This writeup will contain spoilers for
Freespace 1. It is based on the
FSPort mod for
FS2Open, which transplants the original game's missions, ships, and sounds into a superior, rewritten,
open source FS2
game engine.
This is a game which yanks emotion out of you.
You might not expect that coming into it. I sure as hell didn't: I saw a nifty little
space shooter, full of bam bam lasers and gee-whiz look at those missiles! And I got that. A very tight, very thrilling, combat design is the backbone of this game. Your missiles and guns feel meaty without ever giving any feeling of overwhelming power. Your opponents are deadly on higher difficulties, so much that taking on four alone is near-suicide. Your wingmates accept commands and follow orders; usually, they do a damned fine job of it. Never does this degenerate to a
Starfox arcade fly-through.
Enemy fighters are not glorified targets. Allies do not appear for the 5-second rescue, and then cease to exist after.
Sometimes you're attacking a 2km destroyer and reliant almost completely upon your AI-controlled wingmen for survival. Sometimes you're
flying escort for the bombers. Your entire role is to just make sure they do theirs, no more and no less. Sometimes you're
dogfighting in the midst of a capital ship battle, fighting a nigh-pointless fight, while the behemoths rage and charge behind you. All of your struggles seem...insignificant, in the grander scheme of things.
You're a cog in the machine. A pretty damned important, shining cog in the machine, but a tool in a far grander plan nonetheless.
You are Alpha 1.
But anyway, where was I?
Emotion.
No game captures
dread better than Freespace does. And by dread I don't mean the horror-movie thrills of
Resident Evil's dogs bursting out of windows or zombies jumping out of doors saying
Boo! I mean that feeling clutching the back of your throat when you see the interstellar news bulletin update after a battle (a battle you fucking won) talk about the blitzkreig assault on the
Arcadia class installation you were just flying past. You'll feel it hard when the unstoppable
Lucifer annhilates the GTD Galatea in a matter of minutes.
That was your home for 20 missions. Now it's gone.
The second-to-last mission is godly. The
Galactic Terran Alliance, or GTA, (allied with another alien species, the
Vasudans, at this point) has finally figured out how to track and destroy the
Lucifer: while jumping through subspace, its shields don't work. The
Lucifer is
one jump away from ravaging Earth, so this'll be it. The showdown. The idea was for the GTD
Bastion, the destroyer you're stationed on now, to slip into subspace behind the Lucifer and attack its reactors while you fly escort. It doesn't work: the Bastion starts off too far away the superdestroyer, so it does the only thing it can: launch all its fighters and bombers. Pray.
That's another nifty thing the game does: objectives fail beyond your control. The pre-mission briefing will discuss a detailed strategy that nails your moves down to the precision of a dance. And then you'll hit commit, the mission will load, and you'll throw all the steps away. I've not seen the 'Plans never survive contact with the enemy' maxim adapted so well to a game narrative. It all feels so real, so organic, when your allies freak out due to a surprise attack and command's going nuts and shit's exploding that shouldn't
be exploding and you're stuck trying to survive before you can figure out what happened.
Sure, every intelligence failure, every last-second rescue, every hidden destroyer ambush was planned out long ago by the game designers. But when you're in that fighter seat, and 10 different pieces of information stream through your cockpit for eyes and ears, lasers flying, friends dying, the immersion is complete.
You
are Alpha 1.
So, mission.
You
run the fucking gauntlet. It's you and a whole mess of fighters, flying forward, flying desperately. The
Lucifer is far away and it's spitting out uncountable hordes of interceptors. You shoot and you dodge and you fly and you duck and you weave but you know deep down that every second you spend doing this, fighting to stay alive, is a second you've lost to save Earth. And you shoot and you dodge and you fly and duck and you weave and you boost with all the goddamn juice your
Hercules fighter can give. And you're getting closer to the node and the epic battle music is blaring and HOLY FUCK 2 MILE-LENGTH ENEMY DESTROYER RIGHT AHEAD but you have no time to fight, no time to defend yourself, so you fly around. All of your energy is poured into engines at this point, by the way, so every laser that hits your shield is one step closer to touching metal. Your heart pumps in time to the music. So you dodge and you fly and you duck and you weave and you pray. It's the only thing you can do. And, if luck and skill is with you, you'll reach the jump node in time.
The final mission of the game proper, I don't like so much. There's no music. It's terribly anticlimactic. Storyline-wise, no shields work in subspace, so the bombers are free to target the
Lucifer's five reactors before it jumps out to Earth. They never seem to do it right, though: some AI bug, perhaps? Whatever. I'd always just dial down the difficulty to 'Very Easy', take on every defender by myself, and order all wingmates to attack the Lucifer's weakpoints in order. I've never, ever lost. The
Lucifer wallows there like a beached whale while occasionally lobbing the token laser shot at me. Its anti-fighter coverage is appallingly weak. The reactors go down fast; the mission ends.
"I believe it is only The Destroyers who are killed..."
If this was regular Freespace 1, that'd be it. Two cutscenes, the second of which has a thoughtful narration by Alpha 1. I'm surprised they made him talk, since before now he's been a simple, unseen avatar. After that, though, it's over. The last page is read; the book is shut.
But this isn't regular Freespace 1.
See, the people who oversaw the production of the Freespace Port added another mission after the last. An epilogue. You click 'commit', appear immediately after jumping back into realspace, and then hear a massive, unearthly roaring behind you. You do a quick 180 and gasp: for there it is. The majestically dangerous
Lucifer, emerging from the blue waste of subspace, and accelerating toward you. You're screwed. You will die. Everyone on Earth will die. The human race, scattered throughout interstellar colonies, might have a few months before the
Reaper swings his scythe the other way.
And as you're looking you see where that roaring came from. A few orange clouds burst off the
Lucifer's side, rapidly increasing in ferocity and number, and then you know.
The
Lucifer dies with its hand around its prey's neck, ready to squeeze.
As the shockwave rocks your tiny fighter around you can't do anything but smile. That whirling potluck of emotions just rushed through and left in a matter of seconds; what else
can you do? And then you hear it: the music of the Terran fleet. Calm. Confident. You look forward...and there they are. The 1st Fleet of Earth, majestic fortresses of safety. Of home. They're only a few kilometers away, now, and they've already sent wings of fighters out to welcome back the battered and shaken saviors of humanity. And behind them, a yellow sun.
The Sun. Our Sun. My words do little justice to the feeling that washes through you. Picture a close friend you haven't seen in years; now picture saving their life. Can there be a more joyous reunion?
For the first moment in an eternity of fear, Alpha 1 knows peace.
The music switches to a glorious march as the Freespace Port's credits scrolls past your viewscreen. This is triumph. There is no talk, no communication from the fighters or the capital ships. You can still command wingmen; they will silently obey. I always smiled at how apt this touch was: for, while everyone else is certainly exploding with a firey, aggressive joy, Alpha 1 cannot hear them. As his companions shout their electric ghost-shouts of life through the cosmos to everyone and no one, Alpha 1 hears the music fill him from within.
I've done things in the mission I do not do elsewhere. Not that I can't: I choose not to. I have led thirty-odd fighters on a space-jockey air show. I have played the baton-wielding leader to a marching band of metal. I have flown down the length and breadth of 3-kilometer long warships. I have marveled at the quiet beauty of
guidance lights on the docking ring of a space station viewed from ten feet away. I have flown through the giant fucking hole in the
Arcadia.
I have danced with the stars.
I
buzzed the fucking tower with an innocent mirth that
Maverick would envy.
Eventually, though, all parties must end, and this is no different. I ordered all fighters to guard the GTD
Washington, an
Orion class destroyer that ran things up here. I chuckled to myself softly. Guard the
Washington...against what, now?
And then I flew off on my own. At speed, away from the fleet. If any of them figured out by now what I was planning to do, it was too late. I silently touched the controls, leaned back, and watched the stars stretch out frightfully.
At this moment, the blue maw of
subspace swallowed my ship whole.
I always liked ending it that way. I'm a big fan of games that let the player weave stories that flow from the experiences; this is a perfect example. I sometimes wonder
why Alpha 1 vanished so suddenly in the midst of such celebration. He had an intra-system jump-drive, sure, so maybe he jetted off to Earth. He'd return with flashing banner and silver trumpet as one of those Heroes that Saved Us All. He'd see his
long-lost love and embrace in a shower of kisses. Maybe. Or maybe he was exhausted from the greatest of mighty labors. Maybe he finally understood the wisdom of that legendary 20th-century space explorer,
Major Tom. Maybe he accepted the deepest
Black, content that
ghost-ship myths of his
Hercules fighter would persist for generations to come.
I still don't know the answer.
"I'm told we can expect them again, but not in my lifetime... such is liberation."