Forspoken

I didn't even want to write this review, but while going for 100% completion in this game, I almost lost my mind, so I HAVE TO vent about it to preserve my sanity. 🟢 The Good The Core Gameplay: First things first: the game is actually fun to play, which is why I tried going for 100%. The game is quick, responsive and fun to play with a unique twist to the combat system... at least initially. 🔴 The Bad The 20-Hour Wall: The thing is, the game is only fun for the first 20 hours or so; after that, it becomes straight-up torture. It feels like a social experiment to see how long someone can do the same thing over and over again before going crazy. The Combat System Illusion: While it is fun at first, you're going to reach a point where every encounter simply revolves around spamming every single ability you possess with little to no strategy at all, transforming one of the positives of the game into yet another con. An empty Open World: The way they handled the open world is borderline insulting. There is nothing to discover, nothing to interact with, and no secrets. Just the same activity repeating itself a billion times because the developers couldn't help but copy-paste over and over and over again. The Story & Writing: Speaking of the story... Yeah, it's actually trash, there is really nothing else to say. The concept was cool, but the writing must've been done by a 14-year-old. It's so bad that sometimes I couldn't believe what I was watching. ⚠️ Final Verdict Seriously, you can finish the main story and all the side quests in about 20 hours, after which you're left with literally nothing but the exact same activity for the rest of your playtime. If you ever want to play this game, I recommend completing the story, enjoying the gameplay for what it is, and then dipping out immediately. Unfortunately for me, I like to 100% games and, as I said, I was actually enjoying it at first, so I thought to myself: "I'm almost done, I'll just go for it." Little did I know I was about to experience hell. The crazy thing is that it didn't even take me that long, but the repetitiveness was just too much to bear. What a shame.

I wanted to love this game but several glaring issues prevented a positive review. The writing is bad; the combat is convoluted; the story incomplete; and it was, generally, very difficult to care about the people in the world. I should mentioned SE actually shifted staff from FF15 to work on Forspoken. That's why a lot of the planned DLC for FF15 was canceled. The game even looks like FF15. [b] Writing [/b] The game had 4 writers and the writing is...bad. My primary issue with the writing is the lack of character development and character psychology. • Frey is an orphan. In New York. None of what she does in the game reminds the player that she was an orphan. She has two cliched tropes: loner and rebel. Why does she rebel? Give the player an example of Frey's current rebelliousness by showing us previous interactions with authority figures. She’s a loner? Why? • She was supposed to steal a car for the gang she’s a part of but was caught (hence the court appearance). The gang doesn't care about the circumstances, only the failure (surprise, surprise) and try to harm Frey. How did she get involved with this gang? Frey's 23 years old and weighs no more than a sack of wet rice. A young, female orphan in New York keeps her head down. • Give us a reason to sympathize with the protagonist. Thus far, she was present as a willing participant in criminal activities. I don't understand why we ought to feel sympathy? I think the writers thought we'd sympathize for Frey because she's an orphan, in spite of everything we had been given about Frey up until that point. Show us why would sympathize, not tell us. This is rule 1 in any basic creative writing course. The dialogue is worse. Everybody has seen the videos. As a reminder, Frey's mocap and voice actor, Ella Balinska, is British. She speaks American the way American is spoken in English language dubbed anime. • Nothing about what she says and how she says it is uniquely New York. She is transported to a new world and speaks to the people there like she's still in her own world (with both slang and jargon). • What's worse is the inhabitants of that world understand her. I don't see how that would be possible. Children can't change their speaking habits to accommodate the people they're speaking to because they don't know how. What's Frey's excuse? The lore is interesting. The world is split into region and each region is ruled by a "Tanta". The world is being corrupted by something Frey names "the break". I won't spoil too much, but [spoiler] the town she goes to is attacked by an avatar of one of the Tantas. After defeating the avatar, she's told she has to kill the real Tanta to actually stop her. That's a line Frey doesn't want to cross, but ends up crossing anyway. [/spoiler] • The townsfolk are putting a lot of pressure on Frey to save them and she starts to buckle. This would make sense if we knew anything about Frey's psychology specifically. • Frey is clearly overwhelmed by everything that is happening to her, but she lashes out. Why? We get bits and pieces of cliched responses about being orphaned and her fear of abandonment, but what does that have to do with the townsfolk? They didn’t do anything to Frey. • She behaves the way a loner and rebel would behave: selfish and egoistic. But nothing thus far has given us any indication as to why Frey specifically should be behaving this way. What happened to her to cause her to behave this way? What happened to her that she has sheer disdain for people who are facing annihilation? • The writers were given several opportunities to make us care about Frey, or, at the very least, flesh out her psychology a little more to give us pivotal information about her development so we might even root for her, but, unfortunately, they failed. Everything about Frey is something the writers assume we should generally know about being an orphan in New York. She remains totally unlikable for about 4/5 of the game. I don't understand why writers think players want to spend 40 hours with unlikable characters. [b] Combat [/b] I really disliked the combat. It's entirely possible that I didn't understand the combat and chaining different elements together for more powerful combos, but I didn't do any of that and beat the game. Enemies have weakness, and once you find them you can switch to that element and spam attack. • There are 4 elements and each attack in each element has three levels of charge. You can depress the attack button once for a single attack or hold it to allow the attack to charge. OR you can dash into a full level 3 charge. • The game has 105 total spells spread across the 4 elements. How are we supposed to sift through all those spells in combat? This necessarily forces the players to chose the most powerful spells and stick to those. This game, from a combat perspective, is basically FF15-2. • SE released major patches to address some of the issues with the combat, even allowing players to switch specific combat mechanics off. This tells me they oversold the combat to SE and what they planned did not translate well. • There is a dodge, but it doesn’t work as a dodge per se. It doesn’t actually create distance, so any AoE attacks will hit Frey no matter what, disincentivizing close range combat. • Without a functional parry system, open world action RPG’s will always have a subpar combat system. The game does have its positive attributes. The world is gorgeous. The colors are vibrant and work well together. The voice acting, aside from Frey, is done well. These, obviously, aren’t enough to save the game. I beat the game, spent over 100 hours in it and got every achievement so my review would be presented with as much objectivity as possible.

Gameplay is ok. The story is a let down. The main character is insufferable. The final boss fight is also a bit bland. Overall, it is not that great.

A Misunderstood Gem with Incredible Gameplay I’ve put 41 hours into Forspoken so far, and I still haven’t even finished the main story because I’m having too much fun checking every single nook and cranny and collecting everything on the map. It completely baffles me why this game got so much hate online. Is it perfect? No. Sometimes the world can feel a bit blank, and yeah, some of the side fights get a little repetitive. But let’s be real—what open-world game nowadays doesn’t have that? It’s pretty hard to find a game where every single encounter is 100% unique. What matters is that the core magic parkour and combat loop are so fun that I don't even care about the repetition. Zooming around and combining different elemental spells feels amazing once it clicks. As for Frey, I know everyone complained about her being "cringe," but people completely ignore her backstory. She’s an orphan who grew up rough on the streets of New York. Her swearing, defensive attitude, and awkward jokes actually make sense for someone with that kind of trauma. She’s putting up a wall. Watching her slowly lower her guard and grow into her role actually felt pretty realistic to me.

Игра интересная, но рекомендую брать по большой скидке, слишком мало для такой цены. Мир огромен- тот же момент кажется пустым, анимации слабенько сделаны, сцены как-будто замылены. Сюжет хороший - но хороших сцен мало, отдельно можно подчеркнуть дракона и финал, остальное не вызывала интереса. Побочные задания кажутся скучными и ненужными, разве только ради заметок и всё. Подземелья одинакова выглядят, только босс меняется. Мне понравилась система умений и игровая боёвка, но почему не дали возможность менять облик? Это же ведьма! :0 Оставлю положительный отзыв, если бы не то, что я выше написал, оставил бы отрицательный отзыв. Потенциал у игры был, но кто-то решил сделать игру странной) 6/10

I genuinely don't know why this game gets all the hate it got! I played it because the demo was so fun with the magic system and traversal that I really wanted to get the game someday. I got it on sale of course but with the expectancy of utter trash game other than the combat. I was pleasantly surprised by the story, it was very predictable for the most part, but actually pretty cool, made a lot of sense, and wrapped things up well. I played the game in French and then Japanese language, which I think made the "cringe" lines actually pretty cool haha. I enjoyed the banter of Frey with other characters in the world, I really enjoyed exploring the world as well. I actually got attached to some of the characters too Q.Q, Frey's attitude and personality makes SO much sense when you consider her background, and it was really wholesome seeing her grow into her role. The gameplay is sooo fun, and yes the open world gets repetitive and a lot of it is bland/filler, but they give you tools to traverse it very quickly to get to where you need to go so it doesn't really ever feel that much because of how fast you go through it. You zip zap zoop, or zwoooshh, wherever you need to go and the fighting and combat is soooo fun!!! The enemies could be varied more, but the combat is so fun, it doesn't really matter imo because it's just a flex of your magic powers and using them in cool and creative/fun ways. TLDR: give it a shot, the story is actually solid, gameplay loop is really fun and engaging, traversing is super easy and smooth. Play it in a different langauge(♥♥♥ preferred, the voice acting is fantastic, doesn't match the lips but eh, I liked it anyway lol)

been nearly 2h and what i've done so far is more listening to the story. is to much story telling and less gaming

Great movement and combat system. Loved exploring the world. Nice twists in narrative. Banter between characters is rewritten and far more palatable in non-English languages (I played in Japanese)

i could have gotten over the hilariously bad dialogue if the gameplay was even remotely interesting or had any sense of weight or it felt like i was actually doing anything at all. at least make me aim at the enemy if all im gonna do is stand back and spam R2. not even a fun bad game unfortunately. looked a bit pretty at least

I'm writing this review early because I feel compelled based on the reviews I read that almost swayed me away from the game. I'll update it once I get further through the game as well. I was expecting a trash and cringe story, lackluster world, etc. What I've found so far is the polar opposite! I really like the story thus far, the dialogue isn't any more cringe than modern super hero movies, I've found it even to be quite emotionally compelling. The soundtrack is great, and I rarely care at all about the game's soundtrack. The combat and traversal is phenomenal, with what seems like a system that will open to all kinds of possibilities and lots of exploration. We'll see if it holds up as I get further in the game, but as of right now it seems like it's totally worth the sale price and the barrage of negative reviews are mostly just bandwaggon hoppers.