Previously referred to as "Project Athia," the Square Enix RPG Forspoken is a fantasy saga centered around a New Yorker named Frey who steps through a portal to a word of magic and monsters and masters powerful sorceries. True to this plot, gameplay previews of Forspoken place a lot of emphasis on the game protagonist's magical abilities, ranging from a diverse set of offensive spells to a jumping system that lets players swiftly navigate the game's open world.
The fantasy plot of Forspoken, revealed through press releases and game trailers, is a lot like Alice In Wonderland, Peter Pan, the Chronicles of Narnia, and other books, movies, or games within the "portal fantasy" sub-genre. There's a deep appeal to the idea of escaping from the complicated messes of the real world into a romanticized fantasy land of adventure, magic, and opportunities to be a hero. In more modern "Portal Fantasy" works, though, the romantic "otherworld" usually turns out to contain its own share of complex ambiguities.
The protagonist of Forspoken, a young woman and New Yorker named Frey Holland, is introduced in a story trailer as a lonely woman who is unhappy, friendless, and without family in the Big Apple. In a recent Forspoken game trailer, she expressing the wish to move to a new place "that loves cats" with "clean air and blue skies," then gets sucked through a portal from her hotel room's fire escape into the world of Athia, seemingly a classic fantasy realm with magic, magical creatures, and a thinly peopled landscape.
In short order, Frey acquires a talking golden bracelet with magical properties survives an encounter with a dragon, and gets on the bad side of the Tantas, magic-wielding matriarchs who use their powers to rule over and oppress the people of Athia. The plot of Forspoken, going by gameplay footage and cutscenes glimpsed within the trailers, seems to be a classic hero's journey where the champion named Frey liberates the people of Athia from sorcerous evil overlords.
Forspoken could also be a deconstruction of the hero's journey, much like the book and movie versions of Dune deconstructed the idea of an "otherworldly savior." If the Tanta antagonists of Forspoken are villainous because of how they use their magical powers to destroy anyone who stands in their way, will Frey Holland (and the player by extension) be any different? At the very least, players of Forspoken will almost certainly have access to a terrifying, deadly range of magical "spells" they can use to rain destruction down upon their foes in the game world, spells that take these following forms and have these following functions.
Forspoken's Magic Spells Are Divided Into Elemental Categories
Most of the magic spells and magical parkour abilities seen in Forspoken game trailers seem to be divided into categories based on elements from different classical philosophies – air, water, fire, earth, wood, and so on. Earlier "Project Athia" trailers showed Frey casting a spell that caused plant roots to erupt from the ground, while newer Forspoken trailers show her conjuring large bubbles of water to envelope her foes, blades of spark and cinders, and spikes of ice, among other phenomena.
A new Forspoken gameplay trailer revealed the names of several wood-themed spells within the radial wheel magic menu of its game interface. One magic spell in Forspoken called "Bind" is described as tying enemies up in a "tangle of weeds," and the "Implant" spell literally fires plant seeds as projectiles that sprout within a foe's flesh to deal extra damage. The "Disperse" spell conjures forth prehensile flowers capable of picking up and hurling rocks at enemies, while the "Burrow" spells sends out roots to pick up items and loot in the player's vicinity. "Prime," a proximity-triggered earth spell with the utility of a land-mine, doesn't conjure flora, but does seems to be within the same elemental category as the other plant-themed spells, while spells such as "Conflagration," "Blast Slice," "Tempest," and "Bolt" seem to belong to different "schools" of elemental magic.
Forspoken's Magic Spells Are Designed Take Control Of Open World Battlefields
Many of the combat encounters in Forspoken can be divided into three categories; battles with giant creatures such as dragons, skirmishes with mobs of small enemies who swarm the PC, and duels with fellow mages who have their own diverse collections of magical attacks. The developers of Forspoken haven't given gamers any detailed game tutorials or formally explained how combat works in their RPG; that said, a close examination of the gameplay footage they've released so far reveals several interesting details.
"Run-and-gun" magical combat, where players use "dashing" and "trap" style magical spells to create space and damage opponents, seems to be a core element of the open-world Forspoken experience. It's not quite clear whether players can increase the damage of their attacks through elemental spell combos – trapping enemies in a bubble of water, then hitting it with a lightning spell, for instance. A gameplay mechanic along those lines would mesh well with the magic-centered narrative of Forspoken while also encouraging players to switch between different schools of magic mid-combat.
When players level up in Forspoken, they do gain additional points in a resource called "Mana," a term used in many computer RPGs to refer to the magical energy mage characters draw from when casting their spells. It's unclear, however, whether Mana in Forspoken is fuel for magic like in other computer RPGs. Spells cast in Forspoken's gameplay trailers don't seem to drain any meter in the game's interface (the trio of diamond icons above the player's health meter indicates how many times player can use the dash in rapid succession); "Mana" in Forspoken may instead refer to special kinds of experience points players can use upgrade the potency or shorten the recharge time of certain elemental spells.
The lack of any "meter" or "resource" to limit the frequency of spellcasting is probably a deliberate design choice made by Forspoken's developers. After all, Forspoken is a "power fantasy" video game about an isolated lower-class New Yorker teleported to a fantasy world where she has the power to literally shatter the landscape and fight back against those who want to hurt her. A magic system players are free to go wild with meshes well with games like Forspoken that explore the concept of power and how it changes those who wield it.
