At one point in time, the biggest game Square Enix has when the PS5 was announced was Project Athia, a new IP from the team behind Final Fantasy XV (now rebranded as Luminous Productions). That later became Forspoken, and once the publisher revealed the next numbered Final Fantasy entry and the sequel to Final Fantasy VII Remake are also coming to PS5, Forspoken seemed to become somewhat estranged.
Forspoken is still a PS5 console exclusive (there is a PC version available), but most of the Squenix fanbase have all left Forspoken forsaken.
It’s a shame, because there are definitely some good aspects and ideas in Luminous Productions’ first new game free from the baggage and mounting expectations of the Final Fantasy name. Yet somehow, its fleeting freedom is shackled by numerous design and writing issues.
Presentation
Forspoken looks good on PS5. It runs well enough on performance mode with only a few noticeable framerate drops despite having twenty or so small enemies on screen with the particle effects all popping off. You’re trading off visual clarity (read: blurry and smoothen-out imagery) for something averaging 60 fps in performance mode, and it’s totally a fair trade. But for those that can stick to 30 fps but want consistent resolution, or want those sweet sweet ray tracing effects, those are available too.
The sound effect design is impeccable too. The swooshes and vooshes when you go magical parkouring, the impact of falling off a cliff only to be protected by magical wards that sonically shatter like they are made of brittle glass, the crisp of fiery rage when you channel red magic. There’s great attention to detail in each magic power being channelled, and pair that with the impressive particle effects and mesmerising geometries that appear when you use magic, and it makes for an audio/video splendour.
However, the world design of Athia in general feels… bland. It feels plain, both figuratively and literally since most of the lands are just empty plain after empty plains. The design of buildings, abandoned towns and the few man-made monuments do look extravagant and impressive at times, but when the few buildings that you actually interact with like the Pilgrim Refuges and the Guild Towers are all copy-pasted in looks and layout, that impressiveness is drowned by excessive asset reuse.
There are plenty of well-sculpted rocky cliffs in Athia, but other than that, this supposedly fantasy land looks too real and grounded for its own good. The lands look and feel uninspired, not enticing enough for the curious eye to go around and see “Ooh this looks interesting! Let’s head there!” which is something you don’t want to happen for an open-world game.
It doesn’t help that there’s plenty of fog and smoke that covers your line of sight, probably there for technical reasons. And the idea that the world-corrupting Corruption is basically a fog and storm effect with different colour palates made this supposedly malevolent phenomenon feel unthreatening.
This is supposed to be a magical fantasy world, why not go more imaginative, or just go bonkers with how to portray this apocalyptic doom? This isn’t supposed to be a “fantasy based on reality”, go ham!
The local flora and fauna of Athia aren’t much different than on Earth either. There are sheep, chickens and cats living in the main city of Cipal. Speaking of, my goodness Forspoken has one of the best depictions of cats. Those fluffy furballs look ever more so cute in this game than in other titles I’ve played before that feature cats.
By now everyone has an opinion about how the characters in Forspoken speak. Objectively speaking, the voice performance is fine, good even. When full performance capture is used, it looks great, but you can clearly see the difference in how characters move when they are restricted to only in-game animations. Which is fine.
The soundtrack, however, is bland, boring and generic. The orchestra arrangement sounds like a bunch of tripe orchestral noises than an enchanting melody that could’ve evoked an emotion or enhanced a story moment. The main track you hear at the start game screen, the haunting hums paired with trap beats, is the best thing you’ll hear from the soundtrack. And the one song near the end of the game- that did give me goosebumps- but then the sequence goes for so long and the song starts looping over and over and it stops being epic.
The UI is rather interesting, in the way that the menu uses a fish-eye effect, for… reasons. Thankfully it doesn’t make any of the text illegible, so this is the sort of “go ham” I wanted to see more in Forspoken, the developers are trying something. Setting the style aside, navigating the menus and finding the things you need is easy and fast, as any good UI does.
But I do have a nitpick on the crafting menu. You just hold a button to continue crafting and adding the stat, which starts slow but becomes progressively faster as you keep holding. Good idea, but as you keep holding the button, the stat will increase to the point that you reach a different tier which then requires a different material. I wish the UI allows you to hold until you max out that tier, but have it stop and make you hold the button again to confirm you do want to continue upgrading with the new materials. I did say it’s a nitpick.
Gameplay
In Forspoken, you play as Alfre “Frey” Holland, a downtrodden New Yorker with a checkered past. You’ll spend the whole of Christmas Eve with her, following her struggles with life, only to suddenly find herself transported into another world. She now ends up in the dying world of Athia, with a talking vambrace she calls Cuff cuffed to her arm, and now she seeks a way home. Also, she now has magic powers.
The game wants to relate this as an Alice In Wonderland-esque journey, as Frey drops down into the rabbit hole into a world of wonders. But for you cultured gamers out there, Forspoken is essentially an isekai story.
Since we’re talking about the story, it’s time we address the elephant in the room. What’s going on with the game’s writing? Despite Luminous Productions being a Japan-based developer, the presentation and story writing here are done to appeal to a Western audience. Hence, the Alice in Wonderland analogy. There are some big names attached to the writing team behind Forspoken, and what we got is.. a game full of cringe quips? At least that’s what people on Twitter keep on saying.
But honestly, the quips aren’t all bad when in context (they are, however, mostly not funny). But that is unfortunately the tone of writing that goes on for most of the game. Everyone in Athia speaks in old-timey British English you’d expect to hear from a medieval-time setting whilst Frey from New York here speaks in modern-day lingo (which also means no one reacts to all her excessive cussing). You get your fish-out-of-water story moments as banter (folks trying and failing to pick up on Frey’s slang words) which I find to be okay. There’s work done to ensure Frey feels believable in adjusting to this new world she happened to get isekai’d into, that’s cool.
Attempts at witty banter (which mostly comes out unfunny) aren’t really the big problem with Forspoken’s story. Rather, I find that Frey is just insufferable, with conflicting motivations that make it hard to understand her perspective let alone root her on her journey. And as she’s discovering herself throughout the game’s story, she’ll be making bad decisions that I wasn’t able to empathise with. It doesn’t help that she’s just overly abrasive towards everyone. The normal banter between her and Cuff sounds way too toxic for me. I guess Frey likes cats, and that’s the only bit I was bewitched (or rather, forspoken) of her character for most of the game.
Sure, you can say that the beginning chapter is supposed to make you understand how Frey is behaving like that, but that shouldn’t excuse her for being a character so hard to like.
And no, having a big lore dump of revelations at the end of the game doesn’t excuse it either. The idea of having the final act giving you a perspective to recontextualise all the previous events is a cool one, but Forspoken missed a trick- it needs to make those previous events something the audience cared about.
That all being said about the game’s messy story and writing, gameplay-wise, Forspoken is actually fun! It’s a bit quirky but it works. You have one attack button and one button to launch support spells and pressing both when you have the meter full to do a Surge Spell, your ultimate attack essentially.
The one-button-attack gameplay means that yes, you do have to mash the same button over and over. Some spells might make your finger sore thanks to the power of the DualSense adaptive triggers because it makes the trigger a bit firmer. And combos are more about how you varied the magic spells usage, like holding the attack button to activate a special spell, doing parkour vaulting before attacking, or switching around the many, many different spells you can use, so much that you need two dedicated weapon wheel buttons (one for offensive spells, the other for support magic).
There are four different magic elements Frey gets access to, all corresponding to the PlayStation’s face button colours coincidentally (Purple, Red, Blue, Green). Some enemies are weak or strong to one of the elements, so you are expected to switch between the elements during combat. It’s a spectacle when the combat gets going, where you can end up having dozens and dozens of enemies surrounding you only for them to all be defeated by your mighty Surge Spell of awesomeness. But don’t expect too much of a challenge, you can get by mashing R2/Right Trigger and spam the spells while avoiding attacks.
On that note, Forspoken is weird for not having an active block button. Instead, Cuff will auto-block some attacks for you- which you can respond with a counter which you usually won’t because the input window is so short- or you just take the hit. Cuff can also take a fatal hit once- leaving you with a sliver of health- and there’s a long cooldown before he can do it again. Avoiding attacks is also easy to the point of mindless, just hold the parkour button and you’ll probably jump and vault over projectiles and enemies.
Forspoken’s combat system is quirky like that. It’s not standard (there’s no aim button). It can be a bit fiddly (the auto-lock is hit-and-miss, and using the red magic’s long-range spell is weird because sometimes the game registers the button press attack as well, which is a melee attack, which you probably didn’t want to do when you were holding the button in the first place). But it can be fun.
The real star of the show is Frey’s free running skills, or parkour. Once unlocked, you run so, so, so fast that traversing kilometres upon kilometres of the open plains in Athia feels so, so, liberating.
You’re limited by stamina at first, which really kills the flow, but there are ways to mitigate this issue. The idea is to use Shimmy (press the jump button just right after you land to do a bounce back and refill one portion of stamina) and then continue running with Flow. Or do infinite bunny hops if you time the Shimmys just right. The idea of managing stamina by adding variety to your parkour is interesting.
Once you got the right upgrades and abilities, free running becomes an active action where you have to chain shimmies, zipping up and swing around town and then wave-riding on water to keep on running around at the speed of sound (got places to go gotta follow my rainbow).
The power of magical parkour compels me to just go out and about and reach the far-flung regions of Athia. The lands are littered with your usual open-world hotspots, with a handy list of all discoverables available on the map screen to really hammer home this is one of the checklist-clearing open-world games.
And by that, don’t expect too much variety in terms of what to find at each spot on the map. A deserted town? Probably an enemy ambush. A Guild Tower? Probably has the same floors and a few enemies. A labyrinth? Probably just two or three corridors leading to a group of enemies, which ends with a large room with a boss fight. It’s all cookie-cutter, repetitive open-world design that some folks dread and others may find enjoyable.
The open world offers some distractions including dungeons, high-score runs and, interestingly enough, treasure chests locked behind sliding puzzles. Don’t worry, the puzzles are too hard (most of the Normal difficulty ones can be solved by 3 moves or less) and there’s an accessibility option to skip them.
Even if the destinations are not that enticing, the act of going there is so fun that I find myself more often than not going off the critical path and seeing if I can reach that place. Despite the huge plains and plateaus the world has, there’s also plenty of elevation and you can’t just Skyrim it by repeatedly jumping on a face of a cliff to somehow reach up the top. Figuring out the paths to get to a point of interest is part of the fun.
Forspoken understands that for an open-world game, traversal needs to be fun. And the parkour abilities absolutely do exactly that. It can still be further refined though, like having more ways to deal with falling. The Zip ability can work by latching to the ground for safe falling but it’s too fiddly for that, and the ability to float down to soften a landing is locked way, way in the late game for it to be of good use.
Throughout the game, you’ll be collecting many, many materials found littering around the ruins of civilisation (tip: enable auto-pick-up items in the Accessibility menu). And these can be used for crafting. The crafting and upgrade system is also quirky and sort-of interesting. Frey can find necklaces and robes that she can wear, all of them having stats and slots for passive abilities. The interesting bit here is that all the robes and necklaces can be upgraded to max stats and have the passives you want freely. If you want to stick to the one loadout but keep making it relevant by upgrading the stats regularly? Sure. Want to wear that sick red robe you just found but the stats are not good? Make it good. Dress however you like.
There are still incentives for finding new necklaces and robes, and that’s to unlock new passive abilities. Once you discover gear with a new passive, that’ll be unlocked for crafting. And from there, you customise the gear with any passive you like. Some of them are way, way too situational with descriptions that are too long (for example, Recovering from Defenselessness Boosts Surge Magic Recharge Rate). If the combat system is a little tighter these situational passives might shine a bit more- as it rewards players for being smart in buildcrafting and min-maxing. As it is right now, just slap whatever and you should still be fine.
But I do like the idea of making any gear viable for any content, but still making the act of earning new gear worthwhile. That’s another thing Forspoken got right.
Content
For an open world game, Forspoken is rather short. It took me 20 hours to finish the game, and still faff about exploring optional parts of the world. Short here doesn’t mean bad, it just means that main game is rather lean and its critical path can easily be beelined through. I’d say 15 hours is all you need to just finish the story by only following the main missions.
As previously mentioned, most of the content in the open world are the usual cookie-cutter, uninspiring kind of content. There are barely any surprises. Heck, even all the locations tell you what reward you’d be getting for completing the area, and when you dangle that carrot on a stick, I was definitely less inclined to explore areas where your only reward is lore.
Lore unlocks shouldn’t be put on the same level as robes and necklaces unlocks, if you ask me. Especially when the world of Athia doesn’t seem that interesting to begin with. It’s a world similar to ours (but with wilder rocky landscapes) where four aunties rule the lands after a big war until suddenly they went mad and unleashed a pandemic fog. There are efforts in world-building, but other than that one sentence everything else in Athia resembles too much of our own world to really be hyped up as this magical, fantasy land.
There are side missions available but most of them are forgettable time wasters. And with the story being like that (the good bits only unfold at the end) you probably want to rush seeing this through rather than take your sweet time and explore everywhere before the credits roll. And don’t worry, there is a post-game if you want to continue playing after that.
Just to be clear, the game length is fine, what I have issues with is the lack of engaging additional quests or stories that are worth my time.
Personal Enjoyment
Forspoken really feels like a neglected child in the Square Enix family. Once the publisher revealed the two Final Fantasy games are coming out soon, all the fans that were on the Project Athia train jumped ship. The marketing for Forspoken got attention but for the wrong reasons as everyone dunks on its writing style.
Frospoken is flawed but not for the reasons most folks would point out.
I think the game still has some looseness in how it’s designed. Some mechanics just don’t gel well enough, or maybe could still be tinkered with. It’s why I describe most of the mechanics as quirky. It’s not standard, it’s trying something unorthodox, but can still be refined further.
But the execution? Mostly fine, with barely any technical issues or bugs (the delay was worth it).
I love the traversal in this game, the combat may be simple but it’s definitely flashy. And that philosophy of crafting gear can go places if more games take note of it. Try the demo, the core gameplay is solid if you can get your head around the combat system.
But I find Forspoken’s biggest selling points to be its biggest letdown. The story didn’t come together until the very end, so I spent the whole time playing this not caring about our protagonist’s struggles because her motivations are unbelievable and I don’t like how she treats people. The soundtrack is forgettable and I wish Frey had an AirPod with a playlist of her favourite tunes to drown out the boring whimsy orchestra. At least the performance of the cast is good, considering the material they had to work with.
The open-world design (as in, how everything is laid out) is good enough, but the things you do in the open world itself are lacklustre.
For every little step Forspoken has that makes it stand out, there’s another step back that’s holding it back. It feels like the game is shackled in some way. And it forever looms under the shadow of Final Fantasy. All the Square Enix fans, including those in the West, wanted a Final Fantasy game (they’re getting them). Not a game that attempts to appeal to a Western audience that tries really hard only to fumble. And I don’t know if there is a big enough audience that might find Forspoken appealing when you exclude that big fan base Square Enix has.
It’s a shame though. Because I do find Forspoken very much enjoyable. I had fun more so than I cringe at the writing (you’ve probably seen all the worse ones on Twitter already, the rest are okay). And the cats are total cuties.
Verdict
Forspoken has an impressive traversal system with quirky combat and upgrading mechanics that are fun. But its writing, world and music leave a lot to be desired. It’s a decently put-together game that’s technically sound. There’s fun to be had despite it having that familiar open-world game design you’ve seen way too many times before.
It’s hard to recommend Forspoken- unless it’s on sale, but this game is by no means terrible. Similar to the story it’s trying to tell, Forspoken is like a neglected child, who has so much potential, that could have benefited from love and attention. And I hope the developers get another shot to turn this into a truly bewitching spectacle.
Played on PS5. Review code provided by the publisher.
Forspoken
It's hard to recommend Forspoken- unless it's on sale, but this game is by no means terrible. Similar to the story it's trying to tell, Forspoken is like a neglected child, who has so much potential, that could have benefited from love and attention.
- Presentation 8
- Gameplay 8
- Content 6.5
- Personal Enjoyment 7