Square Enix’s Forspoken trailer is absolutely toasty online

Earlier this week the marketing team behind it The upcoming action game from Square Enix Leave posted a tweet with a few sell points and a short gameplay video. It should have been a perfectly normal and forgotten exercise in video game promotion, but dear readers, I’m here to tell you that this video is Poorly.

Before we continue, here’s the tweet:

I can maaaaaaaaaybe see what they were trying to do here. Break this down into something relatable, like the promo for a Marvel TV series where an everyday kid gets wild powers. But, uh, yeah. It’s bad! And while I don’t think the ratios are under a tweet hard sciencethe fact that this video was quoted and tweeted here many times (at the time of posting) is not a good sign:

I’m not writing this only to tell you it’s bad but it’s terrible Things on the internet that I don’t bother to post on the Kotaku.com website. I am writing this to share some wonderful examples of people – some of the highlights among the 6757 listed above –Absolutely roast meat the video.

Here is @funnywes with a bloodborne edition:

@bovidsnow has one Tony Hawk professional skater Execution:

Voice actor SungWon Cho manages to work Mario, animal crossing and Danganronpa in the one video:

That is @Maximus123458 give Undertale the “Talking to a Cuff” treatment:

We also got some Metal Gear, courtesy of Jake Baldino:

If you want to scroll through the other 6700 examples, ranging from Metroid to Persona to Half-Life, you can find them here.

Readers may remember the last time we wrote about this Leavethat was in late 2021 when we found out about this alongside the main character Freya actor Ella Balinska No black person was directly involved in the creation of this prominent black protagonist, and Square Enix instead said the team worked “working closely with a number of advisors with BIPOC backgrounds”.

For anyone wondering if this trailer is somehow unrepresentative of the game itself, here it is another useful passage from Isaiah’s preview of the game:

Another concern I had going into the previews was how many times Frey and Cuff joked about each other throughout the game, which was a lot of Marvel movies, both from the first trailer, The Game Awards trailer, as well also from my hands-off look. These banter would include swearing during the banter between Frey and Cuff during combat encounters. In response to those concerns, Square Enix said the intention of the banter was to present Frey’s complexities as a “complex, imperfect, and raw character” and to make her more relatable as a self-portrayal for players into the wacky environment she now found herself in make in

Maybe this game will end up being good, who knows! But boy I can’t remember the last time there was a big release sniffed his pre-release routine so bad.