Forspoken surprises and delights, but it takes a while

Frey Holland is an ordinary young woman who must harness her magical abilities to survive in a fantastical and dangerous land called Athia in Forspoken.  (Square Enix)

I didn’t expect to enjoy Forspoken as much as I did.

For one thing, the game, published by Square Enix and developed by Luminous Productions, is riddled with cliches. It’s a rote fish-out-of-water story in which the female protagonist is paired with a sassy British sidekick in the form of a cuff (whom she insists on calling Cuff) that gives her magical offensive powers. This is on top of the fact that this is a by-the-numbers open-world video game, with a list of waypoints on a big map with various activities to do, usually in the form of battling fantasy monsters.

But a lot of things happen later in the game that make Forspoken just a little more special. Credit goes to writer Amy Hennig and story creator Gary Whitta (screenwriter for Star Wars’ “Rogue One”) for crafting something memorable and fun.

As the player, you are Frey Holland, a 21-year-old orphaned New Yorker who loves her cat and her kicks, performed by the very capable and charismatic Ella Balinska. She’s had a very difficult life, and the game doesn’t shy away from the fact that Frey is suicidal. There’s a tenderness in how she cradles her cat (magnificently named Homer) and cries herself to sleep, unable to escape a merciless life that has left her homeless and with a criminal record.

As she’s about to end her life, she finds the magical and sassy Cuff that whisks her away to Athia, a magical land besieged by something called the Break, which turns people mad and creates monsters. The Break is caused by four goddesses called Tantas, former rulers of the land who have gone mad. Frey is the only person unaffected by the Break for reasons she has yet to discover, and the people of the only human city left, Cipal, depend on her to figure things out.

Frey Holland spends most of the game Forspoken in Athia, a magical land besieged by something called the Break, which turns people mad and creates monsters.  (Square Enix)

There aren’t a lot of action adventure games about spellcasting wizards, even fewer with a Black woman in the lead role. And you get to gather and wear colorful flowing capes, do cool kick flips, twirl and spin like a ballerina, and race across fantasy lands with superpowered shoes like Sonic the Hedgehog. Frey is an engaging, fun hero to be. Balinska injects just enough verve in her dialogue to make even the cringiest line at least a little charming. The game also offers an option to minimize the dialogue, which I flicked on halfway through the adventure, since Frey and Cuff both often repeat lines whenever they visited the various repeating activities across the map.

Being Frey only becomes liberating and powerful at the end of the game, once she’s collected and absorbed all four powers from her defeated foes. Forspoken falls into the trap so many power fantasy games can’t seem to get around: Progressing the game and story is tied to the self-imposed limits of creating a progression curve, which is a carrot to keep playing, but locks the most fun and interesting ways to play the game toward the end.

It’s a bit disappointing that Frey’s complete spell set is as generic as the game’s setup: It’s all elemental-based spells of earth, fire, lightning and water. But at least with the larger area-of-effect attacks, Forspoken lets you conjure up some impressive and good-looking fireworks.

Frey Holland’s superpowered shoes allow her to do cool kick flips, twirl and spin like a ballerina and race across fantasy lands in Forspoken.  (Square Enix)

Movement and traversal is another highlight, as Frey blazes through the landscape with magically enchanted sneakers. She can quickly earn more power to her move set, as she’s later able to kick off cliffsides and walls to climb higher up, and jump across long distances. Movement also makes the large-scale battles more dynamic, as the biggest encounters take place in huge battlefields. Frey is able to block and dodge enemy attacks. You aim her magic spells like a third-person shooter.

The biggest disappointment with the spell set is that it lacks impact. Her fire set gives her a much-needed melee moveset, and lets her summon a flame sword. But hitting monsters with it feels like smacking things with tissue. At least the bigger spells land with some force. The light feeling also contributes to making Frey’s fighting feel effortless, so your mileage may vary depending on what you want in a combat system.

The biggest hiccup in combat is the lock-on mechanic for aiming spells. It behaves erratically, sometimes unlocking from enemies. If a locked-on enemy is defeated, the game doesn’t target a nearby enemy. Instead, the camera flies away from the horde, requiring fiddling with the joysticks while you’re trying to charge and switch spells. Coupled with voluminous particle effects, fighting can be visually chaotic and confusing.

The open-world gameplay in Forspoken is fairly typical of such games — beautifully designed and offering lots of activities, but exploration yields nothing terribly exciting or essential to the plot.  (Square Enix)

There’s not much to say about the open-world gameplay that hasn’t been said with every other game of this type. The map is large and cavernous, and beautifully designed, but it’s just scattered with waypoints for activities. Don’t get too excited about the “dungeon” areas: They’re all cut-and-paste hallways and combat rooms with treasure chests, never deviating from a very bland format. I wouldn’t have bothered if these dungeons hadn’t promised more capes for Frey to wear, so at least they offer worthy rewards.

Although I enjoyed Frey more than I thought I would, it’s inescapable that “plucky American with sassy British sidekick” is a well-worn trope, and Forspoken does little to distinguish itself from other stories of this type … until it actually does. Cuff and the denizens of Athia are strangely combative and argumentative to Frey, and to be fair, Frey is an abrasive character herself, given her background. Initially, I thought these arguments were written in just for the sake of having tension and conflict in the story.

Then the story begins to justify this, as the people of this land aren’t what they quite appeared to be at first blush. I struggled to finish the game’s formulaic open-world activities, but once the story got going, I was riveted.

Forspoken doesn’t do anything new for the open-world genre of games, but it does offer just enough to distinguish itself, mostly thanks to Frey and her magic spells, and a story that’s able to stick the landing.

Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC

Online: forspoken.square-enix-games.com/en-us