Forspoken is very fun

[Oathbreaker]

Someone got it for my birthday so I'm playing the heck out of it. Wow this game got the biggest wave of games media racism I've seen since that particular arm of what qualifies as journalism started not being so explicit about its anti-Japanese racism (which absolutely factors into this being developed by a Japanese studio). I barely saw anyone anywhere talk about how it is as a game, it was basically a shell game of rhetorical nonsense about why no one is allowed to just say it's pretty good. Even the best article I ever found about it when it came out was someone who hadn't played very far into it addressing how misplaced all the rhetorical nonsense around its release was. So here I am to say it is a good game and is fun to play. I'm still not very far into it myself but even only getting about as far as that article I mentioned, I'm having a blast.

One of the bigger gameplay things that got marketed pretty heavily was Frey's parkour-style traversal. It's not actually much like parkour at all but it DOES feel really good, like nearly as good as the best Spiderman web-swinging feels in the best Spiderman games. Once you get the hang of how it works and figure out that any interruption of the full-speed animation resets the internal timer on when it consumes a pip of stamina (be it jumping or aiming yourself at a short obstacle to make Frey parkour over it), it becomes functionally endless though unfortunately not limitless due to some world design choices.

The other big part was hey, this game's combat is about using magic! I still only have the initial set of abilities because HOLY SHIT the world is filled with stuff to loot and I can't not loot it all. However even the starting set of abilities you can unlock have a pretty good breadth of stuff to do. Throw rocks and then a bigger rock, throw rocks like a machine gun with a piercing shot at the end of it, throw rocks then form a shield that acts as a shotgun blast when released or hit by a melee attack. That's pretty much the bread and butter and while it sounds lame it FEELS REAL GOOD. I also know you get magic sword stuff later on so I'm really looking forward to prying myself away from combing through the map and getting more magic. You get an amazing crowd control move that roots everything in its aoe as you cast it letting you absolutely demolish them, and basically a turret flower which is good extra damage and annihilates flying enemies (which are somehow even more toxic than the bird enemies in Elden Ring). Your starting big ultimate attack is a little bit like Ripper Blast from Star Ocean 2 if it were magic vines instead of rocks. At first it's not amazing unless you're fighting a lot of stuff at once, but as you upgrade it, you can hold the input to make it do up to two more pulses of damage, each one making it get bigger and hit harder and then it's just good for all occasions. The final hit when fully upgraded even has a really high chance of poisoning enemies that survive. From there it's all about unlocking more stuff, a whip that hits most things close to you and drains health, an explosive mine, all kinds of stuff and that's just the initial ability selection out of apparently like four sets? It even has a similar time-slow effect as FFVII Remake while you're switching your readied spells (which you will probably do a lot, it's easily the most unfortunate combat design consideration).

It's definitely not without SOME things worth criticism though. The world is big and has tons of stuff to fight and loot but the massive majority of it is just crafting resources which doesn't matter basically at all except to increase your inventory capacity as far as I've played yet (which isn't very far at all but hey, 12 solid hours of just running around collecting it because game so fun). It feels very much like Dragon's Dogma all over again, but quite a bit bigger, and an unfortunately more evenly spread range of enemies to fight and less equipment to mess with. There's the occasional Mutant enemy which is essentially a superboss version of one type of enemy or another but they aren't within reason to fight until much later. The best incentive to explore is all the mana spots there are to collect, which are basically how you unlock new magic and stuff; you get SO MUCH MORE of it from exploring than you do from leveling up. And the biggest thing is just how heavily the world was designed around an ability you won't get for I imagine at least a couple hours if you stick to the story. There are walls higher than you can climb and weird pillars of stone all over the place that just about require you to have that ability, and it's a little annoying to not be able to just do the thing. You can sometimes find a couple spots to circumvent it early but it's not easy or really worth the effort. Also the world map while technically completely open is clearly designed in discreet sections that have one or two points of entry/exit each. Good thing part of the lore is that super powerful beings actively shaped the world themselves cuz it sure isn't natural.

Now the most interesting wrinkle. For all the crying about the writing style, it doesn't even actually employ the style everyone criticized it for having as far as I can tell. It was obvious barely anyone was actually sitting down with the game before copy-pasting that garbage everywhere but wow, the ones who did get through the game must have thought it was written too well to criticize it for things it actually does. And the things it does are... not the best! Everyone has already talked about its bad optics at the very start and the voice acting and whatever but once you get past the introduction sequence (where most of the criticism immediately stops because none of the racists were willing to keep the game on for 2 hours and lose their Steam refund window), it does things that matter a lot more to the narrative pretty inadequately! Like hey why is Frey being blamed for people getting killed when EVERYONE WATCHED THE PERSON WHO DID THE KILLING and knows they aren't in their right mind? It's supposed to come across like blind religious zealotry mixed with some apocalyptic desperation fear but the writers just don't get there with it because they spend too little time developing the situation for the player before moving you right along. And what's so incredibly interesting about that failure on the writers' part is that somehow the way it all washes over Frey without her being very phased by it early on actually makes some pretty good sense on closer examination! Like yes the panic of being isekai'd but no one is telling her the situation in any meaningful detail and her first impression of people was getting traumatized by them wanting to execute her for existing or use her because she's not susceptible to the Break. No one would want to stay in that. It's not just a generic refusal of the hero's call, there's a lot more tangled in there and it manages to actually work. There's also a lot worth criticizing about the Tantas and their relationship to the state of the world (at least if the game plays the setup straight until the end) but I don't know exactly how to go about that particular line of critical thought other than, the people who wrote this set up a very cool, very powerful matriarchy just to ruin it for the point in the world which you play through. So that's unfortunate.

 

[Oathbreaker]

For anyone that may play this in the future don't make my mistakes and over-explore too much too soon, I am many hours deeper into playing but not much farther into the game. The game has a bit of a problem with properly rewarding extensive exploration now that I've done more of it. All the big equipment rewards are very nicely and clearly labeled, but generally many, many of the purple dots on the map that are regular treasure chests aren't worth the time they take to collect , at least not yet (though tall chests with block-sliding puzzles give old coins used to buy useful stuff so those are always worth opening). Got some more story done though and the Dragon's Dogma comparison is even more appropriate than I realized. The game continues to absolutely crush the combat feel while cutscenes are tipping more toward low-budget scenes with older era animation work. FFXIII Lightning Returns might be a good comparison too with the disparity between its high-quality cutscenes and most of its sidequest scenes.

Unlocked the first new set of magic too and it's also VERY FUN. Fire, lots of fire. Fire punching, Summon swords, Fire walls, explosions, it's great. The only wrinkle is that switching between spell sets is a touch clumsy, but it seems like you always have access to a shortcut to get back to Frey's beginning set of spells so that helps a bit. I also unlocked the big important exploration ability that lets you target and zipline to objects sticking out of the environment (and to the environment itself though it's more limited in what it considers a viable target than I thought it would be). It's not as fluid as the general movement but still very helpful to get that little bit of extra height even when there isn't a super helpful target to launch you up.

I'm also pleased that the writing is sticking to its guns. It seems fully committed to under-explaining everything while primarily developing Frey's perspective on her situation in relation to Athia. It's still weird and it still works super well somehow. I'm sure there's gonna be some twist or other to the plot at some point but it really seems like there isn't any exposition the game is just waiting to drop. You can pick up a bunch of entries for the menu archive to piece more things together than the main story is telling you sort of like FFXIII's data log, though it's not nearly as extensive.

All that said the state of the world definitely GOES places. The general ever-present fog in the distance that dampens some of the light and color does it a disservice but there have been some pretty cool art designs like entire cliffsides and rocky structures that look like the inside of a polished agate and a whole thing happening with the skybox under very heavy concentrations of the Break.

 

[Mr Bean]

Please keep sharing your thoughts when you can. I was / am still interested in this game but don’t have a PS5 yet and all these observations disconnected from the release hype cycle are FASCINATING.

 

[Oathbreaker]

I haven't done much more to say anything about yet but I realize I've forgotten to mention something. Break storms! The game introduces them very early but doesn't explain what they are until you get into that heavy concentration stuff with the cool skybox effect I mentioned. It doesn't seem to happen often and might be random but sometimes a blue storm will just roll in and your health starts whittling away, you'll be absolutely swarmed with nightmare creatures, and sometimes a gigantic superboss appears that will tear you apart (the environment actually does a neat little foreshadowing thing here with certain very large, very alien structures you might see around). It manages to be MORE like Dragon's Dogma than Dragon's Dogma in this case, the way everyone kinda plays up nighttime being scary and dangerous in that. In this case the enemies are infinite and if you try to outlast the storm in a fight it's actually REALLY TOUGH and the designs are quite a bit scarier than the normal enemies though I'm not sure how much of it is me just generally being a little baby about even slight horror elements. The game encourages finding shelter in rest areas or caves but most of the time it's happened to me I've been quite far from any and get completely lost in the thick blue haze. These are also distinct in that most of the time you're fighting stuff corrupted by the break, but these nightmare creatures seem made from the break itself. The superboss is properly dangerous and I'm not sure when exactly will be a good time to fight it but I imagine this along with the mutants dotting the map are the sort of thing I want to dig into the gear upgrading for.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

Did you finish this yet? This page is the one positive bit of commentary about Forspoken I’ve seen on the entire gaming side of the internet, so I’m curious to hear more.

 

[muteKi]

It's good to hear this game's traversal is about as fun as it looks. I still haven't played the demo, can you believe it?

 

[Oathbreaker]

I didn't get much farther than when I last posted cuz life came at me a little fast recently, and so did Zelda. I'm planning to pick it back up and finish it before Baldur's Gate 3's full release though.

 

[Peklo]

I played this. It's a really boring game. The only remotely positive aspect of it is the traversal when it gels together in the intended way, which can be arbitrary because this has the slippery, imprecise fluidity intrinsic to Luminous's other project in Final Fantasy XV, resulting in player animations that are entertaining to witness play out but half-hearted and awkward in how they feel to control. The way they alleviate this aspect is by generally giving absurd large-scale mobility to their protagonists, and so you end up with this game where Frey might as well be functionally immortal mechanically because you can always just zip away from enemies, or hold a button and never get touched. Combat feels so meaningless to engage with because you're almost always fighting nondescript melee shamblers and destroying them from afar, at no risk to yourself even if you try to play more actively, diversely, or stylishly--it all results in the same show of effortless dominance where you might as well be popping inanimate targets. The second spellset in the lone melee-focused kit is where I briefly thought things might change, because doing a Noctis-lite bumblefest combo exercise did feel more active and fun than zoning against a zombie wandering in the wrong direction 50 meters away from you, but the lack of meaningful opposition eventually dismantled that notion too--both as visual designs, and as movesets, the game's bestiary is exceptionally rote to engage with on any meaningful level.

All of this has a cascading ripple effect where one element of the game doesn't work, setting the next up for a fall: combat isn't fun, so doing dungeons which have no layouts beyond copy-pasted square room fightboxes lacks meaning. Exploring the open world is not rewarding in the literal material sense, because the game's RPG systems on a number basis aren't worthwhile or necessary to push to their fullest. Unlocking new spells is the only thing that has a transformative, interesting impact on play, and those are either doled out at mandatory story thresholds, accrued through primary path experience and mana pick-ups, or rarely discovered in fountains on the map--you don't need to go out of your way to attain them. Crafting is pointless to care about, and the cosmetic effect of Frey's various cloaks, necklaces and painted nails is the only compelling aspect of seeking them out, not what they do as pieces of gear--and if dress-up is the comparative winner in the dynamic, it should've been leaned into more (like different shoes for the sneaker enthusiast). Everything the game does feels awkwardly in conflict with itself, in ways that signal to a development process that had no clear ideas on what the game ever wanted to be before it was time to compile its disparate, half-finished design goals into a semi-coherent work.

Movement in games is some of the most fun you can have just pressing buttons, and this is clearly the ethos with Forspoken, but game mechanics don't exist in a vacuum. For movement to really prosper in a game's context, it has to be developed in a way that you want to do it for its own merit and for how it allows you to interact with the environment differently. Forspoken has a hard time justifying its slick movement velocity, incremental layers and added wrinkles because its setting is so boring: a contrived desolation of ruined, ambiguously European-medieval townships, plains, pastures and cliffsides that is intended for Frey to use as an ever-expanding playground to test her boundaries in, but because there's nothing interesting to find, the want to go out beyond the horizon isn't there, and the small impact further ability upgrades bestow doesn't provide motivation either. The only time you feel like having reached a new stratum of movement is just around and past defeating Tanta Sila, the first of the major bosses, because the grapple you acquire from her magic pool and the "contiguous timed jumps to maintain horizontal ground momentum" ability that's unlocked around her domain are those precious few additions to Frey's baseline that do have an impact on how you play and engage with the world, and if there's any will and want to explore the game's world, it should only be done after acquiring them; I frankly don't think the player should have ever been without them with how navigation is built around their use, or made significantly more active of a process in a game that often feels extremely automated to its detriment.

I'm going to think of this game as poorly written both because of the white-people-writing-a-black-protagonist aspects of how Frey is positioned from the story's outset and what stock stereotyping is leaned on in that respect, and also because of the general structure of what the entire narrative is, which is uninspired to the point of absurdity. Everything about it reeks of bought-into Campbellian hero's journey horseshit in a screenwriting 101 three-act structure, with all the projected emotional beats, low-points and eventual resolutions playing out with nothing to say or do for the entire time it takes to run through them. There's even a poor little eight-year-old orphan girl who's killed after like two scenes to provide Frey with a revenge motivation. Forspoken had no chance once it was declared public enemy number one of racists and misogynists, but it's also muddled awareness of what the story it tells is about and is like, and I can't commend something so enormously thematically immaterial, tonally tiresome and superhero origin-packaged just because it was targeted by bigots. I don't know how many supposed punchlines to Frey and Cuff's antagonistic patter are simply a "shut the fuck up", regurgitated in endless iteration, but there's generally no emotive tenor the game doesn't completely overextend itself with, offering no substance to back up the volume of dialogue.

I'm not a great enjoyer of open world games of this type in the first place, but there was nothing about Forspoken mechanically or atmospherically that made me want to linger in its world. It always felt too pointlessly vast for how I experienced it, even though I knew why the breadth was such; my own interest simply limited me to following its direct paths once it became evident there was nothing but a dead world full of nothing much at all everywhere else I could've gone. Every point of disinterest was compounded by quite possibly the worst video game soundtrack I've heard in full, consisting of little else but hackneyed Hollywood-tinged assembly line noise and cliches, not what's supposed to spur one on to engage with the material on a deeper level of appreciation. There's just so little that coheres in the entire game--a few visual aspects like main character designs, and competently-delivered performances delivering dialogue that doesn't rate up to the performers' standard--that leaving it behind having effectively ignored a great many chunks of it doesn't feel particularly wasteful, because given all the chances in the world, it ultimately couldn't justify its own.