Heartfelt, high-concept and the subject of much internet hysteria; there’s plenty that Forspoken has in common with its predecessor of sorts, with the development team behind Square Enix’s big-budget action RPG having been assembled from those who’d worked on Final Fantasy 15 – a game whose tortured development became legendary, but one that emerged hobbled yet highly entertaining.
I’ve had a soft spot for Final Fantasy 15 ever since it came out, its abundance of character and sense of adventure atoning for some of its lumpiness, and despite a rough ride in recent weeks following its widely-derided trailer I’m developing a soft spot for Forspoken too. After spending just over an hour fleet-footing around the fantasy region of Avaolet, there’s that same free-wheeling sense of adventure that warmed me to Final Fantasy 15, backed up by an abundance of systems that promise some serious depth.
ForspokenDeveloper: Luminous ProductionsPublisher: Square EnixPlatform: PS5 and PCAvailability: Out January 24 2023 on PC and PS5
Those similarities shouldn’t be too surprising, given that Forspoken is only the second game built upon the Luminous Engine that powered Final Fantasy 15. It shares the same stupendous scale of world to explore, with the same propensity for a beautiful wide-open vista – the area we had to play around with was full of diversions and mobs and sub-bosses to defeat, but perhaps the biggest distraction was the photo mode I kept turning to, capturing our hero Freya dancing across the fantasy landscape with her magic-infused parkour. If your idea of a good RPG is a stunning open space to explore with plenty of distractions along the way – as is mine – then Forspoken looks like it’ll deliver.
“We didn’t set out deliberately to make it in any way like Final Fantasy 15,” Forspoken co-director Takefumi Terada told me after I’d played through the demo. “We thought okay, we’re doing a new IP, we’re doing a completely new game here. We want to do things that have never been done with Final Fantasy before, and we had that great opportunity so we didn’t really have it in our minds at all to set out to make something similar. But obviously as we worked on the game, we put it together and suddenly came and took shape. Then we started to see those same things and they surprised us just as much so yeah, this does feel a little bit like Final Fantasy 15. So in some ways it was as much a surprise to us as it was to you!”