Freedom Wars is more than just a game, and this helps players relate to it

Hit Japanese action RPG Freedom Wars may be an awesome game, but producer Junichi Yoshizawa revealed over the weekend that it’s also a social commentary.

In an interview preceding Singapore’s Gamestart Asia, Yoshizawa said that the game’s “one million years of imprisonment” within panopticons is similar to what is happening in reality right now. He cited the taxes that citizens have to pay to their respective governments as an example. Yoshizawa said taxes can feel unreasonable, and that the system is similar to the game’s concept of imprisonment.

The setting in Freedom Wars is pretty bleak, with the remains of humanity having been driven into panopticons. These city-states compete fiercely for dominance and resources, and players have to pledge allegiance to one of them. The panopticons for the Japanese version of the game, released June 26 this year, are all named after cities in Japan. However, the international and Asian versions have playable cities from around the world, including smaller Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia and Singapore.

Yoshizawa said this superficial localization was the best way for non-Japanese players to relate to the game, as a full culturalization was expensive and tough, since each country also has its own customs and cultures. However, culturalizing a game is a good way to connect with your target market, if it’s one country that’s big enough. Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies series had two China-centric versions produced in its Shanghai-based studio: Plants vs. Zombies: Xi You and Plants vs. Zombies: Great Wall.

See: How Popcap Games adapted Plants vs. Zombies with resounding success in China

While some Japanese games riding off popular IP like One Piece are able to attain more mainstream appeal, others, such as idol-management series Idolmaster, rarely get localized outside of Japan. This could be a matter of cost and manpower, as Yoshizawa mentioned, but differences in cultures also come into play.

Yet multiplayer co-op “hunting” games like Freedom Wars, Monster Hunter, and God Eater, to name a few, are all the rage this year, with popular series Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star Online showing off their own additions to the genre at Tokyo Game Show. Games like these definitely have no issues with crossing borders, as beating monsters to a pulp is a pretty universal language. However Yoshizawa said that rather than the genre becoming an industry trend, he thinks multiplayer games like these are popular nowadays simply because internet connectivity is much better compared to the past.

The post-apocalyptic romp Freedom Wars will be released today for Playstation Vita. Having sold approximately 300,000 copies in Japan in the first month since its launch, Freedom Wars from SCE Japan studio is among the best-performing first-party titles for the Vita console. Hopefully, it will also help bolster the console’s sluggish sales.