There are a few upcoming games that I’m more excited about Square EnixDive into isekai type with forsbook. Fortunately for me, I was able to spend some time with the game at Tokyo Game Show 2022.
The demo itself begins with a quick tutorial, teaching magical parkour – zipping across the open world at high speed – and the basics of combat. Basically, you have a selection of magic spells across two elements – earth and fire. When you’re at close range you can simply do a bunch of initial melees but within range you can do rechargeable magic attacks. The parkour button turns into a doge button in combat and you can use a grappling hook of some sort to lure yourself into enemies at any moment. What this means is that you have a lot of variety in combat – and you can change both your range and your attack style at any moment. Or in other words, you feel like an overpowering magical badass.
After the tutorial, the TGS demo takes you into the open world and highlights several goals – such as finding a safe house (where you can upgrade equipment and comfort) or discovering a monument that gives you strength.
The best part about the demo is the goal of clearing a bridge for enemy forces. The bridge is full of bow-wielding enemies that force you to learn how to deal with bound opponents – for example, keep moving. Once eliminated, a woman wearing armor is faced with a set of scales in her left hand. The trick with this battle is that it changes its base weakness based on your attacks element. Thus, to overcome it, you must constantly switch between earth and fire spells in order to be able to deal damage to it – even while dodging powerful and fast melee attacks. It was so amazing and incredibly bright.
While the game looks polished overall, I have to admit that traversing the open world was a bit annoying. Since magical parkour uses your MP whether you’re in combat or not, the game constantly locks up in breaks whenever you temporarily run out. Likewise, the many vertical cliffs seemed to have to be climbable somehow or somehow, but at least with the powers included in the demo, they simply acted as walls that forced me to walk long distances to reach most targets.
However, even with these minor issues, I’m more excited about it forsbook what you’re going for. Honestly, January can’t come soon enough.
forsbook It is scheduled to be released on January 24, 2023 for Play Station 5 and Windows.
Richard is an anime and video game journalist with over ten years of experience living and working in Japan. For more of his writing, check out Twitter and blog.