Frey Faces Her Fears in Flashy Forspoken PS5 Cinematic Trailer

When will game developers realise we don't want cinematic trailers, give us gameplay please.

Edit: To clarify, this is for games in general, not just Forspoken.

@Rob3008 Play the demo. Although I think the demo has hurt the game massively because no one seems to have had a good impression from it

Yeah the Demo was pretty bad.
Curious how the game finally turns out. Videos looking good but the demo was a huge downer.

@Rob3008 They have, and also there's a playable demo..A little rough though..

Nothing about this game excites me and apparently my feelings are aligned with a lot of other people.
I think this game is going to be a flop.

When Frey becomes Prey

When games looks like the cinematics in FF7, i thougt, playing on Ps1....1997.
This is the future......of course Resident Evil gave me the same chill and thought.
But...how many games since 1997 is as good looking that good??

This game is a prime example of why releasing demos is usually not a good idea

Illiteration is fun.

@Chronald_Srump

This user name checks out. Time for you to find a quieter dog whistle as everyone knows this one. Go troll someplace else.

@SamMR

At first glance, I would have agreed with you on this demo. However, I spent a lot of time developing my skills in the demo just to see what I could do and it has surprisingly deep game mechanics, even if it is just like InFamous.

@Shepherd_Tallon Fair enough. I'm usually on board with Square Enix games but I just didn't enjoy anything about the demo. Up for giving it another go if it reviews well.

@Chronald_Srump what's so woke about it exactly?

I love magic to death, so I'll most likely get it. The demo was decent, though not exactly my cup of tea. I prefer action games like God of War, Devil May Cry, etc/..

Interested enough in Forspoken to buy it just not on release day. Its a wait till later this year on PS store sales kinda game for me. For a brand new IP it's got some balls going up against the big stacked releases coming soon I'll give it that. Dead Space, Powerwash sim, Yakuza Ishin, RE4 and Dead Island 2 much more a priority

@naruball It's the I'M NOT PLAYING AS A STRAIGHT WHITE GUY, IT'S WOKE BULLSH*T DURRR!1!
Weird how whenever a POC character or an LGBT character has a spotlight in a video game, they always have a mental breakdown. It's political duuurr!1!1!
I can't anymore lmao!

@naruball a black female main character is woke according to the anti woke folks on twitter a lot of them just using the word woke to hide they’re bigotry.

The worst part of the demo was the GUI for me. Truly awful.

@naruball because according to bigots black females dont exist. So we cant possibly have a game where they are the protagonist. 🙄People make me sad!

It's on my list, although I've not played the demo... And have plenty to tide me over just now.

I'm thinking this is a sale purchase if it seems half way decent once released and patched a bit.

The dialog in this game will be hilariously bad.

It will give FF Strange of Paradies a run for its money.

Tbh after playing Sony titles I get very allergic to bad dialog because sony games are so good in that area.

TLOU, GoW the dialogs are so well crafted.

On the other side whenever I play a JRPG I want to rip my eyes and ears out when experiencing that typically cringe japanese dialog.

That said...

CHAOS!!!

Not enough f words in the trailer

@Shepherd_Tallon the demo was good enough to win me over. Nothing near as amazing as I thought it would be but still solid.

Easily a 7/10, good fun. The only thing is these days who wants to spend £70 on a game that isn't a 9 or 10

@Allfather 😂😂😂

That chaos stuff got to be some of the worst dialog in any media of all time. Worse than the room

I didnt like the dialog in the trailer, maybe I`m getting old, but the game world looks decent, and the combat looks fun, maybe I`ll try when the price drops.

Too many quality games coming out this year and this one went way down in my estimation since the initial reveal. I won't be taking a chance on it.

@Rob3008 Agreed. I prefer in-game cinematic scenes and gameplay. Yea cinematic trailers used to be cool and hyped you up years ago, but with graphics now able to compete with cinematic trailers, they aren't needed any more.

I keep forgetting there was a demo released for this.
I really need to get around to giving it a go.

I really want to love this game, it has that classic "this is a PS game" look and feel....and yet....I just.... don't.... It seems so generic. Maybe what bothers me most about it is that it seems like it's trying to be an Marvel product without being a Marvel product. The whole Marvel template is in place and this would be at home as a TV series on "the CW" network. And I absolutely abhor the entire Marvel template and everything about it. This might do well since PS is the home of everything Marvel now (eww), but.....it just turns me instantly off.

I have a curiosity about it, but it's one of those things I might wait and pick up in a black friday dumpster sale next year, then add it to my backlog and eventually play it on PS6.

@somnambulance " I like what Luminous does."
So you like 240p rendering with Vaseline smeared over the lens, or 2k-ish resolution with 15fps slideshows, do you?

Man, see, people keep saying "inFamous" which is my mostest favoritest of "modern" Sony series I'm bummed is gone. And you said Sonic Frontiers which I think is absolutely awesome. And it makes me want to want this game. And yet everything I've seen about it from the demo to the video seems like the most bland paint by numbers filler game ever imagined...

@SamMR If letting people play a part of your game hurts the game, I'm not sure the right take-away is that your game should be better hidden to hoodwink people into buying it based on hype and marketing before they know it's not good. I think the right takeaway is you should make better games and get better opinions on its milestones during development to fix it.

@ILikeStake F'n CHAOS! Amirite?

Forspoken is typical Square Enix in that they are always late to the party and bring nothing to it. The demo outside of interesting combat was pretty bad with a open world what is just completely empty, bland and well boring. Its funny as the team behind this made FF15 a game what also had a empty, bland and boring open world, to be clear i liked FF15 just not the open world part. Maybe the final game will be better but that demo really convinced me to get Dead Space instead

@SamMR To be fair, it's a great idea for the consumer!

Certainly saved me money in this case.

Just zero interest in this game. I guess first impressions mean a lot. At least for me.

Holy f**k s**t. It's f**King Frey from Forf**kingsaken. F**k me sideways.

@nomither6 😂

@Starkei You f'n won the f'n thread. Cogratu-f'n-lations! lol

I can picture a bunch of proper Japanese businessmen in proper Japanese business suits sitting around a proper Japanese conference table in a proper inornate Japanese conference room watching a bunch of western television for market research for this game and determining this is what the vulgar, uncivilized outsiders like and it will sell many copies if they copy this. I want to see the Japanese language script for this just to see how different it is and how refined Frey is in their version

I'll definitely pick this up. Not in January, though - "despite some rough edges" means that waiting for a sale also likely means waiting for a more polished game to enjoy. That's a win-win.

EDIT: I also played most of the demo. Not my favorite game from what I played in 2022, by a long shot, but it has potential. I'm interested in trying the full game - at a less-than-full price, when it's as polished as it's likely to get. So, maybe a Black Friday sale in 11 months.

Played the demo. Zero interest in purchasing now.

Well played I guess; it's saved me some cash!

On the one hand the character looks so much nicer in this trailer than the initial cover art release from ages ago.

On the other hand the music is beyond awful, just a massive mood kill and feels totally inappropriate for the setting.

@somnambulance Total wild cards can be a good feeling for under $20...70s another matter 😂

@Constable_What Makes sense. Does the character work any better in the Japanese context or is it still a weird forced mess?

I really wanted to like this game but the demo confirmed my fears and it’s a pass for me.

@somnambulance I'm always in favor of niche. I just require it to be actually good. Correction. I f'n require it to be f'n good. which means but Marvel-y 😂

@Constable_What Yeah I'm thinking that might be the way to go. I completely forgot this game was written by a bunch of American and British writers. Worse, part time writers. No wonder the dialogue is what it is. Not that everything they worked on is bad or anything, but, this is no Japanese game in story and tone, it truly is a Hollywood HBO nonsense script. Ugh. Square continues it's march to trying to be Western in a "hello fellow Yankee-san" sort of way 😩

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika Lol, I haven't even played Ragnarok yet and that's the very first thing I thought as well 😂

It was a really bad demo and the game looks to be a massive let down. Still cant believe the downgrade, they said it would be the most graphically impressive open word game ever and it looks pretty terrible and empty to honest. The performance and controls were awful aswell. One of the worst demos in a long time

I've been keeping an eye on this game ever since the ps5 was revealed. If i listened to every comment or review that told me a certain game was crap i'd have missed out on a lot of games i've really enjoyed (gotham knights,necromunga hired gun,outsiders etc.) Yeah i take what you guys say onboard when thinking about purchases but i only use push squares reviews as guides and do not take them as gospel because you can always tell how a games going to score usually straight of the bat. This is one of those games like hogwarts that i think i will enjoy and i'll take a punt on it..

The lack of people in the demo was a major turn off. It felt very artificial, like a world map which a collection of very video-gamey challenges in discrete points. That's not what I come to games for.

Put this down in the 'demos might hurt sales' camp, because I was relatively curious about the game before.

I remember not really liking the Dragon's Dogma demo way back in the day because you only played as a warrior class and they were slow and heavy.

My concern is whether it's just next-gen glitter with a mediocre-at-best game underneath.

@NEStalgia
Agreed on Infamous. Bring back Cole.
I played the Forespoken Demo and deleted it because of Frey. Developers confused arrogant, snarky and rude with witty, Independent, bold and assertive.

All I will say is this is a good ass cinematic

I’d be interested enough in this game to pick it up around launch it there weren’t so many other games coming out this year. I feel like this game would have had much more success if it could have hit its launch last year. As it stands now, I’ve got to keep room on my plate for Hogwarts in a few weeks and then Jedi Survivor.

Ill be interested to see how this reviews. Whilst it didnt blow me away, I didnt mind the demo and I enjoyed the traversal and magic systems. Looked like it was heading for a 7/10 score.
With so much else out, its unlikely I'll pay full price, but I might pick it up in a sale!

@Constable_What LOL! Perfect description, really. It's like the writers of "Saint's Row 2022" joined into this game too. "I know, beatnik kid with an attitude that makes 90's Sonic look formal, who doesn't want 30-75 hours of that in their ear?" Especially with the bracelet angle I get High on Life vibes, except without the toilet humor that draws some people. And hopefully better gameplay.

When I look at the writing talent involved what strikes me as immediately problematic is just how many writers are listed. There's not one writer, or a cowriting, there's like 6 primary writers which should raise red flags immediately in terms of writing cohesion. That's kind of unusual to begin with. Then when you look at the background of them it gets weirder. Ones a gaming journalist turned writer, who's also written for major hollywood productions. Ok, good enough if that's your direction. Then you have Amy Hennig who is probably where the snark comes from...but Uncharted and Uncharted 2's writing was on target, and the snark worked. Maybe Balinska just doesn't deliver it like North and Black? Then you have an actor that seemingly also also writes but has written nothing of note, a producer who also writes and seems to have nothing but a play credited, and a screenwriter that's written some episodes of some low budget TV shows I've never heard of in the US.

Why did they need that many writers, and why did they need one Hollywood film writer, one video game writer with some big credits behind her, and then a bunch of people "who wrote some stuff once or twice as a side gig?"

I can not imagine what went on for development of this game, and I don't know if it's a matter of Square having no idea what they're doing but assuming spending more money on a bunch of foreigners makes a saleable product, or if it's a matter of Sony throwing talent on to "save" it it from whatever it was prior, and instead muddled it, or if Square actually thought that was a good plan. But it's obvious why the script is where it is when you look at the cacophony of voices talking over each other in the writing department. It feels like instead of making the game Luminous wanted to make, they made a focus tested product their consulting firm told them would hit sales goals in the target demographic because kids today like this sort of dialogue. (Then again, we're still waiting for the end of FFXV they were going to make and then cancelled it to work on this and get these guys far away from FF.... )

It could have been a cool campy cult hit with a different dialogue approach I think. But it just comes across as trying too hard to hit the "key 14-25 market in the important US/UK regions with significant crossover with current cinema trends evidenced by Marvel sales volume." This will either not age well, or will be hysterical in 10 years.

@nathanSF Cole was just an awesome, interesting somewhat antihero even when he was full hero. Miss that guy. Delsin was....I will never know why we got Delsin....I didn't hate him. I just don't remember him. He ordered the Venti decaf with extra milk, right?

@Constable_What Yeah, though it remains hard to figure out if the mess of writers or the Focus they were assigned (sorry, could help but add some bad-FF humor), was bad to begin with. So much of what you describe easily applies to FFXV which came from the same team, as well even without trying to go all Hollywood.

I wonder what the impression of this game would be if it did not have Sony-exclusive mega-marketing behind it trying to make it look like it stands on par with Horizon and GoW. It weirdly seems like it has more marketing money behind it than GT7, an actual tentpole release.

Once understood the controls I loved the demo playing it a few times to better understand it not just once and give up. I always loved the platforming verticality and combat in the gameplay showcases. Crazy particle effects going off, the movement is great for attacks like other good action games than a God of War/Elden Ring slow and different approach it gives me DMC/Bayonetta vibes in an open world or Darksiders 2/Biomutant in that intense combat open world RPG combo I've wanted to surpass Darksiders 2 for years but nothing as and maybe nothing will but still I'm all for it (Darksiders 3 was soulslike so they basically annoyed me and Genesis was an isometric entry of the 1st game/prequel story so).

When it was parts of FF15 in the announcement it seemed alright. The isekai angle had me eh about it and I've focused on gameplay the most like I always care about and everything else is just what it is of fine enough I can tolerate it. I don't care for western influence making it so clear Square wants western appealing products even if Capcom and others have done a better job at appealing to western fans and newcomers even if certain areas might not be what people want they still do a better job conveying it at least for a large enough audience over the years. Movie staff is always a bad sign. The 'were cool kids' can also be laughable just make something standard not to an audience unlikely to actually care compared to GTA5, COD and Fornite anyways. Those that are teens that play RPGs or open worlds already have many that aren't appealing to an audience and they know what their looking for the suiting a particular audience approach this way seems odd with the characterisation for one the rest is pretty alright I'd say but I like open spaces to run around not a village every 5 metres to show 'look a build we filled the world as bad or as good as possible so people don't go 'but we need quests, people and this and this'. I'd rather run around then care about NPCs, quests and whatever look for characters. I play games to not deal with people and their boring tasks. XD

The little touches of the nailpolish and other details are great to see, it's not as Dead Space contextual health on his back but still nice to see (noticing similar with the optional upgrades Bayonetta has for earrings), the fishbowl menus are weird though. Like Strangers of Paradise I think it's niche for action game fans and most people will push it aside. Same with Valkyrie Elysium both I cared about. Unlike FF16 that has mainstream appeal I don't think Forspoken does I don't think people will like it. I do and I hated the isekai idea at first but came around the more I saw and thought about elements I did like about the game.

The companion could be annoying but at the end of the day they have purpose in the game, a talking object is fine and she has no idea about this world she can only get so much from monologuing/speaking to people. Is the companions in God of War 2018/Ragnanrok annoying who wants a talking head regardless of their purpose, role (Mimir is a good great but making a point) and who they are, it's ok there but we can't have talking wearable arm pieces, sure................. that makes so much sense.

The trailers are what they are I don't care for the isekai/another world angle of the story/premise but I hope they surprise me, yes that element made me hate the game but I changed my mind and became hopeful. But as an Anime fan have to get used to isekai being annoyingly everywhere while the west hasn't really had that Narnia or otherwise in your face for 10 years so it's fair.

The New York angle they are going for the localisation I think is odd. I don't think Square Enix don't understand the US characterisation (which yes I have heard that from people I think they are overthinking it they have localisation teams for a reason, if the Japanese dub is that way sure but for the English one that's different, seeing enough anime subbed and dubbed or other games it's clear to me what some intentions are between versions but to some people it isn't and they think weird theorises up) I just think Frey seems like either what a movie version of a New Yorker is like or accurate I don't know never been can only go off tv or people that have travelled to the city. Which as some games do have movie sound effects of guns or so doesn't surprise me that studios keep to what audiences expect than accuracy unless said so (I know odd to compare that way but I can't think of another example).

I don't care that it's empty I don't expect it to be overly populated. How many fantasy locations need a village/kingdom every 5 metres for people to be satisfied with worlds I swear. It's also 1440p 60FPS for more grass and trees than ground texture and villages. Fast running like Sonic (I've been wanting this to be the case for years in open worlds (even as someone not into them) not slow boring characters their heavy sucks and sure we get DMC or Bayonetta but for an open world title this movement never happens so you bet I'm excited like Sunset Overdrive and Gravity Rush (the two open worlds I actually liked) before Forspoken and Sonic Frontiers style of open worlds and great movement mechanics). It's like the Minecraft community wanting Nether villages, sure because people set up shop in the underground dimension, sure it'd be cool but why bother. I'd rather have 'space to run around in with such a particular movement focused moveset'.

@NEStalgia
The Writers Room but as chefs
People like ice cream; check
People like peanut butter; check
people like chocolate, check
people like pizza, check
people like burgers, check.
people like potato chips; check
Okay chuck all that into the blender and we have a sure-fire winner.

Meanwhile the designers of the restaurant, (visuals) are geniuses of creativity
Visually the game is stunning and gameplay and controls are fun and fluid.
Pity dialogue is a big dog's fart in a small room.

@nathanSF LOL, I'd say the restaurant designers are good, and the table settings (gameplay and controls) is good, but they forgot to put chairs in the building and the windows are missing (empty open world)