Couldn't ask this to happen to a more deserving publisher. Poor SE, they don't have a Western studio to blame when it flops

They could still blame Xbox fans for not buying their crumb serving of games on Xbox

Going by the Eurogamer review and a few other bad ones, that is exactly what those reviewers definitely want.  If you are really not a fan of Rick and Morty or that type of humor gets underneath your skin, its good that its an option.  Case in point, I played the Forespoken demo and the constant chattering of the that goes on made me wish for a setting to turn it either off or tone it down big time, while GOD of War Rag I did not mind as much.

If Forspoken bombs then Luminous Productions future looks shaky.

Ironically, the west kind of is to blame with this one I think, at least partly. This isn't truly a Japanese game, Square Enix got some crazy idea to fuse eastern and western game design philosophy into a single game. The studio that developed the world, the combat,  etc., is Luminous Productions, who last made FF15; however, the writing team is all western, consisting of Gary Whitta (Star Wars: Rogue One, After Earth) as the lead writer, Amy Hennig (Uncharted 1-3), Todd Stashwick (co-wrote the cancelled Amy Hennig EA Star Wars game), K-Michel Parandi (an indie French film director and writer), and Allison Ryhmer (worked on the scripts for shows such as Greek, Shadow Hunters, and Chasing Life). The composers for the music are also western, Bear McCreary (God of War 2018, God of War Raganrok, CoD Vanguard) and Garry Schyman (Destroy All Humans series, Bioshock series, Middle Earth: Shadow of series). The main character is an American from New York City who gets sucked into the fantasy world the game is set in, and alot of the character design looks more western than Japanese as a result.

It was just a bad idea imo, trying to fuse east and west into a single game. Whenever Japanese games take too much influence from the west, they are often hated (Resident Evil 6 is a good example, the devs said they were heavily influenced by Call of Duty, which is why the game ended up being more action than Survival Horror and had an over-the-top story like most CoD games do), whereas many of the best Japanese games are built for the Japanese audience first and foremost, for instance Persona 5.

The game is fine, it reminds me of Sonic Frontier in that with a couple of tweeks it can hit a high mark.  Definitely tone down the constant prattle between the armband device and the main character.  The game combat takes a while to understand what its going for but once I got the mechanics down it was fun to play and there are a lot of big effects.  Its always hard to get a good feel of an open world game from a demo since it just drop you in a section and you just run around completing missions pretty much.

Yeah, I could see Square giving them the axe if this flops. FF15 already failed to meet their expectations for it, and now this is looking like it will sell quite alot less than FF15 did, between 2 years of Sony exclusivity, and what is looking like a sub-70 metacritic game.

Can't wait to replay Witcher again. I'll take any excuse I can get lol