Having all those bad reviews at launch, I was expecting a complete disaster. Started with zero expectations but at the end it was an OK open-world game. It is just too ambitious for its own good. The world is wayyyy to big for what it is with nothing interesting going on in it. Repetitive locations for the sake of the collectable or stat increase just gets boring after awhile. The story itself does not need that much space and useless side content. There are a lot of good ideas underneath all of this but most are not developed fully. The battle system is also quite engaging with various different abilities and play styles, just, again, too bloated and filled with huge number of them, confusing the player more than engaging him into variety. If they made it on a smaller scale, focused more on the story and less on the huge open world, this could have been so much better.

Don't play this unless you want to see the most unintentionally funny story/voice acting ever. It's not nearly as terrible as people say it is. But it still isn't great. Bad writing does not make it unplayable, mediocre at best story, Hilarious voice acting, it is not a broken game as some claim, the world does vary more than they claim too, and quantity over quality style of open world is it's biggest flaw.

Where to start. The story is the most unintentionally funny thing I've seen in awhile. The writing is pretty terrible. It's a bland story. The voice acting ranges from terrible to hilarious to mediocre at best. The only good voice acting is Cuff. Frey is so cringe. It's really funny how cringy and terrible her delivery is.

Frey has bad delivery of her lines. She talks like a pre-teen trying to act cool. Cursing at every moment she can. When the game tries to be funny, it is not. But a lot of the time, it is unintentionally funny. You get second hand embarrassment by her acting. It hurts because it's so cringe. And it's a great experience to laugh at.

The game looks like a PS4 game at best. I played it on quality mode. There are aspects that look like a PS5 game. But character models are not great. Someone environments are pretty while others are bland. Graphics are not that important but this was noticeably lower.

Controls are not great. If you must play this, I highly suggest turn on auto lock on. The aiming is terrible and you willl struggle to hit things. The parkour system is kinda neat though. Although a bit unruly at times.

The biggest issue with this game is the map. OMG it's too big. There is no reason it needed to be as big as it is. It's so big, that half of your main quests are guiding you to an area, just for it to instantly move the waypoint. I guess it was their way of making sure you don't get lost.

The story barely uses the the map. It's a short story and you don't explore a lot of the map. They took a quantity over quality approach. What is there to do on this map? Collect hundreds of chests, get lore journals, get stat boost, get familiars, and equipment. There are a few other things but none of it matters. It tells you exactly what you will get for doing something. A lot of it is lore journals. It's very repetitive. Either you just scan until you find the lore to complete the area or you kill enemies to complete it. THAT'S ALL.

There is no variety. They try to create an illusion of variety by changing the area and what your reward is but believe me, there is no variety at all. Another thing proving the map is too big is when you unlock a tower and only 3 meaningful things pop up followed by 20+ chests. What's the point of having such a big map if you are not even going to fill it. A lot of the icons on the map are literally just walk up to the thing and get your reward. No different than the 20+ chests that also unlocked. It's not worth doing.

I love collecting things. I love brainlessly completing maps. I completed Elden Ring. Did like 95% of the stuff on the map, but this game not only overwhelmed me, I actually just could care less after I realized how big the map was.

The magic is neat. Some of it is really cool looking. Probably the prettiest aspect of the game. You are constantly able to find currency to get new magic. The music is pretty decent too.

The accessibility features are really good except for a lock of a photosensitivity mode. Made the game playable. Made the terrible controls not nearly as bad. I played this on easy, with auto evade, low damage taken, auto lock on, and a few other things. It was an easy experience. THIS GAME IS NOT WORTH STRUGGLING ON.

I had fun with this but I cannot recommend this game. If you must play it, know what you are getting into. Play it on easy. TURN ON AUTO LOCK ON. I cannot stress that enough. Make it a brain off experience. I only suggest you play this by making it as easy as possible. If you want to witness the story, it's like 8hrs tops. Just zoom through it without challenge. Get a few good laughs at how terrible the story, writing, and voice acting is. And never play it again.

A really interesting fantasy world and magical combat system, held back by some minor open world gripes. The stats and exploration weren't very good, but I am a sucker for a game with a great sense of kinetic movement and complex action combat system. The story was even surprisingly interesting and touching by the end, with some truly suprising twists. A game definitely worth playing, but by no means a masterpiece. A more interesting open world to explore would elevate Forspoken into something truly special.

Enjoyed it enough to play through it but a hard sale on the "better than some say" front because I still agreed with some reservations and there are some that don't even necessarily reward your patience to get its best elements. Just to start it off: it's not that badly written, it just starts off on absolutely the worst foot for the first two hours with constant quips to a bewildering setting and a slow pace, and a framing device that admittedly barely coheres even in the end. When you get past it though, there are elements of actual minor character development and some serious turns that are "fine" if not height of game writing even now. Feels like a first draft to its lead's development that finds itself as it goes along, when it should've just cut some of the treacle and filled in the world you spend most of your time in moreso.

The biggest problem is an engine that only sporadically knows what its best elements are, and mostly there for the gamer to pick and choose in a spread-out open world, and in such a way that it's not necessarily a preference to any given newer Assassin's Creed game outside of being shorter. The battle system varies on a whim (even within its own magical sections) from snappy and satisfying loops to just feeling like throwing snowballs at sponges, and even its biggest success in the parkour movement system takes longer to get some of its best elements and takes most of the game to get to areas that use it well. And by then? You're almost done and there's very little reason to max out or explore more. As fair as the game warns you enough that it's not much beyond a time-waster, it still could've presented that better.

I can understand the hatred for this one, but also really struggle to see how this game has gotten so much worse reviews and heapings of hate despite just being an okay-ish open-world game.

Forspoken is a pretty good game, when it feels like being a good game. I think the people who did the storyboarding, setting the lore for the universe, and who did the enemy and character designs should absolutely get a raise, promotion, or whatever you can give them. I've seen a lot of people call this game "bland" or "boring" in design, but when you see the half-dog-zombie monsters, crystallized orcs, and lavish outfits for the royalty and upper-class members of this game, I think it's a lot harder to call Forspoken "boring."

In reality, this game has a good amount of good, settled in with a good amount of bad. It's a game I don't think I can dissect too much outside of listing what I liked and what I didn't.

For what I liked? To start, the gameplay and traversal were pretty fun. I don't think there's a lot of great open-world games that want you to move at the speed of light, dodging through rocks, mountains, craters, and valleys, but Forspoken is totally okay with you skipping around its world as you check off objectives and quests (more on this later). It's fun to feel so free, and I think it gave me a lot of good memories with something like Spider-Man or Infamous coming to mind. It's not just a generic horseback or trodding through the world game, it wants you to rush through it and lessen the limitations you might feel in other open-world games.

On the gameplay side, it's a mostly good game with a few modifications that would have helped it be better. I think the game has overall good gameplay, and most importantly, it's unique. It's a good mix of peppering in spells, assists, and ending your attack with a crushing ultimate attack. It doesn't really go beyond this in any tree - one of my gripes - but it does a good job being this magical fusion of DMC and generic guard-breaking, enemy weakness spamming you'd see in a Ubisoft game.

I'm also generally favorable on the way this game handles upgrades - it's fun and again reminescent of something like Infamous when you're picking up the blue mana pools around the world. These are used to purchase new spells and enhance your abilities, and on top of this, you're able to change challenges at certain markers in the open world to enhance that specific ability better with a challenge, also permanently making Frey stronger. This is one of the best ways I've seen a game do this, outside of some challenges being highly situational and hard to accomplish. There really shouldn't have been a limit of three of these you can obtain at one time (it's three, and sometimes you can be in a story mission, unable to change these from a menu or anywhere else until you are back at at a safehouse).

Getting more into the meh or bad parts of this game, there's really no shortage on where to go. On the world design, I'm sort of in the middle. The strange obelisks, the gothic architecture of certain castles and each bosses domain? Very, very good. On the other side? Yeah, there are a lot of areas in this game that are fields and plains. Fields, and more plains. Did I mention they had fields and plains with some enemies in a generic looking field of rubble from a town? Forspoken does a great job on the main path of the game, but veering off to the side can really ruin the magic of the game and put you in sort of that open-world nausea so many of us face when being bored while playing these games.

The story for the game, again, is mixed. I think the game was written pretty well to start, but once you reach the sort of "isekai" moment for Frey...yeah, we're talking YA fiction levels of dialogue. Generic swearing, Marvel-isms, and just a lot of tell-not-showing. It's something that can sometimes, on occasion, actually land well. Frey's voice-actor does a pretty good job of selling the frustration and anger of being trapped in this other world, but the dialogue choices are pretty often mediocre and not what even a normal person would say in a lot of these scenarios.

Along with that, there is a lot of talking in the open-world segment, but I don't find it any more infurating most JRPGs are with repeated voice lines after combat or while exploring dungeons in games of their own. I kinda hate to see people bring that up and go to see something like Xenoblade or Persona or even games Square Enix has made in their favorites. It's repetitive and annoying but no more annoying than most games that have only thirty to fifty voice lines per character.

I think if there's anything to rag on this game for, it's for the massive lack of side content, fun minigames, or really anything to do other than progress the story. There are fun boss-fights and dungeons to explore, but for one of those, there are three "visit an empty town and kill some enemies". Or even better, sit at a statue while we raise your health or defense by +1. Really nothing engaging to see while you are progressing the story. The townspeople missions are all horrifically bland fetch-quests as well, most of them not even requiring that you leave town, but instead running chores for the townspeople as they spout off about how much they hate you (Frey is pretty much hated for 2/3rds of this game by most of the town). This game really has some of the most lackluster side content that will be making this platinum on PSN much more frustrating than if it just had the dungeons, difficult bosses, and more fun challenge runs left in as side content.

Overall, I think this is a good open world game as a bargain bin game. I got this for $20 and have no regrets in beating it or playing through it, unlike if I had maybe bought this for $70 at launch.

(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.

There's 70% of a cool game in here. People got pissy about the writing, but it's not that bad. Makes a worse first impression than last.

Where it really stumbles is narrative content. There's just so little! There's an explanation for why the world is so devoid of other characters outside the capital city, but that doesn't justify the capital city itself being so lifeless.

Outside of the main quest, there's practically no story guiding you to the side objectives. It's pure Ubisoft map icon world design without even the thinnest plot directing you to those icons.

This burdens the final chapter with basically telling the entire story of the game in a manner that feels rushed and threadbare.

As for the combat, which is most of what you do in the game, it's very flashy and generally feels good. Dodging, blocking and countering never quite feel right, though. The flashiness extends to enemy attacks and design, so they look cool but aren't very readable. I frequently felt like I was getting hit by stuff that I had dodged, or didn't dodge because an animation wasn't obviously an attack.

It's not a game I'd die for, but a solid C+/B- game shouldn't have killed Luminous Productions, either.

I really tried to give it a fair shake, but 6 hours in I am just so deeply bored. Everything is grey. Magic parkour is kinda cool, but not across the same grey rocks again and again until you hit something just a bit too high and have to spam circle to dash up it a bit at a time. A grey city filled with grey people. Grey lands filled with grey zombies and grey wolves. Maybe that changes later, but I'll never see it. The magic combat is nice visually, but feels so flaccid. No oomph to it.

Telepathically chucking pebbles at a corrupted bear aye? Fuck me.