(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.
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.