The worst of 2023

 

Fandom is a balance between what you love and what you hate, otherwise you fall into a blind fanaticism that helps nothing but the pocketbooks of those who leech your money from you bit by bit. You have to know mediocrity in order to look it in the face and recognise it's shortcomings, if you don't call out the issues then how is the light of quality ever going to shine? The Marvel Cinematic Universe has dropped off a quality cliff in the past few years, but with people calling it out and noting how bad things have gotten, Marvel knows that changes need to be made in order to restore the trust of everyone. Whether or not they actually have the gall to go ahead and make those changes is really up to them. The same should be true in the video game world, where terrible messes of games should absolutely be called for what they are- even if our metric for what constitutes a terrible game might have shifted a little over the years as more insanity has dropped.

Afterall, there was a time when Forspoken was the worst anyone had experienced! Forspoken with it's annoying dialogue, lacklustre narrative, generic and uninspired world, and unengaging combat. (I know there are those who says it was really good, but I struggle to reconcile their insistence with having the thing in my hands.) Forspoken wanted to give us an Isekai story with a relatable cool-girl protagonist and a intriguing story with twists and turns. The problem is just none of those sectors of design came together in any quality fashion, which meant the worst parts glared out like swollen appendages. Chief of all being Frey Holland's dialogue which felt corbelled together from the worst 'witty Marvel protagonists' out there with a sprinkling of extra angst and swearing to whittle away any small hint of charm imbued therein. Forspoken cost it's entire studio as they were promptly shut down, and may have been a factor in the decision of Square to sell off all their Western Studios under the comment of "We don't know how to sell games in the West anymore!"

But that crown was soon stolen by a game that was easily so much worse than Forspoken- the majesty of 'Redfall', a game who's name had been bumping around Bethesda fan forums for years under the belief it pertained to a secret Elder Scrolls Project. In truth it was a confused four person co-op vampire hunting game made by the Dishonoured developers. (But not the main studio) Xbox threw the weight of their marketing efforts behind this game at the start of the year, making the game the belle of their conference- insisting to the world that this was going to be big. They probably should have checked the game first, though. Clearly low budget, creatively confused about how to work in the Arkane identity, plagued with even more 'witty Marvel Protagonist' dialogue, buggy to the point of lacking fun- Redfall was a painfully generic title cooked in a house of creative masterminds underneath the production of Bethesda- and it appropriately sank like a stone for it's sins. 

Which would have given that game the ultimate top spot for worse game of the year without a shadow of a doubt. If Gollum hadn't slid along in the next few months. I think there's a cognitive disconnect with the game Gollum. When people look back on it, granted the distance of time, they squint and comment about how the team were trying to do something, but their talents just weren't up to task. I concede that on paper they maybe had one half-decent idea: the Gollum-Smeagol argument system- but everything else was a total failure in even the design phase. Gollum had no idea what it wanted to be, at any point. A totally glitched to heck mess of painfully boring fetch tasks, mind-blowingly dumb minigames, unimaginably terrible stealth, and a typically bonkers main narrative results in a largely unplayable title. True disaster. Another developer shut down.

But surely that is the worst of the worst right? I mean, there's no way that things could get any worse than- Walking Dead Destinies. I think we all knew what we were getting into when we saw that first trailer with the half-decomposed ventriloquist puppets that were the cast of Destinies. A half decent idea was coined for the game I'll admit, giving the story an 'alternate reality' remodelling. But the game is trash. It's a barely functional mess of half-aborted ideas swirled together in a melting pot and served ungarnished and unseasoned. It is a pitiful, reeking, discharge that rather clearly never made it through a play test unscathed from criticism, or even through one at all. It is a vapid and vain attempt to hold onto a licence that the publisher should never have been granted to begin with, and god knows they should never be entrusted with a popular brand ever again- because Gamemill deliver only trash.

Which was further validated within the exact same quarter when Gamemill released 'Skull Island: Rise of Kong'- a game somehow even worse than Destinies! Kong is perhaps one of the most unfinished officially licenced games you will ever play, to the extent that one famous cutscene features the production still in lieu of the basic animation meant to replace it. The slap-happy gameplay is utterly unchanging and undeveloped throughout the experience, the level design carries the same aimless inanity that children slapping together their first game conjure up. The art direction is a disaster of colour and muddy textures. The models are ill-fitting within the same game and overall bad. That anyone has completed the game is a display of human excellence, because I was certain the thing had never been completed.

But somehow, even with everything bad about the year, my prize for the worst of the worst still falls squarely on the shoulders of The Day Before- simply for the scale of the grift matched with the absolute wasteland of the game delivered. The Day Before managed to fool Nvidia and IGN to be featured prominently on their channels, it led a lie for years about the range of their graphics or the quality of their design concepts, and when the other shoe started to drop they still managed to hide the extent of their disgrace with more false trailers that looked worse than the initial promise, but nowhere near as bad as the final game. The Day Before dropped like a stone from space, picking up momentum with every second until it impacted with such a force it destroyed the company within a blink of an eye- and that, by and large, makes it one of the worst of the year. The extra push over the finishing line would be the fact that entire game was an asset flip when delivered- capping off the worst of 2023's worst. What an honour.

Fast times at Square Enix high!

 There's only enough room for one dragon

Forspoken is one of those games that ol' Nostradamus me just knew wasn't going to make it big from the very second I saw it. I took one look at the visuals, saw recycled assets from Final Fantasy XV for the world, and recycled visual flairs from the tech demo 'Angi's Philosophy' in the character design, (although I would only remember that very recently in a flare of realisation) and mentally checked the thing out as a lazily processed title. Of course that was a very uniformed preliminary assumption of what I was seeing, and there's nothing inherently wrong with reusing old ideas, and even old assets, to create something new and interesting. But something about the way that Forspoken looked, to me at least, just wasn't fitting together. I didn't like the vast-stride canyon jumping, the featureless craggy expanses and especially not the static flick-wrist combat. But first impressions are mere illusions to which we attach far too much significance- I'm sure the game would win me over given time.

And yet, it didn't. Most seemed to get along with the idea of Forspoken at first, even somehow the well-worn idea of an Isekai premise, all until Frey opened her annoying mouth and started to speak. Marketing is an oft scrutinized equation in the formula of game creation, and one often tossed aside as pandering trite; but if there's one example to prove the power of bad marketing- it's Forspoken. Totally misunderstanding the tastes and sensibilities of the audience, misidentifying the strength factors of your game and how best to convey it's tone, and chucking context free cringe-dialogue at the unwary viewer with clueless abandon has to be one of the most self-sabotaging marketing routines the modern industry has seen. Unfortunately, unlike the movie studios who tried to cut the original Blade Runner into an action movie for the trailers, Forspoken doesn't have that same level of quiet genius in the supporting package to win over the misled and ticked off.

Not least of all because the game was being sold for an eye-watering $70; a price tag insisted upon by Square Enix as just payment for the sheer quality of the products they develop and put out... a laughable joke if ever there was one. On the flip-side, and though the comparison seems a little worn by now, I want to present Tango Gamework's Hi-Fi Rush. A thematically irreverent rhythm-accompanied smash action game that was announced and released within the same hour. Only possible thanks the to the combined platform of Bethesda and Microsoft fans, as well as the novelty of that sort of release window; but still an idea that would conceptually be marketing suicide. But by what small metrics we can actually track, digital sales figures, it would appear that in their shared launch week Hi-Fi managed to beat out Forspoken. In revenue. Whilst Hi-Fi Rush was half the price of a traditional premium release. That is just... ouch.

All this is to provide the background for the news that has been flying across all the relevant headlines recently; Luminous Productions, the Square Enix based yet apparently legally distinct development entity, has been announced to be shutting down after a mere month of Forspoken's release. Let me remind you all, that this was only their second full game release after Final Fantasy XV and we still don't know how much of a flop the game actually was, or wasn't; without a rough idea of development costs we can only speculate. I mean, it was certainly a critical flop, but sometimes those games make money regardless. Not enough to justify keeping Luminous around as a studio, however; because those developers are going to be split up and reassigned to the far-away studio of Square Enix. A studio which, as I said, is located in the exact same building that Luminous was. So... not a big change there, I guess. Maybe some cut pay checks.

Still, it's a sad legacy to leave behind. Even Final Fantasy XV had it's problems both before and after the launch of that legendary game. Before there was the whole, you know, fifteen year development period hanging over the entire team. A little bit trying when you've been doing nothing but make the same game for your entire career. After the game came out there was trouble realising the full scope of the potential, whereupon the extent of the game and it's world was supposed to unfurl through the DLC which got cut off mid-way through production. Fans have but rumours about the giant swathes of content they missed out on, but people say that Episode Noctis would have combined some of the scrapped elements from Final Fantasy Versus XIII into the XV timeline! What I wouldn't give to have finally see Stella interact with Noctis- god, we missed out!

And then Forspoken comes along with it's underperformance, itself just the latest in a slew of bad release games which Square Enix has run out of scapegoats to blame. First it was the Deus Ex developers for failing to address the climate and wants of their franchise, which cost them their trilogy; then it was all their western studios at large for just being so weird and hard to market, leading Square to drop them off at uncle Embracer's and never come back. Now we have more failures, and the hammer has to finally land on someone responsible. Sure, Luminous has to fold but it just can't be them. Luminous didn't seize control of every low performing title that Square has put out over the last 4 years. At somepoint you have to turn around to the common denominator: Yosuke Matsuda.

That's right, CEO Matsuda is being tossed out of the corporate window with a golden parachute, leaving all of his cringe inducing promises of metaversal NFT future unfulfilled, stinking up the place. Meaning that the era of his tyrannical rule is over and Square Enix can finally move on under the purview of their new supreme leader: Kiryu Kazuma? (Why do I hear 'Receive You' playing?) Wait, I read that wrong... actually that's Takashi Kiryu, a man who looks like a computer render of the one in the RPG who betrays the group in order to run back to his evil master, only for the dark lord to end up crushing him like a bug because even he can't stand to be around the snivelling little worm of a man. Oh, and he's also got history leading an NFT company in his past.

So it's seems we're on the verge of some historic changes across the Square Enix world, whilst also a historic amount of crap staying exactly the same because of the revolving door of clowns we call the corporate elite. Even with Matsuda out the door and Luminous shuttered, don't think this marks the end of confused titles bouncing off walls with mishot marketing campaigns that kill once decent ideas, all because the powers that be are too busy salivating over the exploitative potential of their WEB3 suger daddies. You expect me to fall about praising the bravery of the company to finally give the slightest amount of change a shot? Or to give this new CEO a chance even knowing exactly what he's all about, where's he going to take Square and how the board of directors probably only brought him on board hoping for a 'play as you earn' tainted future? Yeah, that's a negative to all that. Kiryu can bite and receive me.

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!

Forspoken

But will she rise, though?

Me and Square Enix aren't exactly in sync these days, and the big reason why should be fairly clear. (I've spoken about it out loud once or twice.) At the risk of repeating myself, I'll elaborate: there is no way on this earth I'm every going to give them £70 for a video game, and I don't even care if it's something incredibly close to my own tastes like Final Fantasy VII Remake. (Of course that game is also an Epic Store exclusive, that helps me feel less bad about ignoring it.) And if Final Fantasy isn'y going to win me over, you best bet that this 'Forspoken' game, which leaves such little impression that I would have forgotten it entirely if I hadn't made note of it at every single gaming show I've covered for the last year, hasn't got a chance in hades. (Everytime I've gotten around to talking about the game next on my docket of blogs, I've just been like- "you know what? I'm not feeling it.") But let us take a good look at exactly what a 'next gen' £70 game looks like in Square Enix's eyes.

Aside from having a simply insanely generic name (I mean they must have needed to workshop for months to devise a title that slips out of mind that easily!) Forspoken has a protagonist in a young girl called Frey who is described as a 'New Yorker' (yikes) who gets transported to the 'beautiful and cruel land of Athia'. And if you think that sounds like an Isekai- ding ding, that is indeed the inspiration and you win 10 points! So that's your big next gen £70 idea, is it Square? An Isekai? One of the laziest, artistically bankrupt, done to death genres in all of Anime? I mean sure, this isn't an anime; but that's pretty much it's only saving grace because the anime community would have roasted an Isekai that takes itself seriously in this day and age to death. This genre is so empty that every single ongoing Isekai series right now is at least part born of a parody of the genre and how overdone it is. At the very least, Square, you have to let us see Frey get run over by the Isekai truck, it won't be the same if she doesn't.

But sure, we're doing an Isekai, whatever. What about the game itself, what is that like? Well that has been where this game has scored a few fans, because this very game managed to both stun and wow on it's first showing through merit of superior visualisation of the environment and main character's fluid movement. Like those tech demos for Unreal Engine 5 that were blowing us away last year, Forspoken seemed to challenge the limits of onscreen vertices one could have, or the fidelity of capturing flowing character movement without just resulting to a scrappy blur that everyone turns off within the first few seconds of gameplay anyway. (Seriously, does anyone actually play with motion blur on? Please reach out if you do, I have so many questions.) Nevermind the fact that the world in question, now named Athia, boasted a few instantly recognisable mountain range assets that were clearly lifted (or adapted) from Final Fantasy XV, but nothing ruined the aesthetic- the game looked fine. And it still does, kinda.

And that right there, my lack of being able to commit a game looking great or brilliant or different or diverse, is the point where I start to shake my interest. Because with how many games are flying at us nowadays, with crazy and interesting ideas behind them or world-level modellers breathing life into them, something needs to stand out in the crowd to make a lasting mark. This game should have done that with the fidelity of it's graphics, but it just doesn't. Maybe it's the abundance of vast open... rock. Or wide plateaus of... more rock. There was a lack of diversity. Which is something I think the developers really heeded when coming to make the Game Awards trailer which has been our latest look into this world. But I'm going to be honest right away in saying that I don't think they've gone far enough to convince me that this Athia is going to be the next cool fantasy world I want to explore and know more about so badly- (Which is kind of what you need for an Isekai to work.) but they're on the right track.

This Game Awards gave as our first look at Forspoken's story, which so far doesn't appear to amount to much, what with some hammy cutscenes and odd-looking monster designs that are all either too messy or dark to stick in my mind, oh and some dialogue that just doesn't click at all. (Sneaking 'Freakin' into your script once is highly questionable on it's own, but twice? You need a wordsmith to make that work in a read.) Some of the environments do look cooler than the reveal trailer initially teased, however, and I'm really getting into the 'European medieval with fantastical elaboration' aesthetic they've got going on for the character designs. (They just need to be careful they don't go stepping on Final Fantasy XVI's shoes.) But there's a nagging part of the core design of the game that I really can't come to like, and it's so arbitrary that it's tearing me apart; and that's the weapon. The story has a 'talking weapon' dynamic going on, because ingenuity is dead, and it's this bangle around Frey's wrist which shoots out magic stuff. That's her attack. She just thrusts her hand out and gunk blasts out the other end. I hate it. It's hard to explain why, but I think it makes combat look so lacksidasical and unexciting, and I know this is my own prejudice getting in my head but I can't shake it- I think combat looks off because of that choice alone.

It is annoying, because outside of that stupid arbitrary point of contention I think there's some cool gameplay hints in this trailer. One of which being the way that the hand gunk apparently gets to mess around with elements at some point, potentially setting up elemental combination attacks, and a handy quick shield which might betray some high-speed Sekiro style rush boss fights at some point. (That shield gotta be around for some reason.) I mean the team were even kind enough to put together a gameplay trailer which- oh, okay this sort of looks like how the back of my mind was saying it would. Yeah- I think that maybe the call for a gameplay trailer was mandated by Square proper and the team really didn't have the time to throw together your typical vertical chunk with exciting moments, set pieces and, you know, a purpose.

Looking at the gameplay trailer, this game almost feels like a beta build of a DMC 2 remake, for the bland desert level the game wants explored, the complete circumvention of several fight scenes (for no apparent reason) and then a passive looking zombie bout that does little to prove itself 'impressive' or 'exciting'. It's... well it's boring to watch. And I think it's a good thing this little gameplay snippet isn't exactly well known, because this isn't the kind of foot forward you want for your game. Although at the same time this looks exactly like I expected it to, so I'm trying to figure out if there is a solid game here at all. I know there are more solid vistas, but will the fighting be compelling in any significant, and crucially lasting, way? I would say that it's a wait-and-see topic, but with the 'curse of forgetting' this game seems perpetually under, I may and many others might not remember to check up on this game when it launches. (Only when writing this blog did I realise there was a whole other story trailer released not that long ago; marketing are doing this game dirty!)

But those are just my hopes for any game to do well, then I'm forced to remember how this title is being weaponised as a vanguard in Sqaure's attempt to normalise extortionate game pricing and my sympathies dry up fast. I'm sure this is a mandate from Square corporate and the developers aren't at all involved with pricing concerns, but that doesn't change the fact that this title is now embroiled in something toxic for all the industry, and if it does well then that will encourage the rest of this industry to jump aboard a 'nakedly hostile to consumers' trend. It makes an already hard to find game even harder to like, and that is currently where I'm at with Forspoken right now. (I was so close to writing 'Forsaken'; what a terrible title.) It's an invisible game, with never ending marketing woes and a deathly legacy tied to it's success, needless to say I am not a ready fan waiting with bated breath. Not today, and maybe not in a perfect future where Square realise their folly and sell this game for a reasonable price either.