Frantic Flea (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
157A playthrough of GameTek's 1996 action-platforming game for the Super Nintendo, Frantic Flea.
Frantic Flea is a game that I doubt most people, even those that are into the Super Nintendo, are at all familiar with. It launched very late in the system's life, and given its lack of a license (or at the very least, an appealing concept) and poor critical reception, it's hardly a surprise that time has all but buried it. I couldn't find much on it on YouTube or the internet in general, so I figured I'd do a video for it.
Sometimes finding these old, hyper-obscure games is awesome - there are some real gems that have been long since forgotten. The sad reality of it, though, tends to be that forgotten games are generally forgotten because they weren't worth remembering.
And sadly, Frantic Flea is one of those games.
You play as a hero flea that has to go and save its flea brethren from all sorts of baddies that want to enslave them, and Frantic Flea does this through collect-a-thon gameplay within labyrinthine stage layouts. You have to rescue a certain percentage of fleas in each particular area and make it to the exit before the time runs out. Your hero zooms around the stages at a good clip, and his flea counter works a lot like Sonic's ring system - if you are hit, the fleas scatter and you'll have to go find them again.
It's a basic platformer that really does seem to make an effort to be something special. The graphics were apparently designed to look like an old-school cartoon, and they don't make a bad go of it. The art-style is nice, though it's a bit flat looking and far too zoomed in. The characters look reasonably good and animate well, and the backdrops, though repetitive are colorful and cheery. The music is also reasonably good in a generic, muffled, but vaguely catchy sort of way, but the clicks and pops in the audio do get distracting at times.
The controls are super twitchy, though, and since the screen is zoomed so far in, your field of view is extremely limited. As a result, blind jumps and hits from enemies you didn't see quickly become the order of the day. The timer is fairly strict, as well, so there are many times when getting hit means you won't have time to finish the level. If nothing else, Franric Flea can be an extraordinarily frustrating game to play, especially in its later stages.
If it had been released three years earlier and if the mechanics had been polished *much* more Frantic Flea might've been a fun little way to pass the time while waiting for the next big game to drop. As it is, though, Franric Flea feels like a frantic attempt to shove something out the door before the SNES became entirely irrelevant on the market.
It's not completely terrible - the first few stages work well enough that the game does initially feel like it has the potential to be pretty good, but at the end of the day, it's entirely too simple, too sloppy, and too hard to really be worth playing. If you want something obscure to play, this will suffice, but there are far more satisfying alternatives out there.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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