The lowly console owner that I am, I spent two years waiting to be able to play the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time. After all that, there's no way it could actually live up to the lofty expectations I had set for it, right?

Right?

Yeah, Freedom Planet 2 is freaking incredible, it's wild how much it blows its predecessor out of the water in terms of polish and scope. If FP1 was in my Top 20 favorite games, then FP2 is a Top 10, maybe even a Top 5. It pretty much checks every single box in terms of what I want from a game. Complex and fluid movement, satisfying combat with a high skill ceiling, level design that's consistently fun and inventive, bombastic boss fights, loads of side content, adorable character designs, an engaging character-driven story (seriously it's way better this time), utterly gorgeous and cartoonishly colorful visuals, and an incredible soundtrack. It elevates Freedom Planet from a lovely homage to the Genesis era to an all-timer platformer series that can stand on its own alongside some of my favorites in the genre.

Gotta say, I'm a bit surprised by all the mixed reviews I've been seeing. Penny's Big Breakaway has been my most anticipated game this year, so I had some pretty lofty expectations, especially considering who was working on it. Thankfully, I think it really lived up to them, and I've been having an absolute blast with the game.

The movement is very momentum-based, focused around using your yo-yo tricks in succession to gain and maintain your speed. It's got a bit of a difficulty curve to it. Like in a Sonic game, you're probably gonna screw up a lot in the first world or so, but with time, there's such a strong sense of flow to navigating through these stages. You have so much freedom of expression, to the point where there's rarely one way to make it past an obstacle. You can swing to carefully position your jump, dash to keep the speed up, land on your yo-yo to keep your combo going, or chain them all together and maybe even skip a few platforms. It's so good, and the level design feels meticulously crafted to encourage you to go fast.

But beyond the core gameplay, PBB is just so fun. The visuals are bright and colorful, and each world has such unique and fresh theming, like an Italian-style restaraunt set in a volcano or a library floating in an endless void in space. The animation for Penny is so lively and expressive, the NPCs are so charmingly written, and I shouldn't have to say that the soundtrack by Tee Lopes and Sean Bialo goes incredibly hard. Outside The Eidophusikon is already a solid candidate for best vgm track of the year.

PBB isn't without its jank, but as a fan of 3D platformers from the early 2000s, it scratches an itch I haven't been able to scratch since probably A Hat In Time? In a lot of ways, it feels like this game was made for me.

Literally a bootleg. Midway took the sprites, engine, and even some of the level design from Shin'en's surprisingly solid EU-exclusive Maya The Bee games, stripped out all of the animation, made the controls worse, and dropped Manfred Linzner's great GAX music, just to sell an inferior product to America in the hopes of capitalizing off The Bee Movie. And on top of that, Midway released it on the DS too with zero changes, and it still looks worse than Shin'en's work on the GBA?

This game is so weird. I don't even care about Maya The Bee, but Shin'en deserved better than this, man.

I feel obligated to inform people every time this happens but if you're looking to try out the GBA Gradius games, please try checking out the JP version, Gradius Generation. It adds in a bunch of unlockable challenge modes that aren't in the American release, and being a shmup, there is pretty much no language barrier to deal with.

As for the game itself, it's good, even as someone who's not much of a Gradius fan. The level design and bosses are super creative and are designed around the GBA incredibly well, and the difficulty was tough but fair.