Forspoken review6/7/2023 ![]() “We’re well aware there’s this popular kind of sub-genre, especially within Japanese anime and stuff," says Luminous creative producer Raio Mitsuno. ![]() The premise, of a person in the real world being transported to a fantastical land, is a hot genre right now in Japanese anime and manga called Isekai, but Luminous says the inspirations for Forspoken predate the trend. The idea was created by writer Gary Whitta (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and later included contributions from Uncharted’s Amy Hennig and finally Allison Rymer and Todd Stashwick. While struggling in our world, Frey is mysteriously transported to a fantasy realm called Athia where she gains powers through a sentient bracelet named Cuff. Frey Holland (played by Ella Balinska) is a troubled girl from New York City. While the powers are all from fantasy, your player character is a different kind of protagonist. Visually, Forspoken looks to be shaping up to Luminous’ goal of achieving tech-driven visuals. The Luminous Engine certainly appears to be putting in the work, especially during the combat animations that mix all kinds of elemental effects like water, lightning, and fire. Frey can cycle through a collection of magic spells and fight enemies with a variety of long-range and close-range attacks, whether that’s firing lightning bolts from afar or dashing close to hit enemies with a magic sword. Combat is completely real-time and primarily magic-based. There appear to be several points of interests Frey can explore and no limit to where she can or can’t venture towards.Īlong the way, Frey will encounter various enemies and monsters in the wild. Protagonist Frey is seen traversing overland to various waypoints and mission markers. The presentation was hands-off, but the gameplay we saw will be familiar to anyone who has played a modern open-world RPG. While Terada says there’s room to grow, Forspoken will serve as a showcase for the studio in terms of the quality Luminous can bring to the gaming landscape. Through Forspoken, we believe we’ve been able to incorporate our concept for the studio and showcase that to a certain degree” ![]() “So the goals are quite high as far as developing an open-world game that achieves the highest heights, essentially. “When you look back to Luminous Productions and kind of a core concept or theme for the studio, it is to really blend art and technology,” Terada says. Who exactly was given a review copy also seems very random, with a lot of sites we’ve never heard of before and yet many that have obviously been left out on purpose – perhaps because Square Enix thought them more likely to give a negative score.Speaking with IGN, Forspoken director Takefumi Terada explains that the open-world gameplay will reflect one of Luminous’ themes as a studio. The current Metacritic score is just 66, which is extremely low for a major release. The scores are in and, as seemed inevitable, the game has not reviewed well. We will update this article with any review scores that are released on Monday afternoon but Forspoken itself launches on Tuesday, January 24 for PlayStation 5 and PC. So, in the meantime we’d be very cautious and unless you really liked the demo you’re probably best to wait until there’s a critical consensus. Perhaps Forspoken will be better than the demo and our hands-on suggested, but we won’t be able to tell you until after it’s already out. Nintendo Switch 2 rumours return as Sharp confirms they’re working on a ‘new console’ That’s great but Frey is from New York and her dialogue, and that of her magical bracelet, is awful, with every fish out of water cliché you could imagine and endless, tiresome f-bombs. To Square Enix’s credit the lead is a black woman named Frey and the fantasy world she finds herself in is very diverse, in terms of race and gender (the main bosses all seem to be women). The demo then got an update that changed how the lock-on works and altered things like the text sizes, which is not the sort of last minute change that inspires confidence.Īnd then there’s the problem with the main character. It was different to what we played – which seemed to be just chunks from the almost-finished main game – but went down so badly that the producer had to make a statement saying that, in terms of mission structure, it was not representative of the finished product. We spent a good few hours on the game but all our complaints could become less of an issue as the story continues, although the free demo on the PlayStation Store wasn’t much more encouraging. Forspoken – the graphics aren’t very good either (pic: Square Enix)
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