Final Fantasy 15 was a mediocre disappointment. Barely a single frame of its E3 reveal trailer was featured in the finished product, which was ultimately fractured, unfinished, and unable to live up to the legacy of its namesake. Additional updates and downloadable content ensured it improved over time, but its shaky foundations remained apparent and held back something that could have been so much more.

This was a game that began life as Final Fantasy Versus 13, and was bludgeoned into a new form to ensure resources and money spent were recouped. While some love Final Fantasy 15, and many of its characters are excellent, it just never felt like Final Fantasy to me, which is irredeemable given its status as an experience we spent almost a decade waiting for.

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Noctis and company pushing their busted car along the road as Florence and The Machine howled alongside the title card was instantly iconic. Yet the charm and irreverence of this opening gave way to a journey filled with convoluted storytelling, a so-so battle system, and characters whose motivations changed on a whim. It was clumsy even for a JRPG, a genre never afraid to lose its audience to a wave of melodrama.

Final Fantasy 15

It felt uninspired, like whatever story the developers originally wanted to tell was lost along the way and only a small selection of excellent characters were left to pick up the pieces. Its world felt inconsistent, while the evil threat looming over it all never reached the heights of Sephiroth or Kuja. I’m sorry I’m really digging into Final Fantasy 15, but it’s necessary to cement how underwhelming the game felt in order to highlight how Luminous Productions’ Forspoken could build upon its mistakes. For one, it seems to have a coherent storyline from the start, instead of coupling together disparate elements from over ten years of development.

Forspoken follows Frey Holland, a young woman who finds herself transported into the mysterious fantasy world of Athia. Here, she adopts strange powers thanks to a talking bangle on her arm, and is thus whisked on a magical journey where the safety of this world and her own will likely come into balance as an evil threat rears its head. I’m not expecting Forspoken to rewrite the rulebook of JRPGs, but it doesn’t need to - it simply needs to improve upon the cumbersome mess that came before it. However, there’s a number of hallmarks here that are relatively new to the genre. The heroine is a woman of colour, as are much of the supporting cast, and it’s leaning into an aesthetic that isn’t defined by silly haircuts and adorable twinks belonging to royalty.

Forspoken

The recent trailer hints at a tale that will delve into the history and politics of Athia as a place, instead of it existing as little more than a series of beautiful environments for us to explore. That’s already a big improvement over Final Fantasy 15, whose world felt like a disconnected series of locations that never possessed much life of their own. I want Athia to feel lived in, drenched in circumstances that were apparent long before you stepped into its towering mountains and serene lakes.

The best virtual worlds are ones that don’t revolve around the protagonist, abiding by their every whim and making sure they’re always celebrated as an unstoppable hero. Forspoken doesn’t seem to be doing that, and given Frey comes from the human realm, she will need to learn how this strange new place works and how she fits into it all. We see her using a variety of elemental powers in the trailer, but we don’t know how she gets them, nor how she’s able to jump across the sky like a superhero without breaking a sweat. I can’t wait to learn the origins of these powers, and how they blend into a wider story that will make the world and characters feel like they matter, instead of Final Fantasy 15’s discordant delivery that never managed to engage me.

Forspoken seems to represent a greater Western influence on Japanese role-playing games - something which is also apparent in what we’ve seen of Final Fantasy 16. Both games are being recorded and localised in English first and foremost. The narrative is being helmed by Gary Whitta and Amy Hennig, two supremely talented writers responsible for the likes of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the original Uncharted trilogy, respectively. Knowing this, the components are assembled for this game to shine like few other JRPGs in recent memory, and it has Japan’s willingness to engage with Western influences to thank for that.

Final Fantasy 15 felt like it was doomed by old habits, and the series desperately needed to evolve instead of chasing after trends and unsuccessfully trying to ape what came before it. Final Fantasy 7 Remake addressed many of these complaints, and will continue to do so with its upcoming sequel, but Forspoken already feels like a competent re-examination of what did and didn’t work for Luminous Productions’ previous game, and I hope the ambition on display in all of the trailers translates into something that is a delight to play. If I didn’t make it clear above, I didn’t like Final Fantasy 15 that much. Here’s hoping Forspoken will fill the void left behind by years of disappointment.

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