Forspoken Continues to Divide Opinion Following PS5 Demo

The thing i didnt like the most was hearing the main character talk, she would always come up as a smartass everytime she talked

I'm really torn after the demo because I was having a tonne of fun until I started feeling queasy and the queasiness kept getting worse the more I played, same happened a few days afterwards when I booted it up again.

The only other time I've had this sensation with games is when I played some janky VR years ago.

With Forspoken I have an inkling it might be because of how the camera sticks so close to Fray during combat.

Hopefully there are better camera options in the final product.

@johncalmc this comment wins the day

I turned it off due to clunky controls and unexpected cursing. I just wasn't able to connect with it.

I gave the English VO one more try in the demo but found it just insufferable personally. So I switched to Japanese VO and found it shockingly much more tolerable.

However my biggest issue with the demo is it has a lot of flash but nothing feels like it has enough...I don't know impact? It's hard to explain but something about the spells just didn't feel very satisfying for me. I also thought the traversal felt a bit too janky. I never felt like I was in great control of where I was going.

I'm still intrigued to see how it reviews though. I like the idea of an open world witch game but I don't know if the execution is there with this game. I'm hoping it reviews well. Maybe it was just a bad demo.

I haven't had time to play the demo, but I have it downloaded. I'll give it a shot and make a determination from there.

Her design is incredibly cool and her personality is the complete opposite. This game needed better writers.

Especially after that demo, I still can't see what PlayStation saw in this to want to buy an insane two years of console exclusivity.

@NielsNL Honestly I did the exact same thing about 10 mins into the demo. It's just not for me. And the demo need another months or so of polish imo. Didnt look great to me.

I’m afraid 2023 can become quite a disappointing year concerning PS5 exclusives. Not that it will be bad, we’ll still have the likes of FF XVI and Spider-Man 2, but the media hype around the release schedule has just been too big.

Now that Forspoken could become a disappointment we won’t have THAT many big games releasing in 2023. Besides FF XVI and SM2 we’ll only have some Horizon side dishes and while everyone keeps mentioning FF7 Rebirth we all know it won’t be released in 2023 (Square Enix never even claimed this).

Meanwhile the Series X will most probably have Starfield, Redfall, Forza Motorsport, Stalker 2, Ark 2 and possibly even Fable as exclusives on Gamepass in 2023. My PS5 will definitely be joined by a Series X in the coming months.

I thought the gameplay was pretty fun,but man the main character talks so much.

“Case in point: the title's new trailer, which debuted earlier this week, currently has more dislikes than likes on YouTube “

I’d assume that has more to do with people with an agenda against the game than a reflection of its quality. I checked out old videos for FF: Stranger of Paradise and Babylons Fall and they all have more likes than dislikes. So what’s the difference? Is this game looking significantly worse than those?

The main character is a Black Female, now would anyone have an issue with such a thing? The kind of people that might be know for review Bombing etc perhaps.

@Darude84 Stalker 2 is a 3 month timed exclusive and Fable is not coming out in 2023 considering they just recruited a new lead writer in the last 6 months.

This game doesn’t look all that appealing to me. And with Dead Space and Atomic Heart releasing shortly after it combined with a small handful of titles I still haven’t even picked up yet, plus the release schedule for the remainder of the year, I doubt I’ll ever pick this up.

@ChrisDeku Didn’t know that, thanks. Yet still Starfield alone will be reason for most gamers on older consoles to choose X over PS5.

The demo just didn’t do anything for me to say buy this game at even $40 and it will be $70. I mean to the people that liked it, thats cool and i ain’t trying to rag on what games you like, but for me this is a hard pass, and not anything worth taking time away from games i am playing now and enjoying. If this was on Xbox it would be labeled GP filler in the more aggressive chat forums with the fanboys. That was sort of my take on it.

I feel a bit like the whole racist / right wing categorisation of negative reactions is becoming a bit of a smokescreen for sub-par products. The demo was underwhelming, but if it gets good reviews, I'm definitely interested.

I played the demo and wasn’t impressed. Then I came across a reddit post that had advice on what options to change for the demo an, sure enough, the second time was a bit better. The main issue I had was the constant annoying back-and-forth between Frey and Cuff, which turns out can be limited or even turned off completely by a setting under Accessibility, of all places. The other issue was that the demo does not even mention the “grapple hook” ability that is mapped to Square button; without it you may miss a lot of content that you can’t reach easily otherwise.

However, my main issue was that the protagonist Frey comes off as annoying rather than edgy. There is frequent use of f-bombs for no apparent reason (bad writing) and the voice actress (fresh out of her stint in that horrible “Resident Evil” show Netflix already cancelled) is miscast - she comes off as a teenager trying to sound like an adult. I also thought the main music theme, which combines orchestral work with hip-hop elements, just doesn’t match the atmosphere of the game.

Was planning on buying the game on day one/late preorder depending on reviews, but the demo convinced me to at least wait for a sale. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t feel like something I needed to buy at launch.

@Americansamurai1 That seems to be a problem with a lot of games these days. Too much talking.

Frey's lines comes off as a cheap version of Kaine from Nier. I haven't lost all interest in this game though but I'm not buying this day one, that's for sure.

@KaijuKaiser People are upset because this 70$ game was written by a 7 year old. When you spend money you expect quality even if you swear casually irl.

I have nothing against people that played the demo, enjoyed it, and are looking forward to playing the full game. Feel free to ignore the negative comments and have fun playing a game that you like.

In my opinion though, Forspoken is probably not going to be a good game. If the full game is anything like the demo, it’s not fer me. The movement abilities, the combat, and the magic mechanics all felt off to me. The dialogue between the lead character and the cuff was cringe. And the UI design was terrible, with lots of complicated menus and that fisheye curving that they use in some places.

SquareEnix is saving me a lot of money putting out their most recent demos. Valkyrie Elysium had the poor out-of-combat animations and inconsistent art design. Star Ocean had the boring dialogue and framerate issues in one of its maps. And now Forspoken.

I can certainly see why developers don’t put out many demos these days, but I’m really glad they did in these cases. I may have bought a game that I would’ve ended up disliking.

I didn't find it fun from the get go. Pushed through and disliked it more and more. By the end there wasn't a single thing I liked about it so it's getting a pass from me.

@stayawake are you saying the inclusion of a black woman is a "forced agenda"

@Starkei I think it's kind of half and half. A lot of the online reactions to products featuring non-white / female / non-cis-normative characters is absolutely driven by bigotry. On the other hand, it becomes a bad thing when companies attempt to deflect from valid criticism by appealing to idpol. You saw that with Ghostbusters 2016, where anyone who rightly pointed out how unfunny and stupid it looked was castigated as a misogynist.

You also saw that with Doctor Who. The first season of Jodie Whittaker's take on the role was, IMO, almost unwatchable at times, to the point where I dropped the show completely, but any criticism was framed as people being angry about a woman taking over the role.

I think there are going to be a ton of criticisms of this game. Many of them perfectly valid. Some of them insane and racist. I just hope criticism isn't deflected by signal boosting the latter.

@stayawake It probably helps that there's almost a 1:1 relationship between paranoid comments about "forced agendas on society" and right-wing views, lol.

@stayawake calls people clowns while complaining about "forced agendas" they can't even make an example of lol

The game is like an old guy trying to impress the cool kids.

I haven’t played the demo but the game is on my rental list. I’m just not entirely sure what it is? The trailers I’ve seen haven’t done a great job at explaining what the game is actually about? I’m not expecting much but I’ll give it a try.

@KaijuKaiser I don't think this will happen, but we'll see. I think (and hope) Starfield will be the game of the year and a huge hit.

@Ralizah I liked GB 2016. Much more entertaining than GB Afterlife which put me to sleep. Can’t beat the original GB though.

Annoying cringeworthy main character who doesn’t stfu, yeah I ain’t picking Forswoken up. Pass.

@Starkei I think it’s actually the other way around. The racist trolls feel like they’re justified in their opinions because the game ended up being bad. They were gonna crap on the game anyways, but now they feel vindicated now that it turned out to be bad.

The people that accuse people of being racist just because they don’t like something are more than likely the exact same bad-faith trolls just trying to rile people up. It’s hard to distinguish between them unfortunately, thanks to the anonymity of the internet.

But anyone using “woke” as a pejorative should give you a clue with regard to their sincerity. Those people should always be ignored. (There are examples of this right here in this comment section, at least before they get moderated.)

Sometimes demos just don't do a game justice and i have found myself falling in love with a lot of games even though I hated their demos. I'm willing to give this one a go but the demo didn't impress me. It felt like a complicated game with a lot to learn and memorise. Even when I get the hang of it, it's one of those games i will forget the controls quickly when I stop playing for a while. The character talking so much is a bit of a deal breaker too.

@Darude84 You seem to be forgetting every single PSVR2 title.

People are being overly critical of an unreleased game with a black protagonist? I'm shocked, I'm absolutely shocked, that anyone would be surprised about it because it happens every time.

I loved the demo as it made me decide not to buy this game. The gameplay and world didn't do it at all for me.

I don't know, I thought the demo was alright. Would I pay £70 for it? Well, Rift Apart is the only time I've paid that much for a game, so no. But once it's like 30% off I'll consider it.

Demo placed you in an advanced gameplay area. No explanation on how things work, no idea what the story is and how she came to this place.

Demo should have been first hour or so, enough to get your feet wet. Instead it drops you n the middle of the ocean with “stuff” and the developers thought this was a great showcase?

This was on my list but with so many games coming out, this one was sacrificed to make room. Got fire emblem and dead space to play this month, sorry forspoken.

It's gonna flop but square will recover with ff16 release so no problem,

@Darude84 Who knows MS needs something good to release.

If I were to play it I wouldn't go anywhere near the english option, the main character is unbelievably annoying and would ruin the whole experience.

@MFTWrecks That’s a relatively marginal market (less than 5% of PS4 owners owning the first PS VR).

ForFloping is getting bashed everywhere , square should’ve made a multiplayer .

I tried it, but I didn’t like it at all! The characters talking to each other came over as an annoying teen and a Jarvis type character from Iron Man. No, I couldn’t stomach that at all. I actually did a bit of exploring rather than follow the demo path to see what the world was like and although pretty vast, I found it a bit sparse. I also have issues with HDR. I have a really good TV, but games vary from awesome to awful in HDR and this definitely falls into the latter. All in all, I cancelled my preorder after playing this and I won’t be reordering the game.

To airy fairy people want blokes and bikes

@Darude84 There will still be a bunch of big games released for it and Sony is going to push the hell out of them.

Don't act like Call of the Mountain won't be positioned as a sizable exclusive release.

Not really a reliable metric.

what would the real like to dislike ratio be when you Take away the dislikes from the sub humans who only dislike it Because it's "woke"

To be honest i quite enjoyed the demo. And yes, it had it flows and most like the final game will retain some of them too.

But this is one of the very few games that I am not as much interested in the story, but rather the combat. At the beginning the magic-swap-wheel annoyed me so very much, but after couple of hours when I got used to the spells provided I found myself swapping between melee, ranged and support abilities so freaking fast that the combat started to feel extremely satisfying. And this made me pre-order the game. I am really looking forward to the post-game where I would have the full magic arsenal and set my own combos to devastate end game bosses with style.

Oh people on YouTube not liking a game with a female black lead, I am so surprised.

I really enjoyed the demo for its gameplay tbh.

@Fenbops I have zero interest in even looking into the demo of Forspoken, as Square games are usually "blah" to me, but whenever the "W word" is tossed around without a second thought, that person should immediately be ignored as a non-serious, right wing buzzword-obsessed clown.

@ChrisDeku I'd like to know how you determined that the character is black. Was it part of some game description released from Square Enix?

I don't care what sex or color the lead playable character is, that's not the reason why I'm not purchasing this game on release. The reason I'm not purchasing this game on release is because Dead Space, Powerwash Sim, Like a Dragon Ishin, RE4, Dead Island 2 and Burning Shores. Its to do with cash and priorities and has absolutely nothing to do with the playable character being black or female

My opinion: Frey is cute as hell but sounds terrible (the things she says, not the voice itself.) I can sort of live with the dialogue, especially if I bought the game at a discount, because it does look like it has some cool elements.

But for me, the real nail in the coffin is the music.

Like wow, that music is just awful. Awful. I haven't played the demo but if the game sounds like the trailer it's a hard no for me.

it reminds me of those movies where they have these insane guitar riffs meanwhile the setting is that of an ancient epic. Every time I saw a trailer for such a film I said no thanks.

I want Conan the Barbarian (1982) music.

I wasn't that interested in the game until I played the demo, they could have said to hold square to use the grapple magic and it is a bit rough, but I found it very enjoyable and completed it.
Granted Frey and Cuff butt heads and she comes across as overly snarky, but she's supposed to be young and overly confident and I'm sure both characters will improve along the journey and become much less irritating after a bit.

Can we all agree and acknowledge the fact that this article provides literally no substance and is specifically designed to illicit a large amount of responses in order to drive viewership and engagement?

Got to look out for that bottom line.

@GreatAuk the character is literally a digital scan of an actual human actress of Caribbean descent. I’m not sure what more you’re looking for…

@stayawake what examples? That the main character is a woman of color? Seriously? Is that an agenda to you?

@RBRTMNZ I’m black and I live in a country that’s predominantly black. Does that give me a licence to be critical of this game? Maybe if people would stop using racism as a shield whenever someone is critical of a game, movie, etc. there wouldn’t be so much drama over something so few people care about. Surely you can tell the difference between toxic comments and proper criticism.

Holy f*ck (I'm down with casual swearing!) - why is it every time a game comes out with a black lead, people start saying that it is part of a forced agenda?

If it is part of an agenda, it's to be more inclusive & have games reflect the multicultural societies we live in.

@ChrisDeku The actress is half Polish. She calls her self mixed race (which would be accurate as that's what she is.)

I don't see black or white when I see Frey. So I find it very strange that a bunch of you have just slapped a label on Frey as "black" with such confidence and without hesitation.

I say that with complete sincerity, I am not being sarcastic.

BTW the cover art for this game is awful. Frey looks terrible there. Her hair just screams Brooklyn transplant leftist with trust fund to me.

That's why I once said that she looks as if she was designed by a committee on how to attract the most young progressives.

Seeing the character in trailers, she looks so much nicer. And it makes sense since Balinksa is a good looking woman.

@IslandLogic You do realize it can both be true that this game is deserving of critique and that games with black protagonist always receive an exceptional amount of pre-release criticism. This is literally Deathloop all over again. If you want to ignore that pattern cool for you but doing so doesn't make you more sophisticated and rational as you seem to imply. I would say it makes you a bit of an Uncle Tom but that's your business.

@GreatAuk being mixed race doesn’t exclude you from being Black, they’re not mutually exclusive.

“ I was a little mixed-black British girl watching someone who looks like me kicking ass through space and time, and I thought it was the most amazing thing ever!”

This is a quote from Ella on the SquareEnix website about black history month.

@ChrisDeku Stranger of Paradise’s trailer is amazing with its repetition of the word chaos. The dialogue in this came off as annoying and bad, not perfectly insane and stupid.
One is an enjoyable bad so to speak, it’s stupid, but you enjoyed watching it. The other you mock because you did not like sitting through the trailer. That is a very bad comparison.

@ChrisDeku And your point regarding your first statement?

Then it's just as accurate to call Frey a white character.

I don't see you doing that though. It's very clear that posters of a certain political persuasion have all agreed that this is a black woman and that's it. Just as a disclaimer, I am not left or right so I usually get hate from everyone so I am used to disagreements.

BTW, just because a voiceover is of a certain heritage, doesn't mean the game character is as well.

Kratos for example is voiced by a black Canadian.

Balinska is also British, does that mean Frey is also British? She sounds like an American to me.

Do you see why this connecting of voice and motion capture actors to game counterparts can be silly? Sometimes they'll match, sometimes they won't.

@Darude84 yeah 'besides SM2', likely going to be the biggest, highest selling PlayStation studios title of all time, Sony don't have much 🤣🤣

Bit of a clown comment mate. Plus the new FF looks absolutely awesome and will get me back into the series.

@GreatAuk she isn't the voice over actress or motion capture, the character is her face scanned in. She is a black person, she self identifies as black and looks black. When racists look at her they see a black person.

The rest of your post is nonsense.

@Immortal_Barnet Strange tone of voice to use on people you don’t know. I’ll leave it at that.

The game looks fun to play, but the main character is insufferable from what has been shown so far. It would still be insufferable even if the main character were played by Margot Robbie or Amanda Seyfried. It´s not the color of the character, but her dialogue.

That said, I think this is an overreaction, maybe the dialogue gets better as the game goes on and the character gains experience, I dont know, I will give this game a chance when the price drops, because I've played games with worse characters, for example, Watch Dogs 2, a game that I ended up liking by the way.

About the graphics, I love Falcom games, so I can´t complain about Forspoken. haha

@Darude84 I was just reading your post history... Everyone can see you are trolling/MS shill.

@stayawake "Have you ever thought that people just don’t like these forced agendas on society? Maybe you clowns should consider that reality?"

Erm...here? What are you even going on about? Can you read your own comments before accusing me of not reading them?
Btw I'm not gonna waste any more of my time on you, have a good one.

How did this thread descend into weird arguments over politics and the actor's ethnicity when nearly ALL the criticism has been aimed at the horrendous writing and bland world design, and almost never aimed at the acting or character designs?

@ChrisDeku The difference with this game is that SoP and BF were under the radar games that most people never knew existed or cared about, and the niche expects cringe. This game was a highlight from the mighty PlayStation Exclusive(TM) fleet used as a showcase for a console launch with full Sony "this is a console-seller!" level marketing. And....it turns out to be an underdeveloped open world game with pre-teen drama level writing that's equal or worse than "CHAOS!" that was pointed down the sights of the mass market rather than the weeb niche that loves Ninja Gaiden and the meme side of FF. The backlash is less because "people hate cringe B-tier niche games" and more about "why is our hyped console-seller PS exclusive a B-tier niche game?"

@ShogunRok Please, please, when you do the review, assuming you're the poor sap this review is foisted upon privileged influencer that gets early access to this hotly anticipated instant classic, please tell me you plan to work with PJ O'Reily at PXB to do the entire review in the format of the game's dialogue as he did with High on Life. This must be done for the good of the future of the Internet. Weirdly the game shares some almost identical flaws. I mean s't, this review needs to be f'ng done right!

@Falien My biggest issue was that they threw so much at you without really explaining anything. But do you have a link to the way you can make changes I'd love to give it another go.

Knew since day one, this game was going to be a hunk of garbage. After playing the demo? Yup...Still don't care lol But of course, you gotta give everything a chance though. Forspoken won't be spoken about for the remainder of the year, that's for sure.

@RBRTMNZ Wow man, resorting to name calling because I don’t agree with your response. LOL! Have a great day, buddy. May God bless you!

@IslandLogic You're calling a Latino racist for telling another person of color that they're doing a bad job of supporting our shared struggle. I don't think you have room to talk.

"How did this thread descend into weird arguments over politics and the actor's ethnicity when nearly ALL the criticism has been aimed at the horrendous writing and bland world design, and almost never aimed at the acting or character designs?"

The article is specifically about a downvoted YouTube video. If you think the people that took time to visit the video of a game they dislike to downvote was based solely on their dislike of game mechanics then you are not living in the real world. The discussion here might be reasonable and concerning game mechanics but you will find plenty of the other comments on YouTube and Reddit

@IslandLogic - I personally don't believe it is a liberal agenda at all. I see it far too often that when a game drops with a black lead character, the comments immediately start about agenda's, and accusations of 'wokeness'. These type of comments often thinly hide racist leanings.

@Shepherd_Tallon I will join you in the minority on this one.
The demo did not have a decent tutorial and it was easy to miss things that make a big impact as to how enjoyable it felt.
It fept lika a 7/10 game to me once I figured it out. But my kind of 7!
As for the script, ive suffered far worse from the very same company, so not an issue for me, especially as the worst examples can be switched of in accessibility...
Regardless of online sentiment, a games sucess or failure is not down to how people like us see it, and the bulk of punters will be swayed by marketting, so it could still do ok.

The reason is simple, it is because the gameplay and setting are decent but the story sucks. All things related to Fey small talking to inanimated ornaments or the story itself will not do well for many players (including me).

@RBRTMNZ Hey man, I disagree with you, but don't want to get in an argument or 'cause problems, so I altered my response. If I upset you or anyone else, my apologies. God Bless!

@KaijuKaiser work it out

I just played the demo.. I'm shocked by how bad it was..
I tried to give it a fair chance, but unfortunately I wasn't successful.. and the voice actors were cringe inducing.

@Shepherd_Tallon 👍 Warriors of Might and Magic👍

@ChrisDeku Can you be specific on what exactly I said is nonsense?

I swear I am asking in good faith, I'm not just trying to waste your time.

Maybe she identifies as black culturally, I 'll take your word for it (even though she has acknowledged her Polish heritage in conversations) but she clearly presents as a mixed race person. What's so bad about that?

Why is it ok for you to erase half her heritage and just unilaterally declare her black? Who are you to make that determination? You can feel a certain way and look another. Frey doesn't look black to me, she simply doesn't. Neither does Balinska. You know why? Because she shares a heritage from two different groups!

Frey is not Ella Balinska, Ella Balinska is not Frey.

Apparently when racists see Frey they see a black woman, and when progressives see Frey they see a black woman.

The rest of normal people see a an ambiguous mixed race presenting character that's been given crappy writing and bad music.

The only reason why we're even talking about what Frey looks like is because racists and progressives shoehorned this conversation into a game's review.

@Titntin On the flip side, gamers called "Saint's Row" a disaster from the start, in part for a lot of the same issues (terrible "hello fellow kids" edgy writing, annoying characters, bland game world) , it got massive marketing, and still failed miserably in the mass market, too, to the point of pretty much ending Volition. I don't trust the masses to have good taste (look at the reception of High on Life!) but sometimes they get it right

@ChrisDeku Fortunately I don't really pay attention to Youtube and social media, but within GAMING circles the discussion of the game has been about writing, and about the world being empty and uninspired. I don't know if the conversation on Youtube is different or not, but the negative leaning in impressions seem to align with the discussion withing gaming circles. People may be seeing what they want to see based on an expectation bias or looking for fights rather than taking at face value the game is receiving negative attention because of the game earning negative attention. Some are always looking for fights, but they're missing that the actual conversation between everybody else is about a disappointing game game world with a Mean Girls level screenplay. We've seen it before, the movies, shows, and games that think adding an expletive every 5th word and giving the characters bad attitudes makes it "cool." And we've seen it fail repeatedly with the masses. No race wars required. Everybody hates that kind of writing. It's the true uniter. There's always people that will look for fights, but it's a 100% guarantee that if this was a great game with great writing, it would not have a broadly negative reception regardless of fringe elements thoughts.

There is absolutely no reason this game should be as divisive as it has been in online discourse, yet it’s not surprising in the least given the state of humanity.

People are so quick to judge and nitpick without giving something new a chance, unless it ticks certain boxes. The toxicity needs to stop.

I’ll reserve my judgment for when the game is out, not based on perceived advertising or demo missteps.

@GreatAuk no one’s erasing her identity, ethnicity is not mutually exclusive of each other. You can be black and also polish, and also Chinese if that happened to be the case. A black person is defined as someone of a specific heritage, not mutually of that heritage.

Her being black and her being a woman are key easily identifiable features that you can pick up from one look, being of polish descent is not. People making snap judgments on the game, calling it woke and having an agenda are clearly referring to the main character being a black female, not the fact her father was polish. you can say mixed race if you prefer, to the incel crew being mixed race is just as objectionable as being black.

The rest of your posting is the usual nonsensical right wing false equivalency. Progressives and racists are the same. “There were fine people on both sides” in reverse.

I was actually playing the demo last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. After getting a hang of the controls I found the combat fun and satisfying. The game looks and sounds great too, although will probably be better on PC. I'd personally play with higher fidelity and frame rates. My only gripe was Freya's Tourette's episodes. I'm not a prude in the least but the cursing is unnecessary and feels forced. Why is she dropping f bombs every other sentence? Because she's from NYC? I know plenty of people, including myself, who grew up in NYC and don't talk like gutter trash. Conclusion: will purchase PC version.

@ChrisDeku This is a weird take, you're basically equating a certain skin tone to being black, and everything else is irrelevant.

Why do you choose to call her black? She's exactly 50% black, 50% white, and she absolutely looks it.

Any normal objective person can see that. Yet the progressives and racists have decided that she is black.

This is what slaveholders use to do, the one drop rule. You are literally employing a tactic racists used. If there was any black heritage, then they're just plain old black.

I feel that I must remind you yet again that the game is called Forespoken and the main character is called Frey. It's not called "Ella in Magic Land with an American Accent."

Miles Morales was a smashing success and everyone loved it. Why wasn't that game bashed?

I will admit that there are in fact people who are bashing this game for more than just the poor writing and (for me, the music.) But to act like the criticism this game is getting is mostly because of bigots means most posters on this site hate black people because most posters have found the demo unsatisfactory. You sure that's what you actually believe?

And lastly, the "both sides" argument I am making is literally the opposite of what the right wing does that you accuse me of also doing.

I'm saying they are both negative to society, progressives and racists. Both obsessed with ridiculous identity politics, it's absurd, annoying and tiresome.

Trump got 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2020 (higher than in 2016) and even gained some ground with black voters compared to 2016. I bet the left didn't expect for him to not only hold on to his results from 2016 but to actually increase them.

I ascribe that result to people's complete distaste of progressive politics. Progressives are insufferable. All of us in the middle are forced to have discussions about Frey' actress' racial origins because the left and right fringes just can't help themselves and so we have to defend our opinions regarding a game's quality against accusations of racism or misogyny.

@Shepherd_Tallon I agree on the demo, I would have enjoyed myself much more had things been explained and wasn't thrust into a good chunk of the game where you're already expected to know what to do.

@pharos_haven I’m not sure how to paste links in here so here you go:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/zjut0r/forspoken_demo_a_complete_settings_guide_for_a/

This strikes me as a mediocre game I likely won't bother with, that is getting a load of extra crap thrown at it because of misogynoir.

The actress who plays Frey seems good enough, but the script seems like absolute crap, and the mechanics seem kinda divisive based on individual tastes. If it weren't for the fact that Sony are shining a spotlight on the game, and a load of bigots are salty about having to admit that women of colour exist, then nobody would be talking about it, and honestly it's getting boring at this point.

game needs better graphics infamous ps4 launch title had better graphics imo

@theheadofabroom nobody cares about the protagonist's gender. It's her character which is not great. The gameplay doesn't seem to be all that great either.

@ChrisDeku I agree with you. Any time there is a black protagonist, especially a black and female protagonist, the neck beard trolls come out to play.
No different from TLOU2 and the bigoted garbage because characters were either female, trans or gay.

@KaijuKaiser everything & it's absolutely garbage & will flop. Grown men don't want to play games with annoying young female lead characters & if they do well that's very odd.

@KaijuKaiser lol I'd pay to see that 🙊 it's sad but likely true.

Dot get me wrong, I'm not overly impressed with the demo. I hope the final product will have an option (like many recent games) to reduce protagonist idle chatter. I mean I wish I could stick a sock in kratos mouth (runs to hide) but don't hear anyone complaining about the incessant and predictable overly surly dialogue. Yes kratos is cool but people sure have GoW Ragnarok a hype fueled easy pass. If you stop and look there is some wonky animations (look at a chain/rope as it rises/fall or worse water that falls on the wrong side of a dam when u block/freeze a waterway). So yeah... No sure why these same folks who praise GOW are bent out of shape over forespoken. Yup GoW is still one of my favorites but I can still be objective about it's flaws. I'm sure square will polish the game and it'll be an enjoyable and solid 7.5 on release. seems like SE is firmly aiming for this AA market and just giving up on the 3rd A.

I just dont vibe with the game at all and the combat is very average, I cant see myself playing it for 20hrs or so.

@RBRTMNZ To be fair, no it doesn't. No one complained that the protagonist in The Walking Dead games was black, or that Clem is. People loved them. No one complained that the MC in GTA San Andreas was black. Tyrael and the paladin in Diablo 2, Alyx in Half Life 2 as a side character and main in the HL VR game more recently, the two main characters in Deathloop... People didn't even remark on their race from what I saw. It's the awful MCU-type writing and "greetings, fellow kids" vibes that are putting people off mainly. To be honest, I think for a lot of people, the hot protag is the only, or main, tempting thing about the game.

I was looking forward to it, but the demo and trailers are meh. Im glad to see Square trying new things and bring back its old IP's but this looks to be a Herizon type clone without a fleshed out environments and story. And the talking the braclet and character do, lord, better hope some thug women buy the heck out of this, because no young man or men in general are going to want to play with the sound on. What was that square game that flopped last yr with fall in its name, this is 2.0 unspoken.

I have nothing against this game but PSVR2 is pre-ordered so this is a really bad release date for most non-VR games for me.
I will play ALOT of PSVR2 games coming months but only "normal" pre-ordered game is Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. And even that game comes just a week or so after PSVR2 22Feb <->3March. Rest of the games will have to wait for a sale at the end of the year.

The demo was kind of a mess and definitely didn’t make me more excited, but it didn’t make me hate the game either. Maybe the actual story will have something going for it. Still not something I’ll consider at launch because of Dead Space Remake coming out, unless there’ll be a bunch of raving reviews.

@Immortal_Barnet Don't know what you're talking about, I've never trolled in my life. And I don't understand "MS shill" but if it's about Microsoft; I've only owned PlayStations so far.

Liked the demo. Still on my list (after One Piece)

As always, people complain about something in one game but same things gets a pass in another. More to do with being predetermined not to like it.

Voice work is not any more annoying than other jRPGs I've played.

I watched a streamer play the demo live on twitch and it just didn't really click with me. No offense to Frey's VA but her constant talking and dialogue made me pass on the game.