Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.

Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls. We’ll see how it goes in January.įollow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Again, hopefully the rest of the game is not as bad as this voiced-over clip, but something about how the game has handled its lead and concept (a modern woman is suddenly thrust into a world of spells and monsters) does not seem to be landing, even if gameplay continues to look rather excellent. This is not an ideal situation for actress Ella Balinska, who is being saddled with what appears like it’s not going to be the best of scripts as the lead of this game, shortly after her turn on a different sort of video game project, the critic-and-audience lambasted Resident Evil series on Netflix. But rather like it’s a parody of the worst kind of action dialogue in media at the moment. Not just like, someone’s writing a clunky script that gets mistranslated in localization. It’s not cringe, it’s cultural, unless it’s this specific game for some reason at which point the critics entirely unlearn the language of genre. When we do we find the same critics have no problems with dialogue and pacing in Crisis Core and FF7.

There’s a common notion that most Square Enix games just do not have great writing in general, but this feels like a different kind of bad. Let’s compare it to other games its genre instead. The superpowered magic-wielding combat actually seems pretty fantastic, and no amount of bad scripting will probably turn me away from playing, but it’s not great to have to deal with. It’s frustrating to hear dialogue this bad from Forspoken, given that everything I’ve actually seen from gameplay continues to look absolutely stunning.

Forspoken bad dialogue