If it's one thing that I always appreciate, it's games that not only offer challenge, but that teach you a unique and useful set of mechanics, that leave you a changed gamer. Achieving this balance has historically been lacking in the modern gaming era. I will discuss how Freedom Wars succeeds or fails in this review.
This game was developed by SCE of Japan. It was released on the Playstation Vita in 2014. I must really take my hat off to Sony. They released a good handful of titles on the handheld console, and with decent variety. This game follows in the same Phantasy Star vein that so many games have taken over the years, including God Eater, Monster Hunter, and several others. You are a player in the center of a huge and deep story involving the survival of a dystopian society, that is one of many factions at war for meager rations in a war torn world. Due to the state of society, all besides the elite scientists, are branded sinners, and must live like soldiers for hire, completing assignments from the city, or Patnopticon's ward. As you complete missions, with varying worth, your sentence of 1 million years as a slave of the Patnopticon is reduced. It seems a very insurmountable number, as mission, at most garner few thousand years in reduction.
The gameplay of Freedom Wars is very similar to God Eater Burst. You have no real magic system, but a set of skills like Monster Hunter. The weapons that you can use include Large melee weapons like Great Swords, Hammers, Long Swords, and Pole Lances; Small Melee weapons such as daggers, and a range of firearms. You have portable artillery weapons that you procure from large enemies, rocket launchers, and machine gun as well as sniper rifles. You can not only modify weapons, but build them as well, when you bring the necessary amount and type of materials to the factories that you construct and manage yourself. You can manage Weapon facilities, Medical facilities, Munition facilities, and Augmentation facilities. Medical, weapon, and munitions speak for themselves, but the augmentation facilities allow you to construct modules for you character that can improve various aspects of combat, such as offense, defense, and movement ability. These facilities can be made more efficient by collecting management staff and workers that you salvage from the field during missions.
The story involves a world struggling for resources, that has been split into different warring factions, or cities. The state was caused by people from "On High" and a great and disastrous conflict with large mech creatures and the unleashing of a Casket device on the world. People from On High literally live above where the cities dwell. You discover that your city had a girl from On High, captured in a vault for experimentation, as she holds the key to what could bring about the conflict again, or neutralize it. You rescue her, and embark on uncovering those mysteries, as well as the disappearance of her father. It was intriguing.
In the city, you have scattered citizens and sinners, and facilities to rendezvous with comrades and purchase supplies. You can trade components and supplies with other sinner as well. There is also the secret Cell Garden area, where you encounter heavily guarded items and machinery that answers questions to the games mysteries. When going on missions, you will be tasked with rescuing citizens, holding off opposing Panopticon forces, and destroying Abductor mechs, who capture citizens. You may also be tasked with collecting supplies. Abductors are the heart of the game. They come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and attack patterns. I use the word Patterns loosely, as they tend to do whatever the heck they want or need to to crush you, sometimes spamming a stomp or rage technique over and over again like an angry player more than an AI. The battles are very epic in scope, as taking down these bosses is quite a task. They are often assisted by rival sinners, and have insane health and defense. The idea is to craft weapons and mods that will maximize damage and defense, as each mission is timed.
The issues with the game, were the idiotic modules and the enemy AI. As you progress into the game, the later missions will throw a task of defeating an Abductor at you. In some of these missions, the Abductor will only appear after several waves of other strong Abductors and sinners. Sinners are just like you, and carry weaponry and melee devices. Another core of the game that I failed to mention are Thorns. These are mechanical devices that are attached to a sinners arm. They come in Healing, Binding, and Shielding types. They can be strengthened and have different levels of charge. They also allow you to cling to things and use them as a grappling hook to get to places and cling to and drag down Abductors. Other sinners have them as well. Sometimes, when a battle is already hard enough, a few random sinners will employ insane defensive movement and high offense, wiping out your whole squad. You have a limited sustainability in missions, which is essentially your life stock. You can avoid losing a life if a comrade or Accessory revives you in a certain amount of time.
Your Accessory is your surveillance robot, who follow you and keeps you in line, as part of the Panopticon's regulations. They can be customized and given set orders in combat, as well as equipment. They fight and protect you if necessary. The aim of the enemy sinners was insane at times and really made it difficult to contain them along with the overpowered Abductor. Movement in this game is controlled by the left analog stick, and the camera alone is controlled by the right stick. This is made an issue, because your character aiming reticle is controlled independently from the camera. It is a hassle trying to aim at zipping enemies, and keep them in front of your camera's view.
You really begin to rely on the augmentations and weapon upgrades that your factories can make at the end of the game. But resources become a problem at a point, because the high level resources needed to make a weapon slightly beneficial in combat are carried by insane enemies that you are nowhere near strong enough to defeat. It became very infuriating. I did my best to use entitlement points to upgrade the equipment of my comrades to help. You gain these points upon completing missions. However, once a mission is played, the points gathered on it drop exponentially, so once you've played all of the main missions, it becomes impossible to go back and rack up points and useful items. You feel completely stuck. There are special ops missions that give you higher yields of points, but those are also, way out of your league. Like Hell Divers for the Vita, and Monster Hunter, this game is designed for you to play with butt buddies. If you don't have them, you are punished. I strain to think how it's practical that games today force you to rely on friends who play the exact same games with the exact same schedule as you, as well as consistent and reliable internet connection. What world are these developers living in?
Graphically, the game was gorgeous, and it's good to see titles like this on the Vita, because it utilizes its power, and bolsters the argument against the system's idiotic detractors. There were several cutscenes that you can view again in the library, and each arena that you fought in was well designed and detailed. The game was in Japanese of course, but the music and sound was great. It was an excellent soundtrack.
Part of the lure of RPG's from day one, building a character from a zero into a formidable hero that can traverse their world with greater ease towards the end of a long journey. That has always been the payout. This game fails to do that miserably. The augmentations in the game are beyond stupid. You face Abductors that have shields, rocket launchers,are resistant to elements etc. You have the ability to knock off, or cut off all parts of an Abductor's body, but that is a task in itself. If you are familiar with the Monster Hunter series, it almost as hard as in that game at times. In your factories selection, even after improving your facility's output, you will find modules that help your character run faster for 10 seconds after respawing upon losing a life, or raise your defense for a few seconds after dying, or allowing you to do slightly more damage when at full health. There are modules that allow you to be noticed more by enemies or noticed less. These are the kind of wonky and stupid augmentations that they want you to work hard acquiring. You do have some attack and defense modules, and ones that apply boosts to specific types of Abductor encounters. The issue with those, is that, as badly as you need them, the boost they provide is almost unnoticeable. It's ridiculous. You keep thinking and hoping that useful modules will become available, and that things will level out, and they never do. I found myself just happy to be done with the final mission.
The last boss has had many people miffed for a long time. I used a powerful scoped AR with a great sword towards the end, so I was well equipped for him, but he was still ridiculous. he has attachments on his body that come out up to 8 at at time and move like lightning. When near death, he can wipe out your entire party and stock of lives in an instant. It took me several days to figure that boss out, and even after the completion of the campaign, I'm stuck once again. My characters are still way too weak to compete with any additional missions. This type of bull crap should not be happening after the completion of an RPG, and it makes you wonder if the developers at SCE understand the genre at all. As a long time RPG player, I can tell you that we don't toil for 60-80 hours on a game, to struggle at the end. That sucks, and makes you want to get rid of it. If it weren't for that, I would really enjoy continuing to play. The mechanics of how combat works, and how you systematically fool and take down the Abductors is very rewarding. Battles really do feel epic. But hard missions have their place. Those kinds of missions, you brace for and prep accordingly. It feels very out of place to have nothing but missions that can't be done available to you after the game is over. You feel as if you wasted time, and got no stronger over the course of the game.
I was waiting to write this, because I was so annoyed the entire time. I will not find people to go online with, and I will not continue to run into a wall for this game. It's a decent adventure, with limited scenery and settings, as you go from ward to ward, to battle arena in dark abandoned cites. There are a cool cast of characters, though pretty small, and the city feels dead to a degree. One of the main comrades that I spent point getting strong, betrays and stabs me at the end of the game. So his skills are lost, making the extra missions that much more impossible. Due to the idiocy of the developers, this high potential game, is left being restrained to just a decent adventure meant for one painful playthrough. I give it a 7.9/10
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