How To Fix The Forspoken Trailer
Listen, I don’t want to crap on the Forspoken trailer more than all of us already have. Somebody worked hard on it. And, for all we know, a perfectly capable writer was showered with notes like “give the dialogue more pop”, “make it sound the way Gen-Z talks”, and “I’m in this position because being creative didn’t work out, so I’m going to ruin everything I touch.” Take it from someone who’s written for both television and games: The end result ain’t always the way you wanted it to turn out.
Still, the Forspoken trailer is awful. And it’s not just awful because the narration sounds like a style of dialogue that’s fallen out of favor with fans who once - let’s be honest - treated that same type of dialogue like it was delivered by the hands of angels. I know we all retcon our preferences to have always hated something made by a later-outed abuser, but let’s not act like this style didn’t create an entire cottage industry of novelty shirts for two decades. That’s on a lot of us. Not me, because I always hated it. Wink.
Related: Forspoken's Trailer Shows How Marvel Has Ruined Modern Media
The reason the trailer is awful - and this style has become intensely grating - is because not every character on this goddamn planet needs to be self-referential.
For some reason, video games love self-referential jokes. I feel like half of tutorials in games now feature a guy saying something like, “Press A to jump - WHATEVER AN ‘A’ BUTTON IS LOL!” And while I think Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is leaps and bounds above the other Borderlands games, that series is absolutely filled with characters who will seemingly explode if they don’t make a note of how nuts everything is. The logic being, well, if the world is bonkers, then it’s fun for
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