Freedom Wars is one of my favorite examples of how elements beyond the gameplay can add to a game. The constant, often hilarous reminders of how oppresive the regime that owns your soul is are not only a great way to narratively justify unlocks, but also add a lot of personality to the game throughout your whole playthrough.
Of course, this is not all the game has going for it, if there's a word to define Freedom Wars that'd be ambitious. The game shakes up the reliable formula of the monster hunting genre adding third person shooting and a hook shot that makes zipping through the maps a reason to play the game all by itself. And that's on top of having online team based PvP modes, a character creator, several different commands to order your AI partners around, the weapon crafting that's to be expected of the genre and a stellar artstyle.
But that same ambition may also be the game's greatest flaw as the core of the gameplay feels like it could be fleshed out further: Both the weapon diversity and complexity are pretty limited, missions will repeat the same enemies, maps and objectives mercilessly, the camera can get pretty annoying to control at times, one hit deaths that get more common as you progress to the game (I understand the revive mechanic is pretty busted but if I have to choose between having a bigger, limited healthbar or being at the mercy of my AI partners not dying on their way to revive me I'll pick the former every single time) and the time management added to the crafting is blatant time wasting to pad out the endgame.
Even with all these shortcomings I would have enjoyed my time with Freedom Wars a lot more were it not for the story. Not necessarily due to how by the numbers it is, but because it drags the pace of the game to a crawl making you sit though very slow dialogue exchanges, slow hub traversal and lots and lots of very slow loading screens. I may finish it someday

This is a heavily flawed game and is more of a 2.5 or 3 star rating, but this game is a personal favorite of mine as well as my favorite vita game. The setting, combat and player customization is fucking great. Having to earn your rights and have your own fully customizable partner/waifu is fucking amazing. Its main issues was its lack of missions and enemy variety and some dumb ass cooldown to level equipment (or getting new equipment. sorry can't remember which). Seriously if this game had a much more mission and enemy variety, it would of been seen by many as one hell of a great game. It's such a fucking shame we'll never see a Freedom Wars 2 or even a port of this game.

+graphics are nice and clean on the vita's OLED screen, and the performance is relatively solid. I actually found I had more frame drops in the hub than in actual battle
+the individual ideas here are interesting and I hope to see them in a game with better design eventually. I like how the thorn decouples playstyle from weapon selection and offers a bevy of different ways to deal with enemies ie grapple to parts to sever them, topple them, simply move around faster, drop healing trees, etc.
+the final boss design (at the end of CODE 7) I enjoyed, perhaps just because the monster (er, "abductor") selection up to then was so sparse. a very hectic fight but satisfying when finished
+there's a little bit of mission variety... so many of these positives are backhanded but I guess I did enjoy not only fighting the same abductors endlessly. the big one is citizen reclamation, which I like quite a bit. the AI is pretty good at escorting citizens when you wanna focus on fighting, and vice versa
+the AI overall is pretty good, they could be much worse than given here. they are not the brightest about dodging attacks but they are always quick to heal you and can wipe out enemies with ease

-the handling is stiff and cheap, with melee weapons in particular feeling uncomfortable to use and combo with. there's almost no weight to any movement the character makes, even when they're getting tossed around by enemies or doing a dodge-roll. the knockback from attacks is often straight up as well, placing you uncomfortably close to whatever hit you in the first place in many instances
-this game favors guns over melee outside of severing and downed enemies, and it makes the combat feel very lifeless. I spent maybe 80% of combat just running around spraying bullets waiting to soften up a component to sever or bide out time until an AI teammate decided to begin a dragdown
-there are too many mechanics in the game for the limited buttons on the device. I chose the sprinting-focused scheme, and thus had to press R+triangle while standing completely still to use items... if I wasn't completely still I would throw out my thorn instead
-as mentioned previously, the abductor selection is absurdly limited during the main campaign. from what I can remember this is only a standard biped, an artillery biped, a quadruped, a tiger, and a tarantula, and endless variations of these ie with a shield generator, with special resistances, with extra weapons, and so on. it's dull to fight the same things so many times, esp since the latter two appear more rarely
-arena variety is also extremely limited. they are small maps which reinforces the repetition, esp for the desert arena which I had to do repeated fights in all the way up through CODE 6. the few maps introduced later in the game barely show up at all for some reason (tho I didn't delve much into the special ops)
-the story itself is not great, which is really not surprising for an anime story grafted onto an action game like this. it's standard "you are the chosen one to bring around a Great Event" stuff with some faintly sketched side characters to jabber at you. this wouldn't really a detriment for me since it's part and parcel with playing a game like this, but you are forced to spend so much time in cutscenes, fetch quests, and godawful stealth sections to progress it rather than just having some text before ops or flavor text around town. there's no reason to walk around as many of the areas are identical, so instead you are forced to endlessly warp around to talk to different people until a new operation finally is given (or during CODE 2 esp just run around endlessly fetching materials, as fast travel is not unlocked at this point)
-the crafting and upgrade system takes real-time minutes to proceed (strike #1) and yields paltry items compared to most of the stuff you pick up until pretty late in the game (strike #3). the materials needed to craft also have sci-fi technobabble names that indicates little on how to get them especially since every harvest point on the map is a nondescript blue ball (tho there are tooltips for each material broadly explaining how they are obtained)
-minor quibbles: the game seemed inconsistent with how it would auto-refill combat items after battle (I dunno if this was an issue of mine or not), severing is more of a pain than it should be because of the mashing, enemies spawn on top of you frequently, as said previously the stealth sections are laughable, the pacing is terrible near the start of the game, once the hub opened up it felt like at least an hour of busywork until I unlocked an actual mission, having to replay the final three missions because I failed the final boss with so little of his health remaining really really really stung (thankfully I got it on attempt 2)

really did not enjoy my time with this, and I don't think I'll be pursuing much post-game content. the online is pretty solid but the gameplay is still too dry to make me want to invest a lot of time into it. I'll keep trying here and there but I'm about ready to move on to better games. I'm sorely disappointed with the quality of this game and wish that the teams here had been able to pull of something more interesting with these ideas.

The definition of wasted potential. The gameplays is great fun but needs some polish. The story as boring as shit and gets in the way, and when it's actually starting to get cool, the game just ends. It's a cliffhanger. Except it doesn't really feel like a cliffhanger ending, it just feels like you only got to play half of a game. This game really needed a sequel or improved re-released to fix its flaws, because it actually had a lot of potential. But I guess the game having lots of potential and being abandoned by Sony is fitting for a Vita exclusive, considering how awfully they handled the Vita itself. A fucking shame.

Was pretty hard swallowing the pill on how very NOT-good this game is especially after saving it for last on my hunting game run.

Game starts off quite fun and really interesting with how the world is setup as well as making you really feel the burden of all the restrictions set on you as a low rank prisoner and in turn the feeling of having that weight off your shoulders when you do get the necessary permissions to do more things or do old annoying things faster/easier.

The fun quickly fades when you realize it's easily the most unfinished hunting game in the entire genre and suffered so hard from never getting an expansion like pretty much every other series. The worst offender being that the story straight up cuts just as things finally started actually happening and this is after one of the worst fights I've ever done in my life.

That said, it's hard to hate on the game too much when it really did try to be one of the most experimental hunting games out there and sadly failed to deliver despite how promising it was. I really liked the customization and clothes options in the game a lot and how cool the dismemberment system was. The combat itself was fun for a bit but would've been 100x better if it actually came out on a system that allowed for an aiming-heavy game like this to be played without wanting to bash your skull in. The partner AI system is really cool too and so are some of the tracks in the game, especially the vocal ones.

I do hope the Studio TVT game thats a spiritual successor of this actually manages to come out and fix all the issues this one has.

I remember this being gassed up by Liam from Super Best Friends Play (RIP) so I had to try it.
The combat didn't feel as refined as monster hunter, but the whip and gear farming was really really fun. (This came out before the Rise whip or World wirebug was in monster hunter btw.) I also really dug the setting. Every mission was community service, shaving years off your life sentence. You could grind your life sentence down to 0 if you really wanted! What a cool way to show other players your playtime and gauge progress.
Playing alone was nowhere as fun as playing online with players who knew what they were doing.
Would I ever play it again?
Probably not. I'd want to bring friends with me, but even then, I don't remember much about the story.

The Vita is a strange system as several developers tried to make various genres a stable on the system. With Monster Hunter clone Soul Sacrifice not exactly bringing about that feat, Freedom Wars is the next game to make the Vita a blockbuster hit for co-op monster slaying fun. Freedom Wars starts out a little strange just like Soul Sacrifice. I didn’t understand the game for a while and it seemed just like there was something missing through the whole adventure.

Freedom Wars tries to bring about an interesting anime style post-apocalyptic adventure in which people are all prisoners and sentenced to fight monsters that will destroy settlements unless they have some sort of trait that the government can benefit from. Everyone starts about with a lifetime sentence, but it can get reduced based off of various accomplishments such as donating loot from battle to “the cause”, fighting monsters, taking part in more missions, and behaving. This is ingrained into the players head from the start as you are sentenced to 1,000 years by walking for too long. Yeah, it’s crazy and I loved it. If you run for too long you get your sentenced lengthened so you have to buy an upgrade that allows you to run, talk to other people, and do various other things which are actually quite cool.

One you read your sentence you put your thumb print on it and off you go. Now, the game is very slow to start and this is a huge downfall for these types of games as Soul Sacrifice suffered the same problem. There’s a bunch of dialog and back story to get through, a lengthy tutorial — not just for combat — and then getting used to controls and getting through missions. It takes over 5 hours just to get into the swing of things and start chipping away missions which are not a good thing. These anime type games always do this from monster slaying to JRPGs and it drives me crazy.

Once you do get into the field you can switch between melee and ranged weapons. The goal is to lock on to enemies and hack away at a weak point, but your special weapon is your grapple which can heal or do damage among various other things. Once you grapple to a weak point you can hack away at it and then the monster falls allowing all bots and yourself to go to town. It only gets fun when you find a momentum and your AI teammates are all getting along and doing their job. You also have an assistant bot that always look out for you that you can customize and assign certain weapons to. Once you fall you can be revived, but if it takes too long you lose a life. If you lose all your lives your sentence is lengthened and your reward for the next turn is reduced making this a tough game towards the end. I was able to whittle away to 4-5 star missions and it started getting ridiculously difficult and repetitive.

Without human teammates, the game becomes frustrating because you can fall in battle and 3 bots are right next to you and won’t revive you. There are also issues with the same 3 or 4 maps recycling over and over again and the same missions goals. Save these VIPs, destroy all these monsters etc. It gets really boring towards the 10th hour and I just stopped playing after awhile because I had no reason to go back.

Let’s talk about upgrading and creating weapons. This is so complicated and irritating as most of the time you can only upgrade or create something with components you have and it takes quite a few missions to build up a little variety. See, you have to create and build workshops to assign the civilians you save in missions to reduce build time and create things like healing items, weapons, ammo, etc. You can upgrade these buildings sometimes, but in the end, it’s all just a bunch of filler and nonsense. Give me a workshop to upgrade and create and leave me alone. It’s always so complex and unintuitive with these Japanese games. From JRPGs to action games, all the way to free-to-play mobile games. There’s layers upon layers of unnecessary upgrade menus and fusing and defusing etc. It hurts the game quite a bit so I just rely on buying more powerful weapons and upgrading them; I completely skip creating new weapons entirely.

Customizing your character is quite deep as you can buy new color packs, armor, and accessories in the game with points you earn in missions. I enjoyed it quite a bit and it there’s a lot of things to customize here so players won’t be disappointed. Overall, the game the looks quite good with great lighting effects and textures, probably one of the better looking Vita games out there. There’s a lot of detail here and game, it’s just a mess and is completely unorganized and unpolished. I feel the developers were trying several different things and couldn’t decide on just one. The gameplay is clunky with repetitive missions, recycled maps, and annoying AI bots. The story is nearly non-existent as it takes forever to unfold as you slog through missions after missions just to get a text cut scene. I would love to see a sequel, but seeing as the Vita is slowing dying I doubt that will happen.

Freedom Wars is only for the people who love Soul Sacrifice, Monster Hunter or are really patient and don’t mind repetitive combat to get to an ultimate goal. Playing with friends helps, but it doesn’t hide the mess and unpolish in this game.

Un juego con una historia y unas mecanicas bastante buena. Por ejemplo el uso de los acompañantes en la misiones y el tenerlo que rescatar se me hace bastante divertido. Luego la idea principal, de estar condenado a 1 Millón de años, y si haces alguna acción te condena a más años me parece un puntazo.
Pero por ejemplo con algunas misiones se me hacen bastante repetitivas y si no farmeas demasiado en las misiones principales de la historia, te va costar demasiado. Pero aún asi es de esos juegos principales, que recomiendo jugar a la PSVita,