Sorry it took me so long to finally get to Spark The Electric Jester 3, but this playthrough was a rollercoaster. Just read ahead to see why...
Spark The Electric Jester 3 was a game I thought I would never play.
It's part of a series so inextricably tied to the PC, the culmination of
both an entire trilogy's worth of Sonic fangames and an entire
trilogy's worth of Spark The Electric Jester games. As a diehard fan of
Freedom Planet, I was always really curious about the other major Sonic
throwback, but I gave up on being able to experience them a long time
ago. Then Spark 3 got announced for Switch.
Jumping into a series with its third and last installment is certainly a unique challenge, but I'm lucky enough that I was able to go into Spark 3 was a decent amount of context. I knew that the Spark The Electric Jester games are made by a indie dev named Lake Feperd, who got his start making Sonic fangames like the popular Before/After The Sequel games. He then proceeded to make a 2D original title named Spark The Electric Jester, which became a cult hit and paved the way to two sequels, both of which shifted to 3D and tried to take more cues from the Adventure era of Sonic. From what I can tell, Spark 3 is generally regarded as Feperd's magnum opus, the peak of his craft. If I could only play one game by him, most people would recommend this one. So does it live up to the hype? Will it reach the Freedom Planet levels of expectations I've built up towards it over the years?
Well... it's complicated...
The Opening
Spark The Electric Jester 3 starts off with an incredible opening, like so good I needed to give it its own section. The game kicks off with Spark in a car chase with what seems to be the police, and you quickly take control only to find out that the car controls in Spark 3 are... actually really good? Seriously, the handling is so tight and intuitive, I was genuinely stunned. Spark 3 has a good amount of these car chase sequences and they're genuinely some of the game's highlights. After that action-packed opening, you get a charming cutscene where Spark snarkily fills the player in on the events of the previous games, revealing that he's off to stop an organization called the Fark Force. The game has a bunch of these exposition dumps, but this is far and away the best one. Spark's down to earth personality and frequent quips keep the exposition feeling entertaining, and in general, I think this scene was important for players like myself who didn't experience the previous games. After this bit, we can finally get into Spark 3 proper, but before I dive into the actual levels, let's go over the general gameplay and presentation first.
Platforming
Spark The Electric Jester's main gameplay can be split into two halves, the platforming and the combat. The platforming is obviously the main appeal of the game, and it feels pretty good. Your jumps are fairly floaty making navigating platforms a breeze, and your handling while at high speeds is impressively tight and manageable. You get a fair amount of moves to help you build up speed as well like a simple dash, a more powerful charge dash, and a homing attack of sorts, and it helps give the game a consistently fast pace. The game also really runs on the "SA1 spin dashing up a slope" philosophy, you can absolutely snap levels in half by boosting off the right piece of geometry and it feels fantastic. However, as you'd probably expect, Spark 3 does have its fair share of jank. It's definitely possible to catch yourself on pieces of geometry, and I even ended up accidentally flipping the car a few times by driving into a wall the wrong way. None of this was game-breaking or anything though, if you're familiar with the kind of jank in the Sonic Adventure games, this should be par for the course.
Combat
Meanwhile, the combat is very blatantly inspired by Devil May Cry. It's got combos, launchers, a fairly generous parry, cancels, the works, and it's surprisingly fun. You can tell Feperd is a genuinely big fan of these games and has a good sense of what makes them work, Spark 3's combat is fast, fluid, and allows for a lot of freedom on the part of the player. You can just use the same basic attacks and mostly skate by, or you can try to really style on your foes, and enemy/boss health bars are beefy enough that it's totally doable. The early enemies do tend to wait around a bit too much between attacks, but the lategame really tests your combat abilities with far faster and more aggressive foes. That being said, there's once again a good amount of jank here. Trying to parry will often cause the camera to bug out a bit, getting hit occasionally sent Spark awkwardly sliding around, and figuring out parry times can be pretty frustrating. As far as Sonic equivalents go, I think Spark 3 definitely has some of the better combat out there, especially compared to Frontiers' pitiful attempt, but it still feels a bit held back by its lack of polish.
The Switch Port
One of my biggest concerns with Spark 3
on Switch was going to be the porting job, and it's certainly not
perfect. The resolution took a decent hit, though the visuals are
simplistic enough that the slight fuzziness doesn't really ruin the art
direction. The framerate similarly has been downgraded to 30fps and I
find it often dips when you go at blisteringly fast speeds, but as bad
as this sounds, Spark 3 felt remarkably playable for its entire length.
Despite the dips, it never felt like my inputs were being eaten or that I
was unable to react to obstacles. I'm actually really impressed with
how well the game has been ported given how reportedly difficult of an
undertaking it was. The devs at Freakzone Games themselves said that
Spark 3 makes so many physics calculations that getting it to run at a
somewhat stable 30fps is tough enough, and with how large the levels are
and how fast you go, the fact that Spark 3 runs as well as it does is
deserving of praise. There has of course been a fair share of bugs and issues, but Freakzone Games has been fairly vigilant in catching and patching them. Ultimately, I think Spark 3 on Switch is worth getting, though I would at least recommend waiting for version 1.1 to come out for reasons I'll get into later.
Presentation
The port aside though, I am a bit split on
Spark 3's presentation. There's a lot of good here and a lot that
doesn't quite work for me. The environments have this simple geometric
look to them that at times really harken back to the PS2 era of games,
and at times can feel a bit empty. The world of the Spark games is so
inherently surreal that I don't feel like I was really able to immerse
myself in it as much as in, say, Freedom Planet. It probably doesn't
help that I was never huge on character designs in Spark, they often
felt either too busy or too minimal. That being said, Spark 3 is a
decent improvement over previous games. Giving Spark a jacket alone
gives his design so much extra texture and Float's new look is pretty
solid too, though the design highlight for me has to be Clarity for
spoilery reasons. The cutscenes are also a mixed bag to me. Some are really vibrant and charmingly animated, but others feel fairly stiff and impactless, though they are bolstered by easily being the best-looking parts of the Switch port. I'd honestly say the general art direction is one of the Spark's weakest aspects as a series, it just... doesn't have the sauce, if you know what I mean.
The music is great though, as per the usual for Feperd's games. There's a decent blend of upbeat Sonic-esque synth rock and fast-paced techno to keep the action moving along. They even brought in Freedom Planet's Woofle to do a few tracks, and as expected, they're some of the best. That being said, I will say that this is probably the weakest soundtrack of the Spark trilogy. Many of the best composers of 1 & 2 didn't come back to work on 3, so it doesn't quite have the same level of musical variety as its predecessors. Though when you get the second game's entire soundtrack bundled in (more on that later), I can't complain too much.
Terminal Village
Terminal Village is the first proper zone of Spark 3, and it's a totally solid tutorial, offering up a wide open cityscape to run around in, with lots of alternate paths, long straightaways, and hidden nooks and crannies. It's short, replayable, and does its job well. After beating that first level, Spark 3's world map will proceed to branch out into a bunch of side stages. Beating a stage nets you a Freedom Medal and you need a certain amount to progress the story, so you're required to do some but not all of the side stages. This isn't a bad thing though, these side stages usually have entirely original level layouts and are quite fun and varied, some even having alternate objectives like beating the level in a certain time or getting a certain amount of medals. The ones in Terminal Village are fairly standard, though special mention goes to High-Rise Tracks for being a fun and fast-paced train level, which are always great. It's also worth mentioning there are a few short tutorial stages that also net you Freedom Medals, and they're definitely worth doing as well. In total, Spark 3's campaign has an impressive 40 stages, all of which are unique which I really appreciate. Terminal Village ends with a pretty fun but simple boss fight against a robot called Saw Man. He's very much meant to be a combat tutorial so Saw Man stands around a lot and attacks fairly slowly, but his fight still has a decent amount of spectacle and the final cutscene where Spark kicks him to the ground is pretty sick.
Drynion Desert & Protest Prison
The next two zones actually have a lot in common. They're both pretty heavily inspired by existing Sonic stages (Rail Canyon for the former and Prison Island for the latter), they both put a lot of focus on rail-grinding, and they're both... fine. A bit unremarkable and long-winded, but still fairly fun. Drynion Desert has a nice blend of interior and exterior sections to keep things varied, but a lot of it is still rail-grinding, and while Protest Prison has a few more varied hazards like conveyor belts, the entire level maintains the same forest prison look. The side stages for each zone is also a bit of a mixed bag. Drynion Desert has the soothing Lost Ravine, but also the dull and dingy score-hunting stage Canyon Zero. Protest Prison has a few neat environment setpieces like dashing through tree-trunks and a side stage being set in an ashy forest, but the core gameplay feels a bit too consistent across all of its stages. These zones are still pretty fun, but it feels like Spark 3 is still picking up steam and I wasn't fully hooked yet.
The Guardian
Another thing that Drynion Desert and Protest Prison have in common is that they don't have boss fights. Instead, you meet the Guardian, Flint, after the main levels of each zone who challenges you to a brutally challenging fight. You can win and you'll get a new form for Spark early if you do, but it's more likely that you'll lose. I'm not a huge fan of this decision for a number of reasons. First off, I just don't like scripted boss fights all that much, I'd much rather have actually fought someone tailored to my current skillset to improve my combat skills. It's also quite jarring to see the borderline same exact Guardian cutscenes before both encounter. But then there's how these fights impact the story-telling. Each Guardian fight is followed up with a lengthy flashback showing off Flint's backstory on a TV screen, like in the opening but without Spark's fun and snarky narration. This is where the bulk of the story progression ends up being until the final act, Spark himself genuinely just spends most of the game lollygagging around trying to find the Fark Force. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with backloading your game's story to the final level, Kirby does it a ton and it usually works quite effectively, but you need to more elegantly lay breadcrumbs hinting at the story than just offloading a ton of exposition to the player. This also means that instead of spending time becoming attached to the characters, the game spends most of its cutscene time giving the player info that the protagonist doesn't receive, only separating us from him further. In general, I think Spark 3 suffers from a character building issue. Aside from Spark himself, I didn't really end up getting attached to any of the other characters in the same way as in a Sonic, Freedom Planet, or even a Kirby game.
Protest City
Protest City is, in my opinion, where Spark 3 really comes to life. It's very much meant to be a take on Speed Highway, but the darker and more hectic setting helps it feel fresh. You'll be speeding down highways, dodging police, hopping across protestors, running down buildings and through tunnels, and trying not to get hit with tear gas, it's a fun time. Even cooler, the stage introduces yet another vehicle, a helicopter that you can fly around to shoot down enemies. Like with the car, the handling for this helicopter feels really nice, and you get a beefy health bar preventing these bits from feeling unnecessarily frustrating. The side stages also took a big bump in quality, between fun vehicle stages that flesh out the car and helicopter gameplay, and a surprisingly solid medal hunting stage that has you dropping down a unique sewer environment. As I said, it really feels like Spark has been finding its footing with Protest City, and it only gets better from here.
Float & Style Switching
The boss fight of Protest City (and second proper fight of the game) starts off with you piloting that helicopter again to take down a battleship, only to be knocked out of the sky. Suddenly, a new character named Float shows up and you get to play as her for the rest of the fight. It's not an especially tough encounter, but it's memorable for introducing your second playable character. Spark 3 has a bunch of playable characters that you can swap between on the fly, along with that aforementioned second form you get for defeating the Guardian, and I'm a huge fan of this mechanic. Each character/form has their own strengths in combat which lends Spark 3 almost a rudimentary form of style switching, but I also really like using Float for the platforming since she can fly over hazards. On a story level, Float's appearance does give Spark's side of the story a bit more intrigue, and as mentioned I really like her design. However, I can't help but feel Float is a bit underutilized by the end of the game. She only shows up halfway through Spark 3, and a certain plot reveal at the end of the game pretty much renders her a red herring.
Historia Hysteria
Historia Hysteria was the level I was most excited about and it did not disappoint. This stage takes place in some trippy non-euclidean museum with looping hallways, gravity shifting, surreal background imagery, and some banger DnB music. It's a fun, frenetic, and inventive stage and in any other game, it would probably be my favorite, especially with how good the boss fight is. Throwback is basically a boss rush of three fights from Spark 2, though the game adds a nice wrinkle by having you randomly swap between fighting all three bosses at the same time. It's a cool concept, executed and balanced pretty much perfectly, it might even be my favorite boss of the game. Sadly, the side levels aren't quite as strong. Balloon Fiesta is quite fun, but Heaven Park duplicating itself halfway through and Endless Hall's confusing layout made for pretty weak missions. Historia Hysteria is a fantastic stage all around and definitely ranks as one of the most memorable in Spark 3, but one stage managed to surpass even it...
Stratoria Interstellar
Stratoria Interstellar is the best level in Spark 3, it's so cool. The whole level takes place in an airport, starting with you driving the car up to the gate before taking you through check-in, the food hall, the baggage check, the runway, and finally into the plane itself. Despite clocking in at around eight minutes casually, making it one of the shorter levels in the game, Stratoria Interstellar uses its setting to constantly toss new ideas at you at a brisk pace. There's multiple paths, a nice balance between linear gauntlets and wide open areas, and it fully takes advantage of its premise, I'd easily rank it among my favorite 3D Sonic levels. And the side stage roster is similarly fantastic. I love how one side level has you racing to enter a rocketship ala Metal Harbor, only to be followed with a side level that has you hopping across satellites in space. There's also another fun, if somewhat janky, car chase side stage and an exhilirating side stage that has you escaping an exploding plane. The variety on display is absolutely incredible. The boss fight, Mecha Madness, has you pilot a mech to fight off Flint's own giant mech. It's a decent spectacle if a bit thin in terms of gameplay, and it of course is followed by yet another bit of backstory, this time for Float.
Pacific Abyss
Pacific Abyss only has a single main stage, Deep Descent. This stage focuses around skydiving, Spark 3 has a mechanic where you can fall for a certain amount of time but can die of fall damage if you spend too much time in the air without stalling your fall. It's a neat mechanic to work around when speedrunning, but when you have a level that's almost entirely focused around it, there's really only so much Deep Descent can do. It's a pretty repetitive stage especially compared to the last few, and it doesn't help that it's also freaking massive! This stage took me 15 minutes playing casually, and there's so many wide open areas and buried secrets that actually taking the time to explore Deep Descent would've probably taken an hour at least. I don't think this is a bad stage by any means, but it's definitely my least favorite of the bunch because it just feels a bit more drawn out.
The Finale
The final act, on the other hand, is truly something interesting. Utopia Shelter immediately presents itself as a lengthy, brutal final challenge that tests you on everything you've learned, and I'd say it mostly succeeds. From tough enemy encounters, to dodging a variety of hazards, to navigating tight paths at high speeds, Utopia Shelter is quite the test of skill, and it took my lunch money and then some. The icing on the cake is that the game forces limited lives on you, and while I had more than enough since I had collected a good amount of medals prior to playing the stage, it still gave the stage a lot of tension. Once you finally reach Fark, you get treated to the game's last big exposition dump, which reveals that a rogue AI named Clarity has assimilated the entire world thousands of years ago, and Spark is just stuck in a time loop reliving the moments that caused it to happen. It's a bold story decision and a dark turn, and it leaves me very divided. Like many aspects of Spark 3, I get the feeling that Feperd made this story decision because he thought it'd be cool. Wouldn't be cool if Spark just went full Evangelion? But when the first 80% of your game turns out to just be an artificial time loop, and the major side character turned out to be a replica responsible for freeing Clarity, what was really the point? It's a similar issue I had to the Mr Robot finale, where the audience being misled for the vast majority of the story and the final few minutes being what actually happened makes the whole thing feel... kinda like a waste?
But whatever, for all the story gripes I have with Spark 3, it was still a fun game. I still really liked the gameplay, and that's what matters most. So Spark gets taken over by Clarity, and now you have to fight him as Fark. That's cool, and what ensues is probably the hardest fight of the game. It's a three-phase behemoth with little room to heal, and while you have infinite lives, you're sent back to the beginning of the fight is you die. It took a few attempts, and each time I was able to do more progress. At one point, I was just a few hits away from finishing the boss but I died... and then the game crashed, and I lost all my progress on the level.
Complicated Thoughts
Apparently, this was an issue with the Switch port. If you die on one of the final bosses, there's a chance the game will crash. I wasn't lying when I was praising the port, the team at FreakZone Games did send out a patch soon after the game released, but when I was playing, Nintendo hadn't yet approved it, and they still haven't. As you expect, this absolutely devastated me. I dedicated time out of my day to beating Utopia Shelter, I put so much effort into that damned thing only to have all of it wiped away. At the time, the thought of having to put myself through that again made me sick. Even thinking about Spark 3 made me sick. It sucks to have a bad experience with an otherwise good piece of media, and Spark 3 is a genuinely great and fun game, but this issue did sully my experience with it a bit and it would be disingenuous to pretend it didn't. As you can expect, that's why it took me so long to get this review out. I had to step away from the game for two weeks before I could even think
of giving Utopia Shelter another shot, and when I did, I bumped the
combat difficulty to easy so I wouldn't risk triggering the crash again. But thankfully, I was able to do it this time. I actually had a pretty easier time with the tough platforming segments in Utopia Shelter, and managed to get through and enjoy both the Linework fight and the actual final boss. I still don't think Spark 3 fully stuck the landing, the story was pretty much completely incomprehensible for me by the end, but I at the very least was able to end the game on a somewhat positive note despite it all.
Side Content
Now that we're done with Spark 3, what else is there to do? Well, quite a lot actually. Each level has a bunch of side objectives you can do, from beating them within a certain time, to getting a high enough score, to finding all 10 Explore Medals peppered throughout the stages. They add a lot to the game's replayability, though the requirements can be a bit absurd. The Explore Medals in particular can be really tough to find with how massive some of these stages are, the ones in stages like Deep Descent and Doublemoon Villa can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. But aside from that, I'd say the really exciting side content comes in the postgame, most of which were free DLC updates for the PC version that came packaged-in with the Switch port. First off, there's a
brutal 101-floor raid mode that locks the true final boss behind it,
which I don't even think I'm nearly equipped enough to handle. But more
excitingly, Spark 3 also comes with all of the levels from Spark The
Electric Jester 2, and they're genuinely pretty great! They're a lot simpler than Spark 3's levels, but there's a pureness to them that I find really fun. They're a bit shorter, easier to run through, and their often abstract visuals do have a real charm. And as I mentioned, the Spark 2 levels have some incredible music which only sweetened the deal. The fact that Lake Feperd was willing to essentially double this game's content was great on its own, but after my turbulent experience with the final level, getting to experience Spark 2's fantastic lineup of stages did so much to help wash that bad taste out of my mouth.
Conclusion
Overall, Spark The Electric Jester 3 is an
incredibly ambitious indie game, with a huge scope and an impressive
amount of bold swings taken. Not everything works, the story backloads
itself too much without fleshing out the actual world, the character and
world designs feel a bit hit or miss, and there's a good amount of jank
permeating the entire experience. However, so much of Spark 3 does
work. The core platforming gameplay feels fantastic and nails what made
the Adventure games so fun, the combat does a far better job at
realizing the concept of a Sonic-inspired character action game than
Frontiers did, the level design in the second half absolutely ranks
among some of the best 3D Sonic stages, the vehicle sections are
legitimately so fun, and the sheer amount of content and replayability
on offer makes this more than worth the price.
I can't help but admit that my own experiences with the game somewhat tainted it for me, that one crash will probably always cast a dark shadow over Spark 3 for me. I don't think I will ever see it as the Sonic killing masterpiece others seem to think it is. However, one unfortunately timed bug shouldn't ruin a game for me, especially when I've moved past it and it's likely to be patched within a week or so. I still enjoyed Spark 3, and while I don't really see any way in which it dramatically improves upon the games it's inspired by, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Spark 3 nails the fundamentals, reaches some serious highs, and packs in a lot of heart, even if some of it is misplaced. If that doesn't remind me exactly of the Sonic Adventure games, I don't know what does.
4.5/5 Stars
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