A Dust Tale

Hello
welcome to a review of a real classic game that is, and probably will always be a demo. Sad, but you still can enjoy it, so since the link here is outdated, take it here A Dust Tale. OR if you want you can watch a playthrough of the demo on Youtube HERE.
A Dust Tale is a classic techno-fantasy jrpg (not unlike or some more popular games like Star Ocean, Xenosaga, Phantasy Star, FFVII and FFVIII or the more recent Cosmic Star Heroine), made with RPG Maker VX by edumazieri (Eduardo Mazieri). This demo was released in 2010 and unfortunately that's all we got.

In this game we play as Edward, a gunslinger and soldier of the Empire that had to fight through a spaceship filled of rebel miners and mechas that are giving a hard time to the imperial soldiers. BUT he and his friend Jonny are members of the Dust Squad, a special team of specialists that are more dangerous than your average army soldiers.


Edward and Jonny are the two protagonists in this short prologue!

So we have two party members: Edward is a gunslinger with the ability to attack with a shower of abilities or act faster thanks to his Bullet Time skill, while Jonny is instead a knight, armed with a more classic sword that still can unleash lightning attacks (particularly useful against robots, of course) or strike twice, for more damage.
The game is pretty easy also thanks to two aspects: the first is that characters are automatically healed after each combat, so you use consumables only during fights, the second is that there is also no need to spare mana/action points since you can spend one round to recover them all, and this with all playable characters. Simple, fast and easy indeed, even if it's also important to take advantage of enemies' weaknesses!

The game is pretty much linear, there are really few options and choices to do, it's just a long corridor that acts as a tutorial, giving out also some details about the background (But I was not fond of the choice to relegate to a single slide with a lot to read... I'd have preferred a couple of cutscenes or a sort of Star Wars opening crawl. I do not know, but not just a page that the players must read).
For the rest the graphics are pretty good, there is a bit of everything among the assets: portraits edited from Fire Emblem, robots from Metal Slug, soldiers from X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, and so on, including some graphics from Rpgmaker XP. Anyway all these assets were also edited very well, so I do not mind as they work perfectly together! The maps are good and the setting is futuristic and believeable, so very well!
Music is also ripped and while I can recognize some themes, at the moment I do not remember the other jrpgs where they were taken from. But yes, that's ok!

What else? The story is unfortunately just introduces and the characters merely presented, and it's a pity since it seems a very particular... appetizer! Unfortunately this adventure ends as soon as it was getting really interesting.


Who is this new entry? Well first it is time to face that huge robot, then we'll learn who is Nad!

Final Verdict
A lot of games where sadly abandoned (even if some won't be missed, but it's not the case of this game, of course!), and A Dust Tale is one of them. Combat is solid, fast and simple, and for a prologue the difficulty is fine. I can just complain that there are a couple of cut dialogues, and that the walking speed is VERY slow, while the running speed is just slow. Anyway these are all the flaws I could find in this short, linear experience. Of course I cannot give a proper rating, but I wanted to remind the existence of this game. It's an interesting prologue that oozes style (starting right from the menu!) and it's very solid and well done.