Published , by Lucas White
Published , by Lucas White
Freedom Wars starts with such aggression it almost feels personal. You’re a Sinner. Locked up in a cell barely big enough for a person, your only crime is existing. In this world you’re a drain on resources, and you don’t get to live life as a citizen until you work off your million-year sentence. If you so much as stand still too long, talk to an officer, or lay down to sleep, you get years added as a penalty. The only way to move forward is killing giant monsters for the resources your community needs. Back when I played this game the first time on PlayStation Vita, I thought: “The guy who wrote this must’ve done time, damn.”
It was a real surprise to see Freedom Wars Remastered step up to the plate! It definitely has cult classic status here in North America, but it sits in a weird spot historically. Back when the Vita was doing its thing, there was practically an arms race happening between different studios trying to be The Next Monster Hunter. This was well before Monster Hunter World became a global sensation, and the Vita wasn’t exactly a thriving platform. So this effort mostly fizzled, although Bandai Namco’s God Eater has stuck around.
Anyway, Freedom Wars is one of those, developed at Dimps and published by Sony. Between being published by Sony, Japan Studio (RIP) contributing to development, and the loud and edgy prison theme, it makes sense that Freedom Wars did stand out for some at the time. Bandai Namco published it, another interesting factor, so I have a lot of questions about the possible future here. But we’re here now, and significantly more eyeballs can be on this game now that it’s on platforms that are, in fact, thriving. So there are way more folks checking this out for the first time.
Playing Freedom Wars is a lot of fun! It has a lot of weird ideas on top of the ones clearly derived from Monster Hunter, one being a sort of grappling hook/magical anime thorn gimmick that has several different purposes. You can use them to zip around like you’re playing Attack on Titan, you can attempt to rope and yank monsters off-balance, and you can even use them to help your teammates in various ways. My favorite part is ziplining onto the monsters themselves, where you can use a special command to hack away at breakable body parts. It’s all very fast and intense, which is pretty much the opposite of Monster Hunter’s more careful, realistic (ish) pace.
There are two problems that keep Freedom Wars from reaching the promise of its earlier hours. One, the Cool Prison Story isn’t really that at all, and turns into something a lot sillier and convoluted by the time the game ends. There was a lot of promise and apparent seed-sowing for interesting commentary on incarceration and labor, but you get high concept genre stuff instead, and an enemy who is clearly a walking reference to Gundam’s Char Aznable but not nearly as cool. The ending was so goofy and awkwardly conveyed it even left the sickos for games like this confused, and the parts leading up to it weren’t so compelling, either. The fun gameplay loop is the primary motivator here, despite the novel hook.
Two, while the loop is fun, the progression system runs out of gas well before you roll credits. There are only three types of melee weapons, and while there are a few more guns than that, their functional variety doesn’t reflect that well. Getting stronger requires getting a lucky drop of something really good to start with (or settling for less) and feeding enemy pieces into your loadout as your upgrade capacity grows over time. There’s a point where items get really scarce, asking you to grind for amusingly tiny drop rates. Things more or less balance out if you just hang in there during the story, but it can be frustrating to run levels over and over trying to get the right drops, especially since there isn’t an in-game way to track which enemies drop which items (or if there is, it’s bizarrely hard to find in whichever the game’s three different main menus it lives in).
It’s tough to say a lot more about Freedom Wars, despite the fact I had a lot of fun playing it! It really is the quintessential Vita game. It tries a lot of things, hits really hard on a few, and everything else doesn’t quite come together. It’s from before even Capcom struck gold with Monster Hunter World, still figuring things out and building momentum itself. The gameplay alone can sustain hours of squadded up, monster wrangling, gear upgrading fun. But the storytelling really whiffs despite a strong start, disappointing more as a result. And in terms of interesting stuff going on besides the main loop, Freedom Wars fails to find the sauce as well. This one is here for a good time, but not a long time. I should probably go to jail myself for that one, yikes.
Freedom Wars Remastered is available on January 10, 2025 for the PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. A code for the PC version was provided by the publisher for this review.