Interestingly enough I only ran into the dialogue annoyances a few times while playing the demo. It’s like seeing what gen X Japanese focus groups think western millennials and gen Z are like. Definitely cringeworthy but I have enough beef with the rest of the game to say “what were they thinking?”. I really love the enemy designs and the music is pretty good. That’s where the praise stops though.
- The font they use is atrocious. It’s literally tHiS fOnT tHaT kIdS lOvE! Everything is also skewed so that you can’t just comfortably read a word.
- Menus are useless there is a huge skewed picture, and the text is placed on the bottom left and top right with a bunch of empty space in between. You can’t even find a list of spells for your skill tree, you need to scroll between runes (all generic and unrecognizable).
- Combat/world interface is atrocious. Impossible to see anything without scanning with your cuff. Picking things up is more hide and seek than resource management.
- Speaking of resource management, there is a ton of worthless stuff even in the demo. Plenty of plants and shit to grind for, why? To say they have crafting. Wish games would stop with the crafting mechanics, they’re terrible.
- Traversal feels awful. Too slow unless you’re parkouring, and then it’s too responsive (until the animations constantly rip control out of your hands). Forced slow walking in buildings.
- Combat was OK. It seems like you have a lot of options, and I can see where there might be depth if given more time to play. But it felt way too button mashy, and the context sensitive parts did not seem to have any rhyme or reason when they activated. It feels like many games do nowadays, where they have a predetermined result they want you to achieve and then try to “help” you do it. I wish it would just trust the player and stop trying to help me along, it just gets in the way. Maybe it’s just me coming from Returnal which is nearly control perfection, but Forspoken Just fought me the whole time.
- Finally, not specific to Forspoken, but the open world is so pointless and empty. Oh look a hut with firewood I can’t carry. Thank god that’s a landmark on my map. And instead there are impassible cliffs everywhere you look, with a temptation to try and climb before your parkour system glitches out halfway during your ascent. It’s clear you are supposed to get more powers and explore more easily, but it just feels tedious and bad. I could deal with it had there been anything of interest to find. I know this is a demo, but shouldn’t they include something to hook players and make them interested in continuing?
This game is going to bomb so hard it’s going to shake SE’s confidence about everything they’re working on, at least until we know if FFXVI is awesome or another FFXV.