I was hopeful for this game, as the combat appeared good in trailers and showcases, while the writing always seemed terrible. But this was due to Hollywood Z listers from California for some Godforsaken reason being hired to do the writing, while the Japanese devs did everything else. So I was thinking I could play the game with dialogue muted and skipping cutscenes.
Alas, its much worse than I hoped for. There is a glimmer of something good buried under a bunch of horrible decisions, the spells can create interesting combos and the parkouring specifically near places with a lot of jumping (just one in the demo the empty village with many rooftops) functions well if you change the default settings from horrendous to playable. But that is the exception for now I'm afraid. They also seem to think that more spells == better gameplay while the opposite is true. More well refined but fewer spells instead of constant spam would have been so much more enjoyable. Not to mention too much stuff on screen makes it impossible to follow your spells effects and the game also has incredibly boring enemies to fight. Another beyond braindead move is making the enemies drop tiny pellets of loot... in a game consisting of 95% grass fields. It is literally not possible to see the drops vast majority of time.
Another thing, I
wish this game was like FFXV, as I love that game, but I will be the first to acknowledge it isn't perfect and was rushed out after being removed from Nomura's 10 year thumb twiddling exercise. People who say the world is like FFXV are nuts, as every location of that game has much more things to discover (though not an immense amount, just much more than this demo) and every location is far more detailed and the world cohesive. FFXV world looks like the tagline, a fantasy based on reality. And to me it works, you have a car that you can drive to places of interest or Chocobos to travel to campsites. Like you would travel in, y'know reality? (not the Chocobo part smartasses, yes I am preempting you) Not every square inch of real life has another shiny object to interact with. But it still constantly had points of interests to travel to and seemed like a fantastical interesting world too. Image below is from FFXV demo on PS4, fittingly.
Forespoken demo area is flat land separated by walls of rock with a few random huts, an empty "castle" and empty "towns" and interactable monoliths to thrown in. That's it, without leaving anything out of the summary. Not to mention the creatures! Every creature can be found everywhere else as everywhere else looks and is the same as every other place. Which again FFXV did absolutely not do, every area had different enemies as they were different places. FFXV also had a time of day and weather system. (Does Forespoken? If anyone here played it long enough lol)
And the "dialogue" and main character...? Less said of her the better. Let me put it this way, worse than the trailers implied.