Forspoken

released on Jan 24, 2023

Forspoken follows the journey of Frey, a young New Yorker transported to the beautiful and cruel land of Athia. In search of a way home, Frey must use her newfound magical abilities to traverse sprawling landscapes and battle monstrous creatures.


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(Winner of "Most Hated Award" in the 2023 Vidya Gaem Awards, speech below)

We've been noticing a trend amongst our most hated winners. Sure, they're no fun to play, but there's a certain apathy built into them. As if the developers made a plate of chocolate chip cookies, and followed the recipe exactly, but forgot the most important ingredient: Love.

Forspoken has some aspects that could be passable, like the parkour and the graphics, but it's all spoiled by the terrible taste the whole game leaves in our mouth when all the other bland factors join together into a hard chalky mess.

It represents Square Enix's absurd commitment to pander to the west in the laziest and most boring way, when nobody was asking them to in the first place. The more they involve the corporate office, the worse the result, and it's been this way as far back as the Crystal Tools debacle with FF13. Final Fantasy as a franchise was never consistent, and for many that was a selling point. The fans never knew what was coming next. Sure it didn't always hit, but it came from a place of genuine enthusiasm: Some Japanese fuck who'd been sitting on their fanfic for twenty years, waiting for technology to finally catch up.

Costing over 100 million dollars, it's sad to see Forspoken as such a gigantic financial risk, but not a creative one. Who was this story for? Was it ever for anyone? Did it start as a lifeless product meant to check boxes, or were the hard edges filed away through dozens of international board meetings and zoom calls?

How many more Forspokens and Saints Rows can they afford, now that the tech industry is in shambles and investors are pulling their money away from gaming? Forspoken is only here because it's the latest in a string of disjointed constructions by a handcuffed or uninvested creative team: Don't call it a cause, call it a symptom.

(Winner of the "Pottery Award" in the 2023 Vidya Gaem Awards, speech below)

How on Earth do you fuck up an isekai? Anime publishers are buying up rights to this derivitive garbage from literal whos on Narou and serving it up every week as disposable slop for a braindead audience. The difference here being, cheifly, that it's derivitive garbage by committee. It felt like something stitched together from tropes and cliches taken from a long forgotten era of pop culture, which makes sense because it was a team of 4 western writers raised on 80's movies, who then passed it off to a Japanese team who didn't know any better.

The lack of passion in the storytelling isn't helped by our own protagonist's apathy with her own situation. I could go on about all the stupid quips our protagonist and her cuff companion make, about how she completely refuses to be empathetic towards the people that help her, about how barren, generic and boring the world the game takes place in is - so generic in fact that I can't even remember its name. Frey isn't having any fun 20 hours into the game, which is a huge problem because she's supposed to be our window into this strange and "fascinating" world. If she can't muster any enthusiasm about her own story, don't expect the player to act any different. Hopefully soon, this type of writing becomes as dated as the references it makes.

The game is better when you see it for what it is, a test of your magical abilities, and magical fighting skills. With a story about loneliness and abandonment issues on top.
Finished the main story at 60h

Entendo todo hate e ódio que esse jogo carrega, história com protagonistas forçadas, história bem wft, gameplay chata e cansativa e outros problemas sérios

Ainda sim aqui não temos o completo esgoto, pelo menos ele termina do jeito menos pior

pirated it and deleted: always oppose worthless slop

This review contains spoilers

Forspoken is like Twilight in that there's a lot of serious, legitimate complaints about it, but they're all overshadowed in mainstream discourse by people hating it because the lead is a teenage girl.

Legitimate criticisms:
• SE has the worst fucking marketing department in the world. Not just this game, they have been so bad at marketing literally every game over the past few years. They picked by far the worst dialogue in the game for that trailer and didn't include anything from the first 20 min, which is far more interesting?! Also, the trailer made the game seem super PG when this is an M-rated game and the intro is dour and gritty?! Most of the game takes itself very seriously and Fray is serious and mature in a lot of scenes, the banter stuff is mostly just when it's her and Cuff alone and I actually didn't think it felt grating or cringe.
• This is a story about a black woman in NYC who is an orphan and a repeat offender, who avoids major jail time because the black woman judge decides to give her a second chance. This is explicitly a story about American blackness, but they didn't have a single black writer working on the game. I like that premise for an isekai and there are a lot of interesting possibilities there, but an affluent white writer is absolutely not the right person to tell that story!
• The "twist" and ending are infuriating because you can tell the writers think they're so fucking clever, but it's obvious, cliche, and dodges all of the difficult and interesting aspects of the story to do a boring "The power was within you all along" happy ending. Things not addressed: Tanta Cinta thought New York City in 2001 was the most peaceful and wonderful place on earth? And nothing happened around then to change that perspective? Frey's dad didn't take care of her and didn't have any friends/family to take care of her either? Is that because he died in 9/11 around the same time the corruption started in Athia?! If the premise for your game is that this fantasy apocalypse happened at the same time as 9/11, why don't you address that?!
• Reading the archive entries after the fact, they directly tell you that the Rheddig invaded Athia and found Susurrus, a demon defeated by the first Tanta, locked away in the Locked Labyrinths and considered him a hidden super weapon, so they freed him as they were retreating after losing the war. That's an interesting and reasonable story and it's fitting that Frey has to seal Susurrus away again, like the first Tanta did, and like the 4 Tantas were unable to do. However, in the dialogue in the story quests, the Tantas say they started the war with the Rheddig (no reason given) and wiped them from the face of the Earth and then Susurrus implies he's the last of the Rheddig and doing this to get revenge for them? What the fuck?! You absolutely cannot say that the victims of ethnic cleansing are in the wrong in your story!!! Why is there such a huge disconnect between these two things?! The first makes Frey wearing Cuff again seem like a fun "Devil on your shoulder" frenemies thing (which is the tone they want for him), but the second feels like you're enslaving the last person of the race your mom genocided, which is extremely fucked up.

Gameplay:
• The magic parkour feels like Jet Set Radio Fantasy, which makes me wish Cuff was more like Professor K.
• The combat clicked for me when I encountered a horde of 20-30 zombies. There were so many of them that the AOE and crowd control aspects of the spells really shone.
• The combat and movement absolutely rule once you get a feel for it. Circle-strafing enemies and holding O to automatically dodge attacks feels so good when you're cartwheeling through the air while shooting a machine gun behind your back. Cycling through spells to put them all on cooldown makes me feel really cool and smart, even though it's not that complex to do and I'm not using that much strategy.

I really wanted to like Forspoken. There's a good game in here somewhere, but it takes too long to open up in a way that makes you want to play it. Traversal and combat are compelling, but the story, dialog, quest design, and barren open world simply weren't good enough.