Forspoken review

When Forspoken was first announced by Square Enix, I liked it very much and started to wait, thinking it might be a good game. After all, they were coming up with a completely new IP that used the Final Fantasy XV engine and had powers almost like Avatar (animated, not made-up movie). It had good promises such as hopping parkour mechanics, roaming freely in the huge world on the verge of disaster, using elemental powers to knock down enemies. Moreover, the staff consisted of very interesting names. So it was difficult for the game to turn out badly, well done, they succeeded.

Forspoken review / PS5

From Street Boy to Hero

We meet our main character, Frey, in a courtroom. Frey, who testified for his previous crimes and his recent “car theft,” escapes jail thanks to the judge’s goodwill gesture and we find ourselves wandering around New York City. Threatened by a group of vagrants for failing to steal a car, Frey goes to his cat after he manages to get rid of them. The vagrants find his house, the money he saved for escaping is destroyed in the fire, Frey, who entrusted his cat to the judge, goes to the place where the bracelet that caught his attention is going to do something, and puts it on his arm, and all of a sudden, we find ourselves in another world, with the talking bracelet that we can’t take off our arm.

The name of the world in which we find ourselves is ruled by divinely powerful beings called Athia and Tanta. One day, these entities with the name of Tanta begin to behave strangely, at the same time a kind of epidemic – curse called “Break” appears, slowly starting to corrupt everyone who is exposed. By spoiling, exposed people turn into zombie-like beings, animals become wild beasts and so on. People beg the Tantas, but no help comes. Together with our bracelet, which we call Cuff (handcuffs), which has been in this world before (in fact, it wants us to call it armrest), we start the adventure themed “I’ll go home, I don’t care, but I will avenge the people I met 5 minutes ago”.

The Forspoken story deals with the “Iseaki” theme, which is a very popular concept especially in Japan, that is, the adventure of our main character who finds himself in another world. Isekai concept, which I think is used a lot, could be nice for the story of this game, if it wasn’t a bit too standard story. The story has some surprising twists, but you pretty much already guessed most of it. The characters don’t last long enough to be liked, the dialogues are weird, the cutscenes are already very interesting.

The dialogues of the game are interesting and I am not talking about Frey’s way of speaking when I say this. They are quite logical, actually, if a street child in his twenties were born into a new world, he could talk like that. But the characters do not know each other, nor do they get acquainted with each other at a level that makes them talk to each other, when did I establish an emotional connection with this person and I started to care. I wonder if there were dialogues that I didn’t see during the scene transition?

I guess they gave the editing job to the intern while they were doing the cutscenes. The intern applied his newly discovered “Fading” scene transition to every scene, but applied it so irrelevantly that I can’t tell. While the camera is rotating around the character, the scene transition effect comes on, you expect it to shoot from another angle, but no, the camera continues to rotate. From where?! Come on, it was difficult to animate in the game, instead of feeding the sheep, you pressed a transition effect, why in the cutscene?! If I played an independent game, I would say the budget was not enough, that is not possible either.

They had good ideas when they founded the world, but they are weak in presentation, most of the interesting events are described in the books you find on the right and left. You expect people to read this, but why should I read the books when I don’t care about Athia and her events?

As a result, I didn’t enjoy the story, I couldn’t warm up to the characters and it made me a little sad. Anyway, the story may be an important factor, but it should also look at the gameplay, maybe the game will save itself thanks to the fun gameplay.

I Use My Elemental Powers to Throw Stones

In the Forspoken world, with the help of Cuff, we can use special elemental powers. When we first come to Athia, we have the powers of the earth element. This unlocks the ability to “throw stones at the enemy’s head,” which is the first thing anyone new to elemental powers will do. With the struggles we will make later, we start to use different elements and their powers.

For example, the element of fire, the second power we get. I got bored playing with earth, I prefer melee in such games, I didn’t use magic or guns while playing Final Fantasy XV, melee was more enjoyable, but it’s nice to have a choice. Here, too, we can use it as a sword when we receive the element of fire. Fights suddenly became more fun. I was happy and even thought “others will be different, we can fight by combining skills, it’s great”. Then the other elements came and my thoughts flew away.

The “the idea is nice but not implemented” feeling in Forspoken’s story is also present in the fight. There are 4 elemental strengths but 3 of them are the same, they are different in visuals and elemental durability, but their gameplay is the same. The producers were officially lazy and said, “Let them all shoot from afar, tatata”. At that time, one of them said “I completed the fire alone” and I guess they put it differently. We use many elements as weapons, there are guns – rifles – shotguns in the ground, even directly. Water and electricity also come with abilities that are different in theory but do not change the gameplay.

Apart from normal attacks, of course, we also have abilities that have cooldowns, we can take roots and attack, summon helpers, use interesting features, but it doesn’t work, no matter what I do in the fight, I couldn’t enjoy Final Fantasy XV. Again, we can combine elements and make visually beautiful moves, but it’s not fun to play. Let’s just say let’s play with a sword, this time there are fire resistant types, you get bored while playing so that it ends, so I tried.

When I saw the parkour mechanics, I said “this looks fun”, it didn’t work either. We can’t run and jump as we want, the character has animations, but climbing the wall, jumping from one place to another, etc. does not happen as you think. You say to jump from building to another, he does not jump, you ask him to climb stairs, he acts as if he is jumping off a cliff. They’ve already put an interesting fall damage into the game, Cuff usually protects, but it’s also a big disadvantage. If you try to climb the wall, it happens in a strange way by jumping, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t understand what they thought when they put this mechanic into practice. I think it was said, “The players can reach places we don’t want with a comfortable parkour mechanics, crawl them”. We reach it again, but in Skyrim, the parkour system is like climbing a flat wall.

The world of the game is presented as having lost most of its population after a disaster, with the rest gathered in a city. While traveling in the open world, we can see “break zombies” who lost their lives while traveling to the city, animals that have turned into monsters and special spots among the ruins of the pre-disaster world. The open world isn’t as lively as it should be, but I’d say post-disaster. The city where the survivors gather is not alive either.

NPC characters that don’t move a bit, meaninglessly big, but as Frey said, “completely back streets” city structure, not being able to move as we want because of invisible walls. On top of that, running around is a problem because we can’t use our parkour skills. Such cities can be accepted in MMORPG or JRPG games, players are already running in one of them, they keep the city small in JRPG and so on. It didn’t happen here, you would have either reduced its size or the number of people would have increased a little.

The side quests called “Detour” range from interesting to “very boring”. In fact, the mission structure of a strange game makes things that can be given with cutscenes make you do things like “walk two steps”, increasing the gameplay time (I experienced this in One Piece Odyssey as well), and you get bored quickly when the mission rewards are not interesting. For example, there is the task of taking a photo, the reward is more photo filters.

Finally, there are optional dungeons, a nice idea, but not in practice. We run from the beginning to the end of the dungeon, defeat the enemies in the rooms in front of us, and finally beat a boss. It’s extra tedious to do this in “copy-paste” dungeons, since fights are boring anyway. In the 3rd dungeon, I left it by saying “the first dungeon was enough for me”.

There was a promise of visual feast

Forspoken was actually a game that confused me visually. I haven’t watched much of the game’s development videos, so my expectations weren’t too high. I also thought it didn’t look bad, but after playing for a while, my opinion changed a bit. The game doesn’t look bad, but whether that means it looks good is debatable. I can say that the in-game graphics are at the level of cutscenes from PlayStation 3 games. It flows, looks good, but I can’t say very well.

First of all, the magic effects look very nice. When I switched to Ray Tracing mode, I saw some very nice magic animations, especially water and fire attacks. In performance mode, I was able to play most of the game with both acceptable images and a smooth 60 fps experience. Let’s just say until the water element comes into play.

The water animations of Forspoken, which has been released exclusively for PlayStation 5 on consoles for at least 2 years, cause FPS drops in the performance mode of the game. Now, just as the effects worked, you can suddenly find yourself falling to 40 FPS. My switch to Ray Tracing mode coincides with these periods. I played with very nice animations at 30 FPS. You feel that the screen drops a little when it gets crowded, but it doesn’t break the fluency. But you’re a console exclusive game, didn’t the producers ever look at it?

We talked about the quality level of the game’s dialogues above, but there is one more problem. There is a short wait between each dialogue, as if the game is searching for the right dialogue and loading it into the character. Seriously, we wait at least 1 second during each conversation. Already while the facial animations are being made, the nose of the characters is fixed, so they look a bit artificial when talking, and there are cutscenes that constantly hit us with the fact that we are playing video games when the cooldown is added to it.

The music of the game was very good, Bear McCreary, whom we know from God of War, and Garry Schyman, who worked on Bioshock – Shadow of Mordor/War games, became the best part of the game when it comes to music. I loved the main theme, the in-game music is very nice, but there is a strangeness on the usage side. Basically, I’m entering a new area, the environment is green, there is no threat in sight, but the music playing is the kind of “stealth mission” tension. Or the musician in the city plays music and sings but does not sing, the music comes in unrelated ways and so on. The OST album is nice, but it’s controversial in the game.

Conclusion

Frankly, I was hopeful about Forspoken, even saying that I was the one who volunteered to review it, saying, “This game can’t be that bad.” It’s not really “that bad”, the points that people call bad on the internet are actually acceptable aspects of the game. Forspoken made me very sad with its wasted combat system, parkour mechanics that didn’t work properly, its really dead open world and weak story rather than storyline. If it was the first game of an independent company, an AA game released with AAA price, I could still say better things. But the enjoyment I got while playing Biomutant (Biomutant review), which meets what I said, was many times more than this game.

I wish I could write a little longer, explain the game’s challenge mechanics, character strengthening tactics, crafting and item system, but I think I wrote a lot for this game. Playstation 5 version I definitely do not recommend buying Forspoken, which is on sale at the PSN Store with a price tag of 699 TL. It is not even possible for me to recommend you buy it without a serious discount. I played to the finish because I was going to do a review, but during that time I had the thought “I would have more fun if I played SpongeBob’s new game”. His review will follow shortly.