I tuned into The Game Awards for The Matrix, Sonic, and the Player’s Choice, but I stayed for Forspoken. As far as I’m concerned the trailer for this game truly stole the show when compared with everything else we saw. Forspoken is an action role-playing game developed by Luminous Productions and published by Square Enix. It’s scheduled to be released May 24, 2022 exclusively for Playstation 5 and PC. Here’s everything we’ve gathered on Forspoken.
The story follows main protagonist Frey, a young woman from New York who is somehow transported to the magical land of “Athia”. Stranded, she must use her newfound magical powers to traverse landscapes while battling against monsters and the “corruption”. Anybody else catching Inuyasha vibes? Maybe? Just me? Okay. If Frey keeps looking familiar to you it might be because she is portrayed by Ella Balinska, who you may recognize as co-starring in the Charlie’s Angels 2019 reboot. Not too much is known about the story, but hopefully future trailers can show us not just more about her adventure, but the world of Athia as well.
Those drop dead gorgeous graphics aren’t by coincidence either. Luminous Productions are the developers who brought us Final Fantasy XV, and while I wasn’t the biggest fan of that game there’s no denying they know how to build a beautiful world that’s filled with action. This seems to be their main focus as head director Takeshi Aramaki has stated in an interview with AMD “we are aiming to achieve the highest quality visuals ever seen in an open world game”. This emphasis on performance looks more like a necessity than a goal in order to keep up with the way Frey moves through these landscapes.
As we can see from the trailers, traversing looks to be a huge part of this game. The way Frey glides and bounces through the open world would even have Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales like “sheesh”. But when Frey isn’t darting around she’s using a multitude of magical abilities. Some moves we’ve seen so far include ice blasts you can charge, fire spears that crash on enemies like a dragoon, swords made of fire to melee, electrical area attacks, earth spikes shooting up from the ground, and she looks like she’s just getting started. The biggest thing I really enjoy so far is that the gameplay looks like it is the driving force behind everything. Similar to how everything in Mario is designed around his ability to jump, her abilities seem to dictate the majority of what happens in the game. Her powers are the focus of the story, why the game needs to be so big, and why there’s such a big emphasis on performance. Its a simple concept, and I think the key to success with this game is simplicity. Welp, looks like I’m going to have to add this to my list of games to hawkeye in 2022.
