It’s fairly common practice to assume that long lasting loot games like Monster Hunter, Ragnarok Odyssey Ace I and Toukiden are going to be fairly acquired tastes. They require hours upon hours upon weeks of dedicated gaming and persistence to even scratch the surface of their natural depth. For most that kind of barrier to entry will be too much of a bell curve to consider, but for those that take the plunge it usually is very much worth it.
Freedom Wars is a game of many mixes that seems to work in some ways but not so much in others. The story is straight out of an anime. Panopticon is a world or city within which the people live under constant scrutinisation from camera’s, minions and robots. Surveillance is everywhere, you are a sinner being watched constantly by everything you can think of, even the helpers that you are assigned are out to bite you in the rear. The game opens with a nice cutscene (above) from the eyes of the protagonist as a major badass, shooting with great accuracy, jumping and hanging off walls to take down enemy combatants while escorting a civilian to safety, but in a twist of fate/chance or anime, a huge monster finally catches you out, cracking your head off the floor and causing you to lose your memory.
When you awaken, you don’t know who you are, how badass you are or how to fight. You apparently don’t even know what you look like so, insert character customisation here. As punishment for your careless loss of memory, on a dangerous mission wherein you could have lost your life, your sentence in this prison like Panopticon is increased to 1 million years, you selfish git. Serves you right.
In addition to your generous sentence you are also given a helper, known as an accessory, which is a humanoid robot/cyborg that helps you in battle, saves your life, carries your items and reminds you of that kid from school who always told the teacher on you. The accessory is very much Panopticon property and as such it will constantly survey what you do and how effectively you do what you do. This means that whenever you do something bad, your Accessory will be the one that bumps up your sentence on behalf of the rules. As you progress through the game, initially in the opening explanation section reminding you of what you do as a sinner, you will unlock permissions. These permissions shape everything you do in the game, which can be frustrating because a large portion of the better permissions are in the late game. Either way unlocking as much as you can is needed to become the best Sinner going.
Unlocking these permissions allows you to keep higher level items from monster drops, increasing the item level of your allies weapons and ever increasing levels of customisation. Not only that but without certain permissions you aren’t even allowed to lie down on your bed. No seriously, everything you do without permission increases your drastically high sentence, which lends to the game very little unfortunately, outside of a mild convenience and frustration when you do something stupid, like walk too far from your accessory. The customisation in this game is extremely deep such as colours, clothing styles, facial settings that revolve almost solely around the eyes because, you know, Japan expresses a lot with the eyes in gaming. The possibilities are varied and diverse, making your sinner look as swanky or as simple as you prefer. The downside is that no matter how gaudy you make the character look, it still lends very little to the game outside of aesthetic – which becomes a trend very quickly in this game I find.
During the course of the game you are given various missions to compensate for your horrendous and outrageous existence, this will reduce your sentence by some large number of years over time. The game showcases battle much like a third person action adventure game. It’s balanced against the large enemies that you fight but against the other sinners in battle the game is nightmarishly unfair. Their ability to lock on to you while using a gun and never miss, while you yourself have to manually aim, might be the most broken part about that battle system. It sounds like a minor complaint but honestly when you take into account constant accurate damage from an enemy you cant do the same too, and maybe 5 of them doing it at once It feels broken and unfair.
While it is difficult to ignore this aspect however, the games fights against large monsters is fantastic. It could be compared to Monster Hunter, only Monster Hunter and Toukiden don’t have the ability to climb on monsters and sever specific parts off monsters. This makes Freedom Wars unique in one aspect, but unfortunately it is not enough to hold the game up by itself. The fighting is fun, frantic and fast paced but it’s let down by the controls in a way, they aren’t very responsive at a pace you would feel comfortable with. The enemies are frequently punishing but not in the satisfying way that Toukiden or Monster Hunter do it. Combined with the balance issues the game already has and you can paint a picture of how each fight can play out.
After testing the game via PlayStation TV, I can confirm a few things. Firstly the controls are BETTER but not such a significant improvement that it then fixes the games issues in that regard. The balance is still off, the characters still feel floaty, and not just because they are anime based. It works well, looks very nice on a HD TV as well considering that it’s still a Vita game but it doesn’t compare to others of its ilk on the same console. With games like Toukiden Kiwami coming to PlayStation 4 at the end of March now, Freedom Wars will probably lose its war in the fight against the giant.
It’s not like these lower flaws pull the game through the ringer, the story isn’t bad it’s just generic, and the sheer number of customisation options available for your sinner is enough to make any fan of the type have a field day! Unfortunately in the end this is ground previously walked on by bigger giants with better experience than any sinner could hope to achieve.