By now you’ve more than likely taken a gander at the initial critical reception to developer Luminous Productions' first foray into new worlds and surroundings that don’t pertain to the Final Fantasy name in the form ofForspoken. The game releases tomorrow for PS5 & PC and putting it lightly – around these parts at least – the game has sadly not turned out as well as we would’ve hoped. Yet for all its problems, shortcomings and issues big and small, Forspoken is not without good merits. And while that may sound inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, much like the technical achievements in a game likeThe Callisto Protocol, sometimes those individual aspectsdeserve highlighting. Regardless of the end product they’re attached to.
In Forspoken’s case, it’s the load times and how surprisingly quick they are on PS5 compared to titles of a similar scope and size. If memory serves me well – as much a quick glancing over of previous tests – it’s one of the fastest instances of transition between game states.
The mere two seconds to load up a save file easily trounces something likeSaints Row’s eight seconds orYakuza: Like a Dragon’s seven seconds. It even manages to go toe-to-toe with a major first-party title like 2020’sMarvel’s Spider-Man Miles Moralesat just a shade over two seconds. But as for the latter comparison, Forspoken manages to best it on the fast travel, at roughly half the time it takes for Insomniac’s game to get you from one corner of the game world to the next. It’s quicker too even on boot-up, totaling (skipping introductory animations) little more than nine seconds to reach the main menu.
Overall the game may not have delighted everyone, but even those releases that don’t meet expectations are often graced by one or two consolations. In Forspoken’s case, its utilizing of the PS5’s SSD is worthy of mention. And while that may sound like an inevitability to be expected from improved hardware, rather than marveled at, it’s nonetheless a promising step – three-and-a-bit years into this console generation we may be. To find that even those games that may end up faltering are at least making the effort to do away with the lengthy load times of previous generations for those still prioritizing consoles. For all that it has going against it, Forspoken has genuinely done one thing right here. And impressively so.
