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.

Oh god there's so much shit I can write about this, but here's a watered down version:
-Combat is extremely dumb down compared to base PSO2 (3 PAs, lackluster skill tree, KNUCKLES GOT FUCKED OVER BY GOING FROM A FAST COMBO WEAPON INTO A BOOTLEG HERO'S SLOW COUNTER WEAPON)
-No real difficulty (Gigantix being recolored bosses that can one shot you is not real difficulty. They still move slow as shit and their AI isn't changed)
-Fixa is a horrible mechanic (No, the future update to transfer a Fixa onto a weapon WITH THE SAME NAME does not fix the problem)
-Content (There is none lmao. You can reach "endgame" in 1 day)
-Community (Garbage. Filled with people that will defend this, and even say real endgame is fashion. Pathetic)
-Market (No meseta sink so it's getting worse everyday)
This is basically a tech demo that killed base PSO2. Maybe give it 2-3 years just for a CHANCE it MIGHT get SLIGHTLY better.

It's really dated compared to Baldr Sky, the first two routes don't go that deep into the main story, and hell mode's stage 35 is bugged (at least for me) but if you can get over those problems (seriously what the fuck I even did every stage without using the heroine's plugins and hyper mode plugin to see if it unlocks. even did 150+ survival waves) the game is fucking amazing. The gameplay is unique and fun, hell you can cut out the visual novel and it's worth playing. The story and characters are pretty great too and I actually liked it more than Baldr Sky's story mostly because it's more mature. One of my favorite games of all times. Too bad it's kinda tricky to download as there's no way to get a legit copy for the SE PC edition which is the only version of the game that can apply the English patch.

The game was pretty great early in its steam release life, but the shift in community and terrible updates in recent years have pretty much killed it for me. I'll admit the old community did meme around for swimsuits for years, but they also cared about other Orange_Juice games (mainly the SUGURI series). The community now is just filled with surface level weebs with no real interest in Orange_Juice, and so the new updates are now to please them with whatever shitty OCs and shitty event story they can come up with. Character balancing is still pretty garbage and the new cards are either way too powerful, too weak, or too annoying in a bad way. S E V E N Y E A R S A N D W E S T I L L D O N ' T H A V E C U S T O M B O A R D S. The grind is a pain in the ass too both in terms of getting new cards, new cosmetics, and event farming. It was so bad that it killed off a bunch of its old community around late 2017-2018, and it's gotten worse since I last time I played in 2020.