Dust: An Elysian Tail is a fantasy themed Action Platformer. It masquerades as a metroidvania style game, and makes a good effort at incorporating RPG elements, but ultimately falls flat in both categories. The art and voice acting are great. The story is cliche, but earnest.
I like this game, I really do, but it's difficult to recommend. It starts off really promising, but quickly descends into mediocrity. This isn't a bad game, but it isn't a great game either. It's alright.
The story, characters, and dialogue are cliche. If you're a genre savvy gamer, you'll see every twist in the plot coming from mile away. The voice acting is amazing, and delivered well, but the dialogue is... er...
difficult to take seriously. It's not a bad story, but its tropes are played out, and I felt inclined to roll my eyes during nearly every conversation. The writing appeals to a particular niche culture, and it's difficult to appreciate if you're not in the target audience. If you
are in the target audience (which, once upon a time, I was), then the story is a gripping emotional tale of personal conflict, as the protagonist seeks to reconcile his past, his destiny, and... above all... himself.
The art is very pretty, and the main character's animations are dynamic and have impressive weight. Don't look too closely at the enemy animations, but you probably won't be able to see them anyway once you've filled the screen with projectiles.
The gameplay is solid, but repetitive. By the time you make it to the first town, you'll have seen everything this game has to offer. Rinse and repeat to the end.
The combat feels fun and satisfying, but it gets repetitive. It's very flashy, and very anime. Combat options are nuanced and varied, with timed parries and a multitude of combos that allow you to strategically juggle your enemies on the ground and in the air. If you're willing to handicap yourself, it can even feel like a proper fighting game. That's the problem, though. You have to handicap yourself. The most effective combat technique, which you learn in the tutorial, is the aerial Dust Storm, which involves holding 'Y' in the air while mashing 'B' (XBox Controller), during which you are effectively invulnerable and doing damage to everything on screen. This will be the most efficient method of dealing with all but a select few "nuisance" enemies, which only require you to parry first. There are limits to how much you can spam this move, but most fights will be over before running into them. If you're playing efficiently, combat, including boss fights, will consist of spamming this move until you're out of energy, then hitting a few things or eating food to replenish your energy so you can spam it some more.
Exploration is one of the game's strong points, but it, too, is repetitive and unrewarding. In this game, it's very much about the journey, because the destination usually isn't worth the effort. The environments are beautiful, and the platforming puzzles are engaging and occasionally even clever. There are a few core elements of the platforming puzzles that are repeated throughout the game, but there's enough variety in the presentation and execution to keep things fresh. What do you get for backtracking or solving puzzles? The rewards are underwhelming. Mostly money and items that you can also get from a vendor or by killing enemies. There aren't any hidden powerups, and the one set of collectibles only serve to increase your maximum health by a paltry amount.
The game presents itself as a metroidvania style exploration game, but fails to follow through. The world is not interconnected and the story progression is
very linear, with no backtracking required and no branching objectives. If you're looking for a metroidvania title, look elsewhere, as this one is worse than Metroid Fusion.
The game also presents itself as an RPG, which is a bit of a stretch. There is exactly one moral choice you make during the game (tied to an achievement, save-scum before doing so to get both) which has no consequences for the story. You level up and get skill points which you can spend to increase your stats, but the game forces you to keep your stats relatively even. You get a wide variety of items that you can find, buy, or craft which further increase your stats. At certain points in the game, this allows for some interesting choices between building tanky, building for damage, or building for utility, but those moments are short-lived. Most of the time new items are strictly better than old ones, so it ends up being a false choice.
From an achievement hunting standpoint, this game is an excellent way to spend a weekend. Steam says I got all the achievements with 24 hours played, but with guides and focused effort you could probably knock that down to 12-16 hours. If you play on Tough difficulty, and save-scum for the one "moral choice" achievement, you can get everything in one play-through. I got most of the "skill" based achievements accidentally in the course of normal play, but none of them seem unreasonable.
3.0