YMMV / Dust: An Elysian Tail

• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: When Dust says "forever" about Fidget doll and changes his voice, it somehow sounds creepy. More so if you know he's Back from the Dead.
  Dust: I think I might have him make another Fidget doll that I'll just hang onto. Forever.
  (later)
  Dust: I guess I'll just have to carry it around. Forever.
• 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.
• Anti-Climax Boss: General Gaius. Aside from being able to parry far more often than is reasonable or fair, his attacks are fairly telegraphed and easy to dodge, and his magic attack in the latter two rounds will detonate harmlessly as long as you let him fire off all three.
• Base-Breaking Character: Depending on who you ask, Fidget (and her voice acting) is either an awesome sidekick, or akin to Navi.
• Best Level Ever: Everdawn Basin. Where the Moonbloods are preparing for their Last Stand against General Gaius and his army. The entire level has Dust fighting through Gaius' army and destroy his warfare weapons so the Moonblood can advance; the awesome music also helps quite a bit.
• 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 clichés at least fall into place well.
• Crossover Ship: A lot of people on the internet ship Fidget and Ori, most likely because they're both heroic Ridiculously Cute Critters of about the same size. They make a cute couple, some of the art, though...
• 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.
• Difficulty Spike: The Sorrowing Meadows. Two new types of enemy — a mook maker who occasionally summons enemies which explode if you run into them and a creature which can knock you out of midair — are some of the few enemies in the game which present any real threat to Dust. The difficulty bump in platforming/level navigation comes in the previous level, though.
• 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. The Aerial Dust Storm even breaks the platforming in certain areas, as strategic use of its ability to pull Dust upwards towards the nearest airborne enemy can used for Sequence Breaking purposes in getting certain collectibles early.
  • 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.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • The wasp monsters in the Sorrowing Meadows. While not overly tough, they appear in groups, their nests regularly spawn more unless under constant attack, and destroying the nest produces four more. Add onto that their quick attack which can easily catch you when you're trying to take out them or others out.
  • Soldiers. They're not particularly dangerous. What makes them annoying is that they can parry your attacks, and in groups they tend to do this quite a lot.
  • Slimes, for having a quick anti-air attack, and thus being one of the only enemies who can reliably knock you out of an Aerial Dust Storm.
• Good Bad Bug: Naturally, items that you sell to a merchant are normally removed from your inventory, but if you sell a number of items that's a multiple of 256 (256, 512, 768, 1024, etc.), the game glitches out, you keep the items and you make money off of them.
  • While it doesn't have nearly as much of an effect thanks to the fact that any combo bonus exp is scaled to your level and thus a 5-hit combo on level 1 gives you 20 bonus exp or so while doing one on level 20 will net you closer to 1000 exp, you can also perform infinite combos with little effort in one of the mansions in Sorrowing Meadow. This involves luring one of the necromancers near one of the pillars with a slidethrough gap in the bottom and positioning Dust between it and another one: if done correctly, the necromancer will endlessly summon zombies inside the pillar where they're unable to hit you (even the exploding zombies won't harm you, even if you're close enough to them where their explosions would normally be able to hit you) and break your combo, allowing you to tap a button leisurely to keep hitting them with the Dust Storm.
  • With the right timing, it's possible, with two air hits while facing one direction followed by an air dash in the opposite direction, to end up very slightly higher than when you started. If you do it again immediately (turning back around to air attack in the same direction as you did the first time), you end up very slightly higher still. Sufficient spamming of this allows you to, albeit very slowly, Sequence Break to places that you are intended to need the climbing, double jump, or super jump power-ups to reach.
• Ho Yay: Gaius and Cassius. The boss battle against the former has no less than three cutscenes where Gaius begs Cassius to remember who he was, even though Cassius is relentlessly beating him down. And even before that, Gaius ignores the death of his own soldiers at Cassius's hands because (paraphrased) "Cassius would never do this, the Moonbloods must be controlling him...somehow." Even for friendship, that's stretching it.
• Narm:
  • The scene when you return Reed's box. One could not be faulted for assuming at first that Dust is merely being sarcastic about the evil spirit sapping his life energy.
  • The animated cut scenes near the end are not as high quality as most of the game's art, which sometimes makes taking them seriously harder.
  • At the end of the final boss battle, when you're crawling over to where General Gaius is dangling from a ledge in the volcano; what's so Narm-y about it is the way he keeps screaming "CASSIUS!" Even given the circumstances, it sounds overacted.
• Nightmare Fuel: The mansions from the Sorrowing Meadows have what could possibly be the most terrifying enemy in a platformer right now. The demon the lurks there is in a completely different dimension, so Ahrah cannot hurt it. If you still try to attack it, the music will soon let you know that you must RUN.
• 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.
• Polished Port: The creator of the game said that he wanted to make sure the PC port was top notch, being a primary PC gamer. According to Totalbiscuit, he succeeded.
• Retroactive Recognition: Xander Mobus plays Merchant Sereth here, a full two years before he hit the big time as the announcer for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.
• That One Achievement: The Stuff of Legends, which requires earning four star rank in all Arena Challenges, some of the arenas requires VERY precise jumps and even to be overleveled to hack through waves of monsters and make to the finish line in time.
  • Getting a one thousand hit combo isn't hard on paper— the problem is carrying it over enemies and avoiding getting hit.^note For high level characters, using the Ugly Pendant is a must to earn this as even the toughest enemies will die rather quickly.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: What with Cassius and Jin's warring souls, the implied scope of Falana (remember that we never see where Gaius was marching from, or anything about the monarchs he served), the plotting of Ahrah and Gray Eyes, the return of technology, and the obvious Sequel Hook, the stage was perfectly set for an epic, morally grey story about Dust resolving all those plot threads and kicking ass. There was plans for a sixth part to the story, as well as the King being more prominent in the plot. Instead, all this was axed due to time constraints and Microsoft liking the game so they wanted it to be part of the Summer of Arcade line-up of Xbox LIVE Arcade titles.
  • However, the creator has said that he plans on making a sequel, so we have that to look forward to.

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