Recent reviews by Unknown Samurai

It's not that bad.

Now please disregard the next several paragraphs. If you just wanted my opinion, you got it. So move on to the next review, otherwise you're gonna be stuck with reading some bizarre fan fiction, where I try and justify why "It's not that bad."

Oh, you're actually considering reading the rest of this? Well alright, if you insist. I'm gonna count down from 3 though, just to give you another chance to back out. Ready?...

3

Let's begin!
So it all started when Concord... you know, kicked the bucket. The discourse surrounding this game's discussion forum was hilarious. I mean, you had people from all over the world, unified, just to clown on this game. Barely anyone played it, and people still don't even know what it is, despite it making headlines all over the place. Huge shoutout to the main defender's at the time, $CRWD.... and that's about it. There were others, but none made as much of an impact as he did. Eventually, solely reading the comments started to make me curious about the game itself. Like, Dustborn can't seriously be this bad, can it? Either way, I caved in, and decided to get it... along with the DLC. (Yes, I got the DLC. No, it's not worth it. I'll explain why later.)

Going into the game, I wanted to keep an open mind. Yes, I did read a lot of... 'spicy' comments in regards to it, but I still wanted to judge the game on it's own merits. Not what some biased Youtuber told me. In the beginning, things were... ok. The writing made it feel like the 'adults' were just teenagers in disguise, not a total game killer for me, but certainly a point that kept coming up during the 'meaningful' moments. However, some of the lines are just terribly delivered, in a 'so bad they're good' kinda way. A few early examples of this are: The scene I got with Sai in the bathroom, "Yeah, I was spiraling!" The scene where Pax talks to 'the robot' in the first campgrounds, "The problem isn't you specifically. The problem is you're a robot." As well as my personal favorite line in the 2009 flashback, "Is that my meme, you thief!" I really like that last one, makes for good clip material.

Now, after slowly crawling my way through, I reached chapter 4... This is where the fun things happened. This is also where I think the open mindedness started to break away and I was beginning to form an... 'opinion'. So the main problem isn't really this chapter specifically, but I think everything leading up to this point pushed me over the edge. Sai says some very... interesting things in this chapter, as well as the other characters having very interesting comments about religion later on. Now it's worth mentioning, a lot of the political things this game offers just goes right over head. I have barely any knowledge on politics so I'm not immediately put off by the characters appearances and the overall 'wokeness' of the game. However, I do take an issue with religion, specifically in regards to something I have a background in thanks to my parents. After chapter 4, I was like "This is the most insane [Redacted] I've ever heard, surely this wasn't the dev's intention." I was a little tilted, and thanks to someone I met here on the Dustborn Discussion forums, he set me up with a thread to talk about it, (thanks Xacova). Which led to the Devs/Dev account directly getting involved. It resulted in possibly one of the best threads I've ever been apart of. If you wish to read the events of what transpired, then check this out: https://gtm.you1.cn/app/721180/discussions/0/4702413158524966782/

After that whole thing went down, I learned a few things. So, the devs did actually take a lot of things into consideration when making Dustborn. (Yes, I'm going to take them at their word as I have no reason to distrust them, even if it is a PR guy, they clearly know a lot about the development, so it's a safe bet that the responses in that thread were genuine.) The main thing that got me thinking was the potential for 'cut content'. The dev account made it seem like Red Thread was under time constraints to finish the game quickly. Doesn't that sound odd? A lot of the things I've read before jumping into the game, was that Red Thread had as much time/money that they needed in order to produce Dustborn, so why make cuts? Also, more specifically, cuts to the character interaction/dialogue as an effort to focus on the main story? Were they given a deadline? If so, I wonder why. The game itself is also more than enough evidence to support this theory. The first half of the game has pretty long chapters, like easily 2-4 hours per chapter. But then after the halfway point, the chapters start becoming an hour or less, with the comic summary only being 1 page. It's very interesting to think about. Not to mention the last chapter basically rushing the entire finale. Oh, also there was the 'ME-EM' issue too. Like how the wave runner minigame got totally forgotten about. (Special shoutout to the Dev who fixed that and re-implemented the UI, I really appreciate it.) I'm guessing the UI was originally meant to be black and white, like the 'Pong' minigame on there, but was changed to a gameboy colour scheme at the last minute. While the Pong minigame remains in the old colour style.

Time constraints aside. It was divulged to me, that some of my other issues with Dustborn would be answered if I just kept playing the game. Now I'm not a fan of this kind of story telling. Where an issue gets raised but doesn't get answered for many... many hours later. "Like trust me bro, it gets good after the 14th season... Just play for another 40 hours... I swear bro, I swear it gets good." Meanwhile chuffing copium like Thomas the tank engine. This is mainly in regards to Noam. So you've probably heard about the 'gaslighting' character, yeah? Everyone has. If you haven't heard of them, well now you have. A good case can be made towards them for being extremely toxic and manipulative, as their Vox is basically just 'brainwashing'/'mind control'. It makes Noam out the be the least trustworthy member of the entire group, and no one says anything about it, or even questions it.... until...

Spoilers (Avoid this section if you don't want to hear my issue with Noam) I was told in another thread by the dev account, that Noam's questionable behavior does get addressed. Which it does.... on the second last chapter of the game! That's pretty freaking close to the end of the game. But it does happen. Pax is able to confront Noam about their use of Vox and how it's manipulative. My only wish for this scene... (Aside from it happening earlier in the game) was that is lasted longer. This is a pretty huge issue and you only get a few lines and then it's time to escape the bar. Which isn't really enough to let this point sink in. Something I found interesting about this though. Remember how I talked about those time constraints? As well as the cut content? There's no campsite scene at the end of this chapter, which is odd. Seems like the perfect time to give a good scolding for everyone's immature behavior, and also talk to Noam more about their Vox. But there's no resolution, it's straight off to Chapter 9, then straight from 9 into 10. Kinda got a bit blue balled from that chapter 8 ending.

While talking about Vox, let me talk about Pax's Vox, as this is another huge issue I see get talked about a lot, and I myself don't like either. People keep saying: "Oh you have the choice to be bad." or "You don't have to use Vox." or "Using Vox gives you the bad ending." This is all [Redacted] by the way. There's a handful of scenes where you are forced to use Vox, no choice at all. What the game fails to do is explain 'why' you are forced to use Vox. Thankfully the Dev account cleared this up for me, because I got pretty tilted at this stuff too.

Oh, it seems like I'll need to continue this in the comment section. Didn't know there was a limit on long winded fan fiction writing...