Nefarious - Part 6 - The Exhibitionist
Time for a bad guy field trip! Apparently, the Sovereign passes by the Villain Museum on the way (though I probably should've played the Adept Co. stage first so that Farrah Day would be there), so they're stopping on by to take a break. Becky doesn't consider it a good idea, but Crow's made up his mind.
To my knowledge, there isn't really much to this stage besides providing backstory, lore, and world-building, but I'm a sucker for those aspects of a story, so it's my jam. I get that it isn't really Nefarious's thing though--the story here is otherwise firmly on the characters, and the world is simply a place where the characters can do things and have it make sense internally. (If there's any part of the story Freedom Planet 1 did well, it's the world-building, even if accidental, so I'm glad Freedom Planet 2 will greatly expand on that aspect. Of course, one could also say the same about the Star Wars prequel movies--the stories may be below-average, but the world-building was great in them.)
The trip to this museum explains the origins of Skorpior (you may remember him as the unseen villain in Insektia; Skorpior appears proper in the sequel webcomic); General Basanite, father of Tephra and Malachite and the instigator of Sukochi's war on Winterdown; and the reason Crow got into villainy in the first place (it's a family tradition).
Crow also makes mention of the Bechdel Test in this stage. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is a way to determine if there are fleshed out female characters in a work of fiction--namely that two female characters must speak to each other of a subject other than men. Named after Alison Bechdel, the person who first came up with it (though she didn't name it after herself), she introduced this idea in the webcomic Dykes to Watch Out For and pointed out that it's actually fairly rare in mainstream media, even in stories full of female characters.
The deepest room in the museum contains...a boss battle against TRmech, the giant robot belong to the heroic Treble Rangers. No, we don't get to see what they look like in this stage--or any other stage, because this is their first and only appearance (including the aforementioned sequel webcomic, where they haven't even been mentioned). The boss fight felt kind of easy for me, though maybe it's because there are health powerups all over the place.
In any case, we will finally go to Adept Co. to find the last princess in the next Nefarious video.