Forespoken Demo Impressions - Forget it

Specter Von Baren

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They do and don't, like she's always saying fuck and I think it would be really funny if the magical world people didn't use it as a swear word and where just constantly going "By god, right here in the street?!". They could also expand on it, like asking her to explain the slang leading to even more confusion.
Wait so they don't even really do anything with the culture clash?
 

Gordon_4

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Especially when those flaws are not only so incredibly obvious there's no way the creators couldn't have noticed them making it clear they deliberately put those flaws there but would take only a tiny bit of effort on the part of said creators to fix. That's when the laziness becomes most apparent.
I don’t think it’s laziness per se but rather it’s a genuine creative decision they made, it was just a really BAD one.

People love to fetishise creatives as talented driving forces but don’t forget that while one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, the reverse is also true. Maybe the Forspoken guys really thought they had an auteur hit on their hands and released it in defiance of criticism or advice, feeling assured the quality of their work would speak for itself.

Well, they weren’t wrong.
 
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meiam

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I don't think the nail thing is meant to be about her being a girl but more about fashion and being trendy, which don't get me wrong, is still kind of cringe, but it's a different kind of cringe.
The nail just feel like the though process was just "girl = loving to get nail done". I do think it would have been really funny if the main character was a guy but the way to power up was still to do his nail, so he'd have to learn to give himself a manicure.

Wait so they don't even really do anything with the culture clash?
She'll use a slang, the other person will go "I don't understand" and the conversation will move on, it's better than most isekai anime that literally never even reach that, but so much more could be done. Otherwise there's a few interaction with her cellphone, but all she does is take picture to show kids. Here again they could do more, like maybe some character would explain a complex things she'd have to do, and she'd just nod and hum along while recording him and at the end he'd go "did you get all that?" and she'd just replay the video to show him or something, but nothing of the sort at least up to about 1/3 of the game.
 

meiam

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Another, weird choice. I made it to the second realm you go to and spend significant amount of time exploring. The first realm is just desert, no hint at all of it being magical land, its just desert and rock everywhere, pretty boring, very brown and grey. Second realm is this lush forest filled with flower and magical floating rocks. Why would you not make that the first realm people see? You gotta wow and hook people at first, brown desert is not how you do it.
 

CriticalGaming

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Another, weird choice. I made it to the second realm you go to and spend significant amount of time exploring. The first realm is just desert, no hint at all of it being magical land, its just desert and rock everywhere, pretty boring, very brown and grey. Second realm is this lush forest filled with flower and magical floating rocks. Why would you not make that the first realm people see? You gotta wow and hook people at first, brown desert is not how you do it.
I finally fought the first big boss, cakewalk but she had phases and did different things each phase which was cool. I think there is a fundamental flaw in the combat is that Frey is WAY too agile, you have to really stand there and ignore things to get hit, you have so much movement in all directions that I genuinely don't know how you can actually have any challenge here.
 

meiam

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I finally fought the first big boss, cakewalk but she had phases and did different things each phase which was cool. I think there is a fundamental flaw in the combat is that Frey is WAY too agile, you have to really stand there and ignore things to get hit, you have so much movement in all directions that I genuinely don't know how you can actually have any challenge here.
Yeah that's why they have to give the stronger enemy instant kill attack, because its so rare to actually get hit. There's a really strong monster called giga in one of the area next to the castle town with the first boss (iirc its the area to the west, maybe one of the one connected to it) that's actually pretty strong and attack very quickly and I actually had to re try quite a few time to beat him if you want some challenge.
 

CriticalGaming

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Wrong. Buffy's dialog was good. Forspoken's Dialog is bad.

It has nothing to do with the style or the humor they are trying to convey, it's simply just badly written.

Also Buffy's favorite word wasn't "fuck" last I checked.
 

BrawlMan

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Wrong. Buffy's dialog was good. Forspoken's Dialog is bad.

It has nothing to do with the style or the humor they are trying to convey, it's simply just badly written.

Also Buffy's favorite word wasn't "fuck" last I checked.
I noticed that Chris McCullen is a big contrarian with a lot of these Area Of Effect articles.
 

PsychedelicDiamond

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With both this games and the live action Cowboy Bebop adaptation's dialogue being compared to Buffy, I just have to assume that Buffy must have had some really bad dialogue.
It does, but at the time was different from the norm. Sorta like Gilmore Girls was.
 

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With both this games and the live action Cowboy Bebop adaptation's dialogue being compared to Buffy, I just have to assume that Buffy must have had some really bad dialogue.
It does, but at the time was different from the norm. Sorta like Gilmore Girls was.
Other than a female focused action show with the lady has the leading role, I didn't see what was so special about Buffy. I can barely finish an episode. I saw about two or three and I left the series alone. Alex Mack is better than that. Kim Possible was partially inspired by Buffy (mainly in the first season), but for what I'm hearing that show has way better dialogue than Buffy. By the second or third season KP was doing its own thing anyway.
 

Casual Shinji

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Other than a female focused action show with the lady has the leading role, I didn't see what was so special about Buffy. I can barely finish an episode. I saw about two or three and I left the series alone. Alex Mack is better than that. Kim Possible was partially inspired by Buffy (mainly in the first season), but for what I'm hearing that show has way better dialogue than Buffy. By the second or third season KP was doing its own thing anyway.
I didn't like it either, but I guess it was the first show to mix certain elements like this in a fresh way.
 

CriticalGaming

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Other than a female focused action show with the lady has the leading role, I didn't see what was so special about Buffy. I can barely finish an episode. I saw about two or three and I left the series alone. Alex Mack is better than that. Kim Possible was partially inspired by Buffy (mainly in the first season), but for what I'm hearing that show has way better dialogue than Buffy. By the second or third season KP was doing its own thing anyway.
Buffy came out exactly around the time when I realized that girls were pretty, and Buffy was pretty so I liked the show.
 
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BrawlMan

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Buffy came out exactly around the time when I realized that girls were pretty, and Buffy was pretty so I liked the show.
I was 7 when Buffy first started, and I was 13 when the series finale aired. Between those ages, I sure as hell didn't need Buffy to know that girls and women are pretty. Halle Berry already did that for me. Then you have some of the video game gals.
 
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Gordon_4

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Wrong. Buffy's dialog was good. Forspoken's Dialog is bad.

It has nothing to do with the style or the humor they are trying to convey, it's simply just badly written.

Also Buffy's favorite word wasn't "fuck" last I checked.
Given her regular activities, and the fact she’s a high schooler, being on commercial television is the only reason I can conceive of that the word fuck does not pass Buffy’s lips on a regular basis.
 

CriticalGaming

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Given her regular activities, and the fact she’s a high schooler, being on commercial television is the only reason I can conceive of that the word fuck does not pass Buffy’s lips on a regular basis.
Fuck was my favorite word in high school. But yeah obviously the TV thing. But even then Joss Whedon doesn't really use cussing in his stuff even on films.
 

immortalfrieza

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I don’t think it’s laziness per se but rather it’s a genuine creative decision they made, it was just a really BAD one.

People love to fetishise creatives as talented driving forces but don’t forget that while one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, the reverse is also true. Maybe the Forspoken guys really thought they had an auteur hit on their hands and released it in defiance of criticism or advice, feeling assured the quality of their work would speak for itself.

Well, they weren’t wrong.
The problem is that sometimes, the flaws are so incredibly extremely blatant that it's not simply a matter of creative decision, the only possible explanations are extreme laziness, extreme stupidity, or both. One man's trash is another man's treasure only works if there actually is another man somewhere, anywhere, that would actually think the trash is a treasure. Some things are so incredibly bad it's nearly impossible to even imagine someone anywhere genuinely thinking "This? This is a great idea!"

Especially when it would've taken a very minuscule change to turn that something bad into something good. Like the painting nails to power up mechanic? There are dozens of ways that mechanic could've been implemented differently so that it did the same thing but wasn't so unbelievably painfully sexist. Like, say, equipping magical gems to change your stats and give special abilities. Lots of games have had mechanics that did basically the same thing as the nails do in Forespoken.

Hell, if they were going to do something like that, don't just go with the painting nails mechanic that obviously was put in because they knew it would invoke a massive negative reaction as a cheap publicity stunt. Go whole hog with it and adding in a makeup and hairdressing and [INSERT STEREOTYPICAL GIRL ACTIVITY HERE] etc. to go along with it would've at least made it seem less half assed. It would've looked more like the developers were genuinely trying to create immersion by giving the players reason to act like a girl in the game. Instead of most games with female protagonists which just have a protagonist that happened to have breasts but otherwise might as well have been a guy for all the difference it made.
 

CriticalGaming

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There are dozens of ways that mechanic could've been implemented differently so that it did the same thing but wasn't so unbelievably painfully sexist
How is it sexist? A Girl thing in a game doesn't mean it's sexist. It's just flavor to the world, and even the character states she doesn't care for this shit but if it means she gets a little more power then whatever. It's like suggesting that anytime a girlie thing happens in a game with a girl character it's sexist. Girls are allowed to have and do girl things and it not be some sort of attack on being a girl.

I will give the game credit in the sense that none of the writing nor Frey's actions have at all been suggestive against some sort of SJW agenda. Her skin color is never brought up, her gender is never brought up, she's not constantly shitting on men because doing so makes you a strong independent woman of some kind. Not of that. So I will defend the game against people who shit on "wokeness" as their only personality trait.

For a game that could have easily slipped in a forced message of anti-patriarchy, and bragged about a black poc main character, and had her dunk on dudes the whole game. It does none of it. In fact the big villains are women, so the evil of the land isn't men in some way. It's actually kind of refreshing to have both the hero and the villains be women. Shame the actual details and characters are just badly written.