I picked this up on the hope that the internet was exaggerating and that it was at least entertainingly bad. It is not, it just sucks. In three hours of "playing," I think I actually played for closer to an hour. The incredibly slow opening keeps taking away control for cutscenes and tutorials, and it's awful. Every time I thought I was going to get a chance to actually play and maybe even enjoy it, control was taken away again. Just genuinely awful. Cannot recommend this, even for the meme of it.

como a frey consegue ser triste e debochada em frente a um mundo tão cheio de coisas incríveis a serem descobertas e paisagens tão pitorescas? como ela consegue se manter descolada em frente a Tantas outras pessoas sofrendo e mesmo assim dispostas a ajudá-la?

uns anos atrás foi recebido com deboche no meio da discussão sobre dificuldade em jogos um artigo dizendo que deveriam existir mais jogos "emocionalmente desafiadores". por mais que a base do artigo fosse equivocada, acho que esse é um caso bem claro de um jogo muito difícil emocionalmente porque ele segura um espelho enorme na frente de qualquer pessoa que não leva a arte que observa a sério. além de perguntar "será que você também não é insuportável?", ele também te mostra de braços abertos e campos floridos que a resposta é que abraçar o mundo é sempre a melhor saída, mas que nem todas as pessoas tem o privilégio de sentir a alegria que vem com o vento no rosto, os barulhos de animais, a liberdade do movimento.

o tchans é que essa negatividade também pode existir, pois todo mundo tem dores visíveis e invisíveis que deixam todos os sentidos turvos em vários momentos da nossa vida, e é importante ter paciência com quem sofre de coisas que não sofremos, ou que sofre de maneiras que não sofremos, pois no fim é essa paciência que vai ajudar mais do que qualquer conselho.

Not even gonna bother finishing this boring forgettable annoying mess of the video game.

It's really cool that for all of the game's faults the mainstream gaming media and annoying people on twitter really latched onto the Joss Whedon dialogue aspect as to why this game is so bad, and not literally every other aspect of the game right down to its core.

On the visual front it’s both horribly bland and uninteresting with some of the most questionable of medieval architecture I've ever seen in a video game; I shit you not it literally looks the devs just had AIs create all of the building and outfits because every is either clashing with each other or is filled with absolutely nothing. The main city hub you constantly go back to is so big and so open then there is just so much dead space in between everything that you’d almost think it was a proof of concept; not something made for a finished product.
The map layout is pretty much every single AAA game you’d see from 8th gen. It’s filled with one huge city serving as the hub, a shit ton of empty abandoned villages, and seemingly endless green hills that are filled with pointless side quest and collectibles that serve no purpose other than to give XP which you already get enough of in the main missions, also the map just looks so lifeless and artificial, I know the game has a story reason but like come on; Sonic Frontiers had much more seemingly lived in open areas and the open world design in that game is like 6th gen as hell.

Oh yeah and the story it fucking blows. I didn’t finish the game so I can’t comment on this as much as I’d like too but let me just say that I am so fucking sick of writers writing character who are snarky assholes on puropes but either give them a good enough to be and asshole to everyone around them, or expects the audience to get attached to them as someone you'd want to root for. Frey’s whole character is that she was abandoned at birth on the streets of New York City and because of that she doesn't trust anyone, along with being actively hostile to anybody trying to help her. This goes so far as in one scene where one of Frey’s friend’s is trying to find comfort after the loss of her father. Keep in mind this is also the same character that saved Frey from being executed by the senate and risked her own life to break her out of jail, and during the whole conversation Frey tries to one up her trauma even with the loss of her father by saying stuff like “well I never knew my father” or “you should be lucky you even had a father in the first place”, and then to add the cherry on top after Frey’s friend tells her that she doesn't even care about the people around here so responds by saying “you're right I don’t care about any of you people, and I don’t care what happens to your world, I just wanna go home.”. That is not something you’d hear from a protagonist of your story that is something you’d hear out of a villain or antagonist, just straight up she is not a well written character, and I’m sure the actress did the best she could with the god awful material she was given but man I’m just shocked and appalled at the level of awful writing choices the game went with. The biggest fault i see is Frey trying to find a way back to New York, during the first half of the game before she gets isekaied she goes on and on about how she hates it in New York and wants to see the world and get out of being impurity or constantly chase by local gang members, and then once she’s in this new magical world all she can think of is wanting to go back and nothing else. Besides her beloved cat she left behind in New York there is no narrative reason for her to want to go back to New York besides the fact that she doesn't want to be bothered to help these people who are currently in the middle of an apocalyptic scenario. Sure yeah you can have a protagonist purposefully unlikable for your story there's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't work when the game keeps on trying really hard for you to fall for Frey’s plight and sympathize with her but you really can’t because she’s such an unlikable poorly written piece of human shit.

Oh yeah the overall gameplay; yeah it’s piss easy. It’s like someone looked at inFAMOUS combat and said “Yeah lets do that but make it super automated and slow.”. Almost every enemy never puts up a fight so they all mostly die in a few hits or even then just one or two, and the bigger enemies with larger heath bars are just big bullet sponges that take forever to kill; one bigger enemy took me roughly 6 minutes to kill and all I did was just walk around in circles and spam attack moves until it died. It is probably one of the most piss poor excuses for a combat system I've ever seen, the real challenge to it is not letting the controller fall out of your hands from late attention and dizziness.

I rented this from one of my local libraries with the initial feeling of wanting to play the game for myself to see if the hate was really warranted. I wanted to see if there were at least some fun aspects the game had to offer to at least recommend on like a steep sale or something like that. I came out of it hating it more than I think most people ever did beforehand, there are just no good qualities this game has to offer. It's just a black hole of wonder that just sucks everything into it only leaving me feeling a deep empty nothingness. At least with the Golem game I could look at that game and honestly feel really sorry for it, oh it still not a good game and one of these days I will review it and give my thought on it; but with that it was a no name studio given the rights to a very popular IP and a semi high budget to make something they’d never made before, and given the state the game was released in it also looked like the game was rushed and filled with crunch. The Golem game just makes me feel sad, this game just makes me mad on every possible level imaginable.

Forspoken is genuinely a decent game and I'm really struggling to see what people as a whole are disliking about it.

At no point did I find the dialogue nor story 'cringe' as everyone else seems to, infact, it's just the same as most open-world RPG's - which is baffling to me.

I actually quite enjoyed the story, and my major criticism for the game is that it was a little bit too short.

Graphically, yes, it's been downgraded from the initial teasers and announcement - which, as a title built for the PS5 is disappointing, but it's still not the worst looking game I've ever played.

The open-world is pretty much the same as most modern open-world games, littered with locations to explore and 'complete' - and hundreds of chests to collect.

There's a surprising lack of side quests though, which is annoying given the story's length.

The combat, however, is the main draw for this game. It's something different and is incredibly engaging, once you've gotten the hang of how the spells work and using them combined with Forspoken's parkour system becomes just delightful to experience.

I will absolutely be spending the next 30 hours collecting everything in this game - and would not be mad at a sequel.

Honestly? This is quite a sweet game! I actually kinda like the story, although it's told a little weirdly - almost television-esque? I do quite like protagonists that are at odds with the story itself, and I get quite a lot of that content here, so that's nice. Ella Balinska's performance is really good, too. Yes, some lines are a little too "quippy", a little bit weird sounding but overall I found the dialogue to be quite fun? And it's also quite understandable that two characters that do not wanna be where they are would talk to each other like that. So yea, I guess I like Forspoken's story! The combat also has enough oomph and glitter and sparkles and very dramatic looking animations that I found it entertaining - and very pleasing to look at. The open world is very under-utilized but works nice enough as a background for stylishly running to your next target. This whole thing feels to me like an AA-effort blown up into a overproduced full-front system-seller AAA-"experience", where the worst parts come from that conversion process. But overall... I think this is nice enough. Never in a million years worth $80 tho!

Forspoken . . .
MORE LIKE FOUR-OUT-OF-TENSPOKEN OUT OF TEN

There are definitely open world games out there that are both more polished/consistent but also more boring than this one.

Game had a lot of genuinely good and novel ideas (hell I even liked Frey) that ultimately didn't come together into something enjoyable. Traces of presumably troubled development can be seen all over the place, most notably in the shoddy cutscene direction. Why do certain parts fade to black in the middle of a scene??

If you for some reason want to check out a game made on the Luminous Engine, go for FFXV instead. It's got a lot more to give.

The game made it super hard on itself by releasing a demo that gave people a very bad impression on it and then proceeding to make it worse by not handing out review codes to several media outlets ...

The game itself isn't terrible. The main issue comes from hiding many of it's mechanics from the player until they reach a certain point in the story. Once you realize that there's so much more to come in terms of skills and mechanics it gets quite motivating to continue. However, aside from the pretty fun combat and movement it still leaves lot to be desired.

The story is as basic as it gets, the banter isn't great and the game just doesn't offer any interesting characters to speak of. The open world stuff also is just super bland and I could not find interesting quest for the life of me.

If you concentrate on the story, only do a bit of open world fluff on the side and just play it as a wizard fighting simulator ... it can be quite entertaining. The effects are pretty stunning and the moveset is impressively large. The main story also has some cool setpieces to offer.

Do not play this if you're a completionist or "require" a good story to enjoy a game. It's not terrible, I'd say it's servicable, but it won't carry the experience at all.

above everything, Forspoken hit me with what it does between the main narrative. while exploring the world of Athia as Frey, you can connect to her journey more directly than what the outsorced main narrative affords. she was stuck in a practically inescapable homelessness situation in New York where she was shunned by almost everyone around her. in there, she could only use her athleticism to run away.

Frey had no connections other than her pet cat to sustain her will.

she then goes through her standard fare isekai initiation and ends up in Athia, learning powers that allow her to both fight back and extend her already impressive physical abilities to extraordinary lengths. by this point the parallels between the two worlds become really clear. is it basically the purest definition of escapism? maybe, but i'd say that much is lost by putting Forspoken inside a box.

Frey's journey in Athia is akin to one of struggling witch learning to accept herself. she's still socially shunned by the higher classes, but she doesn't have to depend on them like she did in New York (there isn't even a fixed currency system!). she gets her own pointy witch houses where she can craft potions, enchant robes and necklaces and take care of her (up to) 13 supernatural cats, each spiritually connected to Athia's mythology. Frey is frequently called a heretic for it.

ultimately, she needs to kill the four demigoddesses that used to rule Athia before losing their minds. she's initially disgusted even by their legacy, but nonetheless has to absorb their powers when she kills each of them. each time the player helps her do this, her abilities grow larger and more varied. they all help Frey explore and thus understand the world better, consequently growing fonder of the four women and spiritually becoming her own amalgam of ancestry and experiences. she isn't defined by them, but she learns to accept them. i don't really wanna spoil anything, so i'll keep from talking about the later stuff that expands upon this aspect.

you can choose to spend as much time jumping around the now almost-natural landscapes of Athia as you want. each open world chapter only asks Frey to go toward the dominion of a specific demigoddess and kill them. this objective is always located pretty far away, and there are these completely optional, game-length areas in here that you can explore while travelling. to appropriately explore Athia, you have to connect with the different demigoddesses by using their abilities; mainly Frey's mysterious first set of magic.

Forspoken is a journey defined by the moments you spend together with its vast land. the game allows you to do this without the need to directly cross over with the main narrative, which i didn't touch because i don't find it that interesting to discuss.

Athia is a rich, nature-heavy (due to the quasi-apocalypse it suffered) land with as many heigths as mundane locations that make it feel tangible, especially when you take a moment to absorb the space it shares with you. it only asks you to accept the connection.

\\

this review is a little wild, but it reflects my pretty weird experience with the game so i'll let it be.

Leave it to pure contempt to get me back into using this site.

The whole game reads like no one in development had any passion for this product. There is nothing exceptional here at all. I don’t know if the Luminous engine just can’t handle gameplay where you do more than hold a button or if this is that team's idea of engaging and are just wholly committed to it, but somethings gotta change here, which is unlikely since I don’t see that studio existing into next year. There’s this parkour system that would have worked if they didn’t drop every obelisk of side content haphazardly onto the world map like a 5 year old playing SimCity. These biomes were absolutely supposed to just be fields lightly dotted with things to see before the Ubisoft curse took hold and instead crammed 6 different iterations of “do our bad combat slogs”. This game makes use of 4 different magic types: short range, long range, long range, and long range.

I could in no world conceive of writing this bad in anything, not even the worst TV show has anything this devoid of character. Not even Marvel movies are an apt comparison anymore, those can have neat things in them. Nothing exemplifies this more than going on a side quest for who might be the only half decent character in the game, inspecting a room with three dialogue prompts that all say “this character must have had a complicated history with one of the villains”, after which you find a diary that “might delve into that relationship further” and when prompted to read it the main character says “nah”. Every idea is only explored to its most basic form. The setting could have been so much more. The story could have stuck to its theme of rising from nothing to do great things, which is already an overly bloated message, instead of spinning out around the last turn and adding the addendum “as long as you were born super powerful and special and important.”

The music feels safe and forgettable. Hearing the first 5 seconds of the battle track over and over as I sped away from combat was very grating but also kinda funny. I do have exactly one positive thing to say about Forspoken, and that is the visual effects are pretty great overall. Magic looks like it feels cool, when it’s not congesting the screen.

I would call this a saltine cracker of a video game, but at least those have salt. This is straight up a communion wafer. Lacking flavor, dry as shit, and a strong association with being in hell.

Erm…well THAT just happened!!!

Played and completed the demo so my experience will be based on that because I am NEVER spending $70 on this game lmao. Not least of which is because I don’t have a PS5 nor do I ever plan on getting one, but also because the game runs like crap on my PC (I cranked the resolution down to 720p and it still stuttered like crazy) and the game itself is very…blah. Combat is actually kiiiinda fun with the different spells you can mix together, but it’s also pretty easy to kill things and lacks any satisfying crunch + enemies barely react to your attacks at all nor do they really try to attack you. Parkour is kinda fun but it‘s mechanically shallow and the game performs most of it for you as you automatically vault over obstacles, there’s very little skill expression to be found outside of the context sensitive grapple pull. The world itself is pretty boring, the most lifeless and generic grass forest wasteland I have ever seen in a video game, barring like one or 2 setpieces, and the dialogue that comes out of Frey’s mouth makes me want to die. It’s not overly offensive like I thought it was gonna be but I’m also positive I’ve seen everything the game has to offer in one fell swoop.