14 Best PS Vita Open World Games

Atelier Firis is the first game in the Atelier series to feature an open world. Firis Mistlud is a young girl living in the secluded mine town of Ertona, and she dreams of exploring the world outside. Once she gets out, she never has to head home to work. Alchemy can be performed at any campfire in the land, using a portable atelier. The whole map is your workshop.

Synthesis works like a puzzle. You place items of different shapes into a square panel, and covering all the lines on the panel grants bonuses. Oskar Behlmer returns from Atelier Sophie with a more mature demeanor, and he can still hear the voices of plants. It is the gentlest game on this list. You will pick a lot more flowers than fights.

In Proteus you explore an island from a first-person view, and that is the whole game. There is nothing to fight. The plants and animals each give off their own musical signature, and the music shifts as you walk past them. It started out as an open-ended role-playing game in the style of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, until the developers saw how much work that would take and made something nontraditional and nonviolent instead.

The landscape generator came first, inspired by walks in the English village of Avebury. Curve Studios made the Vita version and added new gameplay features at Sony's request. Proteus won Best Audio at the 2011 IndieCade awards. Players warn that it is not for everyone, and some wanted more to do. If you like wandering with headphones on, it is lovely.

Oceanhorn first came out for iOS in November 2013 and later reached the Vita, along with a long line of other systems. Its gameplay and look closely follow The Legend of Zelda, especially The Wind Waker and A Link to the Past. You explore dungeons and fight monsters with various weapons. You also throw pots and cut bushes to find hidden coins and hearts, which will feel very familiar if you grew up with Link.

The music is by Kalle Ylitalo, with a few extra pieces by Kenji Ito and Nobuo Uematsu. Having Uematsu on a small adventure that started on phones is a nice surprise. Its world is open in the old Zelda way, with places to reach rather than streets to get lost in. If you want a Zelda on your Vita, this is the closest you will get.

Shakedown: Hawaii puts you in charge of building a "legitimate" corporation. You grow it through open world missions, shakedowns, sabotage and property acquisition. The quotation marks around legitimate are doing a lot of work.

It is a crime game played for laughs, with a city to roam and businesses to grab. The missions push you around the map, and the property you buy keeps your empire growing between them. It keeps coming up when players list Vita games worth a look. It is small next to the big names on this list, and it fits a handheld well. If Retro City Rampage, a little further up, hooked you, play this one next.

Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed is an open-world action RPG set in a virtual recreation of Akihabara, Tokyo's Electric Town district. It is the sequel to Akiba's Trip on the PlayStation Portable. The streets are full of synthisters, enemies that can only be stopped by direct exposure to sunlight. So you fight them by stripping off their clothes.

The cast includes Kati Räikkönen, a Finnish girl who came to study in Japan because she's fond of anime and JRPGs. A third game, Akiba's Trip Festa, followed in November 2016, and a Director's Cut came out in Japan in April 2023 for PS4 and other systems. The fan service is loud. Under it is a real Tokyo neighborhood you can wander, shop by shop.

Retro City Rampage started as a homebrew project in 2002. Programmer Brian Provinciano built his own NES development kit and set about remaking Grand Theft Auto III with 8-bit sprite graphics, under the codename Grand Theftendo. That grew into a full game with original content, a parody of retro games and '80s and '90s pop culture. The Vita was one of the first systems to get it, in 2012.

Like Grand Theft Auto, it gives you an enormous city that is open to explore. You can hijack vehicles, and violence and destruction attract the police. Provinciano brought in three well-known composers for the chiptune soundtrack, which runs roughly two and a half hours. One mode even lets you play as unlockable characters from other indie games, Steve from Minecraft among them.

Liberation is set in 1765 Louisiana and stars Aveline de Grandpré, a mixed-race female Assassin, in New Orleans in the lead-up to the American Revolution. She uses three distinct personas to pursue her missions. It was released on October 30, 2012, the same day as Assassin's Creed III, and it uses the same engine, so most of the animations come from the big game.

Reviews were mixed. Critics praised the setting and Aveline but disliked how the story was told, and some felt it was limited by being a spin-off. The city is the star. One critic called it "a brilliant version of 18th-century New Orleans". It came to PlayStation 3 in January 2014, with some of the Vita-specific touch screen missions removed.

Terraria is a 2D sandbox action-adventure game. You create a character and land in a procedurally generated world, where you mine resources, craft equipment, build structures and fight enemies. Beating bosses unlocks the next tier of items and biomes, and there is always something deeper to dig toward.

Andrew Spinks started work on it in January 2011, and it first came out on Steam in May 2011. It has sold over 70 million copies across all its versions. Critics knocked the PC version for having no tutorial, while the console tutorial worlds, the Vita one included, were commended. That makes the Vita a friendlier place to start than you might expect. Players still recommend it, and it never really ends.

Dragon Quest Builders is a sandbox action RPG in a world made entirely of blocks, and you can use those blocks to build pretty much whatever you want. Players build towns, and a town gains levels based on how much it has been built up. The story comes from a parallel ending of the first Dragon Quest: before the final battle, the hero accepted the Dragonlord's offer to each rule half of the world. It went about as well as you would expect.

There is a main storyline to follow, with quirky side quests and monsters to battle on the way. A sequel, Dragon Quest Builders 2, followed in 2018, and the first game later reached Switch and Windows. One player summed up why it belongs here: "the large open world is pretty impressive for the vita".

Ys VIII came out first in Japan on the PS Vita in July 2016, with later releases on PS4, Switch and more. Adol wakes up shipwrecked on a cursed island. He and the other passengers he rescues form a village, and from there they take on fearsome beasts and mysterious ruins across the isolated island.

Combat is fast. Each character has an EXTRA Skill that fires when the gauge fills. Parry an attack at the right moment and Flash Guard kicks in: for a short time enemy damage is nullified and your attacks all land as critical hits. Ys VIII had sold over 500,000 copies by the end of 2018. Players single it out as the Vita game to play, even though it is on other systems now.

Borderlands 2 first came out in September 2012 on PC and home consoles, and the Vita got its own port later. You play one of four new vault hunters, out for revenge on Handsome Jack, the evil mastermind voiced by Dameon Clarke, and on a whole planet of creatures and psychos. The script by Anthony Burch is seven times longer than the first game's.

It is known for its bazillion weapons and its co-op for up to four players. More than 20 million units were shipped, and it became 2K's most successful release. Critics praised the writing and the variety of guns but criticized its mission design. Getting the whole thing on a handheld was a big deal. It is still cited as one of the greatest video games of all time.

Adol Cristin collapses in Casnan, a frontier town at the foot of an endless sea of trees, with his memories gone and only his name to guide him. An information dealer who claims to have known him joins up. After the pair rescue miners from a collapse, the Romun Army general in town enlists them to explore the Great Forest and map Celceta. Many have tried before, and none have ever returned alive.

Mapping the forest is the point, and it makes the game feel like an expedition. Each character has a powerful EXTRA move for when the meter fills. One reviewer called the combat a more "fast and frantic" version of Zelda that never gets "overly complicated". Another liked that it asked for strategy rather than mindless button-mashing. It turns up again and again on players' lists of Vita favorites.

Most Wanted is the nineteenth title in the Need for Speed series, made by Criterion, and the Vita got it in 2012 along with the consoles and PC. It takes the gameplay style of the first Most Wanted, with one big difference: there is no story. Cars are parked around the open city as Jackspots, and you find them to unlock them.

Autolog, the competition-between-friends system from Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, is built into the game world instead of sitting in a menu. The game won Best Driving Game at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards and Racing Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards. Players keep it on their short lists of Vita must-plays. A full city to race through on a handheld still feels a bit unreal.

Gravity Rush stars Kat, a strong-willed girl in a world that's crumbling to pieces, who can take gravity into her own hands. You tilt and move the Vita to aim her, and the city of Hekseville turns into something to fall across as much as walk through. Director Keiichiro Toyama came up with it before Silent Hill and the Siren series. It began on PlayStation 3 in 2008 under the title Gravité before moving to the Vita.

The world and art draw from Japanese and Western comics, including the work of French artist Jean Giraud, and Kohei Tanaka wrote the music. Critics praised the art style and Kat's portrayal but criticized some control issues. It had sold 200,000 units by August 2012, and a PS4 remaster and a sequel followed. Players recommend it more than any other open world game on the Vita, by a wide margin.