I had no expectations. Frey literally tells her friend, right after said friend's dad dies, that she doesn't care if Athia burns, and that she just wants to go home. This is like an hour or two before the game ends? And in that hour, after the entire adventure, she suddenly cares and doesn't want Athia to burn. That's bad writing. She is literally a piece of shit through the entire game and then 180s right at the end. Come on fellas. Have higher standards lmfao
Give em a break they hadn't gotten that far before deciding to review it. Why you would review a game's writing before finishing the story when how a story ends is kinda of important.... eh give em a break
"Every single direct detail is wrong, Every single thing that could be right about it somehow ends up wrong because none of it comes together because it feels like no one in the dev team actually bothered to speak to each other about what the games supposed to be." Wow, it sounds like the team that made Forspoken was the same team that made the original FF14 1.0.
@@chrisj320ac3 FF15 was a mess because of the decision to space the story over several movies, a couple games and a tv show. The gameplay loop was fun and the fishing was dope
Hopefully this is the last example of SE trying to create FOR the western audience rather than just creating authentic Japanese games that westerners will fall in love with like we have for almost 40 years because of the charm and authenticity.
They tried to create a fish out of water scenario, contrasting a modern, real world person to the fantasy world backdrop. However they missed the real world character big time.
@@isturbo1984 If that dev would really know the woke western audicence they would have known, that the woke western audience is only happy when they can scream and bitch about something.
Let's not give the dialogue a pass. Even in context it either falls flat or completely bad. Especially when their main character is miserable and unlikable for the entire game. Buy Hi-Fi Rush's deluxe edition. Those devs have put in the actual love and care a game deserves.
Agree, the writing overall is far from acceptable, saying “it’s like marvel” doesn’t work either since most recent marvel movies are garbage too, that’s why we can’t have nice things. Hi-fi game looks fantastic though, also better written.
That being said, the opening sequence was a little drawn out. I hate when games open with 30 minutes of cut scenes. It is pretty good after that, though.
The only issue I have is there's no calibration option to slide the audio/video synch a few frames. It's *ever* so slightly off. I don't notice it with other timing based games... it's odd. Love the game either way!
I guarantee you will change your tune if you play this game with Japanese audio because I stream to the game to some friends and they were all over the tomboyish Japanese Frey. I honestly think the issue is that the voice actress for the American version doesn't put a little more oomph into her voice line especially in combat.
The key to having an unlikable protagonist that has an arc is for the game world to call them out or react to them as unlikeable - that way we are on the same page, and it doesn't feel like the game is trying to tell us that our protagonist is just horrible. If your character does nothing but snark and make terrible decisions, and the setting just ploughs on with the story without batting an eye, or worse actively encouraging the character, just feels so wrong.
Forspoken is also priced wrong, its nearly 80€ in Europe on Steam. With the currency exchange in my country Sweden, its nearly 90€ for Forspoken and the game is barley worth 30€
Seems to be a trend so far with every new release lol now we get to see if companies are going to take the sales hits or if they're going to get egg on their faces and eat crow by lowering the price. And even if they do drop it back down to $60 I say we as gamers still refuse to buy them until they drop them down to a more reasonable $30 or $40, which is honestly what they're worth.
@@Startrance85 Even at half price that would be to expensive, the game isn't not being bought purely because of price it is also a bad game. They will probably try to sell it cheaper but word has got out it is a bad/divisive game. I think this is just another L on SE's list.
Squeenix are disgusting. They're just acting like "Pay a shitton more for our games because we want more money. No, we're not going to make them good." And all the dumb fanboys shout you down if you try to suggest that maybe you don't WANT to pay more for games for no reason other than publisher greed and act like you _owe_ the developer your money because global wobal wobbly bits.
Square Enix has always leaned heavily on the cultural appeal that their games have for American audiences. I just can't understand why they would Americanize one of their games like this. It completely misses the mark in terms of what western audiences love about Square Enix games.
I don’t think being americanized has anything to do with this just being a bad game. Good games are good and bad games are bad, nothing to do with what style they are in.
@JayGee nope, a lot of Japanese companies tried tonwesternize their games, Resident Evil 5 and 6 as well as the failed DmC reboot great examples of this, but other companies tried and failed. Back then, Square's attempts were to buy western studios and publish actual western titles in order to appeal to the west more. Like all attempts to westernized, they have failed and misses the point, that people enjoy Japanese games, there is no need to westernize.
@@Jedi44Master It’s in a very literal sense, it’s an isekai game made by Japanese devs and written by Western writers (likely why the devs included the dialogue reduction option!)
16:00 Regarding the narrative trap doors, I will never forget the moment in Mass Effect 3 where Tarquin Victus fell to his death while my Shepherd, a Vanguard with Pull off cooldown, stood there watching. As a gamer and amateur modder, I understood why it happened - the game did not have class-based interrupts and not every class has Pull - but it still felt terrible watching Shep derp so very, very hard.
I had a similar moment in FFXIV, playing as a White Mage, when a particular ally NPC is killed in Cutscene right next to me. I could've used Raise or any of the other myriad healing spells in my arsenal to save him, or so I thought. In a high-difficulty fight, the same attack used to kill said ally is used on the party, and it inflicts a brief debuff with the tooltip saying 'There was nothing you could've done. Healing dramatically reduced.' The only way to stop said attack from instantly killing it's target is to share the damage.
@@MrTalithan I know exactly which moment you mean and I think in recent updates they've updated the dialogue there because you're not the only healer there. They've also addressed that ress spells don't guarantee success in the actual conjurer quests, and it's inferred the reason they constantly work in raids and dungeons is that it's used on someone with the Echo. My own personal opinion takes ttrpg rules into account: how far past 0 did their hp go? That character was nowhere near your strength nor did he have a blessing to resist attacks from primal beings, which is what attacked him. Thus he likely took so much damage that even a ress couldn't do anything for him, man literally had a hole in his chest, and ress spells basically just resuscitate, it doesn't rebuild a body. That's my take anyway. ETA: Just wanna make clear I don't agree with narrative trap doors, the mass effect example shouldn't exist, having a reaction for specific classes would've been a great example of choices mattering, there's plenty of places soldier or tech classes could have their own moments too. Just I believe in the case of ffxiv, a lot of that complaint comes from forgetting/not paying attention to the narrative, or is parroted from meme videos by people who were just making a funny but took it more seriously.
@@MrTalithan kind of sad since I can think of other situations, including in FF, where they address that by showing the white mage casting heal or raise and showing that there is a limit in what it can do. Even when it doesn't go into detail, just showing the attempt is enough to say "yeah, sorry not everything can be Healed". Also suddenly reminded of a very large man holding a smaller man yelling " you have magic. Fix him. FIX HIM!". Point is, there are often ways around such traps. The trick though is for the team to think past "cool plot point" and think "if I was the character with their abilities what would I be doing here." Though i imagine it can be annoying writing this amazing scene that has to be redone because the skill designers decided to give the player this fun skill that breaks your scene wide open.
Tell me one game that has you playing as a badass that doesn't all of a sudden have your character turn into the dumbest character in the game during at least one cut scene. Seems like most games end up doing that. Since we're talking Square & FF, we all know the scene in FF7. Like, come on man. I had 5 Phoenix Downs on me when she died.
It's been a while since I played Mass Effect 3 but I rewatched Victus' death. He didn't look too close too Shepard when he fell to his death so you could argue that he was out of range of Shepard's biotics. Shepard was also fighting off enemies to cover Victus while he was defusing the bomb so one could argue that Shepard was fairly busy and was only able to spare a moment or two to check up on him.
Matt's reaction to how bad Forspoken was, is about what my reaction to how FFXV was when it first released and I got it at a midnight release. I bought it, played it until the store opened. And promptly went and sold it back to them because I couldn't get a refund.
Can you expand? I'm trying to search online this but all my results are showing for FFXIV. I didn't realize that 15 has a microtransaction store, and that is disgusting!!!
@@LyohKoh FFXV on release was a very meh game marred by development issues lasting over a decade, I think they had three lead directors that were swapped, not to mention they also swapped the engine twice. ON release it was an alright game that got the bros "go on a road trip" feel in the first half and then in the second half things got wonky and limited. There was tons of DLC trying to fill in gaps of the story (what were your friends doing when they were gone from the party, what happened in between the time skip, what were the villain's motivations), and then there was another planned DLC that was scrapped and released as a book. However, if you want to know the full lore, you have to watch a promotional anime, or a promotional movie, read books, and buy DLC. As a JRPG it was fine, but for supposedly being a part of one of the most iconic series in the world, it was very MEH.
They went from a company that could only make expansive epics to one that can only make convoluted messes. Funny how Monolithsoft broke off from them but now has surpassed them as artists.
As soon as I heard the first few lines (for)spoken from the first trailers of the game I already knew it was going to be a complete directionless disaster.
Interesting coming to this from penguinz0's review. He played it all the way through and said the worst part was the character and story and how she was just a horrible person from beginning to end. Wondering what Michael saw that Charlie didn't.
I thought the same. Everyone that has finished Forspoken that I know of has mentioned Frey's character as a major issue with the game, even if their main focus was with the technical aspect of the game.
Probably the same thing I saw on Twitter when there was a video on the dialogue. Just listening to it after a DECADE of the MCU doing it is really starting to get on my nerves. Just once, I want to see a character take something seriously without the need to crack a joke every five seconds.
charlie didn't pull punches on the game mechanics being mostly shite either, he ranted about retardo mob AI that fails to be a threat and the game relying on making bullet sponges for "difficulty"
Stuff like this is why I am not ever excited for any new games until I see them played and reviewed by non-journalists. Also a big reason why I am working through the more retro games right now. Still have to finish the original God of War series before playing the new ones.
A review i saw said 'The main character is so unlikable you have to push your progress yourself because the character herself does not want to even be likeable' or similar. First her cat is a big deal and then the cat does not matter at all
I actually read the vast majority of negative reviews on Steam-& Metacritic-& was pleasantly surprised at how few of them were "Culture War" based. 90% of them were bemoaning the poor PC performance, the ridiculously high asking price, the cringe dialogue & the boring Open World....or some combination of the above
Social media has become an echo chamber. The reality is so much more nuanced. It's interesting to see people on Twitter say "race" had to do with the hate, however to date I've yet to see a person criticize that as the reason they don't like Forspoken.
@@tb1235 I've not seen the race card played in defence but I know one of the people involved played the 'female protagonist' card. Nobody cares that it's a black girl they care that she's an AWFUL person in a shit game.
Squeenix used to be a company, both back when they were Squaresoft and Enix, and after the merger, where you could reliably expect that 4 out of 5 games they released would at least be good if not great, and the ones that weren't would at least be _interesting._ Modern Squeenix is the company where maybe _1_ in 5 of their games might be good, and the rest are so appalling that it makes you ask why they're still in business. Just think of some of their notable releases from recent years: Left Alive, The Quiet Man, Marvel's Avengers, Babylon's Fall and now _this_ hot garbage. They're just a shit company today.
I had an interesting dilemma related to this. I was leading a dev team on a multiplayer only title once and we made a game that did well on gameplay testing but was not performing so well on the retention side. The question was basically do I cave in to the brilliant rebooting ideas of publisher management and release a mediocre underperforming game or do we stick to the original vision and release a niche title with a side dish of laying off 90% of my dev team members. Wasn't an easy choice but ultimately I went with saving the careers of my devs so that management had to take the blame for their failed Ideas. Ruining couple years of hard work. The point is those situations often arise from internal politics between developer and publisher.
Seeing all this optimism about how the story might improve is so wholesome, I'm waiting for the update video after he finishes the game and realizes this is all there is, and that it does not change at all even at the end
To be fair, all of the DMC games ended up being trash. Mash this button, jump, mash that button, jump, repeat a million times. But hey, they looked good and had badass character designs so sure...
@@Mikedot while that is true, it doesn't keep you from beating the game like that. I wanted to love the DMC games. I had hopes for them to be more than button mashing action games. At the end of the day, they've all more or less been button mashers. The fact that you can get grades for your performance never concerned me. My performance was not dying and winning. I get that they're million selling games loved across the world. I still can't stand all of the lost potential that they had. Button mashing boring ass bullshit...
I don't doubt it was made in isolation, I know someone that worked in one of the big games coming out and they were working in one specific thing in combat, they didn't know what game was and they only knew about this one specific thing they were working on and when they were almost done with it they found out that the player could fly and that changed everything and they had to start from zero. many companies are working like that now on days.
How has culture not thrown Whedon-esque dialog into the dumpster of history yet? There’s not a hunger for something new in culture, it’s more like a ravenous urge, but culture refuses to change. It’s been so long that I just don’t see a changing of the cultural guard any time soon.
Well, part of the problem is whenever someone like you speaks up, your complete and utter lack of willingness to talk about the actual problem. You dance around, trying to keep from saying phrases like "woke" and "SJW" like if you did, it would be a Republican political endorsement or something.
Critical theory taught in schools everywhere has led to all our writers thinking that picking apart the world and society and everything you can find is actually doing the world a service, when actually that is just one of a great many tools you _should_ have, and you need to use them all effectively and with reflective consideration for who you're doing it for, and then if you try with all your might, you _might_ be doing us a net service. Easier to destroy than create--but if you wanted the easy way, why did you become a creative??
No because these lazy doomer-nihilists want to skip to the deconstruction phase of their genre without learning the basics of storytelling. And to do something new would require them to leave their ZIP code.
@@isturbo1984 maybe because those words are overused and don't really describe the actual issues, and because the types that use them don't particularly sound intelligent...
The success of Whedon himself and the MCU set up a trend that carries a lot of inertia. It will take a while before productions pick up on the audience being sick of it.
"A character can be very unlikable at the start and then change". Yeah if the writing makes the character develop sure, some of the best stories are written with characters the viewer/reader won't like at first. You're saying it's a red herring and not that bad but it really is. The writing is abysmal. The main character has no redeeming qualities, blames the outcomes of her bad actions on everyone else around her, and when that's pointed out she can't be bothered to say more than to tell the other party to shut up and never own up to anything. She's like this all throughout the game until fairly late when all the sudden out of nowhere she's suddenly going "well I just thought I could try to be a hero but look how that turned out" like she's gaslighting the last 10 or 20 hours of your playtime. It doesn't feel earned, consistent, or even make sense. This game is a non-stop train wreck of terrible writing. The worst part is how they try to redeem her character by making the big "twist" justify her attitude up until then which I won't spoil even though there's no reason you should ever play this. I agree with you on the gameplay but I really disagree on the characters/story, they really are that bad.
I was immediately turned off it as they were asking 93$ for this in my country. But now to find out how mediocre it is at nearly everything it does, that 93$ price tag is a complete farce.
Watch what happened to Netflix witcher series and amazon rings of power. They will blame the audience over disliking things said or tropes when gameplay is and always will be the main issues games have.
1:00 I find... pretty fascinating how none of the "influencers" mention the outrageous pricetag on PC that tries to push Sony bullshit price increase on PC.
Easy to agree with, I have SEEN someone play it. And.. yeah the STORY TEAM didn't know what the GAMEPLAY team was doing which totally wasn't in the same room as the WORLD DESIGNERS. It has a few half decent ideas... which don't work.
Mat I completely disagree with your opinion that the devs understand the isekai genre. If this was an anime it would be lumped in with every other unoriginal isekai that thinks it's different because it changed one or two details. Look in this one we gender swapped every character without fixing their non existant personalities, aren't we original? The only thing missing is for Fae to start describing the world in video game terms and then we would have the complete package.
Mass Effect Andromeda's a good time these days. Been replaying the entire series and the leap in combat and graphics from 3 to Andromeda is insane. The publishers just need to stop pulling the pizza out of the oven with soggy, half-baked dough and uncooked onion on top. They have to wait until it's nice and crispy with perfectly browned, bubbling cheese. But they're so hungry for the money they can't wait, and everyone ends up with a disappointing meal, onion breath, and a stomachache.
I tried it a couple years ago and accidentally sequence broke the first open zone. Not really sure how I did that, but as EA clearly hadn't bothered to make the game work, I didn't bother to keep playing it.
I can, this is the day and age of shitty Games with either bad Plot's, Graphics or both and only a rare golden egg will be released a few times in a year.
Really? You cant believe it? As mrs leona campbell would say, 'reeeeaaalllyy?!' Cuz its basically the standard in gaming. Hype. BIG hype. Release. Flop. They always overpromise and under deliver when it comes to the big game companies. You could probably more easily name the recent big games that released and did well than the ones that flopped or massively underperformed.. i dont know man, but it just doesnt shock me anymore when this stuff happens, its pretty much just the norm now.
Matt please don't hold back and tell us how you REALLY feel about forespoken (honestly the first minute or 2 of Matt being on screen was just a pure deconstruction and obliteration of Forespoken and its dev team which I loved). Now that I got that off my chest I'll watch the rest of the video
Don't miss the part where he says that the Luminous design team, as a concept, should be hurled into the sun. I'd say that's telling us how he REALLY feels.
I have a friend with a knack of pre-ordering bad games, the moment he said he pre-ordered this I knew it would flop. Thank his blessed bad taste in media products that often wars me.
When I saw the combat system a few weeks back I decided that it's not for me, but I had no idea that it would be such a technical and game design disaster. Everything I watched and heard lines up. What was the last SE published game that wasn't a disaster?
Probably their FFXIV expansion, they also do pump out some good classic-style JRPGS like Octopath (lacking in story but love the gameplay and art style), Live-a-Live, and their Nier Remaster (minus the PC issues). Hoping that since Yoshi P and his team are working on FFXVI that FFXVI turns out a return to numbered FF form. There is also FFVIIR2 coming out.
A fair few. Tactics Ogre: Reborn as a recent example. SE is a many headed hydra and publishes a fuckton of games. Forspoken may be a *massive* poo, but it's one failure among many releases.
The ending segment on mid-development reboots gives me some reflective worry about Metroid Prime 4 since we’ve not heard a thing about it since the 2019 reboot announcement. I will pray to the ends of the earth that it doesn’t go the same way those other examples have, like 2042 which I’ve pretty much moved on from by now.
This game is an example of when focus groups have full creative control over a project. It's basically a check list to see how they can appeal to the lowest common denominator as much as possible.
It's weird that the most praise you can give the game is that the cheesy, Whedonesque, poorly contextualized dialogue isn't as bad as everyone says it is. As someone who has gotten really bored of this kind of dialogue in entertainment, the way the dialogue is written and executed in the game hurts the overall experience. It simply doesn't sound like she's taking her own story very seriously. The writers chose to go the sassy, smart-mouthed route, but then executes it in away that's also not believable within the context of the character's experience. The whole thing is like this bad, tongue and cheek joke that the character is in on and won't let you forget for a second. It's like the people who wrote it loved Thor: Love and Thunder and tried to implement the same quirky feeling without having an established, beloved character to get away with even a little bit of it. It seems like even when you guys are trying to be more favorable to the experience, you actually come off as ripping on it even more, it seems game far worse than even peoples' main, negative talking points bring up. The world looks nice, but that's about all I can see as a positive in this game. From an outsider, it looks like there was never a solid understanding from the devs about what this game was supposed to be and either no one was paying attention or they simply didn't care that nothing came together in any meaningful way. With all the repetitive button hammering, developing carpel tunnel sounds like the most positive thing players will get out of this experience.
Yeah, I've seen more damning things, like the enemies being like only a couple of types with a few attacks and bad Ai. Another thing I have seen is that the cutscenes are everywhere, and it becomes annoying. The dialogue is somewhere between bad to mediocre, but the worst crime is how it doesn't make sense how the people in Athia understand latin phrases, but not simple words. The performance and having demanding is the thing that should sink it all. This game does not deserve the scores that critics give it. It should get much worse scores.
God fucking dammit... I hope MP4 breaks the trend of development hell because honestly? Samus deserves more awesome games in a row, Samus Returns, Dread and MP4 being good all in a row? It would be awesome as fuck.
With how short the game actually is, by the time Frey starts to develope into a possibly likable character the game is about to end. Her still not caring about anything 2/3 through is a bit silly.
I think it was moistcritical that pointed out how she literally doesn't give a single fu** about Athia and it's people right up until the end, then all of a sudden, she wants to protect Athia. There was no character arc leading up to her change of heart, it was like a light switch, one moment she hates everyone, then boom now she suddenly wants to protect everyone, its so strange
@@Gogo32monkey uhhhhh maybe because she finds out she actually is athian and her mom actually did care about her and died to protect her? That seems like a pretty reasonable catalyst for changing your world view lol
@@tehCostHD It does depend on timing and execution how well something like that lands. It happens all the time in fiction, but writers tipically use clever tricks to help us ignore that it's not how people work, really. Granted, I don't know how it's done in Forspoken. It's just, when the audience notices stuff like that, it's usually an execution issue.
@@Poldovico well yeah it’s definitely not going to land with most people, because most people already checked out within the first hour. Oh well. The character doesn’t “resonate” with me, but I don’t hate her either. Everyone keeps expecting her to be a hero and save the world, a world that she literally had no connection to until 1 day ago. If I were in her situation, I would have probably felt the same way as her.
CEO's are monetizing games too much to make games that are just good games. Too many games focus on the money making systems before the actual game is out and good. Also they have deadlines to shareholders. So they can't delay too long, have to pay back the shareholders. The games market is too saturated and the big companies still think they can just pump out games and get rich.
People gotta stop comparing new games to remakes. Dead space remake is good because the studio overhauled a game that was already made and successful. I'd even say the original stuff they added for the most part was the worst parts of the game.
It's why I don't get excited at all for remakes/remasters. Doesn't mean I don't buy them on occasion of course. Video game industry starting to look more and more like Hollywood.
I hate quippy, sarcastic dialogue in everything, thats enough alone to make steer clear. The fact its yet another empty open world, action RPG-lite, "cinematic"-styled game with a crafting system pushes me even further away.
If they made the main character more likable, and talk less, and optimized the game so it ran better, halved the price, made the world size about 1/4 it's size, it would be worth it. The big problem with open world games is that it's easy to make a huge empty open map, it's hard to fill it with things that don't feel like it's just there to pad out the game length... the game has to be good if you removed the story entirely, if it has a story, the story has to be really freaking good and screen tested with the types of people who play games, or just there in the background/skippable, that you can ignore entirely if you want.
Might be the worst game I have played since the horrific Gothic 4 ArcaniA. Thankfully Hi-Fi Rush came out around the same time and was able to wash out the nasty taste I had from Forspoken (Couldn't stand the combat and dialogue in Forspoken). Nice of them to put out a demo for people though!
@@DrakkarCalethiel Yup, it just felt so generic and not like Gothic at all. Had some of the most annoying dialogue I have ever witnessed and it just wasn't fun. Thankfully the original Gothic devs still make games, despite being janky I still end up having a blast on them :)
@@KatalistProductionsKozzySasha Yeah, there was nothing really good about that game. Dialogue was uninspired and boring, overworld was empty, bugs ontop of bugs, crappy combat (if you ask me) and not a single loveable character. Couldn't finish it.
@@DrakkarCalethiel Yup, in reality all they had to do was make decent combat, not make the dialogue crazy cringe and make a decent game world that allows for that Gothic exploration. PB does exploration so well, despite all that jank in there games I have had a blast in every one of them exploring the game world.
Step 1: Ignored most of the combat mechanics Step 2: complain for 10 about the combat in an action RPG when you were playing it like an FPS The game isn't perfect and some of the comments in the second half were valid but basically the whole first half they were comparing about a different game that only exists in their heads.
Luminous managed to take Final Fantasy 15, an already disappointing game to the majority of the FF fanbase, and somehow made it worse. I don't see this studio going anywhere else after this tbh...
Been in the industry for over 12 years now as a Game Designer. Most projects that launch shit have a common issue: no clear vision, bad management that doesn't realize that the vision isn't there and what they are trying to do makes no sense at all.
Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, Doctor Who, Terminator, Scooby Doo, The Witcher, Lord of the Rings, Ghostbusters, Cowboy Bebop, He-Man... the culture wars have ruined so many beloved franchises, that many fans have understandably developed a violently allergic reaction to it. Squeenix should not be surprised to see this allergic reaction against Forspoken, after opting for a marketing campaign that was a culture wars lightning rod. Hopefully at least they'll get the message that fans don't want that stuff, they just want good video games that are doing their own thing.
@@Azureskies01 FF7 spends most of the game following a group of plucky eco terrorists. One of the main antagonists are a giant evil corporation doing evil experiments and killing the planet.
@@Azureskies01 I think it has very little to do with trying to be woke. FFVII remake is a remake and I wouldn't say its reaching the heights of their OG epics. FFXIV wasn't created good, it became good after a lot of refining and fixing. I'm not big on KH3, to me it's an absolute mess, but I can cede to it being a good game in many people's eyes.
I personally enjoy XIII but I respect the people that can't get into the game's political commentary heavy narrative (as long as they don't claim to be VII fans)
I think one of your last points is really fascinating: Bad management is breaking AAA productions, rather than a lack of creativity or game ideas. The reason why I find this fascinating is that this is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from big corporation driven developments. I could understand if games like this happen due to studies draining the same well of ideas until it is dry, but, while this is certainly also happening, this doesn't appear to be the problem with games like Forspoken, BF2042 or Cyperpunk2077: Maybe the ideas were good, maybe even if executed to the end it wouldn't have been all that great, but here we cannot even judge this in the first place since whatever they set out to do never really ended up existing. These games are such nightmares of execution that valuing them on something like novelty or creativity is a self-defeating exercise since nothing exists to actually look at. Constantly changing requirements used to be a problem for the smaller productions (e.g. molyneux-esque scope creep) and was pretty well controlled by AAA-publishers (they might publish the same game every 14 months but at least they are consistent) that brought in all the organizational know-how. What happened??
My wife is Chinese with several Japanese friends that relate things about Japan. The biggest one I ever heard was that Japanese game developers don’t actually understand the west at all. They talk to media and partners in California, people awash in woke culture, and think it is what westerners want in games. They see what AAA games are, and emulate them. They truly are often caught completely off guard when it flops.
Having actually played Hi-Fi rush until literally having to stop myself just to come here and watch this, it physically hurts to imagine what the development process/hell this must've been, how little info must've been conveyed between the teams in order to literally make the game seemingly as disjointed as it is. I'd say it feels unreal, but it's corporate gaming development. I wouldn't be surprised if they had the devs sit above an open flame while a guy is stood behind them with a baseball bat ready to swing.
Hi-Fi Rush and Tango Gamework's previous release, Ghostwire Tokyo, are both very very good. Yet Phil Spencer in all his infinite wisdom has barely supported either with any sort of big marketing push. Tango is frickin' Shinji Mikami's (the Resi Evil dude) studio. Play their games.
For Ghostwire Tokyo, Xbox actually cannot market it due to the playstation exclusivity and the contract that Bethesda signed with them. It was the same with Deathloop, they couldn't even talk about it until the exclusivity window expired, at which point they immediately put it into Game Pass. Ghostwire's exclusivity expires in March, so that's when they can talk about it. For Hi-Fi Rush, yeah you're right, they should be doing a bigger marketing push than they have so far
@@Gogo32monkey I remember a much bigger marketing push for Deathloop than Ghostwire ever got, despite Deathloop also being a kinda flash-in-the-pan not-so-great game.
Knowing it’s square enix, you can follow the entire trajectory of failure without needing any details. Especially pricing and management failures. the only difference is that essentially the design team is forgotten because they “don’t do much”. Who knew that you could not just put pieces of a game into a box and shuffle it around until it was finished.
Just make an Overlord game. The one based on the anime. You don't even need to balance it, since you are supposed to be OP. Just give people a big world to explore, lots of interactions with said world, and there you go. Oh, and lots of waifus, i guess.. that is also what Overlord is all about.
I expect Square Enix to complain about the public not liking their vision, about everyone being wrong, about it being a commercial failure (tomb raider marketing budget), and canning the internal studio and Luminous engine. Because god forbid SE ever do anything positive. Would've loved to see a DX12 port of FFXV on the upgraded engine, but nope, that game ended development, canceled DLC, closed online services, and is now forgotten. Like every other one of their projects that isn't Final Fantasy 7.
I paid full price for it too, but on steam. I played two hrs and refunded it. Ended up buying a ps5 an hour later. My local store actually had one! And got Ragnarok. It's so nice except vrr doesn't work on my monitors hdmi port :( so now I'm tempted to go get the lg c2 42inch. I should add that Forspoken on PC is completely garbage when it comes to performance. Constantly stuttering and massive frame drops. And that's on a 3090 kp.
SE releasing an incoherent, unfinished mess of a game? Colour me suprised. Seriously, I do not understand how people still put their hopes in SE games. The trend is visible for over a decade now.
Square is a massive company with tons of different games, however, they tend to put out more stinkers or unfinished games than finished games. Their more traditional JRPGs or FF games tend to complete experiences (I said TENDS to), flawed or not, but their games catered to more Western audiences tend to be VERY hit or miss.
@@coolyeh1017 I consider Final Fantasy Dead since FFXIII. FFXV was unfinished. KH, wich is an utterly bonkers story true to japanese storytelling, is rather divisive as well. As is the reimagination of FFVIIR. It`s not eastern vs western gamedesign within SE thats the prolem. It's modern SE trying to chase trends without knowing why some of those trends work in the first place.
@@MoreImbaThanYou Ah I see, but I do have hope with FFXVI since it is helmed by Yoshi P of FFXIV fame. FFXIV is widely considered by the majority of FF players (who played it) to be the best narrative, worldbuilding, story, and characters so there is that to go for it, but it does involve a 500-hour MSQ if you want to read/watch everything (this includes optional content since optional content does ALOT on worldbuilding and they add extra scene if you did the optional content in the main story) and the thing is that even in the latest expansion they still call back to rules established in the base expansion so people have to pay attention. But Many consider FFXI and FFXIV different since they are MMOs.
@@coolyeh1017 I do not count the MMO's as "real" FF's, but I do admit that I have heard ALOT of good things about FFXIV. I dare to have a shroud of hope for FFXVI due to that, but my goodwill for SE is long gone. So I will wait for reviews. At this point, FFXIV is the only reason SE is still alive. They should have a statue of Yoshi-P, shouldering the SE Logo Atlas-Style in front of their HQ.
Remember how forgiving Matt was of Squeenix on the 2022 review video? Remember how he said Forsaken was a sure thing? Yeah, love ya Matt but that didn't age well, now did it? 😉
Buffy's dialogue is about 10% of what's in this trailer. Same with Marvel movies. It's dialled up high because the combat thing is constant. But if you turn it down, you're good...but the gameplay being tedious doesn't jive with tedious quips
When making games that don't reflect on the majority of your audience it will fail regardless of anything else. The movie industry is failing for the same reason at the moment, ignoring the RPG story element and just trying to make some propaganda piece.
@@Poldovico I've come to realize CRT means Critical Race Theory. I was thinking it was about old TV's as well. I couldn't be bothered to Google this stuff, so it took me a minute to realize. Not sure what Critical Race Theory has to do with Forespoken though.
thanks to matt for saving me 70 bucks in the first minute of this video. the way he described it, are the exact things i hate most about modern games. when it feels like instead of one game, its 4 or 5 similar games bolted together to make one "experience"
I had no expectations. Frey literally tells her friend, right after said friend's dad dies, that she doesn't care if Athia burns, and that she just wants to go home. This is like an hour or two before the game ends? And in that hour, after the entire adventure, she suddenly cares and doesn't want Athia to burn. That's bad writing. She is literally a piece of shit through the entire game and then 180s right at the end. Come on fellas. Have higher standards lmfao
Give em a break they hadn't gotten that far before deciding to review it. Why you would review a game's writing before finishing the story when how a story ends is kinda of important.... eh give em a break
I'm not sure why you would want to go home to being homeless in New York.
@@njalsand133 Freedom.
but i think this is the persona that they are trying to portray. a lot of the people in the news will turn a 180 depending on their mode.
"Every single direct detail is wrong, Every single thing that could be right about it somehow ends up wrong because none of it comes together because it feels like no one in the dev team actually bothered to speak to each other about what the games supposed to be."
Wow, it sounds like the team that made Forspoken was the same team that made the original FF14 1.0.
Uffff...that hurt.... but its SE....its true xD
Even better, they made FFXV.
@@chrisj320ac3 Kekw
@@chrisj320ac3 FF15 was a mess because of the decision to space the story over several movies, a couple games and a tv show. The gameplay loop was fun and the fishing was dope
“Did the Forspoken devs also work on 1.0? Because, boy, do they need to try again.”
Hopefully this is the last example of SE trying to create FOR the western audience rather than just creating authentic Japanese games that westerners will fall in love with like we have for almost 40 years because of the charm and authenticity.
Maybe NFTs will work
This must've already been in production before SE said they were going to go back to focusing on Japanese games that Westerners happen to like.
@@Revan_7even Did they say that recently?
@@Keirnoth Yes and they sold most of their assets dedicated to "western" productions
They tried to create a fish out of water scenario, contrasting a modern, real world person to the fantasy world backdrop. However they missed the real world character big time.
Yeah they tried making an isekai fantasy but failed to make a likeable character
The real fish out of water was the Japanese dev trying to design a game that would appeal specifically to the woke Western audience.
Never try to appease the unappeasable.
@@isturbo1984 If that dev would really know the woke western audicence they would have known, that the woke western audience is only happy when they can scream and bitch about something.
You have to assume these comments haven't played the intro of the game
Let's not give the dialogue a pass. Even in context it either falls flat or completely bad. Especially when their main character is miserable and unlikable for the entire game. Buy Hi-Fi Rush's deluxe edition. Those devs have put in the actual love and care a game deserves.
Agree, the writing overall is far from acceptable, saying “it’s like marvel” doesn’t work either since most recent marvel movies are garbage too, that’s why we can’t have nice things. Hi-fi game looks fantastic though, also better written.
@@italianspiderman5012 people that think Marvel movies are the epitome of story telling is what’s wrong with the world
It's almost like the developers care
I'd rather buy Assault Spy. Those devs never got exposure like Hi Fi did, and the game is just as fun and stylish
She's effectively stuck in the "Refusing The Call" part of the Hero's Journey the entire time.
Hi-Fi Rush is outstanding. It's like a night and day difference in listening to it's protagonists banter back and forth compared to Forspokens.
That being said, the opening sequence was a little drawn out. I hate when games open with 30 minutes of cut scenes.
It is pretty good after that, though.
The only issue I have is there's no calibration option to slide the audio/video synch a few frames. It's *ever* so slightly off. I don't notice it with other timing based games... it's odd.
Love the game either way!
I guarantee you will change your tune if you play this game with Japanese audio because I stream to the game to some friends and they were all over the tomboyish Japanese Frey. I honestly think the issue is that the voice actress for the American version doesn't put a little more oomph into her voice line especially in combat.
Jet set radio vibes
I can't stand Jet Set Radio.
Hi-Fi rush reminds me of that game. I think it's the cartoonish graphics and style that turns me off.
The key to having an unlikable protagonist that has an arc is for the game world to call them out or react to them as unlikeable - that way we are on the same page, and it doesn't feel like the game is trying to tell us that our protagonist is just horrible. If your character does nothing but snark and make terrible decisions, and the setting just ploughs on with the story without batting an eye, or worse actively encouraging the character, just feels so wrong.
What if.... It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was a video game?
It would bomb because the side quests are all Charlie work and nobody wants to do them
Forspoken is also priced wrong, its nearly 80€ in Europe on Steam. With the currency exchange in my country Sweden, its nearly 90€ for Forspoken and the game is barley worth 30€
Seems to be a trend so far with every new release lol now we get to see if companies are going to take the sales hits or if they're going to get egg on their faces and eat crow by lowering the price. And even if they do drop it back down to $60 I say we as gamers still refuse to buy them until they drop them down to a more reasonable $30 or $40, which is honestly what they're worth.
I might would have tried it but the price drove me away immediately.
@@satzbau9185 This game will probably be half price in a couple of months. If their sales gets super poor.
@@Startrance85 Even at half price that would be to expensive, the game isn't not being bought purely because of price it is also a bad game. They will probably try to sell it cheaper but word has got out it is a bad/divisive game. I think this is just another L on SE's list.
Squeenix are disgusting. They're just acting like "Pay a shitton more for our games because we want more money. No, we're not going to make them good." And all the dumb fanboys shout you down if you try to suggest that maybe you don't WANT to pay more for games for no reason other than publisher greed and act like you _owe_ the developer your money because global wobal wobbly bits.
Square Enix has always leaned heavily on the cultural appeal that their games have for American audiences. I just can't understand why they would Americanize one of their games like this. It completely misses the mark in terms of what western audiences love about Square Enix games.
I don’t think being americanized has anything to do with this just being a bad game. Good games are good and bad games are bad, nothing to do with what style they are in.
To add salt to the wound, Westernize wouldn't be even a hard thing.
It should be no surprise Square Enix has been going on the direction of complete mediocrity. They have lost there way
@JayGee nope, a lot of Japanese companies tried tonwesternize their games, Resident Evil 5 and 6 as well as the failed DmC reboot great examples of this, but other companies tried and failed. Back then, Square's attempts were to buy western studios and publish actual western titles in order to appeal to the west more. Like all attempts to westernized, they have failed and misses the point, that people enjoy Japanese games, there is no need to westernize.
@@Jedi44Master It’s in a very literal sense, it’s an isekai game made by Japanese devs and written by Western writers (likely why the devs included the dialogue reduction option!)
16:00 Regarding the narrative trap doors, I will never forget the moment in Mass Effect 3 where Tarquin Victus fell to his death while my Shepherd, a Vanguard with Pull off cooldown, stood there watching. As a gamer and amateur modder, I understood why it happened - the game did not have class-based interrupts and not every class has Pull - but it still felt terrible watching Shep derp so very, very hard.
I had a similar moment in FFXIV, playing as a White Mage, when a particular ally NPC is killed in Cutscene right next to me. I could've used Raise or any of the other myriad healing spells in my arsenal to save him, or so I thought.
In a high-difficulty fight, the same attack used to kill said ally is used on the party, and it inflicts a brief debuff with the tooltip saying 'There was nothing you could've done. Healing dramatically reduced.'
The only way to stop said attack from instantly killing it's target is to share the damage.
@@MrTalithan I know exactly which moment you mean and I think in recent updates they've updated the dialogue there because you're not the only healer there. They've also addressed that ress spells don't guarantee success in the actual conjurer quests, and it's inferred the reason they constantly work in raids and dungeons is that it's used on someone with the Echo. My own personal opinion takes ttrpg rules into account: how far past 0 did their hp go? That character was nowhere near your strength nor did he have a blessing to resist attacks from primal beings, which is what attacked him. Thus he likely took so much damage that even a ress couldn't do anything for him, man literally had a hole in his chest, and ress spells basically just resuscitate, it doesn't rebuild a body. That's my take anyway.
ETA: Just wanna make clear I don't agree with narrative trap doors, the mass effect example shouldn't exist, having a reaction for specific classes would've been a great example of choices mattering, there's plenty of places soldier or tech classes could have their own moments too. Just I believe in the case of ffxiv, a lot of that complaint comes from forgetting/not paying attention to the narrative, or is parroted from meme videos by people who were just making a funny but took it more seriously.
@@MrTalithan kind of sad since I can think of other situations, including in FF, where they address that by showing the white mage casting heal or raise and showing that there is a limit in what it can do. Even when it doesn't go into detail, just showing the attempt is enough to say "yeah, sorry not everything can be Healed".
Also suddenly reminded of a very large man holding a smaller man yelling " you have magic. Fix him. FIX HIM!".
Point is, there are often ways around such traps. The trick though is for the team to think past "cool plot point" and think "if I was the character with their abilities what would I be doing here."
Though i imagine it can be annoying writing this amazing scene that has to be redone because the skill designers decided to give the player this fun skill that breaks your scene wide open.
Tell me one game that has you playing as a badass that doesn't all of a sudden have your character turn into the dumbest character in the game during at least one cut scene. Seems like most games end up doing that.
Since we're talking Square & FF, we all know the scene in FF7. Like, come on man. I had 5 Phoenix Downs on me when she died.
It's been a while since I played Mass Effect 3 but I rewatched Victus' death. He didn't look too close too Shepard when he fell to his death so you could argue that he was out of range of Shepard's biotics. Shepard was also fighting off enemies to cover Victus while he was defusing the bomb so one could argue that Shepard was fairly busy and was only able to spare a moment or two to check up on him.
Matt's reaction to how bad Forspoken was, is about what my reaction to how FFXV was when it first released and I got it at a midnight release.
I bought it, played it until the store opened. And promptly went and sold it back to them because I couldn't get a refund.
Can you expand? I'm trying to search online this but all my results are showing for FFXIV. I didn't realize that 15 has a microtransaction store, and that is disgusting!!!
That's STILL my reaction to XV... the revised ending section and lame DLC only made the game worse
final fantasy 15 was amazing ... wtf i thought the story is great ,graphics are great the car ,open world .. i loved it ...
@@slavplaysgames in terms of Final Fantasy games it was a disaster of a game a complete garbage dumpster fire but In terms of jrpgs it was Mid at best
@@LyohKoh FFXV on release was a very meh game marred by development issues lasting over a decade, I think they had three lead directors that were swapped, not to mention they also swapped the engine twice. ON release it was an alright game that got the bros "go on a road trip" feel in the first half and then in the second half things got wonky and limited. There was tons of DLC trying to fill in gaps of the story (what were your friends doing when they were gone from the party, what happened in between the time skip, what were the villain's motivations), and then there was another planned DLC that was scrapped and released as a book.
However, if you want to know the full lore, you have to watch a promotional anime, or a promotional movie, read books, and buy DLC. As a JRPG it was fine, but for supposedly being a part of one of the most iconic series in the world, it was very MEH.
I miss Squaresoft. The good ol days 😔
Amen.
Least Octopath and FF14 are good.
They went from a company that could only make expansive epics to one that can only make convoluted messes. Funny how Monolithsoft broke off from them but now has surpassed them as artists.
Yep I remember the name changes. Squaresoft then just Square and now Square Enix...
Me too... Im too old for this BS...
You mean the company that put out "Babylon's Fall" put out another shitty game? I am shocked.
As soon as I heard the first few lines (for)spoken from the first trailers of the game I already knew it was going to be a complete directionless disaster.
This.
Interesting coming to this from penguinz0's review. He played it all the way through and said the worst part was the character and story and how she was just a horrible person from beginning to end. Wondering what Michael saw that Charlie didn't.
Seems like he's only about halfway through and is expecting the character to change. I'm curious if they will post an update once he finishes tbh.
I thought the same. Everyone that has finished Forspoken that I know of has mentioned Frey's character as a major issue with the game, even if their main focus was with the technical aspect of the game.
This is modern writing
Probably the same thing I saw on Twitter when there was a video on the dialogue.
Just listening to it after a DECADE of the MCU doing it is really starting to get on my nerves. Just once, I want to see a character take something seriously without the need to crack a joke every five seconds.
charlie didn't pull punches on the game mechanics being mostly shite either, he ranted about retardo mob AI that fails to be a threat and the game relying on making bullet sponges for "difficulty"
Stuff like this is why I am not ever excited for any new games until I see them played and reviewed by non-journalists. Also a big reason why I am working through the more retro games right now. Still have to finish the original God of War series before playing the new ones.
You are right about everything, I do the same but mostly for money reasons lol
Any recommendations for older games? I've been trying to scratch the itch but can't decide on anything.
A review i saw said 'The main character is so unlikable you have to push your progress yourself because the character herself does not want to even be likeable' or similar. First her cat is a big deal and then the cat does not matter at all
Ah yeah, Asmongold reacted to that video.
Forspoken only exists to boost Square's ESG score.
An expensive "investment". It will endanger all their future projects, too.
Geralt of Rivia, Bingo! This looks like a game made for checkboxes and nothing more.
This is correct. ESG is a joke.
I actually read the vast majority of negative reviews on Steam-& Metacritic-& was pleasantly surprised at how few of them were "Culture War" based. 90% of them were bemoaning the poor PC performance, the ridiculously high asking price, the cringe dialogue & the boring Open World....or some combination of the above
Social media has become an echo chamber. The reality is so much more nuanced. It's interesting to see people on Twitter say "race" had to do with the hate, however to date I've yet to see a person criticize that as the reason they don't like Forspoken.
@@tb1235 I've not seen the race card played in defence but I know one of the people involved played the 'female protagonist' card.
Nobody cares that it's a black girl they care that she's an AWFUL person in a shit game.
What do you mean you can't believe it? This is the same company that released Left Alive.
and the quiet man
I can believe it. It’s to be expected at this point.
Squeenix used to be a company, both back when they were Squaresoft and Enix, and after the merger, where you could reliably expect that 4 out of 5 games they released would at least be good if not great, and the ones that weren't would at least be _interesting._ Modern Squeenix is the company where maybe _1_ in 5 of their games might be good, and the rest are so appalling that it makes you ask why they're still in business. Just think of some of their notable releases from recent years: Left Alive, The Quiet Man, Marvel's Avengers, Babylon's Fall and now _this_ hot garbage. They're just a shit company today.
I had an interesting dilemma related to this. I was leading a dev team on a multiplayer only title once and we made a game that did well on gameplay testing but was not performing so well on the retention side. The question was basically do I cave in to the brilliant rebooting ideas of publisher management and release a mediocre underperforming game or do we stick to the original vision and release a niche title with a side dish of laying off 90% of my dev team members. Wasn't an easy choice but ultimately I went with saving the careers of my devs so that management had to take the blame for their failed Ideas. Ruining couple years of hard work.
The point is those situations often arise from internal politics between developer and publisher.
Stayed up till 3am finishing hi-fi rush and it's an absolute joy of a game that kept me smiling and moving to the beat.
It got a 10/10
How is the challenge on the harder settings and replay value?
Seeing all this optimism about how the story might improve is so wholesome, I'm waiting for the update video after he finishes the game and realizes this is all there is, and that it does not change at all even at the end
He is a shill
I have never seen Matt tear into a title or dev team that hard. Wow.
Getting away with murder for so long has sent the wrong message!
Now that was a good statement.
Buffy the vampire slayer came out in 1997. Quippy dialog can stay there.
Yeah I don't think people want it gone, just most people feel that the quippy dialog execution is poor.
@@GLXY23 Exactly. Anything is bad if the execution of it is bad.
Forspokens dialogue and writing made me enjoy silent protagonists even more then i already do.
Forspoken is what happens when you design a Character Action game while DMC 2 is your favorite in the series.
OOOOOOOFFFFFFFF...... thats bad
SHEESH BRO!
It's like you threw a boiling magma over a French Fries.
To be fair, all of the DMC games ended up being trash. Mash this button, jump, mash that button, jump, repeat a million times. But hey, they looked good and had badass character designs so sure...
@@Xoulrath_ Mashing buttons in a DMC game is a good way to NOT gets good ranks or look stylish, which every game after DMC2 very much discourages.
@@Mikedot while that is true, it doesn't keep you from beating the game like that. I wanted to love the DMC games. I had hopes for them to be more than button mashing action games. At the end of the day, they've all more or less been button mashers. The fact that you can get grades for your performance never concerned me. My performance was not dying and winning. I get that they're million selling games loved across the world. I still can't stand all of the lost potential that they had. Button mashing boring ass bullshit...
I don't doubt it was made in isolation, I know someone that worked in one of the big games coming out and they were working in one specific thing in combat, they didn't know what game was and they only knew about this one specific thing they were working on and when they were almost done with it they found out that the player could fly and that changed everything and they had to start from zero. many companies are working like that now on days.
How has culture not thrown Whedon-esque dialog into the dumpster of history yet? There’s not a hunger for something new in culture, it’s more like a ravenous urge, but culture refuses to change. It’s been so long that I just don’t see a changing of the cultural guard any time soon.
Well, part of the problem is whenever someone like you speaks up, your complete and utter lack of willingness to talk about the actual problem. You dance around, trying to keep from saying phrases like "woke" and "SJW" like if you did, it would be a Republican political endorsement or something.
Critical theory taught in schools everywhere has led to all our writers thinking that picking apart the world and society and everything you can find is actually doing the world a service, when actually that is just one of a great many tools you _should_ have, and you need to use them all effectively and with reflective consideration for who you're doing it for, and then if you try with all your might, you _might_ be doing us a net service.
Easier to destroy than create--but if you wanted the easy way, why did you become a creative??
No because these lazy doomer-nihilists want to skip to the deconstruction phase of their genre without learning the basics of storytelling.
And to do something new would require them to leave their ZIP code.
@@isturbo1984 maybe because those words are overused and don't really describe the actual issues, and because the types that use them don't particularly sound intelligent...
The success of Whedon himself and the MCU set up a trend that carries a lot of inertia. It will take a while before productions pick up on the audience being sick of it.
Duke Nukem in Bulletstorm was a better Isekai than Forspoken.
"A character can be very unlikable at the start and then change". Yeah if the writing makes the character develop sure, some of the best stories are written with characters the viewer/reader won't like at first. You're saying it's a red herring and not that bad but it really is. The writing is abysmal. The main character has no redeeming qualities, blames the outcomes of her bad actions on everyone else around her, and when that's pointed out she can't be bothered to say more than to tell the other party to shut up and never own up to anything. She's like this all throughout the game until fairly late when all the sudden out of nowhere she's suddenly going "well I just thought I could try to be a hero but look how that turned out" like she's gaslighting the last 10 or 20 hours of your playtime. It doesn't feel earned, consistent, or even make sense. This game is a non-stop train wreck of terrible writing. The worst part is how they try to redeem her character by making the big "twist" justify her attitude up until then which I won't spoil even though there's no reason you should ever play this. I agree with you on the gameplay but I really disagree on the characters/story, they really are that bad.
I was immediately turned off it as they were asking 93$ for this in my country. But now to find out how mediocre it is at nearly everything it does, that 93$ price tag is a complete farce.
It will become the price for ALL games 😔
The moment Naoki Yoshida leaves, Square Enix will become the new Konami. Holy shit!
Square has had more broken releases in the past 2 years than 343 has had in its lifetime. Let that sink in.
Watch what happened to Netflix witcher series and amazon rings of power. They will blame the audience over disliking things said or tropes when gameplay is and always will be the main issues games have.
"Is it me who is out of touch...? No! It is the paying customer who is wrong!"
The instant I played this demo on the playstation 5 I called the trash and goddamn was I right
1:00 I find... pretty fascinating how none of the "influencers" mention the outrageous pricetag on PC that tries to push Sony bullshit price increase on PC.
if you cant believe that Square Enix would release something like Forspoken then you clearly don't know Square Enix lmao
Easy to agree with, I have SEEN someone play it. And.. yeah the STORY TEAM didn't know what the GAMEPLAY team was doing which totally wasn't in the same room as the WORLD DESIGNERS.
It has a few half decent ideas... which don't work.
Mat I completely disagree with your opinion that the devs understand the isekai genre. If this was an anime it would be lumped in with every other unoriginal isekai that thinks it's different because it changed one or two details.
Look in this one we gender swapped every character without fixing their non existant personalities, aren't we original?
The only thing missing is for Fae to start describing the world in video game terms and then we would have the complete package.
Oh and she'd need to be hit by a truck .
Honestly they should have had her describe it in game terminology. AND maybe...make her more of a based female Asmongold.
@@Sorrowdusk So I'm not the only one to notice that similarity. She really is Asmongold wannabe in a way.
Mass Effect Andromeda's a good time these days. Been replaying the entire series and the leap in combat and graphics from 3 to Andromeda is insane. The publishers just need to stop pulling the pizza out of the oven with soggy, half-baked dough and uncooked onion on top. They have to wait until it's nice and crispy with perfectly browned, bubbling cheese. But they're so hungry for the money they can't wait, and everyone ends up with a disappointing meal, onion breath, and a stomachache.
I played it a year or two after launch after picking it up for
I tried it a couple years ago and accidentally sequence broke the first open zone. Not really sure how I did that, but as EA clearly hadn't bothered to make the game work, I didn't bother to keep playing it.
I can, this is the day and age of shitty Games with either bad Plot's, Graphics or both and only a rare golden egg will be released a few times in a year.
Agreed. I buy so few games these days, because the plots are generally shot.
@@Sycophantichallenger who shot the plot? A murder mystery of the century 🤔
@@Sycophantichallenger Plots? It's not a book club. This is videogames son!!
Really? You cant believe it? As mrs leona campbell would say, 'reeeeaaalllyy?!' Cuz its basically the standard in gaming. Hype. BIG hype. Release. Flop. They always overpromise and under deliver when it comes to the big game companies. You could probably more easily name the recent big games that released and did well than the ones that flopped or massively underperformed.. i dont know man, but it just doesnt shock me anymore when this stuff happens, its pretty much just the norm now.
This game such a generic Ubisoft stench around it I was genuinely surprised to learn it was an SE game.
Matt please don't hold back and tell us how you REALLY feel about forespoken (honestly the first minute or 2 of Matt being on screen was just a pure deconstruction and obliteration of Forespoken and its dev team which I loved). Now that I got that off my chest I'll watch the rest of the video
Don't miss the part where he says that the Luminous design team, as a concept, should be hurled into the sun. I'd say that's telling us how he REALLY feels.
"Turbo disaster" will never not be the funniest combination of words.
Rocket from Guardian of the Galaxy game is a great and good example of not likeble (for purpose) untill amlost the end of the game character
I have a friend with a knack of pre-ordering bad games, the moment he said he pre-ordered this I knew it would flop. Thank his blessed bad taste in media products that often wars me.
Anyone who's been a fan of SE since early 2000s knows that SE is successful despite its own best efforts not to be.
Anyone who's been a fan before that knows since they've nearly gone bankrupt due to their terrible business practices long before 2000.
When I saw the combat system a few weeks back I decided that it's not for me, but I had no idea that it would be such a technical and game design disaster. Everything I watched and heard lines up.
What was the last SE published game that wasn't a disaster?
Final Fantasy XIV: ENDWALKER, but that's cheating a little bit.
Probably their FFXIV expansion, they also do pump out some good classic-style JRPGS like Octopath (lacking in story but love the gameplay and art style), Live-a-Live, and their Nier Remaster (minus the PC issues).
Hoping that since Yoshi P and his team are working on FFXVI that FFXVI turns out a return to numbered FF form. There is also FFVIIR2 coming out.
Triangle Strategy.
@@shadcroly @Sol Ah, right, completely forgot about FF. Thx.
A fair few. Tactics Ogre: Reborn as a recent example. SE is a many headed hydra and publishes a fuckton of games. Forspoken may be a *massive* poo, but it's one failure among many releases.
The ending segment on mid-development reboots gives me some reflective worry about Metroid Prime 4 since we’ve not heard a thing about it since the 2019 reboot announcement. I will pray to the ends of the earth that it doesn’t go the same way those other examples have, like 2042 which I’ve pretty much moved on from by now.
This game is an example of when focus groups have full creative control over a project. It's basically a check list to see how they can appeal to the lowest common denominator as much as possible.
It's weird that the most praise you can give the game is that the cheesy, Whedonesque, poorly contextualized dialogue isn't as bad as everyone says it is. As someone who has gotten really bored of this kind of dialogue in entertainment, the way the dialogue is written and executed in the game hurts the overall experience. It simply doesn't sound like she's taking her own story very seriously. The writers chose to go the sassy, smart-mouthed route, but then executes it in away that's also not believable within the context of the character's experience. The whole thing is like this bad, tongue and cheek joke that the character is in on and won't let you forget for a second. It's like the people who wrote it loved Thor: Love and Thunder and tried to implement the same quirky feeling without having an established, beloved character to get away with even a little bit of it. It seems like even when you guys are trying to be more favorable to the experience, you actually come off as ripping on it even more, it seems game far worse than even peoples' main, negative talking points bring up. The world looks nice, but that's about all I can see as a positive in this game. From an outsider, it looks like there was never a solid understanding from the devs about what this game was supposed to be and either no one was paying attention or they simply didn't care that nothing came together in any meaningful way. With all the repetitive button hammering, developing carpel tunnel sounds like the most positive thing players will get out of this experience.
The josh whedon-esque trailer killed it for me, the PC spec is sort of expected but the whedon-esque trailer does the most damage to me
Yeah, I've seen more damning things, like the enemies being like only a couple of types with a few attacks and bad Ai. Another thing I have seen is that the cutscenes are everywhere, and it becomes annoying. The dialogue is somewhere between bad to mediocre, but the worst crime is how it doesn't make sense how the people in Athia understand latin phrases, but not simple words. The performance and having demanding is the thing that should sink it all. This game does not deserve the scores that critics give it. It should get much worse scores.
God fucking dammit... I hope MP4 breaks the trend of development hell because honestly? Samus deserves more awesome games in a row, Samus Returns, Dread and MP4 being good all in a row? It would be awesome as fuck.
Never played forspoken but the combat look closer to second son then ff15
And we had such a banger with Bravely Default 2 two years ago.
Company is too busy bowing down at the feet of crypto and NFT’s to be bothered making a good game.
The world lore is good but the way they covered it feels like one huge tutorial
With how short the game actually is, by the time Frey starts to develope into a possibly likable character the game is about to end. Her still not caring about anything 2/3 through is a bit silly.
It's not even her just not caring, she's actively hostile to the people helping her right up to the finale
I think it was moistcritical that pointed out how she literally doesn't give a single fu** about Athia and it's people right up until the end, then all of a sudden, she wants to protect Athia. There was no character arc leading up to her change of heart, it was like a light switch, one moment she hates everyone, then boom now she suddenly wants to protect everyone, its so strange
@@Gogo32monkey uhhhhh maybe because she finds out she actually is athian and her mom actually did care about her and died to protect her? That seems like a pretty reasonable catalyst for changing your world view lol
@@tehCostHD It does depend on timing and execution how well something like that lands. It happens all the time in fiction, but writers tipically use clever tricks to help us ignore that it's not how people work, really.
Granted, I don't know how it's done in Forspoken. It's just, when the audience notices stuff like that, it's usually an execution issue.
@@Poldovico well yeah it’s definitely not going to land with most people, because most people already checked out within the first hour. Oh well. The character doesn’t “resonate” with me, but I don’t hate her either. Everyone keeps expecting her to be a hero and save the world, a world that she literally had no connection to until 1 day ago. If I were in her situation, I would have probably felt the same way as her.
CEO's are monetizing games too much to make games that are just good games. Too many games focus on the money making systems before the actual game is out and good. Also they have deadlines to shareholders. So they can't delay too long, have to pay back the shareholders. The games market is too saturated and the big companies still think they can just pump out games and get rich.
People gotta stop comparing new games to remakes. Dead space remake is good because the studio overhauled a game that was already made and successful. I'd even say the original stuff they added for the most part was the worst parts of the game.
It's why I don't get excited at all for remakes/remasters. Doesn't mean I don't buy them on occasion of course. Video game industry starting to look more and more like Hollywood.
I hate quippy, sarcastic dialogue in everything, thats enough alone to make steer clear. The fact its yet another empty open world, action RPG-lite, "cinematic"-styled game with a crafting system pushes me even further away.
If you must play ubi i suggest anno
If they made the main character more likable, and talk less, and optimized the game so it ran better, halved the price, made the world size about 1/4 it's size, it would be worth it.
The big problem with open world games is that it's easy to make a huge empty open map, it's hard to fill it with things that don't feel like it's just there to pad out the game length...
the game has to be good if you removed the story entirely, if it has a story, the story has to be really freaking good and screen tested with the types of people who play games, or just there in the background/skippable, that you can ignore entirely if you want.
Might be the worst game I have played since the horrific Gothic 4 ArcaniA. Thankfully Hi-Fi Rush came out around the same time and was able to wash out the nasty taste I had from Forspoken (Couldn't stand the combat and dialogue in Forspoken). Nice of them to put out a demo for people though!
Oh god, not "gothic 4" What a shitshow that game was. Cared so little for it that I lost all the OG install media a long time ago when I moved.
@@DrakkarCalethiel Yup, it just felt so generic and not like Gothic at all. Had some of the most annoying dialogue I have ever witnessed and it just wasn't fun. Thankfully the original Gothic devs still make games, despite being janky I still end up having a blast on them :)
@@KatalistProductionsKozzySasha Yeah, there was nothing really good about that game. Dialogue was uninspired and boring, overworld was empty, bugs ontop of bugs, crappy combat (if you ask me) and not a single loveable character. Couldn't finish it.
@@DrakkarCalethiel Yup, in reality all they had to do was make decent combat, not make the dialogue crazy cringe and make a decent game world that allows for that Gothic exploration. PB does exploration so well, despite all that jank in there games I have had a blast in every one of them exploring the game world.
Forspoken is living proof that Joss Whedon and the MCU ruined a whole generation of writers.
This sounds really dumb, but I NEED a video on how you compile your notes for these videos. It is so well laid out.
Step 1: Ignored most of the combat mechanics
Step 2: complain for 10 about the combat in an action RPG when you were playing it like an FPS
The game isn't perfect and some of the comments in the second half were valid but basically the whole first half they were comparing about a different game that only exists in their heads.
Luminous managed to take Final Fantasy 15, an already disappointing game to the majority of the FF fanbase, and somehow made it worse. I don't see this studio going anywhere else after this tbh...
Real chads are playing the Strangers of Paradise DLC.
Been in the industry for over 12 years now as a Game Designer.
Most projects that launch shit have a common issue:
no clear vision, bad management that doesn't realize that the vision isn't there and what they are trying to do makes no sense at all.
i am sorry for Matt 😞
let hope he plays hi fi rush afterword to forget about forspoken .
Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, Doctor Who, Terminator, Scooby Doo, The Witcher, Lord of the Rings, Ghostbusters, Cowboy Bebop, He-Man... the culture wars have ruined so many beloved franchises, that many fans have understandably developed a violently allergic reaction to it. Squeenix should not be surprised to see this allergic reaction against Forspoken, after opting for a marketing campaign that was a culture wars lightning rod. Hopefully at least they'll get the message that fans don't want that stuff, they just want good video games that are doing their own thing.
Has one of Square’s in-house studios developed a good original high budget game since FF12?
FFXIV, KH3, FFVII Remake. They have the ability when they aren't trying to be woke.
@@Azureskies01 KH3 is Trash
@@Azureskies01 FF7 spends most of the game following a group of plucky eco terrorists. One of the main antagonists are a giant evil corporation doing evil experiments and killing the planet.
@@Azureskies01 I think it has very little to do with trying to be woke. FFVII remake is a remake and I wouldn't say its reaching the heights of their OG epics. FFXIV wasn't created good, it became good after a lot of refining and fixing. I'm not big on KH3, to me it's an absolute mess, but I can cede to it being a good game in many people's eyes.
I personally enjoy XIII but I respect the people that can't get into the game's political commentary heavy narrative (as long as they don't claim to be VII fans)
The game is only worth a purchase if it is at a heavily discounted price, maybe 10 bucks.
No lie, i enjoyed watching others play forspoken
I am not paying 100€ for a fantasy ubisoft game with modern Marvel level of cringe dialogue writing.
I completely disagree with the protagonist becoming less unlikable over time. She becomes even more detestable as the story continues, not better.
I think one of your last points is really fascinating: Bad management is breaking AAA productions, rather than a lack of creativity or game ideas.
The reason why I find this fascinating is that this is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from big corporation driven developments.
I could understand if games like this happen due to studies draining the same well of ideas until it is dry, but, while this is certainly also happening, this doesn't appear to be the problem with games like Forspoken, BF2042 or Cyperpunk2077:
Maybe the ideas were good, maybe even if executed to the end it wouldn't have been all that great, but here we cannot even judge this in the first place since whatever they set out to do never really ended up existing.
These games are such nightmares of execution that valuing them on something like novelty or creativity is a self-defeating exercise since nothing exists to actually look at.
Constantly changing requirements used to be a problem for the smaller productions (e.g. molyneux-esque scope creep) and was pretty well controlled by AAA-publishers (they might publish the same game every 14 months but at least they are consistent) that brought in all the organizational know-how.
What happened??
My wife is Chinese with several Japanese friends that relate things about Japan. The biggest one I ever heard was that Japanese game developers don’t actually understand the west at all. They talk to media and partners in California, people awash in woke culture, and think it is what westerners want in games. They see what AAA games are, and emulate them. They truly are often caught completely off guard when it flops.
No, god, please no, no, no, No! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Having actually played Hi-Fi rush until literally having to stop myself just to come here and watch this, it physically hurts to imagine what the development process/hell this must've been, how little info must've been conveyed between the teams in order to literally make the game seemingly as disjointed as it is. I'd say it feels unreal, but it's corporate gaming development. I wouldn't be surprised if they had the devs sit above an open flame while a guy is stood behind them with a baseball bat ready to swing.
Hi-Fi Rush and Tango Gamework's previous release, Ghostwire Tokyo, are both very very good. Yet Phil Spencer in all his infinite wisdom has barely supported either with any sort of big marketing push. Tango is frickin' Shinji Mikami's (the Resi Evil dude) studio. Play their games.
For Ghostwire Tokyo, Xbox actually cannot market it due to the playstation exclusivity and the contract that Bethesda signed with them. It was the same with Deathloop, they couldn't even talk about it until the exclusivity window expired, at which point they immediately put it into Game Pass. Ghostwire's exclusivity expires in March, so that's when they can talk about it. For Hi-Fi Rush, yeah you're right, they should be doing a bigger marketing push than they have so far
@@Gogo32monkey I remember a much bigger marketing push for Deathloop than Ghostwire ever got, despite Deathloop also being a kinda flash-in-the-pan not-so-great game.
Knowing it’s square enix, you can follow the entire trajectory of failure without needing any details. Especially pricing and management failures.
the only difference is that essentially the design team is forgotten because they “don’t do much”. Who knew that you could not just put pieces of a game into a box and shuffle it around until it was finished.
Just make an Overlord game. The one based on the anime. You don't even need to balance it, since you are supposed to be OP. Just give people a big world to explore, lots of interactions with said world, and there you go. Oh, and lots of waifus, i guess.. that is also what Overlord is all about.
Of course the Japanese would understand how to correctly market an Isekai.
how much you wanna bet that the people who made the game are going to call out that gamers are sexist for the game underperforming?
I expect Square Enix to complain about the public not liking their vision, about everyone being wrong, about it being a commercial failure (tomb raider marketing budget), and canning the internal studio and Luminous engine.
Because god forbid SE ever do anything positive.
Would've loved to see a DX12 port of FFXV on the upgraded engine, but nope, that game ended development, canceled DLC, closed online services, and is now forgotten. Like every other one of their projects that isn't Final Fantasy 7.
I paid full price for it too, but on steam. I played two hrs and refunded it.
Ended up buying a ps5 an hour later. My local store actually had one! And got Ragnarok. It's so nice except vrr doesn't work on my monitors hdmi port :( so now I'm tempted to go get the lg c2 42inch.
I should add that Forspoken on PC is completely garbage when it comes to performance. Constantly stuttering and massive frame drops. And that's on a 3090 kp.
I’m more annoyed SE is letting Marvel’s Avengers fade and isn’t just encouraging companies to push for revitalization. So dumb.
this was made by square enix?!!!!
it shows.
SE releasing an incoherent, unfinished mess of a game? Colour me suprised.
Seriously, I do not understand how people still put their hopes in SE games. The trend is visible for over a decade now.
Square is a massive company with tons of different games, however, they tend to put out more stinkers or unfinished games than finished games. Their more traditional JRPGs or FF games tend to complete experiences (I said TENDS to), flawed or not, but their games catered to more Western audiences tend to be VERY hit or miss.
@@coolyeh1017 I consider Final Fantasy Dead since FFXIII. FFXV was unfinished. KH, wich is an utterly bonkers story true to japanese storytelling, is rather divisive as well. As is the reimagination of FFVIIR.
It`s not eastern vs western gamedesign within SE thats the prolem. It's modern SE trying to chase trends without knowing why some of those trends work in the first place.
@@MoreImbaThanYou Ah I see, but I do have hope with FFXVI since it is helmed by Yoshi P of FFXIV fame. FFXIV is widely considered by the majority of FF players (who played it) to be the best narrative, worldbuilding, story, and characters so there is that to go for it, but it does involve a 500-hour MSQ if you want to read/watch everything (this includes optional content since optional content does ALOT on worldbuilding and they add extra scene if you did the optional content in the main story) and the thing is that even in the latest expansion they still call back to rules established in the base expansion so people have to pay attention. But Many consider FFXI and FFXIV different since they are MMOs.
@@coolyeh1017 I do not count the MMO's as "real" FF's, but I do admit that I have heard ALOT of good things about FFXIV. I dare to have a shroud of hope for FFXVI due to that, but my goodwill for SE is long gone. So I will wait for reviews.
At this point, FFXIV is the only reason SE is still alive. They should have a statue of Yoshi-P, shouldering the SE Logo Atlas-Style in front of their HQ.
Remember how forgiving Matt was of Squeenix on the 2022 review video? Remember how he said Forsaken was a sure thing? Yeah, love ya Matt but that didn't age well, now did it? 😉
He especially comes across as your typical Redditor.
Just came across these dudes, they come across like skeptics, have they ever worked for Don Sargoon? Lmao
Maybe he was hoping too much? Granted FFXIV was doing very well in 2022 and FFXVI is on the massive hype train.
Buffy's dialogue is about 10% of what's in this trailer. Same with Marvel movies. It's dialled up high because the combat thing is constant. But if you turn it down, you're good...but the gameplay being tedious doesn't jive with tedious quips
When making games that don't reflect on the majority of your audience it will fail regardless of anything else. The movie industry is failing for the same reason at the moment, ignoring the RPG story element and just trying to make some propaganda piece.
Propaganda for what?
@@goosewithagibus CRT, DEI, ESG. Take your pick of the bundled agenda.
@@thanos43infinity I'm unfamiliar with what any of those are.
@@goosewithagibus Old TVs or something?
@@Poldovico I've come to realize CRT means Critical Race Theory. I was thinking it was about old TV's as well. I couldn't be bothered to Google this stuff, so it took me a minute to realize. Not sure what Critical Race Theory has to do with Forespoken though.
I told my niece that she can never play that game, due to the main character being completely unredeemable and someone who should never be emulated.
thanks to matt for saving me 70 bucks in the first minute of this video. the way he described it, are the exact things i hate most about modern games. when it feels like instead of one game, its 4 or 5 similar games bolted together to make one "experience"
One thing I have noticed with artists is many of them say, "I do not want to overthink, or work, this." I suspect that may be a factor.