Forewarned about Forspoken

 That's something I do now.

Well, well, well, what have we here? An Isekai, huh? Phew, I'm really scared! And so I should be, considering this is the Isekai known as Forspoken which has been kicking around the gutters of video game press from the better part of the last two years just buzzing for it's chance to be set off out of it's pen to sink or swim on it's own merits. There is no doubt about it, from the word go Forspoken just rubbed the public the wrong way. Personally I took issue with it's bleach white environment scar-tissue motif which littered the world and very much seemed to have been lifted wholesale from the incredible world of Final Fantasy XV; and given the cross-over in team members I'm willing to bet that is close to what happened. Some disliked the 'please like me' dialogue, others the floaty looking movement and combat and some just took one look at the protagonist and said... "the Devs are going to make me hate this girl, aren't they?"

Isn't it funny how a whole spectrum of reactions can lead a vast swathe of people towards the exact same place; being dubiously wary of this how this Forspoken thing was going to turn out? I'm sure that at some point trending perception guided some reactions, but those first few days were pure, everybody had their own reason to find this game just off-putting. Others disliked it more than most of course, but everybody seemed geared towards the same track, with a ticket on the same thought train. It's quite surprising, especially given the somewhat similar announcement and launch of Velma. Only Velma seems to have unified the world in why it sucks, the jokes and writing, for Forspoken it really was scattergun, and some part of me feels really bad for the dev team who had the trouble of putting up with that headache of feedback, which they had to try and combat.

But the time for concerned speculation is well and truly over, Forspoken proper is here and people have played it and they have reactions and those reactions are... heavily mixed. It's rare that the affix of 'mixed' accurately applies to a game's reception, and isn't just used as a diplomatic way for more 'prim and paid for' outlets to justify their useless (7/10) review for titles they don't want to stake their reputation behind but also don't want to lose business relationships by trashing. For Forpsoken, people seem genuinely torn between a style of gameplay that isn't to everyone's tastes, a presentation of story that some found trite and unimaginative and a protagonist that- okay, there's actually little debate there. I think everyone agrees that Frey is just the worst.

A common writing trope of modern media is to subvert the typical moralistic paragon virtue of the leading protagonist by bringing their character down to the level of the ordinary man or woman, often by making them irreverent, crass and just straight rude. Now this isn't anything new per-se, the creation of character flaws to flesh out a narrative is one of the building blocks of general character creation, but the trope I'm referring always seems to generate the same character. An 'above it all' pretentious cur who seems to delight in nothing more than being prickly and unpleasant towards those around them under the vain belief that they are always superior and right. For Frey her personality is meant to be a reflection of the tough life she lived, but for an audience we find it quite difficult to wish better for Frey when she acts in a manner so wholly unworthy of the powers and opportunity dropped in front of her. Quite frankly, she's annoying and rude, why would we even want to play as her?

And of course that isn't even touching on the writing woes behind her dialogue which is so painful that it was met with wide spread mockery even in the advertising stage. Just like another Square Enix game got it's whippings for overuse of the word 'Chaos'; this game has been roasted for copious inhalation of 'Marvel Movie talk' only with a jarring 'edginess' wedged in there in an unholy concoction that just sounds frankly unnatural. Frey will cuss like a sailor in certain scenes, whilst substituting the eye-brow-raising 'freakin' for the F-bomb in others. Plus, my girl uses the word 'Gnarly' to describe a creature which is so horribly misplaced given her generation and that of the supposed target audience (millennials) that I can't help but wonder who this was actually made for. Was this the Boomer executives trying to play out their Isekai gender-swapped fantasy upon themselves under the guise of making it the next 'it' game?

But enough about the character, what about the game? Well, here's where I find myself confused. We all saw those insane system requirements to play this title which most saw as a silent admission of the title being poorly optimised. But maybe the general community has been so acclimatised to horrendously buggy or poor-preforming titles that this one isn't even worth commenting on, because I can't seem to find anyone who finds the performance at all objectionable. What I do see, however, is the actual visuals themselves which seem... just fine. This game requires some of the most advanced hardware in the industry to run at maximum settings, but for the life of me I can't figure out where that power is going. The character models teeter between fine and plain ugly, the world seems vast but largely uncluttered and spacious, the effects are glitzy in that way the Luminous engine loves to be, but not overbearingly so. What in god's name do these system requirements serve?

At the very least the parkour system appears to be getting decent responses across the board as well as the magic, which surprises me because I have to say that this game's combat looks utterly boring; but maybe this is one of those 'looks can be deceiving' sorts of situations. Altogether these reviews have coalesced into an bizzare mix of responses that seem to stretch all the way from 4/10 to 9.5/10... Yeah, I don't why anyone thought to go that high for this game either. It actually is an insult to all the masterpiece titles out there that they have now been slumped into the same peer group as 'Forspoken'. The general consensus appears to be, however, one of rank mediocrity; which is such a lack of a shock coming from modern day Square Enix it almost brings a yawn to my lips just repeating it. And I'm writing right now, which makes that even more stark!

Square Enix were once one of my favourite video game developers around, what with their amazing Deus Ex games, the iconic Final Fantasy franchise and the Nier Automata swansong; but somewhere along the way something had just switched under them and since then no studio under the Square banner has been able to hit it out of the park like they once did. Forspoken isn't quite the absolute nose-dive that I expected it to be, but once again it's just okay, and by some more critical evaluations it's even less than okay- and that seems like such a far cry from the publisher who's name was once attached to some of the greatest industry leaders we had. Perhaps this has just been an extended dry spell that will be broken with Final Fantasy XVI. In fact, we can only slap our palms together and pray that's the way things are heading, because Square needs to get some classics under it's belt again. I need them to get it together again!