The sci-fi future of Freedom Wars Remastered makes George Orwell’s 1984 look like a holiday brochure. Forget worrying about the government tracking you, or whether what you read is the truth, in Freedom Wars you’re born with a 1,000,000 year prison sentence. One. Million. Years. From birth. This dystopian vision of the future is so ruthless, you have to earn the right to lie down. What happens if you forget? That’s a crime, and you’ll find another batch of years being added to your sentence.
This brutality paves the way for Sinners like you to work in indentured servitude to your Panopticon – a prison city – earning your right to essential things like lying down, or frivolities like running for more than five seconds. Each contribution to the greater good knocks a few years off your sentence, hopefully moving things in the right direction. Unless, of course, you callously go for a little run. Then it’s going back up again.
Freedom Wars was originally a PS Vita exclusive, and it’s remained one of the most talked about and sought-after titles in the handheld’s catalogue. Arriving here in Remastered form, there are minimal quality of life changes, but the key thing is that the game is here to experience across a raft of modern platforms. That’s well worth celebrating, but it’s a shame that the team at Dimps didn’t take the chance to bring us a more modern interpretation of the game’s iconic gameplay to go alongside it.
Freedom Wars belongs to the Monster Hunter branch of the action-RPG genre’s family tree, its combat centring on taking down huge foes called Abductors with a team of other players – either real-life allies or AI controlled. You follow that up by collecting various parts and components from that fallen foe, and using them to upgrade and improve your weaponry, or turning them in to your Panopticon in a bid to bring that sentence further down.
In 2024, Freedom Wars Remastered is showing its age and its portable origins. While the technical improvements bring the game up to a 4K resolution and 60fps refresh rate, they don’t do anything for the clunky gameplay, and it feels incredibly stilted when you compare it to modern genre entries like Monster Hunter Rise and Wild Hearts, paling before the imminent arrival of Monster Hunter Wilds next month.
While the use of your Thorn – a binding device that lets you pull enemies to their knees or climb up them to attack – still feels fun, it’s not as fluid as you’d want it to be, and though you can swap between two weapons on the fly – an idea that Monster Hunter is only just cribbing from – there are various annoying limitations like the questionable hit detection that wear on you the longer you spend with the game.
That’s not to say that Freedom Wars isn’t enjoyable. The far-flung future setting is one of Freedom Wars greatest strengths, and I love the overarching ideas and themes that push you to improve your character’s loadout, and their position within the Panopticon. The gameplay remains as solid as it was at release, and if you’re looking for a timesink while you wait for Monster Hunter Wilds, there are flashes of greatness through the game’s runtime that make it worth picking up.
It is a case of missed opportunity, though. The PC port has launched in an awful state, and while the first patches have improved things considerably, I wouldn’t expect to be experiencing any level of frame skipping in a basic remaster of a ten-year-old game. On top of that, the different graphical options are extremely limited, and you can’t make any changes to the frame rate whatsoever – surely this is a game that could run at 120Hz without breaking a sweat?
There is one addition that the remastering team have added, but it’s not necessarily an improvement. The original Japanese release of the game used text to speech for some of its AI-driven characters, as it made sense thematically, and was an impressive inclusion in a handheld title at the time. They’ve added that to the English dub this time around as well, and it’s fair to say that its decade-old synthesised speech will be an acquired taste for many. Various words are mispronounced in every single conversation with your Accessory or the Panopticon’s AI, and confusingly, you can’t even escape it by setting the voices to Japanese as these characters speak in English regardless.