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'Forspoken' review: a forgettable adventure inside a kinetic playground
Cuff round the edges
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By Jordan Oloman
25th January 2023
Forspoken is a little chaos. The next game from Final Fantasy XV's Luminous Productions is really a mechanically solid open-world adventure game with a fantasy narrative that's been focus-tested way too far. Plucky orphan Frey Holland is whisked right into a magical world and lumbered with divine purpose, superpowers along with a smarmy British sidekick. You have often seen everything before, but Forspoken's Ny opening, with its foreshadowing pockets of heavy-handed gameplay, doesn't miss an opportunity to bat you within the head with a familiar premise plus some seriously hammy dialogue, leaving a difficult first impression.
The only vibrant book on Frey's dining room table is Alice In Wonderland, and she gets a cardboard escape intend on her bedroom wall. It's not technically long in truth, but it sure seems like a while before you decide to land in Athia, the sizable mythical realm in which the meat of Forspoken takes place. Four big bosses are spread across its landscape, that is corrupted with a suspicious environmental plague known as the Break. Your first stop is the chatty hub capital of scotland- Cipal, which provides Forspoken's archetypal supplementary cast.
Even then, a slow-burn introduction of systems and abilities makes it feel like one long tutorial until about Chapter 5. Forspoken varies of dated mission types, from forced stealth to escort and lots of interact-a-thon exploring jaunts. What's tragic about all of the cutscenes you want you can play is that the ambient open-world gameplay is really heaps of fun when Forspoken lets you from the leash.
The much-marketed magical parkour mechanics feel as top quality because they look, and when you are not holding Circle at all times to include flourish to Frey's movements, you're doing something wrong. Especially when you unlock the mid-game 'Zip' spell -and eventually, surfing – Forspoken ekes out some Spider-Man-esque traversal bliss. If only it didn't have fall damage, which feels like a purposeful bullet to the foot. It helps that the combat is equally as fluid and very moreish, having a hack-and-slash letter-grading system that teases you into some cool combos. Frey blasts, slices and guns down her enemies with a variety of arm-mounted attacks, building towards cool special moves and timely finishers.
It has shades of Remedy's Control while you drift through the air and deliver satisfying trick shots and projectile ripostes, however it lacks the quality encounter design. Outside of arena-based boss battles, you're virtually always fighting in open areas against a litany of spongy predictable creatures. Luckily, the range of magicks, like quirky Gundam lock-on spells and feinted swashbuckling, will keep your fingers interested. Forspoken can seem to be similar to Dynasty Warriors when you take right into a crowd of Break-suffering dorks and start throwing them around like an empty tracksuit together with your elemental Musou magic.
Like its drop-in drop-out, open-world combat, I loved Forspoken's blase approach to resource collection and its pop-up stat-building battles and dungeons. After slogging through tiresome scripted missions, it had been a breath of outdoors to peel through the environment, see some nice vistas and make Frey's skills via optional exploration. Forspoken even has some cool ideas in connection with this, like its collectable nail-painting techniques that provide special ability buffs.
Environmentally speaking, Forspoken is a perplexing mix of detail and absence. It looks like Dark Souls 1 and 3 in equal measure. Sometimes, when it's just Frey and also the environment, the stunning particle effects and nifty animations make Forspoken uniquely beautiful. There's a sequence within the late-game where you parkour through a facsimile of New York which was a genuine feast for that eyes. But it's once the game decelerates, in the cutscenes, hub areas and close-ups, that you start to notice the juxtapositional cracks.
Held items are weirdly big, the creature design is over the place, and some NPC movements are cut together awkwardly. Background characters are uncanny androids that appear to be like they've just walked out of a FIFA crowd, so that they stand out just like a sore thumb next to the photorealistic main cast.
One complimentary holdover from Final Fantasy XV may be the wonderful clothing asset work. The outfits in Forspoken are perfect. The lustre of a puffer jacket, the brilliance of a feathery cape, and exactly how coin accessories and chains glimmer and swing stood out to me. Similar praise must be given to Forspoken's utilization of typography, and its general user experience and interface design, which goes unnecessarily hard. As a tech demo for that Luminous Engine, Forspoken is a remarkable thing – I just wish there was a much better idea to make the the majority of its technical prowess.
Unfortunately, I found a serious clash between the widest-net-possible themes and the photorealistic humanity of Forspoken. There's lots of that old 'Did I just do that? How is this happening – in my experience?!' Whedon-esque whimsy until suddenly likely to oversized gun along with a threat of 'leaving your body within the fucking alley'. Some of the story beats are pretty heavy, too, especially in early stages.
Forspoken loves effing, jeffing and being a bit edgy, but wields its swears like an impressionable teenager who's just emerge from The Wolf Of Wall Street. It's one of the more baffling writing choices, as it puts the game at odds with its 'development hell Marvel movie' vibes. I feel like a script revision to make it family-friendly would have only been a positive because of its potential audience, as it doesn't achieve much using the specifically adult parts of its script beyond creating viral bait for that irony-poisoned. Forspoken is a lot more palatable when it's riffing off of trite-and-tested millennial comedy vehicles such as the absurd clash of real-world objects with fantasy settings and characters that do not understand them. Not exactly groundbreaking, but hey, it really works.
It's a shame since the voice acting talent behind characters like Frey and Cuff is of obvious quality throughout. Most of the side performances are solid too, and there are a few jokes that actually land within the script beyond the clips which have renedered the rounds online. The actors just appear to be working inside a half-baked world, where the protagonist is written to become derisive of their potentially interesting surroundings and very determined to equate everything to some aspect of Ny culture. The common-or-garden Knish gets a surprising amount of script time-
Forspoken has gone out now on PC and PS5. We played it on PS5.
Verdict
There's nothing bespoke about Forspoken's world, which is why it is so challenging distracted by its atmosphere, no matter how it feels to experience. It is a long-haul montage of middling action movie trailers beamed directly into your skull, and you don't even get to watch a cracking film at the end of it. I'm sure the mechanical joy hiding under its disjointed set dressing will be worthwhile for many, however it seems like the kind of flat tire that's destined to have its 'so bad its good' merit extolled in YouTube videos later down the road. It is a rare miss for Square Enix, as its big RPGs are likely to locate an audience, even when they do have a little bit of jank about the subject, but I am not sure Forspoken even knows who it's targeting.
Pros
- Incredible traversal mechanics
- Fun and varied combat
- Stunning assets and textures
Cons
- A predictable story in a half-baked setting
- Clunky mission design
- Poor consistency between 'important' environment and character visuals
