Forspoken - action-RPG from Square Enix with cringe protagonist

[Chanel Oberlin]

It all makes sense now...

Nomura was a mistake.

 

[Zariusz]

It all makes sense now...

Nomura was a mistake.

We live in a reality where Final Fantasy instead of trying to realise Amano's concept arts of fantastical worlds to their full potential is realising Nomura's retarded fashion ideas and belt fetishes.

 

[Duraframe300]

It all makes sense now...

Nomura was a mistake.

We live in a reality where Final Fantasy instead of trying to realise Amano's concept arts of fantastical worlds to their full potential is realising Nomura's retarded fashion ideas and belt fetishes.

Never directed a single Mainline FF though. It's more Kitase and who he assembled around him.

Nojima, Nomura, Toriyama (not the DB guy, the XIII guy), that's all his people.

Booting Sakaguchi is still the worst thing that happened to Square because the creative direction of the company took a nosedive. Money was funelled into a specific group, experimental stuff had a much harder time to get greenlit (For example both Parasite Eve and Xenogears started as rejected FF7 proposals which Sakaguchi went out of his way for to make actually happen), and so on.

I wouldn't be surprised if the emergence of the FFXIV lobby inside Square led to the recent SAGA+ remasters.

 

[Morgoth]

https://www.luminous-productions.com/news/find_your_fight_in_forspoken_available_now.html

You can loot shoes yourself in a PC demo releasing later today.

 

[Chanel Oberlin]

Never directed a single Mainline FF though. It's more Kitase and who he assembled around him.

He directed Kingdom Hearts however, whose massive success convinced the company that action RPGs were the way forward. Everything he's been involved in as more than a character/enemy designer has been a disaster IMO, and Final Fantasy as a whole is unrecognizable nowadays. But you're also right that he's not the only culprit.

 

[Jenkem]

 

[Bad Sector]

https://www.luminous-productions.com/news/find_your_fight_in_forspoken_available_now.html

You can loot shoes yourself in a PC demo releasing later today.

It is available now. 34GB download, 42GB extracted.

I don't have enough free disk space on any of the SSDs so it goes into the spinning rust in a temp disk image. Let's see how the first DirectStorage game will cope with Proton + HDD + 2 filesystems overhead :-P.

(i saw a couple of mentions of the game running on Steam Deck so if nothing else it should run on regular Linux with Proton)

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

41% positive reviews on Steam.
Common complaints: it's unoptimized (but you should've known that since they revealed the requirements), it's nothing like the trailers, constantly interrupted by cutscenes, awful voice acting

 

[gerey]

Only 180 reviews - pretty bad for an AAA release during dry season with basically no direct competition.

Common complaints: it's unoptimized (but you should've known that since they revealed the requirements), it's nothing like the trailers, constantly interrupted by cutscenes, awful voice acting

We all know nobody wants it because the protagonist is an ugly, mouthy sheboon.

I genuinely have no idea how this piece of shit got greenlit - surely not even the coke-snorting faggots that run SE could be so clueless as to think "zoomer nigger protagonist" was going to be a success?

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Only 180 reviews - pretty bad for an AAA release during dry season with basically no direct competition.

Common complaints: it's unoptimized (but you should've known that since they revealed the requirements), it's nothing like the trailers, constantly interrupted by cutscenes, awful voice acting

We all know nobody wants it because the protagonist is an ugly, mouthy sheboon.

I genuinely have no idea how this piece of shit got greenlit - surely not even the coke-snorting faggots that run SE could be so clueless as to think "zoomer nigger protagonist" was going to be a success?

Squeenix was always dismissive of its western branch and probably still is. It's safe to say that, like many companies of that country, the thoughts of western people are more than secondary in their eyes. But western money is still green and having a good IP doing good money doesn't hurt. They axed Eidos to chase the juicy Marvel IP -- that didn't work. They are trying now with a game that feels "western" to them, most likely. There's a chance that a japanese old man thinks this is the stuff westerners enjoy. Whille they are struggling now, Nier (and by that, I mean 2b's ass) is still keeping them relevant, 6 years later. Final Fantasy is like pokemon, a money printing machine. So yeah, that's mostly it I'd say.

 

[Morgoth]

I played around a bit with the demo.

From a technical standpoint, it ran pretty flawlessly. No stuttering, okay framerates, very fast loading times indeed. Very impressive for such a vast gameworld. DirectStorage truly delivers. Also, the soundtrack from Bear McCreary and Garry Schyman is very sublime.

The game itself though is just your mediocre, average walking jogging sim. The quips between Frey and her sidekick demon (?) are amusing if you can indulge yourself into teenage humor, but it grows tired quickly. The enemies are rather spongy, there's your usual collect, climb, loot and upgrade stuff, and a gameworld that's truly huge.

But none of these individual pieces transcend into a better whole. It's a shame, the whole street gurl plunged into a medieval world fantasy could have provided grounds for a witty story and something truly special. But Square-Enix fucked it up by playing safe.

 

[gerey]

Squeenix was always dismissive of its western branch and probably still is.

Not really. Many Japanese companies are moving their HQ West and hiring (((consultants))) to tell them what Westerners like (and they all tell them the same thing - people in the West worship niggers like gods). Naturally, when they do release a nigger worship game nobody wants to buy it, because surprise, nobody in the world actually likes niggers or being reminded they exist.

But western money is still green and having a good IP doing good money doesn't hurt.

If SE cared they wouldn't have actually sold their competent Western developers, or mishandled them and their games by coming up unrealistic sales figures to make back the money the Japanese branch had burned on various Final Fantasy vanity projects.

Final Fantasy is like pokemon, a money printing machine. So yeah, that's mostly it I'd say.

Final Fantasy XIII and XV were complete disasters, and massive money pits. As an example, FF XIII alone had enough assets made for it that they could have made three games using them (which they did in the end to make back at least some of the invested money). And that's ignoring the moronic advertisement and branding campaign. FF XV was worse. Restarted at least three times from scratch, 10 years in development, huge number of assets created and then trashed, a marketing campaign even more obscene than the one for FFXIII.

Only reason SE survived those two projects was Dragon Quest, FF XIV, the various mobile gacha and Western developers.

And now they've sold all their talented Western developers to go invest the money into fucking NFTs.

Square Enix is a deeply sick company that have lost their way and need a change in leadership at every level.

 

[Modron]

Nobody told me Wyrmlord was in this game.

 

[Bad Sector]

Ok, so amusingly (kinda) the game has special support for Steam Deck and in fact crashes if you try to run it on regular Linux. If you launch Steam in Steam Deck mode (just the -steamdeck parameter) it does run, but it forces some weird limitations that seem to be hardcoded in the engine. This is how it looks with the highest settings the game allows me to set via options ("Ultra" preset with a couple of modifications):

On one hand the performance is nice (at least they didn't hardcode the 30FPS cap that is by default there), on the other hand things like foliage seem to be way limited and most objects disappear around 2 meters away from the camera.

As for the gameplay, i don't know, all you do is run around the terrain and kill stuff with magic, can't say i was impressed but only tried the tutorial + a few minutes after the tutorial ended. The random (and frequent) quips haven't hit much with me so far, the most amusing one was when i opened a treasure chest and Frey said "Meh".

I hoped it'd be the first hour of the game or so, so you get to see the intro, get hooked (assuming they believe you can get hooked anyway) and continue the savegame once you reach the end of the demo area, but instead it just throws you in some random canyon with some quests/goals.

Oh well, i might try it again once it works with Proton properly to see how my PC handles modern AAA games :-P

 

[Seethe]

 

[The_Mask]

The funny thing is, 20 years later I still remember their names are Agni and Rudra. Funny how that works.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Reports of technical issues are now answered with "lol potato pc", because computers are just one more console.

 

[Tyranicon]

Steam discussions are popping off. Most are just blatantly trolling (I hope).

 

[turkishronin]

I like how this thread isn't moved to JRPG section despite being made by Japan because it's absolute dogshit.

 

[Tyrr]

 

[ADL]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[Jenkem]

 

[Takamori]

Foreskin.

 

[Baron Dupek]