Square Enix 'got a good laugh' out of the reactions to last month's Forspoken trailer

Square Enix's Forspoken has been doing the rounds for a while - the second game built on the Luminous Engine that made its debut with Final Fantasy 15, it was at the forefront of the PlayStation 5's reveal when it was known as Project Athia and has had various public showings ahead of its release early next year, but perhaps its most impactful came after a trailer was posted on social media last month and was met with a rough response online, the dialogue becoming the butt of internet jokes.

"It was unexpected to see the reactions to the social media post," Forspoken's creative producer Raio Mitsuo told us after a recent opportunity to go hands-on with the game. "Basically, we used existing footage from previous trailers and put something together as a social media post. And yeah, it went kind of viral in a way - that's not the direction that we thought it was going to go! But I have to admit, some of the memes are actually pretty funny, so I got a good laugh out of it.

"But, you know, for us, it's not something that we're concerned with. We're obviously leaving a lot of information on the table, because we're taking dialogue and scenes out of context. Forspoken is a very narrative driven game. It's a very story based game. We don't want to ruin the experience in our marketing campaign. We're being very selective about what to use to generate interest and sometimes without that information about what led up to that moment, or what was the character's state of mind, we're leaving the audience the full freedom to interpret lines in any way they want. It's just one of those challenges that come naturally when trying to find ways to show the game without telling the full story, because we definitely don't want to reveal that."

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