When Freedom Planet launched on PC in 2014 it looked at first glance like a love letter to Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog games. Retro pixel art, loop de loops, and corkscrews filled the stages, and its dragon and wildcat heroes sprinted through Avalice at speeds that felt straight out of the Genesis era. Underneath those familiar shapes, though, GalaxyTrail built a different kind of platformer, one built around combat, three sharply distinct characters, and a story heavy Adventure mode that leaned into cutscenes as much as raw speed.
That combination of high speed movement and heavy mechanics proved perfect for speedrunning. Time Attack leaderboards were built into the game from the start, and the main story quietly rewarded players for finishing under ninety minutes. By the time Freedom Planet appeared in the Sonic block at Summer Games Done Quick 2015, there was already a small but determined community experimenting with Dragon Boost angles, motorcycle wall climbs, and cube based boss melts.
This Speedrun Game Chronicle looks at how an indie Sonic inspired platformer turned into a three way race between Lilac, Carol, and Milla, what kinds of glitches and version quirks shape modern routes, and how a series of Games Done Quick marathons turned Freedom Planet into a minor but memorable fixture of the speedrunning scene.
From Sonic Fangame To Combat Based Indie Platformer
Freedom Planet began as a Sonic the Hedgehog fangame. Designer and programmer Sabrina DiDuro, working under the name Strife, initially prototyped the game with Sonic style rings, Doctor Eggman as antagonist, and Lilac herself designed as a hedgehog before deciding that a derivative project would restrict the game’s future. The cast was redesigned into original characters, the ring health system was replaced by hit points, and Lord Brevon took over as the new villain.
DiDuro founded GalaxyTrail in 2011, and Freedom Planet became the studio’s first commercial project. A Windows demo appeared in 2012, followed by a successful Kickstarter campaign and a full Steam release in July 2014. Ports followed for Wii U in 2015, PlayStation 4 in 2017, and Nintendo Switch in 2018, which meant that within a few years speedrunners could tackle the game on nearly every modern platform.
In play, Freedom Planet splits the difference between Sonic and more combat heavy 16 bit platformers. Stages are filled with ramps, loops, and multi tiered paths, but every level also features mid stage minibosses and large bosses at the end. Instead of rings, characters have a life meter represented by red petals. Lilac and Carol can expand that meter to seven petals, while Milla has less maximum health but compensates with a more flexible defensive kit.
The game offers two main story modes. Adventure mode includes the full suite of cutscenes and character interactions, while Classic mode strips the narrative out and presents stages back to back. Clearing levels unlocks them in a dedicated Time Attack menu, where players can chase personal bests on individual stages under an in game timer. That timer, rather than real time, would become the backbone of Freedom Planet speedrunning and helped smooth out differences between platforms.
Time Attack, Achievements, And The First Routes
For many players, Freedom Planet’s first brush with speedrunning came from its own achievement list. Steam achievements reward finishing the game under ninety minutes with each character, a soft challenge that nudges casual players toward routing and time management. By early 2017, players were comparing routes in the Steam forums and debating which character would be best for those time attacks.
That discussion is a snapshot of early community thinking. One poster argued that Carol was the fastest choice if the player knew where every motorcycle pickup was, but warned that her boss fights were harder and that deaths could erase any time saved. Another suggested Lilac as a safer all around choice. Milla, with her low health, was described by one player as “completely out of the question” for speedruns unless someone was already a specialist.
More experienced players pushed back. A Milla specialist in the same thread pointed out that with good health management, the ability to fly, strong cube based projectiles, and access to several glitches, Milla could clear the game faster than the others in the right hands. Another veteran broke down the situation more bluntly: Lilac was the easiest to move quickly, Carol could exploit bugs to skip the early stages altogether, and Milla had the most extreme glitch potential, including routes that could finish in under thirty five minutes.
Even in a casual achievement thread those comments showed how rapidly the community had moved from “which character should I use” to “how do I bend this game around each character’s toolkit.” While GalaxyTrail’s own design invited players to go fast, the speedrunners were already looking for ways to ignore intended paths entirely.
Lilac, Carol, And Milla As Speedrun Characters
Speedrunning Freedom Planet begins with understanding how its three heroines move. The official GalaxyTrail description highlights that Lilac focuses on dragon powers and aerial mobility, Carol on martial arts and her motorcycle, and Milla on ranged cube attacks and fluttering flight. Each of those kits translates into a distinct speedrun identity.
Lilac is the closest thing Freedom Planet has to a traditional Sonic style runner. Her Dragon Cyclone doubles as an aerial spin attack and a kind of double jump, while Dragon Boost lets her dash in eight directions as an invincible comet. High level Lilac runs weave boosts through loops, ramps, and enemy clusters in ways that mirror Sonic’s spindash chains, but with more emphasis on precise boost angles and maintaining enough energy to string multiple boosts together. Speedrunners write entire guides and video series on her movement tech because mastering boost height, chaining, and recovery is central to world record play.
Carol sits at the opposite extreme, a grounded striker who turns into a rocket when she finds a fuel tank. On foot she can roll, claw, and wall jump, already opening different routes from Lilac. Once she summons her motorcycle, her acceleration and top speed increase significantly, her double jump is replaced by a rolling attack that behaves like Lilac’s cyclone, and she can ride up walls. Nitro boosts and wall riding let Carol cut sharp corners and climb vertical geometry in ways the other characters cannot. In speedruns that makes her an aggressive but unforgiving choice, something early achievement hunters noticed when they warned that dying on bosses could erase her stage movement advantage.
Milla looks slow on paper. She has fewer petals of health, no energy gauge, and a moveset focused on creating cubes, throwing them, and using a shield to reflect attacks. She also has a short flutter that lets her hover and adjust her height. In casual play that makes her the trickiest character, but in speedrunning those cubes hide enormous damage potential. Combined with cube boosts, shield bursts, and clever platforming, Milla can erase bosses in a handful of hits and float over stage sections that the other two must climb. Community discussion and later guides reflect a split reputation: beginners are steered away from trying to go fast with her, but specialists point out that at top level she can compete with or surpass the others in full game times.
These three movement kits are the reason Freedom Planet’s speedrun leaderboards are organized by character. On speedrun.com the full game tab splits into separate boards for Lilac, Carol, Milla, and an All Cards category that tracks collectible focused runs. On the Lilac board alone there are more than fifty ranked times spread across Casual, Normal, Hard, and other settings. The world record sits at 31 minutes 52.120 seconds on Casual difficulty, set by revolucion on PC, with a long tail of runs that stretch past ninety minutes.
Beneath those records sit simple stats that tell the story of a durable, mid sized community. As of recent years the Freedom Planet page tracks more than two thousand seven hundred submitted runs from over a hundred and thirty players, spread across PC and the various console versions.
Glitches, Skips, And Version Differences
Like many 2D platformers built on retro engines, Freedom Planet turned out to be more fragile than it looked. A handful of tricks became central to modern routing, and they often interact with the game’s version history.
One of the most important skips lies in Dragon Valley, the opening stage. Speedrunners discovered a trick that allows Lilac or Carol to bypass the stage’s end boss entirely. In a Speedrun.com forum thread about whether PC was recommended for serious runs, community members pointed out that the outdated Wii U release handled this skip differently. On the older console patch Dragon Valley could be dropped from full game timing entirely, which made it hard to compare those runs to patched PC times where the skip still saves time but the stage remains in the run. Runners who wanted to compete on the main leaderboards were steered toward the PC version largely for this reason.
Another family of tricks revolves around what players call fade out skip. Community guides describe a technique where the runner pauses during the end of stage fade, selects Restart, and quickly unpauses. Timed correctly, this interrupts the normal transition and can keep the timer running while skipping certain sequences or bosses. A detailed guide credits runner Yuuki with first writing down the effect, and later tutorials explore where it is safe, how it interacts with achievements, and what stages gain the most from it.
There are also more extreme glitches that show up both in achievement discussions and formal speedruns. On Steam, a 2017 thread about under ninety minute achievements includes a post from runner Punchy that outlines two particularly striking exploits. In Adventure mode, Carol can trigger a cutscene related bug right at the start. By starting the game, skipping the initial cutscene at a precise point, and continuing to move, the game shifts her into a map used for cutscenes and then into another that belongs to the stage Fortune Night. The result is that players can skip Dragon Valley and Relic Maze entirely. The same post notes that Milla can achieve a similar effect by selecting “Next Level” after Aqua Tunnel, which jumps her straight to Fortune Night as well.
Those tricks, combined with cube clips, wall clips, and other character specific oddities, define modern full game routing. They also pushed the community to document version numbers carefully. In the forum thread about platform choice, runners talk about updating the Wii U version to at least 1.21.4 to keep it in line with PC, and later guides for Freedom Planet 2 even include instructions for downpatching to specific builds for glitch friendly categories.
For comparison minded speedrunners, external tools put the game in context. The site SpeedStats aggregates world records across many games and ranks them by a composite scoring system. In that list, the Lilac full game record sits among a mass of other categories and carries a score just over 329, a tiny indicator of where Freedom Planet’s best runs sit relative to more famous platformers.
Freedom Planet On The Games Done Quick Stage
If speedrun.com leaderboards show Freedom Planet’s day to day life, Games Done Quick marathons mark its public milestones.
The game’s first appearance came at Summer Games Done Quick 2015, where runners johannhowitzer and Mylexsi raced Lilac Any percent as part of the Sonic block. GDQ’s official schedule and VOD index record the race as a roughly fifty minute showcase between more traditional Sega titles. Fans on Tumblr and Reddit promoted the race ahead of time and celebrated it afterward as an entertaining match that kicked off the Sonic segment with a fresh but thematically fitting game.
The following year, Freedom Planet returned to SGDQ with a different face. Runner Fladervy took the stage with a Milla Hard mode run, with GDQ stats listing an estimate of around forty five minutes and a final time in the low forty ones. That choice highlighted how different the game looked when driven by its most complex character, and it also put cube heavy boss routing and Milla’s fragile movement in front of a wide audience.
The high point of Freedom Planet’s GDQ history came at SGDQ 2017, when Fladervy returned for a Lilac Any percent run on PC. Official event trackers list the run at 44 minutes 19 seconds, and a PC Gamer feature later selected it as one of seven must watch runs from the marathon, praising both the game as a standout Sonic homage and Fladervy’s execution as “machine like.” Games Done Quick’s own social media called out the supportive couch and crowd during the run, and a Reddit thread on favorite GDQ performances singled it out as a combination of great commentary and technical play that even impressed other Freedom Planet runners watching live.
Those marathon appearances solidified the game’s place in the broader speedrun canon. Even players who never picked up the controller themselves often encountered Freedom Planet first through those couch discussions of Dragon Boost routes and character differences.
Community, Discord, And Training New Runners
Behind the scenes, the Freedom Planet speedrun community has built a modest but surprisingly deep ecosystem of resources.
The central hub is the speedrun.com page, which not only hosts the full game and level leaderboards but also forums, news posts, and a cluster of guides. Current and former moderators like Punchy, revolucion, and Treya have maintained rulesets, clarified timing and version policies, and promoted community events.
There is also a dedicated speedrunning Discord. A 2017 Reddit post invited interested players to join, noting that records are split by character so newcomers can gravitate toward their favorite hero. A thread on speedrun.com itself, authored by then moderator revolucion, advertises the same server to players looking for routing help or verification. Inside, runners have coordinated races, shared personal bests, and tested experimental categories.
Training material has grown steadily. The guides tab on speedrun.com lists text primers on Lilac and Carol’s movement tech, a comprehensive explanation of fade out skip, and even a video tutorial series titled “How to Train Your Lilac” that walks new runners through stage by stage routing. Older resources on the Speed Demos Archive knowledge base dive into Lilac’s damage values and frame based attack ticks, reflecting the level of detail top runners apply to boss fights.
Meanwhile, casual communities have kept the game visible through fan projects like Shang Mu Architect and Freedom Planet Academy, unofficial stage builders and campaigns that expand Avalice with new levels and challenges. While those projects sit outside the official leaderboards, they reinforce the sense that Freedom Planet’s movement and world still resonate with players more than a decade after release.
Legacy And The Future With Freedom Planet 2
Freedom Planet today sits in an unusual position. It is an indie game shaped by Sonic’s legacy, outlived the height of its first speedrunning boom, and then watched as its own sequel arrived in 2022 with new physics, higher resolution art, and another set of stages for runners to dissect.
Even with Freedom Planet 2 now on PC and consoles, the original retains a small but steady stream of submissions. New players still chase under ninety minute achievements. Others, inspired by GDQ runs or YouTube tutorials, pick a single character and see how far they can push Dragon Boost, motorcycle wall climbs, or cube combos. The speedrun.com stats show that new times were still being posted in the last couple of years, often from runners piecing together old routes with modern patch knowledge.
As a speedrun, Freedom Planet is not defined by a single broken glitch or by one towering world record. Instead, its legacy is the way three characters offer three different interpretations of a single stage list, and how a game that began as a Sonic homage grew its own identity through routing debates, marathon showcases, and a quietly dedicated community. For anyone building Speedrun Game Chronicles, it stands as a reminder that some of the most interesting races happen a little off to the side of the biggest franchises, on a small planet where a dragon, a wildcat, and a nervous basset hound race the clock together.