Freedom Wars Remastered Review – Review

Sony effectively washed their hands of the PlayStation Vita shortly after the PS4 launched in 2013, only launching a few smaller titles for the platform before effectively bowing out and leaving it to localization companies and indies in an extended palliative care period. One of the final titles Sony initially published was Freedom Wars, a take on the hunting action RPG set in a future dystopia as opposed to wild environments developed by Dimps. I had a good run with the original but assumed it would be trapped on an overpriced Vita memory card forevermore, so I was gobsmacked when Dimps announced they had acquired the publishing rights Wonderful 101-style and were going to remaster the game with publishing assistance from Bandai Namco. The result is a game that still has its rough points but enough charm to make up for it.

Freedom Wars is set a full hundred millennia in Earth’s future (specifically the year 102014) as the planet has somehow managed to maintain civilizations on an ever dwindling pile of resources. During the intro video, it’s even claimed that there isn’t a drop of oil anywhere on the planet. The world is divided into city-state areas called Panopticons, and each Panopticon has two classes of people living in it: Citizens who have full rights and Sinners which represent 99% of the population and are officially a drain on the city’s resources; simply being born is enough to trigger a “million year prison sentence” that the Sinner must work off by harvesting resources and rescuing Citizens from large robots called “Abductors”. At the start of the game, the created player is a Sinner of somewhat higher standing, but during a mission takes a hard blow to the head and loses their memory. Since memory loss causes the sentence to reset back to a million, the player has to work off the sentence and possibly bring about a “Great Transformation” of the world.

Following the introduction, there’s a full character creator not only for yourself but for an “Accessory” that is equal parts prison guard and battle assistant. Freedom Wars draws a lot of its atmosphere from the fact that it’s one of the most over-the-top dystopias I’ve ever seen; just after the intro taking six steps in the cell is enough to add time to the prison sentence. In order to get additional rights – such as the ability to lie down – you have to complete story missions as well as occasional optional quests in order to raise your “sinner rank” back to where it was and beyond. Completing the sentence reduces the sentence and awards “Entitlement Points”, with the “option” to donate items picked up in battle for additional perks. Since the items have rarity values and you have to purchase the ability to retain higher-value items, it’s more of a requirement. The Entitlement points can be traded for character customization options and prisoner perks, such as the ability to leave the cell and run in the prison’s common areas for more than five seconds. (The game enforces this by making it so every square centimetre of the prison is in view of a security camera.) Since the game is based on warring city-states, you do have an option to select what area you represent, but unlike the Vita original which had cities around the world available (including an option for Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) all of the options for the Switch version pre-launch were in Japan so I had to go with Kyoto. I’m not sure if this is going to change after the official launch.

The missions all have an element of combat to them, whether it’s against smaller enemy mobs, other sinners (such as a “best of five” race to rescue citizens) or the Abductor robots. The player has access to three different weapons in battle, which can be upgraded or changed with Entitlement Points and allow for a full melee set, all ranged, or a combination of options. A “thorn” is always present and defines the role of the player in battle: an attack focused thorn can be used to trap enemies or drag down Abductors while a healing focused thorn can set an area up as a life recovery zone and a defense thorn can set up a defensive perimeter. Other characters of one of those archetypes can (and often have to) be added to your team for a mission, though I didn’t get a chance to try out the online recruitment option. I didn’t really manage to find a weapon loadout that I was truly comfortable with where I didn’t feel like I was flailing, though the fact that I went a couple of hours between missions due to the Accessory saying “somebody wants to talk to you” for what felt like a couple of hours didn’t help matters.

Because of the nature of the game, there’s not going to be a lot of environmental variety; you’re in a prison. That’s just the way it is. The battle environments start out pretty limited as well, but as you unlock more and more sinner privileges it develops more combat area options (including several battles in the prison proper). The game is fully voice acted in English, but the standouts are the Accessory voices and the “prison mascot” Percy Propa (as in propaganda), who both sound appropriately unnerving for a prison environment.

Freedom Wars is definitely something I’ll go back to over time, because I’ve never managed to actually “complete the sentence” and I’m sure there’s something insane at the end of it. If you think you can grasp the combat and missed it the first time around – the latter’s most likely true – then it’s time to plead guilty.