Just something people do now

Forspoken, the upcoming PS5 console exclusive open worlder from Square Enix, has some strong writers attached to it – including Uncharted’s Amy Hennig and Rogue One’s Gary Whitta. But a new trailer introducing protagonist Frey – played by Resident Evil’s Ella Balinska – is attracting some pretty good memes.

In the clip, Frey soliloquies: “So, let me get this straight? I’m somewhere that’s not what I would call Earth, I’m seeing freakin’ dragons, and… Oh, yeah – I’m talking to a cuff! Yeah, okay, that is something I do now! I do magic, kill jacked-up beasts, I’ll probably fly next!”

Voice actor SungWon Cho – who’s built up an enormous following for parodying anime and video games – was quick to apply the quotes to a series of other games, like Super Mario Odyssey and Danganronpa. It all makes for an amusing clip, which pokes harmless fun at Square Enix’s upcoming game.

From what we’ve seen of Forspoken thus far, it’s definitely targeting young adult fiction fans – for better or for worse. But ultimately, we think this is just a poorly edited trailer that won’t necessarily be reflective of the full game. At least it’s generating some fun memes, though – good work as always, ProZD.

A true PlayStation veteran, Sammy's covered the world of PS gaming for years, with an enormous Trophy count to prove it. He also likes tennis games way more than you.

I can't wait for Chris to do the bit again on Sacred Symbols

My god the dialogue. Deary deary me. It’s so easy to mock, it makes Final Fantasy seem like Shakespeare. I’d rather listen to an entire hour of Tidus laugh.

God its embarrasing to be a fan of gaming sometimes.

i didn’t listen to it but i clicked because of the main character 😍 but then the pic disappeared

..and it's only missing CHAOS.

Those trailers they put out for this game hasn't helped create the hype for Forspoken.

If I'm not mistaken, the protagonist is a generally metro person from the modern day, right? This sounds like the kind of dialogue you'd get in something like one of the Marvel movies, or a series like Heroes. I recall seeing (hearing?) dialogue like this in Control, and that game is praised for it's writing. So perhaps maybe this dialogue isn't so bad after all. I guess Square Enix is just the easy target in gaming at the moment.

@zhoont It never gets old

Didn't the writer of this game do a Star Wars movie recently? What the heck is going on?

Still, I'm interested in the protagonist herself at the very least. I hope they do right by her, but I do have some reservations. I like protagonists that aren't moody and broody. I don't care that the dialogue is amateurish by writer standards, as long as the protag herself is endearing, and not stereotypical, I'll get over it, like many gamers should.

I do wish they got writers who, you know, kind of reflected Frey's background... At least a smidge? To make her sound authentic without being stereotypical.

Much work, the gaming industry still has to do. Now do you guys understand why not every minority hired in a position is a "diversity hire"? Don't mean to get overly political, there.

This dialogue was in one of the first trailers. It was terrible then, and it's terrible now. At least people seem to be recognising it!

@ROBLIVION What’s ‘woke’ about it? The plot is just your standard isekai tropes from anime. Is it literally just because there’s a black woman in it?

@ShogunRok Apparently Ella Balinska’s mum is Lorraine Pascale, who’s a chef off the telly that became a running joke in our household for telling the most anticlimactic story about cheesecake I’ve ever heard. “A bit of cheddar??? On some cake??? But it wasn’t and I liked it.” Classic.

At least the gameplay still looks stellar, but yeah the dialogue's been bad since the first trailer. Now, thanks to Sacred Symbols, every time I see a trailer for this game I hear Chris going "Did I just mooove that with my freakin' miiiiind?!"

@ROBLIVION this post is even worse than the script

Eek the cringe is almost unbearable and this is coming from someone who genuinely loves terrible video game dialog! The worst thing is I think the game looked better in recent trailers but man every time I hear the dialog it just destroys any interest I had. I just can't do it!

This guy: tHiS iS wOkE

Good news, Forspoken is no longer a ps exclusive title. pc was originally available for pre-order on epic, but it turns out you can pre-order on xbox as well.

@Royalblues >"Didn't the writer of this game do a Star Wars movie recently? What the heck is going on?" Well... It's not like SW is particularly linked with good writing. “New rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper, and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable.”

@PegasusActual93 Come on now, we all know it's only white men that get whisked off to parallel dimesions to fight monsters. I do wonder if these people were around in the 90s, would they have called Tomb Raider "Woke Raider"? Would they have pointed out how a woman couldn't beat a t-rex in a fight (but obviously a man could)? Remember in Red Alert, the commando unit was a woman called Tanya? More like Woke Alert, amirite?

@Matroska They’d get annoyed over the fact there’s only one straight Tetris piece.

They’d get annoyed over the fact there’s only one straight Tetris piece.

Look, I'll be the first to admit that some games can be a bit eyerolling in their pushes for inclusivity, but Forspoken isn't one of them. I think anyone calling this woke should absolutely be called out for basically being racist and misogynistic.

"Oh, no, a black female is the protagonist! Call the wahmbulance!"

@nessisonett @Matroska Oh man. You guys are too funny. I mean, their logic is paradoxical, especially if they are in any fandom. It's a shame about Star Wars, though. The writing in today's movies is so formulaic though. Everyone goes to the same schools, is told the same rules and NEVER TO BREAK THEM!!! And the result is slop lol. Wish we'd get better than we do, though.

Now it's all about filling out the same template in fun and creative ways... Still the same template though.

@nessisonett Was wondering that too, is something automatically considered woke if the protagonist looks dark skin? Would solo games about Jade from Mortal Kombat or Sheva from RE5 be considered woke? 🤔

As for this game it sounds awful and at least to me it doesn't look very interesting. SE needs to show more than horrible dialogue that wouldn't make it into a Netflix original film/series about a Japanese intellectual property.

I love Japanese made games more than Western games by a mile, but man their dialogue can be cringe. Thank god FF7 already has a great script to build off of.

@ROBLIVION Congratulations, you posted something even more cringe than that dialogue

Reminds me of the dialog from the E3 2016 Scalebound gameplay. People clowned on it back then too so I'm not sure who the devs are trying to target with this stuff. Not every character can successfully pull off the Spider-Man or Deadpool persona

Well, when this was first announced, I was hyped. I don’t care now. It looks meh or now… terrible. Shame really.

@ShogunRok the dialogue is just something straight out of an MCU movie and comes off as incredibly stupid sounding.

The dialogue does seem to be very cringe inducing lol

@ROBLIVION Thanks for making us woke about things being woke. How woke of you.

The dialogue has been something a lot of people have found concerning for a while. Its always come across to me very Disney channel teen movie.

Even in that early gameplay trailer than people didnt like she wouldnt stop commenting on everything simialr to that trailer.

@nessisonett I'm so stealing this line for future arguments I will inevitably dread having.

I really hope they just pulled some bad quotes for the trailers and the rest of the game won’t be so bad, but I have my doubts

@PegasusActual93 every time I read a comment online that something is "woke", I know I've already wasted my time reading it.

The best part about "go woke, go broke" is the confirmation bias.

Movie with black protagonist flops: "go woke, go broke, am I right, fellas????" Movie that features gay characters performs well: *crickets or "of course that one would do well. It has x actor or x character" (meanwhile same actor or character has been in many flops)

@Royalblues If this person really was part of a recent Star wars movie, then you really should be scared, lol.

I really like the tone of this. A breath of fresh air compared to all these dull western RPGs. And so what if it’s young adult orientated? We were all young adults once. I’m nearly 40 years old and have an English Lit degree (bit of a mistake there, lol) yet I like young adult fantasy fiction. People criticising (not here necessarily) remind me of those pretentious people who enjoyed mocking Harry Potter yet love (the dire) lord of the rings.

Being from Ireland, she hoenstly sounds like what I think all Americans sound like.... Pretty much all TV/film protrays Americans with that level of enthusiasm and cringe

The dialogue is most of the reason I have no interest in this game. There are good ways of portraying fish-out-water characters. This is not it.

I mean I realised straightaway that dialog was cringe but then a lot of video games dialog are cringe. Don’t you realise it ? Haha It’s no big deal. This game is becoming a target for some reason.

Edit Jeez I have Lara Croft whining on and on in my ears now again haha Could have done comedy show about it.

This makes FF origins look more serious

@Dudeman1 What does it matter for your criticism of the script that the game's made by a Japanese studio, when none of the five writers for it are? Take a second to Google "forspoken writers" and see for yourself.

How does that even sound like a Japanese-made script to you, to begin with? It's so blatantly in line with the average western "snark" found in superhero movies and what-have-you.

Plenty of bad writing in Japanese-written games to be perfectly clear, but none of it sounds like that.

@thefourfoldroot1 glad I'm not the only one.

I think most dialogue is taken at face value when only heard but looks silly when spelled out, especially when it's just a vertical slice. Think this game will be fun. The main protagonist reminds me of my kid.

"Oh yeah, This is what I do now" This sentence alone makes me wanna strangle her. Among the worst lead I've seen/heard.

@zhoont it never gets old

@thefourfoldroot1 Say what you will about YA fiction but LOTR’s scripture is hardly dire.

@Blackjay Agree to disagree on that one. To be fair, I did read it all through when I was around 14 and did really like it, but it was one of my first experiences of high fantasy. Tried to go back and read it since, having far more exposure to the genre, and the cracks in the plot, not to mention laborious writing style, just made me bounce off. Can be considered subjective I guess. Anyway, don’t want to disrail the thread with this discussion so I’ll stop there.

Hoping the issues with dialogue don’t distract from the overall narrative depending on what is like, as is often the case with some games.. At the moment the interest seem to ride on the combat and and rapid traversal which for some may be worth stomaching the cheesy script for.

Even so, this is one of my most anticipated new games.

@naruball This doesn’t make much sense…the whole ‘go woke go broke’ thing isn’t for every movie featuring predominantly black cast…nor every movie that features homosexuality. It’s taking already established IP and changing the race, or sex, of characters to fit a certain narrative, isn’t it?

@nessisonett "Is it literally just because there’s a black woman in it?"

She's black? How can you tell? Are you just making assumptions based on skin color? Or is it somewhere specifically mentioned in the released dialogue?

In fact it looks like the producers tried their very damned best to make sure you COULDN'T tell her background. Which actually makes her look unrealistic or "designed by committee."

@GreatAuk She’s mo-capped by Ella Balinska, and based on her likeness. Ella Balinska is mixed-race but identifies as Black and is proud of her Jamaican heritage. I’m sure she’d be real happy to be described as unrealistic and designed by committee considering that’s her actual face.

@nessisonett Online it says she's "British, Polish, and Caribbean."

And why do you assume her mocaped character identifies exactly as the person in real life? Are you limiting the roles she can play to what she identifies as?

She doesn't look black in the game. She looks mixed. You assumed the game character will be black based on what the mixed race actor identifies in real life, not because of the character's appearance in the game.

So to say Forespoken's main character is black is not accurate unless the game itself says so. You can't assume that based on the actor, unless this game is a biography of Balinska haha

Actors play people they're not all the time. It's the job of an actor.

Games with really bad dialogue like this completely turn me off. The gameplay looks fun, but I don't like playing games on mute so yet again Square has managed to turn me away from their games. I just hope the next Dragon Quest doesn't fall into this crap.

@Bleachedsmiles nooope. Not even close. I see that under every article that discusses a video game/movie/etc that has underperformed. E.g. most recently the movie "Lightyear".

You can look it up. Countless examples like that. Another that comes to mind is Harley Quinn Birds of Prey. No established character was changed, but that didn't stop the anti-woke police.

@naruball That sounds more like people with an agenda rather than why the phrase ‘go woke go broke’ was original coined - least that’s what I remember it meaning

That Tiktok video with the guy in the Mario Odyssey hat gave me second hand embarassment.

@Bleachedsmiles but just like "fake news", it doesn't matter how it started, but how it's currently being used.

@nessisonett you walked into @GreatAuk's trap. It's amazing how these type of questions and lectures only come up when the main character fits outside the typical designs.

@GreatAuk Maybe ask yourself why a black character can only be confirmed if mentioned or implied in a game dialogue. Or how a multiracial character that leans more to one race design wise has to not identify as that and deny that part of identity and stay as "multirace" or as you claimed it "unrealistic".

Oh, because it's a video game character and neither of these topics supposedly fit into the gaming world. Got it. Let others for once be able to see themselves in a character and let live.

@thefourfoldroot1 the issue is not that she talks like a YA, its that she talks like how a 40 year old thinks a YA talks

@LordAinsley Well, as the average age of a console gamer is nearing that, I guess that’s what’s important. I don’t want to hear actual young adult speak, it’s indecipherable!

@GreatAuk it's like how FF7's Barrett is actually a white guy, right? There's no dialog specifically calling him black so you can't just assume he's black. /s

Hopefully she'll have much better lines. I remember when everyone hated how aloy sounded during the gameplay reveal of the first Horizon game but she sounded great in the final game. Hopefully it'll be the same case here. Regardless of how bad the writing may be the gameplay still looks incredible

@WadeIsInsane Is this Ella Balinska's game?

What do you mean "Let others for once be able to see themselves in a character and let live?" Is that what nessisonett was doing?

Looking at the game character and ONLY the game character you don't think black. I'm sorry. That's just a fact. Which was the whole point of my post. I wanted to know how in the world can nessisonett could have known for a fact that game character is black just by looking at the trailers and the gameplay that's been released.

If you have to dig up who the mocap actor is and then make sure she identifies as only black since she's mixed race and then somehow come to the conclusion that the game character perfectly matches the mocap character's identity in real life then it's not that obvious now is it?

There's no trap. Stop that silliness. I just think nessisonett made a big assumption about the game character in order to come up with a retort against someone else's argument.

@nessisonett I can't believe that the same monkeys that typed Shakespeare also managed to write this script.

@GreatAuk It's not my job or anyone else's for that matter to educate you on why others see her as black. Re-read my comment until you see the glaring point that you missed. You're the only one between us who's making a bigger deal out of this.

@WadeIsInsane You kind of proved my point. If the game character's appearance is open to interpretation then nessisonett can't unilaterally declare her race and then use his personal interpretation as a counterargument against another person's post.

My problem was that someone decided something to be true with no hard evidence and used that as an argument against someone.

@WadeIsInsane I blocked them. There’s no point engaging with somebody who’s either trolling or acting completely in bad faith.

@Juanalf I don’t think it’s that, I think it’s more the fact they are ‘put in the role’ for woke reasons that’s annoying to some. In African movies for example do they portray their main characters as white people?. I couldn’t care less frankly

@Pepsiman_100 aloy has become one of my favourite hero/heroines of all time. Even if she has sentient hair

@Dudeman1 I know mate. 15 absolutely killed me 🤣🤣🤣

@nessisonett Indeed, it's not worth engaging with a selective reader.

"I'm talking to a cuff" is actually my favorite part.

God this has to be the worst dialouge I've heard since triangle strategy. It does match how bland and generic the game looks though.

@BeerIsAwesome I've never heard control praised for its writing. Gameplay sure. But writing? That's news to me.

@RedRiot193 IGN, that bastion of journalism, praises it's writing. But IGN is one of the worst sites in existence, or so I'm led to believe, so just call me wrong on this one.

Nice! Reminds me of sands of time prince or Miles Morales. I love light hearted mildly incredulous monologues. I’m extra hyped for this. If the gameplay is as good as it looks I am ready to go! Just gotta find a PS5…

Edit: just bought a PS5. It’s go time.

@nessisonett Not woke just boring looking. Every enemy is a man and all good guys are gals. That bugs some people. They apparently forget that playing the game is optional.

I had completely forgotten this game existed until every gaming news outlet on the internet wrote an article about the script memes. I'd call that a marketing win.

@nessisonett Crap story teller or not, Lorraine Pascal's chocolate chip cookie recipe is outrageously good.

I'm personally enjoying the memes, makes me want to play the game alot sooner.

@AstraeaV That happens in games with male protags too. Pretty sure almost everyone Jin killed in GOT was male. The majority of war has been and is waged by guys. And it’s not like we have seen the whole game and every character in it. Some dudes just don’t like to see women fighting let alone having a power fantasy, especially when that power fantasy doesn’t cater to a male sexual fantasy. If Frey were in a bikini or for the really damaged, pale skinned and in a bikini, those same guys would no longer have an issue. Same as the Tomb Raider reboot outrage.

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