Freedom Wars Remastered review: playing for the greater good

It's the best game that was never ported from the Vita, and with the remaster, it looks more beautiful than ever.

Freedom Wars Remastered / Bandai Namco

I was in a synagogue in New York when I asked producer Junichi Yoshizawa what happened to Freedom Wars. Once he remembered what Freedom Wars was, he told me it disappeared along with Japan Studio. We now know the rights landed in the hands of Bandai Namco and people can finally play the best PlayStation Vita exclusive.

Freedom Wars’ gameplay sees you take on gigantic mechs and sever off parts of them to collect resources. It separates itself from being a robotic Monster Hunter clone with the Thorn, a grapple that zips you into the air in an instant, sees you fly swiftly across maps, and helps quickly close the distance between you and an enemy. Monster Hunter Rise introduced a grapple to the series in 2021, but Freedom Wars came out in 2014.

The combat is where Freedom Wars excels, particularly given upgrades in the remastered version to the Thorn and camera. You can now cancel the Thorn at any time, whereas previously you had to watch it slowly roll out before you could call it back, and the camera is much smoother and easier to control. In the Vita version, you had to mash the buttons to sever off parts of the mechs – something you do a lot of – but now you can hold-to-mash in a move my hands are extremely grateful for. 

Freedom Wars Remastered / Bandai Namco

One of the biggest complaints from the original release was that there were a limited number of arenas and enemy types. In a world where people will happily download games in excess of 100GB, it’s hard to imagine a time when games had to fit a 4GB cart. That time was just ten years ago, and the Vita had this restriction for all games. Freedom Wars made sacrifices to hit that file size and variety was one of them. Freedom Wars Remastered is a massive 12GB, but this extra space is used to improve performance and include prettier textures rather than add new types of enemies.

Just like Vita cartridges, resources are running low in the world of Freedom Wars. To combat this, people are born with a million-year prison sentence. If they don’t want to spend their whole lives in a cell, they have to take part in dangerous resource-collecting missions, shaving a few hundred years off their sentences each time. It’s a world rich with propaganda, where your actions must service the nebulous greater good with the same style of humor and co-op missions that players loved in last year’s Helldivers 2. But remember that Freedom Wars was released a decade ago.

Freedom Wars Remastered / Bandai Namco

It still drips with charm. I began running in start stops because I remembered that I would get years added on for running for more than ten seconds, and despite that, I still squealed with delight when I was fined for not responding to an NPC quickly enough. Freedom Wars is constructed in a way that makes the player feel oppressed by the gaming systems, just like the in-game Sinners are.

Given its age and the original size restrictions, Freedom Wars deserves a remake rather than a remaster. This is where the cracks start to show. A lot of smaller quality-of-life improvements have been made, but there are still issues that will deter modern gamers. There is a lot of running back and forth between missions, and if you don’t pay attention to what everyone is saying it can be difficult to remember where you’re meant to be. These issues ruin the game by themselves, but they add friction in a way that most modern games don’t.

There is one issue that spoiled the experience even for people at the time. Most fans complained that Freedom Wars has a stark difficulty curve, meaning that most people will need to grind extra missions or play with real people in co-op if they want to finish the main story. However, the difficulty was never the problem; it was always the tutorialization. Many new players grab an early game gun and start blasting, but the key to Freedom Wars is grappling up enemies to gather extra resources for weapon crafting and to remove weapons.

Freedom Wars Remastered / Bandai Namco

Many of the most important concepts like severing, donations, crafting, modules, and abilities are explained all at once via lengthy text boxes and then never mentioned again. This is undoubtedly another victim of the small file size, but the missions would have to be completely restructured to better introduce players to the mechanics. That’s something a simple remaster can’t do.

Freedom Wars is the best game that was never ported from the Vita, and the remaster makes all of the quality-of-life changes we could reasonably expect it to. It looks more beautiful than ever, with some flashy cutscenes, and though it pains me to say, the remaster is the best way to play. My only worry is that it isn’t enough. While it surpasses the 150GB games of today in terms of innovative gameplay mechanics, fast, fluid movement options, and fourth wall breaks, it lacks the accessibility and variety modern gamers have come to expect.

I want to live in a world where Freedom Wars 2 exists. Where truly creative minds can build on the concepts of the first games with fewer sacrifices and modern game development tools. But that world won’t exist if people don’t let Bandai Namco know it’s what they want. Play Freedom Wars Remastered. Donate to the greater good, let the world know which Panopticon you root for, and team up with others online to help them out. Just like when I spoke with Yoshizawa in that New York synagogue, it’s time to tell people that you love Freedom Wars.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PS5