How much do you love Treasure? The answer likely depends on which of its games you’ve played. If it’s a Gunstar or a Guardian or a Bangai-O, you may well love it a lot, having been drawn deep inside that perfectly garish cartoon frenzy of lights and sounds, and thrust into the whirling gears of the ever-increasing mechanical nonsense. If it’s Radiant Silvergun, or Gradius V or Ikaruga – and if they truly clicked for you – then love is probably only the beginning: these are games that inspire obsession, reverence and even delightful little stabs of blood-red hatred, as they take simple things like light or geometry and effortlessly rip and restitch them around you, looping threads of high-score excitement through your brain before painfully yanking at them.
But if it’s Freak Out, and only Freak Out, you’re possibly a little bemused at the question, trying to recall the faded memories of a slight, frustrating afternoon’s distraction. But then it would never be only Freak Out (known as Stretch Panic in the US and Hippa Linda in Japan) because, above all else, that’s the one game Treasure fans try to ignore, the half-baked oddity that never quite belongs with the rest of the canon, even when compared to the company’s true stinkers. We’re wrong to ignore it, of course, but not because Freak Out is secretly brilliant. We’re wrong to ignore it precisely because it isn’t. Silvergun and Ikaruga, Gunstar and Guardian: these games are too whole, too seamless to shed any light on the forces that created them. Brilliant savants, they have no room for insight, no use for introspection in there among the pure, sugary score-rush. But Freak Out – addled, lopsided Freak Out – forever promising stranger pleasures than it can rightly deliver, provides the best examination available of just what makes a Treasure game tick. In malfunctioning at such a deep level, it provides a single, stolen glance at the clockwork lurking inside the shiny casing.
Another question: what’s the secret ingredient that makes a Treasure game? The answer feels obvious, but
the harder you struggle to pin it down, the less each response fits. How about precision? The micro-surgery standards of movement and strategy demanded by the mirror-world jumping of Silhouette Mirage, or the screen-bisecting gunfire of Radiant Silvergun? Then how do you explain away the messy chain-reacting, screen-filling chaos of Bangai-O? What about exuberance, perhaps? But can you really square that with the calm restraint of Treasure’s licensed games, the quiet skill with which the developer puts Tiny Toons and even McDonalds IP through surprisingly handy paces? Colourful? You’re grasping now: It works for Gunstar, but what of the delicate palette of Ikaruga, benefiting from that underlying austerity of its bipolar mechanics? The truth is that the more you close in on a definition, the quicker it slips away; the kind of mechanic, in short, that the developer could probably have a lot of fun with.
Freak Out certainly looks like a Treasure game: the gleaming artwork, the bosses, the preponderance of characters with spindly ankles. And the concept is the same kind of shrill madness that crops up regularly in its other output. Armed with a possessed scarf which terminates in a grabbing hand, little Linda must tug, bend and twang her way through an elasticated environment in order to save 12 sisters who have become distorted victims of their own vanity. It’s cartoon morality, a savagely slapstick satire cobbled together from candy floss and string cheese, and it comes with the promise of a Technicolor world that isn’t just there to explore, but can be stretched, snapped and endlessly tweaked.
But even at this early stage there are problems. The quirkiness is already laid on a little thick: the full-on assault of the comic-strip intro is a blunt charm broadside rather than a whimsical glimpse of the delights that follow, and key elements of the game, such as the Boniita Zako, the outrageously pneumatic bimbos who must be squeezed and tugged and snapped at to emit the points Linda needs in order to unlock bosses, can seem unnervingly desperate in their invention.
As the game progresses, the cracks continue to show. Mechanically, Freak Out is blessed with a horrible camera and, strangely for a Treasure title, a ponderously slow pace imposed by the tiny steps of the main character. But more importantly, the structure of the game is fundamentally misleading. The hub-like Museum of Agony suggests the safe, segmented explorative pleasures of Mario 64, but the handful of themed worlds to be unlocked are small, simplistically staged and almost entirely empty, home to the inane wandering Zako, some bendable scenery, and nothing else. These are spaces for harvesting the points you need to proceed – workhouses rather than funfairs – and, in the light of such questionable pleasures and frustrating controls, the hasty sketched-in texturing of the Museum itself seems apt for a game that feels unfinished.
Worst of all, it’s in these sections that the stretch mechanic, which promised so much in the mind’s eye, delivers so little. The first time you grab a palm tree and watch it bend towards you is, even now, a showboating thrill that reminds you of when last-gen was next-gen and next-gen still meant the kind of things you didn’t really think were possible, and the pleasure of firing yourself across a gap or at an enemy by grabbing a distant rock and pulling yourself back like a spring has an undeniable tactile appeal. Yet beyond simple navigation and simpler combat, a deeper implementation is distinctly lacking. Partly this is due to the limitations inherent in the idea. Precision jumping or traditional combos would be impossible with mechanics this loose, but there’s also an overwhelming sense that the game is lacking the spirit to bring these sections to life. Try as it might, not even Treasure can stretch and tug the bulk of Freak Out into the shape it really wants.