from doing so by severely beating him up like in her own story.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound of a fully charged Shield Burst, when playing as Milla.
• Narm:
  • The player exploding in a cloud of feathers/tufts of fur when they're crushed or killed by certain attacks.
  • "What do you want with US?!"
  • "Examine the fragment! EXAMINE IT!"
  • One of Lord Brevon's last speeches in the game can suddenly lose its gravitas if one pays attention to textboxes and doesn't simply listen to voices: for some reason, one of the uses of the word "especially" is printed out as "esp.". This is the only time in the game this happens.
• Narm Charm:
  • The game's voice acting is evocative of English dubs for the PlayStation or Sega Saturn that wouldn't sound out of place in a Working Designs localization. With the retraux presentation and the actors' sincerity, it fits the rest of the game's aesthetic of a localized Fifth Generation title.
  • Carol's physics-defying motorcycle is both hilarious and awesome to watch in action.
  • In some of her victory quotes, Milla's exclamation of "Yeah, I'm a super dog!" is one of the cheesiest lines in the game. But given it's well, Milla, it works, and taken with her status as a speedrunning god that utterly demolishes the game in skilled play, it comes off as something of a Badass Boast.
• Padding:
  • Shortly after discovering Milla and Torque, the girls have a sleepover at Lilac's treehouse. It has nothing to do with the story and seems to exist solely to lengthen a break in gameplay that's already been going for five minutes.
  • Another moment similar to this happens later when the heroes are invited to and attend a royal dinner party. The kicker? This happens almost immediately after the Kingdom Stone gets stolen. Mayor Zao justifies it by admitting that it would take time to repair his airships, which were damaged in the attack. It mainly serves as exposition in their conversation to explain to Torque and the audience the legend of the ancient dragons.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The gameplay has received high praise for faithfully recreating the feel of a classic Sonic game while the story is more divisive due to the jarring tone shifts, voice acting, and overly long cutscenes for a platformer. The game includes a Classic Mode for people who don’t care for the story or simply just want to play the game and it cuts out all of the cutscenes and dialogue.
• Player Punch: Brevon pulls a few of these. For examples, he has Lilac horribly tortured and turns Milla into a monster.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The complete lack of any invincibility frames makes a lot of the boss fights in the game way tougher than they should be, since many of the lategame bosses have attacks that take up the entirety of the screen, meaning you can get hit multiple times by their most powerful attacks and die instantly.
• Signature Scene: The scene where Brevon subjects Lilac to Electric Torture is one of the most well known moments in the game and a frequently brought up example of the game’s tonal inconsistency.
• Special Effects Failure: Brevon's entrance at the end of Lilac's Thermal Base is made less effective by the fact that you can see his sprite clip through the top of the doorway.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It's the best Treasure game they haven't made in years. As Strife based a lot of her game design philosophy from games like Gunstar Heroes and Mischief Makers, it's to be expected.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: To The Rescue! sounds a lot like Proof of Courage from Mega Man Battle Network, even sharing the role of a uplifting hero theme.
  • Several have noticed that Aqua Tunnel shares a few bars with Area 1: City from the SNES version of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, which itself was based on part of Simon's theme from Super Castlevania IV.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: While not directly the beginning, the cutscenes between Relic Maze and Fortune Night suffer from it, taking up to ten minutes, mostly just consisting of unnecessary dialogue or expositions.
• That One Attack: Brevon's Knife Slash. The game makes sure to show you how dangerous that thing is, and when you finally battle Brevon, if you let that attack land on you, it will hurt like hell.
• That One Boss:
  • Spade. He's not too hard if you're Lilac, and is fairly easy if you're Milla. If you're playing as Carol, however, he's one of the hardest bosses in the game, as she lacks the speed of Lilac to keep up with his Flash Step dashes, and she doesn't have a shield to reflect his projectiles like Milla does. What really hurts is the fact that his attack pattern seems designed to punish aggressive strategies, meaning you're only going to die that much faster if you try to chase after him.
  • Prince Dail's Thunderbird is particularly difficult as Lilac. His gimmick of using wind to blow you off the stage, coupled with his homing attacks, lasers that can cover all but a small percentage of the screen, the fact that you have to attack a dozen feathers as separate hit boxes to damage him, and his rush attacks that can down your health bar in four hits. What pushes it over the edge for Lilac is her floaty jumps and Cyclones that previously used wind to her advantage can knock you to your death if you're not precise with your jumps. And that goes double for her Dragon Boost, which will get you killed two times out of three if not timed and used sparingly. Carol can at least use her special to cover a wide range to down his defenses and pass through attacks with her invincibility frames.
    • His Shadebeast in Battle Glacier is even worse. He spends most of the fight high above the ground where he's hard to reach. This isn't much of a problem for Carol as she can scale the walls, but Lilac needs to Dragon Boost up there, and the Dragon Boost requires a full gauge. And all this time, he's spamming Bullet Hell attacks. The only time he comes down to ground level is when he's preparing his most devastating attack. At least the mooks give you health.
  • On the flip side, there's Mega Serpentine as Carol. On a flat plane with one wall on the far right end, a boss that loves to spam Bullet Hell attacks, and gets his own temporary invincible shield, it's as if he were designed to be as counterproductive with her melee attacks as possible. And since he loves to run off once hit, there's no hope of spamming a sustained special attack, unlike with Lilac who can quickly catch up to him.
  • Brevon's second phase is probably one of the most difficult boss battles in the game, particularly with Lilac and Carol. His mech moves fairly quickly, its attacks are extremely unpredictable, and its arm cannon follows you as it shoots at you, plus it has an attack where it gathers lots of energy and releases it across much of the area.
  • Even by Final Boss standards, Brevon's final form is nigh-unanimously considered ridiculous. So much so that he was one of the bosses that was toned down in difficulty in a later patch because the creators found the huge number of deaths to him unacceptable. And he's still easily one of the hardest bosses in the game, as a final boss should be!
    • It's also worth noting that Brevon is the only boss in the entire game to have a life bar, as if the game is saying "You know all those other badass people and giant robots and monsters you fought? Yeah, those guys were chumps. This dude is the real boss. Have fun getting your ass kicked!".
    • Even mere impromptu health bars seem to be the domain of the hardest late game bosses: Brevon's first two forms have health bars as a stage piece, whereas Prince Dail at the Battle Glacier (as mentioned below) also has one in the form of a pile of mooks. The closest clue the player gets with any other boss is that it Shows Damage, and sometimes not even then.
  • Just about any end-game boss as Milla can count. The combination of low health and powerful enemy attacks makes dealing with them an exercise in attrition.
    • Special mention goes to the boss of Final Dreadnought Round 1, which mixes an Advancing Boss of Doom with a non-fatal, but still damaging laser, with the entire battle conducted in full sprint. Since Milla's Reflection Shield and Super Shield Burst bring her to a complete halt when on the ground, well timed jumps are required use these moves without hitting the laser.
• That One Level:
  • Battle Glacier. For starters, it's the longest level in the game and starts with an Unexpected Shmup Level. It's also home to just about every Goddamned Bat and Demonic Spider you've seen in the game thus far. Worse, they tend to come in large groups and attack from multiple directions, making it very difficult to get through some sections without taking a lot of damage. To top it all off, Prince Dail is the boss and is quite a jump in difficulty compared to most of the bosses encountered so far, going so far as to incorporate Bullet Hell into his attacks and spawning a large number of annoying lesser enemies in the process.
  • Before that, Thermal Base is the level where the game's difficulty really begins to ramp up. It's another Marathon Level primarily due to the fact that the key puzzles scattered throughout lead to a lot of backtracking through the same sections and make it rather easy to get lost. This level is also the first level that liberally uses Shade Troopers, although the level is also saturated with several types of enemies that are harder to kill than almost anything up to this point.
  • While all the final levels aren't particularly easy, Final Dreadnought 2 is often considered the hardest. It uses the same key puzzles from Thermal Base, including one section where you need to traverse a series of electric traps, fight a mini-boss to get the key, and make it back to the door with no means to replenish your health in-between. There's also the section where Brevon cuts off the oxygen from the ship, forcing you to cling onto a Water Shield for dear life through a series of laser corridors and trap-filled elevators. The fact that you immediately fight Mega Serpentine after this with no chance to heal is just the icing on the cake.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Given the game's numerous similarities to Sonic The Hedgehog and the fact that the project very much started out as a Sonic fangame, this complaint was inevitable. It was especially common before Art Evolution changed Lilac's species from a hedgehog to a dragon. More prominent gameplay similarities to the series, such as rolling, were also gradually phased out if deemed unnecessary.

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