Square Enix''s Forspoken has been doing the rounds for a while - the second game built on the Luminous Engine that made its debut with Final Fantasy 15 - it was at the forefront of the PlayStation 5''s reveal when it was formally known as Project Athia and has had several public showings ahead of its release early next year, but perhaps its most noticeable came after a trailer was posted on social media last month and was greeted with a tearful reaction, the dialogue becoming the centerpiece of internet
"It was unfavorable to see the reactions to the social media post," Raio Mitsuo, the creative producer of Forspoken, said after a recent opportunity to go hands-on with the game. "Basically, we used existing footage from previous trailers and put something together as a social media post. And yeah, it went kind of viral in a way, and it''s not the direction that we anticipated it to go, so I got a good laugh.
"For us, it''s not something that we''re concerned with. We''re obviously leaving a lot of information on the table, because we''re fairly selective about what to use to engage interest and sometimes without that information about the character''s situation, we''re leaving the audience the freedom to interpret lines in whatever way they want. It''s only one of the issues that come naturally when it comes to trying to prove the game without telling the whole story.
With the most recent preview opportunity focusing solely on gameplay, Luminous Productions is a worldwide development group, which employs predominantly western writers as well as Luminous Productions.
"We wanted to achieve a global mindset," said Mitsuno. "We thought we might have a chance to create a brand new IP, and we obviously want players across the world to play it and enjoy it, and this was the best way to go about it, in a sense, because we have these two distinct areas of experience here at Square Enix, and they are fantastic storytellers in the west that we collaborated with. We''re fortunate to work with, like Gary Whitta and Amy Hennig
"We worked with Gary and Amy during our pre-production phase. So very early on, we teamed up with Gary to create this big world of what we expected to become Forspoken. From there on, we worked with Amy who then took all of those big ideas and helped us develop them into a more manageable system. As we went into production and the baton was handed over to Todd Stashwick and Alison Reimer who wrote the whole story."
While story sections were absent from our brief time with Forspoken, it is still a surprisingly chatty game with frequent discussion between Frey and Cuff, the sentient magical armband that acts as your guide through the game''s fantasy world, though that''s something it turns out to be possible tweaked to suit the player''s preferences.
"In terms of the conversations between Frey and Cuff, the frequency that they talk to each other can be adjusted from the accessibility menu," said the forspoken co-director. Takefumi Terada. "Obviously we''ve put a lot of effort into that dialogue and character building through the conversations they have there, so we really want people to pay attention to that and hope others enjoy it. "We''re allowing you to do that as long as you want.
