I really wanted to like this game. Some bits of gameplay highlights looked really awesome. Some didn’t.

But then they showed a lot of story stuff and holy fuck was it bad. People talk about Marvel-level dialogue, but this is way worse than even the worst Marvel lines. But that’s just story. It’s a video game, story is not important if the gameplay isn’t good, so I still had hope that the gameplay would be okay, which is why I kept my discounted pre-order going.

So I gave this game 10 hours of my time. And I’m done with it. So let’s talk about why I’m giving up on this!

What I liked

The concept is good. Isekai story where the protag gets a sentient magic bracelet thing that gives them powers and they have to save the world is pretty standard anime-style storytelling, no problem there if the characters are likeable… Anyways, the gameplay is also not a bad concept. Open worlds tend to suck but this one’s is actually a bit more linear so it’s something of a middle ground. The trailers showed swift movement and impressive magic spells. The leveling system is not too bad, and you’re constantly getting stronger and learning more magic. All this stuff should come together to make a pretty solid game.

On paper, there’s nothing particularly bad about this game. But we’re not on paper. This is an actual game.

What I didn’t like

None of the characters are likeable. Frey is a dumbass criminal who refuses to not be shitty but you’re supposed to like her because… she has a cat? I seriously have no idea. She’s also tremendously stupid (not just because she keeps committing crimes and getting involved with gangs). Like, her apartment building gets burned down, so as she escapes from the fire she figures she needs to grab her money (in a bag) and her cat, as she’s about to use the money to move out of Hell’s Kitchen and maybe finally stop being involved in crime (I guess she got all that money with crimes though…). The problem? The money is right next to her as she wakes up due to the fire. She could’ve stretched her arm out and grabbed it. But no, the cat’s more important so she decides to find the cat before taking the money that’s within arm’s reach. Also her only personality trait is being a dick to everyone. The judge who is too stupid to finally lock up Frey after all her crimes seems nice but she’s too stupid to take seriously. The fucking bracelet that talks, he’s just annoying. The little girl you’re supposed to like that gets fucking killed? Annoying, and ALSO A CRIMINAL. The big religious leaders in Athia, all jackasses. The god-like beings they worship? They’re the ones that destroyed the world. The girl that saves Frey from prison is an asshole. Weirdly the only character that seems to speak any sense at all is the one that has his brain wrecked by the Break. Why are we meant to like any of these dirtbags?

The controls are shit. I actually kinda hate how this game controls. It’s a weird one because it SEEMS okay just looking at it, but actually handling it, it feels like crap. Judging distance is shit and the game doesn’t like really telling you how far your attacks will go in the first place (though I guess that’s a bit less of a control issue). You get 2 spells equipped at once, one of which is a “support” spell and the other is a “main attack”. You have a button each, and a button each to open a shitty weapon wheel to switch between spells for that button. It’s already tremendously annoying to have 2 weapon wheels on different buttons… but then you unlock more spell types, so now you have to press both weapon wheel buttons to change types of spells, which also have their own 2 weapon wheels. The whole spell-switching controls are absolutely shit, because there’s so many spells. Basically, you’re probably better off ignoring 75% of the game’s combat spells, because that way you don’t have to fuck about with the shitty spell-switching system AS much. Just let me customize my own set of, like, 8 support and 8 main attack spells, have just one weapon wheel each. Also, the running around is shit. There’s one button that does parkour, which automates any and all parkouring… Which means that Frey will automatically react to all sorts of bullshit and do random crap all the time. It’s really crap.

Combat is boring. Basically this is a lock-on focused third-person shooter, which can be fine, if they don’t purposely make it boring. The attacking is fine, minus what I mentioned earlier about the range being unclear, as your attacks have really limited range despite being magical projectiles. The biggest problem with the combat is dodging attacks. You can just, you know, move out of the way. That’s fine, it works, no problem there. The parkour button is a dodge button, she dashes out of the way, that’s also fine… But that’s not what you use the parkour button for. Instead, the parkour button puts you in Parkour mode if you hold it. Parkour mode breaks the combat, because parkour mode makes it literally impossible for attacks to hit you, whether you’re on the ground or in the air. Frey literally auto-dodges everything in Parkour Mode. This means, of course, combat is boring because nothing can hit you. When I found the first real big boss, she had those crazy fireball attacks that look absolutely badass and devastating… yeah you can just hold the parkour button and not get hit. Fuck you game. Why are you so bad.

Combat sucks even more in small areas because the camera is shit if there’s walls anywhere nearby.

The open world feels useless. There is an advantage to the open world, namely that the combat is meant for open arenas. But… there’s so much NOTHING in this big fucking map. There’s a couple minor sidequests and things like these side-dungeons with easy boss battles, these races, these fortresses with easy enemy encounters… but most of the world is just nothing. There’s enemies randomly strewn about, it’s absolutely not something that looks like a world anyone ever lived in because there’s no functional signs of previous civilization, even though it is meant to be a real place people used to live before the break. This whole thing feels half-cooked at best.

PC performance is horrid. This is a really fucked up instance where the RECOMMENDED specs are insane. Recommending a 3070 is just… fucking wild. 3070s are super strong cards, you don’t recommend that. I have a 3080, and even that was pretty fucking rough. At 1440p, I was basically never reaching the max FPS of 120 (of course they put an arbitrary cap on framerate for no reason). That was by lowering some of the graphical settings and putting the DLSS to Balanced. I’d generally be in the 80fps region, which is pretty bad, moreso considering the graphics are pretty… not good. This is with a pretty modest overclock (because my “usually stable but stronger” overclock was causing the game to crash). Some parts of the game were extremely stutter-heavy too, because of course. This game is a fucking mess. It runs better than on console, but holy shit the lack of optimization.

I hate that this game is super intent on wasting your time. Spends so much time on the intro just… not letting you play. Even the first part of the game you actually get to play (the walking simulator part doesn’t count as gameplay), that’s pretty much just a straight line that you should rush through because the very small amount of exploration you can do is pointless, there’s nothing to find there. It was about 3 hours before the game finally opened up and let you ACTUALLY play it. But that first part is also a very small open area, at which point it goes back to wasting your time for a bit before getting you into the real open world. But it’s not just the fact that you have maybe 4 hours of time just… wasting away doing nothing of substance, but it’s the little things. Like all the sidequests I decided to do in the town being boring-ass follow-the-npc “quests”, but also even smaller things like talking to NPCs being weirdly time-wasty (sometimes you’d get 10 seconds of being unable to move for no reason after talking to an NPC), or the messages for accepting or completing side-quests preventing you from moving for a weirdly long amount of time.

Overall

Don’t buy this game.

This is the second game from Luminous Productions, and we’re at a nice 0/2 right now. They also made FF15, which was pretty bad. When I was almost starting the enjoy FF15, the game put me on literal train tracks to the end and removed anything that was even a little bit enjoyable about it, and never lets you back into the part of the game that was actually almost fun. Forspoken is a bit more forward about its shitness, as it’s bad right from the start and the issues just keep on coming.

The story’s shit, the characters are shit, the gameplay’s shit and it doesn’t even have the decency to look at least a little bit good. It’s not a good game, and it’s unfortunate, because the concept is interesting. An interesting concept can only bring you so far. You also need talent.