I borrowed a copy of the game for a bit (so my opinion might be different than if I had paid $70) but the game is alright. The combat is actually pretty cool and the game looks good but the world itself is kinda barren. I never really understood the complaints about the dialogue because while it’s no The Last of Us/God of War or anything, it’s not any worse than most games of its type.
Like another comment here said I think some of the hatred the main character gets is because of racism/sexism. I remember leading up to release, reading comments that were like “she is so off-putting” and when asked to explain, their answer was always something akin to “idk I just don’t like her” which seemed to me like they didn’t want to say it’s because she’s a young black girl. Like I said above she’s not really any worse than most games’ main characters.
It’s weird that this game receives so much vitriol when there are much worse games which came out this year that are more deserving of such harsh criticism. Forspoken is like a 7 or 7.5 out of 10 game, I’d say. If you can get it for $20-$30 or so I think that’s a decent price.
I got it on sale, paid around $30 USD. I actually quite like isekai games, so I liked that bit of it. The dialogue wasn’t good, but I don’t think it was unplayable awful as some reviewers thought, it was just standard video game dialogue. The combat was fun and everything looked visually quite nice. I definitely got my money’s worth out of it.
The biggest issues are it probably isn’t worth full $70 price tag and it came out in a year stacked with amazing releases. A bit cheaper in a year that didn’t have much else going for it, and it would been a perfectly serviceable game. Not winning any game of the year competitions, but still something you can have fun with.
EDIT: It reminds me a bit of all the hatred The Order got. Fun, really pretty game that was the target of excessive hate. Mostly because it was a full price game (that was short with limited replay). Years later when people were getting The Order for like $10, nobody understood the hate anymore.
