Dust: An Elysian Tail/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Art: The game looks gorgeous, even during its development it looked amazing. While the art itself is very fluid and is nicely shaded, all of the effects (like the "slashing" effect of Ahrah when Dust swings him) really add to the visual flair.
  • Awesome Music: The music for the game as a whole is stunning. It gets better as the soundtrack was released at HyperDuck SoundWork's Bandcamp page for a minimum of £5 GBP (roughly $8 U.S. Dollars)! And in lossless formats, to please the audiophiles.
  • Cliché Storm: Expect to hear about "souls" a lot. Expect to hear about one's "essence" in the "Life Thread". Expect to hear about "the forces of good and evil" and about how "your choices make you who you are." The story is a straightforward battle of good versus evil.
    • This game is a prime example of Tropes Are Not Bad, and most of these aforementioned cliches at least fall into place well.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • The wizard(s) in the Sorrowing Meadows, especially if you've focused on upgrading your own attack power instead of Fidget's. The wizard teleports to avoid your strikes while constantly summoning zombies, including exploding zombies that can easily be beamed right on top of you. Only Fidget's attacks can cause any harm, so you have to spam it constantly.
    • The occasional yeti encounter in the Blackmoor Mountains. They carry an axe and use wide swings that can easily connect, they aren't stunned by parrying, and they're incredibly tough. The flying Dust Storm is really the only the reliable way to stop them, and they can even knock you out of that if you're not careful.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • The Fidget stat eventually becomes this. Unlike with the other stats, there are numerous items that will multiply the Fidget stat rather than add to it, and they all stack. By the end of the game, the Fidget stat could be four times the second-highest stat. This makes the room-clearing Dust Storm attacks obscenely powerful.
    • Only a couple of enemies can attack Dust while he is spinning through the air spewing Fidget's projectiles, simultaneously attacking, defending himself, and sending out a cloud of enemy-tracking death which puts them in hitstun, allowing Dust to attack them normally, which recharges his magic meter and cools down his spin attack, allowing him to rinse and repeat indefinitely until the enemy is dead. Even the enemies which can hit Dust out of this attack are still best dealt with in this manner because the projectiles put them into hitstun, preventing them from attacking... you just have to make sure you get them in hitstun before you move in, whereas against many enemies you can simply fly over them recklessly. This strategy is also effective against all the bosses, including the final one... indeed, it is fairly easy to avoid being struck by the final boss at all the first couple times you fight him, and even when he throws magic at you, it is still not terribly difficult to avoid and he is still best dealt with via projectile spam.
    • For pure melee, the aerial slash and smash combo lets you chain any enemy into an unbreakable cycle of harm. The smash also sends out a shockwave that knocks enemies back, so groups are just as vulnerable. This is especially useful against flying enemies.
  • Play the Game, Skip the Story: The story might not be everyone's cup of tea, but the gameplay (and polished graphics) make playing Dust worth anyways. There is also an option to skip cutscenes and dialogue altogether.
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