Unveiled as Project Athia in 2020, the game we now know as Forspoken was a very exciting prospect from its initial reveal trailer. The debut showed a witch, later revealed to be played by actress Ella Balinska, jumping and dashing over vast deserted and wasted land, but little else. Square Enix has drip-fed content of the game since then in little trailers here and there, including one from last week’s Game Awards, but we finally got a chance to see a more fully-fleshed preview just before.
The event began with Forspoken’s performance and voice director, Tom Keegan, talking about Balinska’s talent for making lead character Frey come to life. Keegan, who has worked on games like Star Wars: Battlefront II and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, said that Balinska naturally gave Frey a “very hip-hoppy kind of walk.” I asked Square Enix representatives what this meant, but the question was not included in the post-event FAQs given, even though most other singular questions asked during the event were.
Keegan was then followed by the game’s writers, Allison Rymer and Todd Stashwick. Rymer is largely known for writing on TV shows like Shadow Hunters. It took about five minutes of staring at Todd Stashwick before realizing I recognized him as a villain from the TV show Burn Notice, but most relevantly to Forspoken, he worked with Amy Hennig (who concepted Forspoken’s story with Gary Whitta) on the canceled Star Wars title for EA a few years prior.
Which is to say, there’s a lot of western talent working on this game! An actually unusual amount for a game made by one of the internal business divisions at Square Enix. Luminous Studios had always looked to create international hits, but it was interesting to see how much Square Enix was emphasizing both creative teams in Japan and America.
I got the chance to ask Square Enix how this collaboration came about.
“We had a lot of learnings from Final Fantasy XV and one was around story design and narrative,” answered a Square Enix spokesperson attributable to the development team. “For our next project, we knew we wanted to create a game that has universal appeal. In order to do that, we thought it would be best to take our learnings from previous projects and collaborate with creative minds from outside the studio, like Gary, Amy, Allison, and Todd to craft the world and story of Forspoken. It was a new endeavor for us and had some challenges but ultimately it gave us something even more imaginative than what we feel we could have put together on our own.”
The bulk of the gameplay demo took place in a city called Cipal, which is a safe haven from what the game calls the Break. which is both an area and the name of an event that caused that area. Cipal itself looks to only barely be holding it together as Frey darts around the city’s ruined structures. When she leaves the town, Frey enters the aforementioned Break, which is a transformative atmosphere that turns people and animals in it into wraith-like creatures. The demoer took Frey into a large storm-like area in the Break, wherein they quickly got overwhelmed by high level monsters and bosses despite expertly combining spells in battle.
Square Enix also introduced the Tantas, evil sorceresses who were driven mad by the Break, and act as the antagonists of the game. The developers also stated that there is prequel DLC called In Tantas We Trust, which presumably goes deeper into their story, but they had no details about it yet.
The Tantas look very similar to characters from Agni’s Philosophy, a 2012 tech demo from Luminous Productions to showcase their new engine. I asked Square Enix what relationship Forspoken has to that demo and was told the two are completely unrelated, which I…don’t entirely believe, but they at least seem to have no actual story connection beyond that general inspiration.
The structure of the game appears to be your general open world fare of finding main missions and side quests from NPCs to explore the world at large. The hook is the parkour system, which is powered by Frey’s magic. She seamlessly makes tall leaps over giant chasms and tall towers alike, but requires player input to do a lot of her cooler moves. Leveling up makes the parkour last longer, so Frey can travel faster the stronger she becomes.
Overall, I’m not sure if I needed to be more sold on Forspoken, but I’m definitely interested in playing it still. There’s a number of unanswered questions, but my two major issues with Final Fantasy XV were movement and story, and those at least seem to be Luminous Studio’s two major focuses this time around.
Forspoken releases on PS5 and PC on May 24, 2022.
