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.
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.