The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

[Dust: An Elysian Tail]
(X360, PC, PS4)
5/5

Recently beat Dust: An Elysian Tail for the first time. I played my first run on Hardcore Mode and it was a very fantastic experience. I rated Dust 5/5 Stars on PSN, and I'd recommend this game to just about anybody.
It has a blend of a variety of genres. It combines;

- Hack and Slash
- RPG
- Platformer
- Metroidvania

All four of these make for a wonderful blend of gameplay, and the world of Falana is a really cool place. Everyone there is an animal of some kind, but all walk on two feet. You'll meet anime-style cats, dogs, foxes, frogs, dogs and a few snake-like things, I presume. Even the main character, an amnesiac rogue assassin named Dust is some kind of cat-fox, it seems.
The story starts off fairly serious, and gets quite a bit darker from there. There's a sort of happy ending, if you look at it a certain way. By and large though, the ending is a bit sad but it fits with the tale that's being told. I was very satisfied with Dust's ending.

There's quite a bit of gameplay content here, and I played this 15 dollar game for about the same time I'd play a 60 dollar game. What's more, I'm actually still playing it. There are Challenge Rooms that I'm going to 4-Star now, which become significantly easier to get high Ranks on after you've leveled up all the way and have great items.

The final boss alone, I'd rate 5 out of 5, and no matter how easy or hard he is to defeat for you (depending on difficulty, items and level) the fight itself is epic. I was overpowered by the time I faced him, and it still felt incredibly epic. I mean that in the classical sense; musical crescendos, a fight to the death, a world at stake, multiple phases; and on top of that, it's very much personal.

The game has a very simple but elegant crafting system that's always fun to play around with. Its merchant system is also incredible and I wish every game or every RPG at least implemented it. When you sell a Material to a merchant for the first time in that Save File, you effectively "Catalog" it and you may now buy it from them forever, as soon as shops Restock. Shops Restock every few minutes of real-time gameplay, and Restocking is notified to the player by a nice popup in the lower left corner.

Combat in Dust consists of attacks, Dodges and Parries. If you've played Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance or DmC: Devil May Cry, they work like that. When an enemy's about to attack, you hold your Slash button in their direction. It's very nice. Attacks themselves are very standard hack/slash combos. You have a simple combo, a launcher combo, an air combo, a grab combo and ways to link all four of those together. It sounds simple, it is simple.

Magic in Dust is done by your partner/companion character, a nimbat who calls herself Fidget. I didn't know what a nimbat was before playing Dust, but I sure do now. Fidget has a button dedicated to her attacks, of which you unlock three. Combining her magical bullets with a move you have called Dust Storm alters their effect, making it MUCH more powerful and doing more damage to enemies. Fidget starts the game very weak and pitiful, but by the end, she can have up to 13 000 damage stat, much more than Dust's cap - the amnesiac assassin caps out at about 2000. Yeah.

There's not much else I can say about this game, the Map system is simple to understand, and if you like anything similar to Zelda, or Metroid, or Castlevania, or games where you get an ability, then you can go somewhere else, then you get another ability, then you can go somewhere else, you'll love Dust a hell of a lot. It also contains lots of Korean theming, like food items, culture, backgrounds and other cool stuff, since the developer - you read that right, the one person who made this game by himself - has a Korean background.

Dust is a great game. Worth at least two playthroughs.

I would certainly spend the fifteen dollars on a game like this. What else are y'gonna spend it on? Something like Assassin's Creed Unity? That's a stupid idea. Just buy Dust instead. It's actually playable and will make you happy. Unlike Unity. Which might $#!7 on your dreams.

~ DarkAlphabetZoup