Review: Freedom Wars Remastered Deserves a Second Chance

If anyone had asked me about the possibility of a Freedom Wars Remastered release during the last decade, I wouldn’t have put my money on it. Yet this fascinating oddity of a game is now getting a new lease on life. For those unfamiliar, Freedom Wars is a mission-based action RPG with a particular and bold aesthetic, as well as a Sony first-party title developed by Dimps and released all the way back in 2014 exclusively on the PlayStation Vita Vita. But now, it’s showing up on modern consoles and PCs.

Freedom Wars Remastered is set in a distant future where humanity lives imprisoned penal city-states called Panopticons. In these Panopticons, humanity is divided between regular citizens and sinners, people that have been condemned with 1,000,000 years of imprisonment for the crime of being alive. The player character is one such sinners that happens to lose their memories at the start of the game, forcing the Panopticon to reset their sentence to a million. Sinners are forced to “volunteer” in warfare with other rival Panopticons to gain resources or kidnap valuable citizens to perform labor.

The core conceit of the game sounds more melodramatic than it ends up being. While the game evokes images of prison and penitentiary life, it doesn’t take long after the introduction for Freedom Wars to give a different image from its seemingly dour premise. Sinners lead relatively normal lives and increasing your sentence doesn’t change much, other than serving as flavor text. Furthermore, the amnesia plot serves as a device to provide an explanation to the player and introduce them to the world of the game.

First and foremost, Freedom Wars Remastered is a portable game, and this is felt all throughout its pacing. The game starts with some basic tutorials, lengthy dialogue, and light “exploration” stages. I put exploration in quotations because it is apparent very quickly that areas in the main hub of your player-chosen Panopticon are recycled and identical, with very little variation until later into the game. Similarly, worldbuilding and story rely heavily on short, but constant, character exposition in between main story missions. While I didn’t mind this back in 2014 on the Vita, I found it to be a bit obtrusive playing for longer sessions on my PC. Particularly the Cell Garden infiltration sections felt too repetitive, despite there only being a handful.

Luckily, the pacing issues only exist during the first few hours. Once you learn the ropes, the game consistently gives you missions where you deploy with up to three party members and are tasked with different objectives. These vary between defeating all enemies, whether it is rival Sinners or Abductors, giant machines that Panopticons employ to wage war; rescue citizens from your rivals, or domination missions in the style of “capture the flag.” Again, because of its origins as a portable 2014 game, there isn’t a lot of mission variety. However, I didn’t mind this, as the main attraction is the Abductor fights. The variety of Abductor types isn’t massive either. Freedom Wars Remastered makes up for it by starting with fights against one, and increasing the number of Abductors and combinations of them you need to fight at the same time, or even having several of them in waves, or interspersed with waves of Sinners. This distinguishes the game from series like Monster Hunter or God Eater, where the focus lies on a single big spectacle fight.

And, in spite of all of its limitations as a portable title, Freedom Wars Remastered has really engaging combat. The player character can carry two weapons at a type, being able to choose between melee equipment such as one-handed, two-handed weapons, and polearms; as well as firearms in the form of assault weapons, portable artillery, and autocannons. Each melee weapon type has its own moveset, with some of them excelling at severing abductor parts, dealing critical hits, or other specialty. I gravitated towards light melee weapon and polearms for my melee choice favoring the Hawkshadow, and Barbara’s Easy Blaster as my firearm of choice. While practice battles are available to try your moveset in a safe environment, for this remaster I would have liked having the option to change weapons on the fly during these practice missions so you could easily find your favorite combination of weapons.

And yet, my favorite inclusion to the gameplay is the thorn system. Sinners are capable of using a grappling hook-like tool called the Thorn. It is a useful system to traverse the arenas and maps, to drag down enemy Abductors, or even to connect with enemy Sinners for a powerful dash combo. This mechanic is simple but deceptively deep, granting the game a powerful layer of aerial combat and combo opportunities. Thorns come in Binding, Healing, and Shielding varieties, each with unique properties such as the ability to enhance defense, heal allies, or stun enemies. Sinners are also accompanied by an Accessory, a robotic ally that fights and offers support in the battlefield.

As a remaster of a decade-old game, Freedom Wars Remastered adds some subtle but meaningful changes, with the inclusion of some fascinating elements that never made it to the original American or European releases. First of all, the movement speed feels much faster and responsive now. Maps are not particularly big, and traversing them with the Thorn is pretty easy, but this increase in maneuverability is great to dodge and avoid damage in fights with lots of moving parts. Additionally, the unique voice synthesizer editor system used for Accessories in the original Japanese release finally made it overseas. This allows players to create their own unique responses to orders or gameplay actions, such as asking your Accessory to take care of rescuing citizens.

My only real problem with this version of the game is the inclusion of Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) for the PC release of the game. Depending on each player’s PC, this might or might not be a problem for some. For me, EAC resulted in an unstable performance and drastic framerate drops, despite having a pretty powerful rig. I was able to fix this issue quickly due to having had this problem before with EAC and knowing how to deal with it, but this resulted in the game crashing approximately every hour and a half.

The generous use of auto-save ensured that I never lost progress, but this was a considerable inconvenience for the first 4-5 hours of playtime. And at around 10 hours of playtime in my approximately 22-hour playthrough of the main campaign, the framerate issues stopped completely and I was able to play normally. I would advise to keep an eye out in case you’ve ever experienced similar issues with other games that use EAC. The game is still absolutely worth it, but you might want to give it a try on console. On the other side, performance on the Steam Deck was silky smooth and it game me no problem.

Over a decade after its release, Freedom Wars Remastered remains a competent action RPG with a surprisingly engaging gameplay loop and complex combat system. Noticing the seams of a PS Vita portable game will be unavoidable even in this remaster, but it has a certain charm to it. Perhaps the story is not the most highbrow out there, but the aesthetic and purposeful odd vibe of the Panopticons are pretty unique and attractive. While I was unable to try the multiplayer, I plan on putting more hours into the game and jump into the post-game missions with friends, trying to reduce my sentence to 0, and maybe give the PvP modes a chance. If you enjoy mission-based action RPGs, this is an absolute classic.

Freedom Wars Remastered will come out on January 10, 2025 for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.