Summary
: Welcome to Dustborn. This is what you wanted. That’s why you clicked. Right?
: We’re going to start with an option that isn’t currently on the main menu, which is the option to view the prologue comic. For some reason, this option unlocks after you complete the first “comic book” in game (roughly 15-20 minutes in) even though that’s not what a prologue is.
: Right away, you can see that the artist for this game clearly knows how to design a comic cover. Keep this in mind for later.
: I looked them up, and Delio Diaz and Frank Alpizar both work for Marvel now. Again, these are talented artists who were clearly good enough to be hired elsewhere and I’m glad they were.
: I know one other person who should definitely be hired by a comic studio, and that’s dominussart on Discord. He’s great.
: I sent my grill in to be fixed and they added a button that vaporizes your burger into its component atoms.
: We can see here that even though the source material sucks, Delio Diaz and Frank Alpizar made it work and everything is extremely on-model.
: By the way, you’ll notice a poster for Draugen in the background. Draugen is Red Thread’s previous game - it’s a first-person walking sim where the twist is that your character is schizophrenic. It got 6/10 and 7/10 reviews across the board with the complaints being the same every time: the writing sucked and weighed down the visuals and music.
: Let me explain who these characters are by interweaving some introduction shots from the game itself.
: Pax is our player character. Even though it says her vocals “provoke strong emotions”, she’s a direct ripoff of characters like Jesse from Preacher or Banshee from X-Men (or, if you prefer, that one character from My Hero Academia or Lelouch from Code Geass): she can mind control people with her voice.
: Noam is Pax’s ex and also has voice-based mind control. It’s not really clear how Noam’s superpower is any different from Pax’s.
: Noam also sucks for a multitude of reasons, chief among them that they’re an attempt at non-binary representation that falls flat because of the voice casting.
: Noam is voiced by a female voiceactress despite the game outright telling you they’re biologically male, and the end result is something closer to Dr. Girlfriend in Venture Brothers than actual representation.
: Sai is the worst character in this game. She’s annoying, constantly screaming, and her dialog feels like it was written with the goal of breaking the record for most swears in a video game.
: Her superpower is that she can turn her body to stone, which immediately made me wonder if the vitiligo was stolen valor. She is a direct ripoff of Colossus from X-Men.
: Theo doesn’t talk much and generally feels like he’s 72 and not 42.
: This is vaguely reminiscent of the start of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5, where Giorno scams people at the airport. It’s also dumb (from a writing perspective) because the game will establish that using mind control is a bad thing and you should feel bad.
: Reminds me of Miles Morales if that kid had no moral code.
: We will hear this song later in the update. It is not good.
: I think this is the only significant difference between Pax and Noam: Noam needs to touch people, while Pax can just scream at them.
: This is pretty clearly meant to be Kamala Harris. It’s funny they think Kamala would’ve changed the status quo if she’d won the election in 2024 - she’s an establishment corporate Democrat.
: Also, picking “Pacifica” for the name of post-apocalyptic California is a terrible choice that Ragnar Tornquist lifted directly from Cyberpunk 2077.
: The Raid is a minigame that unlocks at roughly the halfway point, because we’re not allowed to have anything more interesting than people sitting around and talking.
: Now let’s start a new game.
: Holy mother of fuck what happened? This is easily the worst comic cover I’ve ever seen. The characters are way off-model, there’s no action at all, and it’s like 80% beige.
: It’s so bad that they had to add the fake Marvel publisher mark and the red textbox because otherwise you’d look at this and go “What the fuck is this supposed to be?”
: If you tried to run this cover past Marvel or DC’s editors, they’d laugh at you. If you tried to run it past Weekly Shonen Jump’s editorial board, they’d toss you out on your ass.
: You know what? Let’s look at some covers for the comics that Ragnar Tornquist is obviously ripping off, the biggest one being the 1980s X-Men story Days of Future Past.
: Look at that shit. No beige anywhere. Lots of colors even for a night shot. Even though there’s no direct action, you have the implied action of Wolverine trying to threaten someone off with his claws.
: I think those pink pants were outlawed in 1985.
: Here’s another one. You have direct action, lots of colors, Wolverine getting his dick blasted off by a laser. You also have a random Spiderman in the corner for no apparent reason.
: He’ll live.
: Now, you might go “Well, those are comic books aimed at kids. Comics aimed at an older audience, which this clearly is, don’t usually do that” and you’re wrong.
: This one even does the car shot better, because the artists figured out that they needed to make it a convertible to show off the characters properly.
: There’s one other argument I suppose you could make, which is that both Watchmen and Transmetropolian are young adult comics and not truly aimed at adults. Here’s my counterpoint.
: Reiwa no Dara-san is a seinen slice of life comedy manga. It’s extremely good.
: Same for Hatarakanai Futari. But what if we assume it’s one of those Silver Sprocket comics about depression or being gay and doing crimes? After all, the cast of Dustborn are gay criminals.
: Uh-oh! There’s no counterargument for that Dustborn cover. It sucks.
: This one I want to chalk up to both a failure of directorial vision AND a bad development process. There are a few things that aren’t in the picture that should be: Pax’s shoulder should be bleeding, as should Noam’s head.
: My guess is that this was done before they had the story nailed down (a mistake) and they didn’t have the time (or more likely the budget) to touch it up.
: At the same time though, this feels like when I went to someone for a commission and realized halfway through giving them references that my idea sucked.
: The game has an option to show who’s speaking and color the subtitles, and I don’t know why it’s not on by default. I wind up turning it on a bit later in the recording.
: “SHIT. Shit! Shit. SHIT. God DAMN this shitting SHIT…”
: Calling that Vivziepop dialog would be wrong. Even she’s not that bad.
: I’m working on getting Mara re-designed to not be a Hellaverse OC.
: “Are you okay, Sai?”
: " ‘Am I okay?’ You’re the one who got us into this, you.. you fuck!"
: “Theo’s just trying to help, no need to yell at-”
: " ‘Help’. Not dragging us into this would’ve been helpful. No, I’m not okay. I’m the opposite of okay. I’m - WE are FUCKED!"
: You would think from the way the game capitalizes random words that the voiceactors would emphasize them, but they don’t.
: At this point, we can press 1 to stop the dialog. I should probably do that, but I’m going to let it go on just a bit longer.
: Okay that’s enough, I just wanted to get across that Sai is a whiny bitch and I wish she’d catch a bullet to the skull.
: “Stop bickering! PLEASE. I know we’re pretty shaken up, emotionally AND physically. But we got out, we’re alive, we have the CARGO.”
: “Tomorrow we’ll be out of the country and on our way to Nova Scotia. We’ll be fine. Better than fine. We’ll be FREE. But if we keep fighting, we won’t make it through the Republic. We need to stick together. We need to be a CREW.”
: “Anyway, that’s all. You can talk again.”
: “Well, that was uncomfortable.”
: “I HATE it when you do that.”
: “What’s going on?”
: “Pax used her Vocals to BLOCK us. I can feel my adrenaline spiking.”
: “Fascinating. I didn’t notice a thing.”
: “Sai. Your hands. They’re --”
: “I know! That’s what happens when I get agitated, PAX.”
: “I’m sorry. But you really need to chill, because if anyone sees-”
: “Thanks, I KNOW. Shut up!”
: “I believe the kids call it ‘K-pop-music’. It stands for ‘Korean popular music’.”
: “It’s K-pop! Just K-pop!”
: K-pop sucks.
: “Right, ‘K-pops’.”
: “It’s.. nice. But.. maybe turn it down a notch, Sai?”
: “How’s your arm, Pax?”
: “Stings. But I’ll survive.”
: “What if I…?”
: “Okay.”
: The concept of having a healer whose ability to heal is entirely a placebo is admittedly interesting, but that’s not what gaslighting is.
: At this point, we need to talk to everyone else in the car. I am going to skip this because this is already boring as sin.
: Ahem.
: You’re not a sin. Anyway, this is where we get those intro cards I showed off earlier.
: To progress, we need to turn the radio off.
: “Leave my music alo- oh shit, I LOVE this song! Come on, guys! It’s a ROAD TRIP, you have to sing along!”
: I feel like whoever wrote that yellow box needs a taser to the balls. Looking at you, Ragnar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AY7jamiFfM
: I have a lot to say about this. The first thing I want to talk about is what you’re seeing in this video. What you’re seeing is pure, unrestrained hubris.
: You are watching Ragnar Tornquist standing on the edge of a tall cliff, leaning over and shouting “Fuck you, gravity! I’m going to fly today!” as he jumps off.
: This song has four different singers in it. I tracked down their IMDB pages: Pax, Sai, Noam, and Theo. What you’ll immediately notice is that all of them had bit parts, mostly in live-action TV, until they got cast in this game. You’ll also notice that none of them have prior singing roles.
: That’s right. Ragnar Tornquist took four inexperienced actors who can’t sing and cast them for a scene that requires all four to sing. Ragnar Tornquist is trying to defy gravity. But I mean, it’s not like Ragnar Tornquist had any experience with that. He was only the director on 5 games over 25 years.
: Uh-oh. I mean, that’s just one game, right? It’s not like there were more..
: Oh no. Ragnar, buddy, this is not looking good for you. At least it was only two games. Two out of five, that’s not bad. Right?
: By Dreamfall Chapters, he was smart enough to not credit a voice director at all, but we all know he did it. Unfortunately, I got banned from MobyGames after literally three searches, so we’ll never know if he was the voice director on Draugen or not (he was).
: Anyone who has ever worked with voice talent knows that finding a voiceactor who can also sing is hard. You can find a singer or voiceactor easily, but someone who can do both well is the voiceacting equivalent of Shohei Otani.
: That’s why usually when you see a character in a voiceacted game sing, they’re a side character like Scylla in Hades 2 or Raphael in Baldur’s Gate 3 where the studio can cast a singer who doesn’t need to voiceact much, or a voiceactor who only needs to sing one song. Voiceactor-singer combos usually command a much higher salary, which is why they’re rarely used for main characters.
: I did have a few people (thanks to TuyuVT, Meowtroid, and Madison;Notes on Bluesky) who suggested exceptions, like the Ryu Ga Gotoku / Yakuza series and Hades.
: The distinction there is that Ryu Ga Gotoku didn’t really have singing until Yakuza 3, and even then Kiryu only had one karaoke song. By that point, RGG Studio and Sega had the budget and a proven franchise to justify doing that.
: Hades is also different because Supergiant realized they hit the jackpot with Darren Korb when they made Bastion, and they never have him sing with anyone else.
: There’s one other part of this that is unrestrained hubris, and that’s having four people singing on top of each other when it’s pretty clear they did not have a voice director or anyone who knows what audio mixing is. That’s a bold fucking move.
: The best part is that Ragnar Tornquist realized this song sounds like shit because the later rhythm game segments (yes, there will be later ones) use only the backing music without the VAs singing the way a normal rhythm game would.
: On top of all that, it’s a bad rhythm game song because it lacks a strong beat. I did this by using visual cues rather than listening to the music, which is a hallmark of a bad rhythm game.
: “They’ve got their lights on. They’re after us. Oh shit oh shit oh shit–”
: “Sai? Calm down.”
: You would think that Doctor Girlfriend over here would use their emotion-dulling superpower or whatever, but no. That would make sense.
: “Take a deep breath, Sai. Let’s pull over, we can handle the police.”
: “Pax, maybe put the CARGO in a SAFE place?”
: They stole a pink monster toy?
: “Handle the police HOW exactly? You know what cops do to people like us!”
: Normally I’m against police brutality, but if a cop decided to “accidentally” unload his entire service weapon into Sai, I would not complain.
: “Sai? PLEASE listen to me.”
: Oh no, not OUR COMIC BOOK. As far as I can tell, the choices don’t matter in this game at all.
: We get two choices that don’t make any sense. I picked 2.
: Sai manages to fuck up driving somehow, even though (as we’ll learn in a minute) they’re in a self-driving car.
: I chose this route because it gives you this Aidyn Chronicles-level cutscene direction where they opted to make the camera clip through the unrendered inside of a truck. Yes, this is noticeable in game.
: If you pick the other option, the car stops and the cop gets run over by oncoming traffic. It’s very stupid.
: “That was WAY too close for comfort.”
: “Are they okay?”
: “What, the police? Uh… I don’t think so, Sai.”
: “I caused that to happen! I just MURDERED people!”
: This is the worst depiction of someone having a breakdown over killing someone I’ve ever seen. There was an indie Game Maker game called Iji like 20 years ago that did a better job than this.
: “Not your fault, Sai.”
: “Do you think the vehicle had time to report the accident before it went BOOM?”
: “FUCK!”
: I have to wonder if Sai’s VA gave Ragnar Dipshit any kind of feedback on how utterly shit her lines are.
: Like, when I hire creative types, I almost get worried if they DON’T give me some kind of pushback.
: “The Pacific Authority will know something’s happened.”
: “You know what cops do to people like us. We’re dead!”
: That’s the second time you’ve said that in the past minute and a half.
: “We need to stay calm. Getting caught speeding won’t do us much good.”
: “We don’t know if they were actually chasing us. You still got the CARGO, right?”
: “All of THIS for that.. FUCKING THING. It better be WORTH it, Pax. You know what? I’m letting this thing drive itself from now on. In fact, I’m never driving again. I’m done. Done!”
: So I have questions. Why are you letting the emotionally fragile lady who has been shown to be able to snap metal with her bare hands drive? Why are you not using the auto-drive in the first place?
: “We’re less than twenty minutes out of Sacramento. We’ll make it.”
: “This is just the WORST. And do not tell me we’re lucky to be alive. I’ve had it up to here with being alive.”
: We get yet another incredibly boring comic that tells us nothing we don’t already know. Yes, we just sat through a 15-minute car cutscene with zero action in a superhero game.
: She’s wearing a shirt that says “Flashback” in a flashback.
: We have control over Pax, but this is more cutscene.
: One problem with hiring two British people to play Americans is that no American would ever say “She’s finally out of the toilet”. We’d say she’s off the toilet or out of the bathroom.
: We can look at a couple of the objects in Noam’s apartment, but there’s only one I care about because I need to show that Ragnar Tornquist is a fucking hack.
: That object is this book.
: Dustborn takes place in an alt-history setting where JFK was never assassinated. The fact that the world is now a dystopia makes this a DIRECT FUCKING RIPOFF of the Steven King novel 11/22/63.
: 11/22/63 is about a guy in Maine who finds a magic basement door that time warps him to something like a year before the JFK assassination. He starts a new life in the 1960s, eventually winds up saving JFK, and then returns to the present to find that the world ended.
: What a damn jimla.
: “So what do you guys think?”
: “I don’t know, man. The whole thing feels incredibly RISKY.”
: Sai’s shirt is a war crime.
: “Riskier than being a DEVIANT in Pacifica?”
: “Why are YOU of all people so hot to trot? You’re RICH, Noam. LOOK at that fucking VIEW! You don’t need the money.”
: I don’t know what the deal with the icons in the top-left are. I guess it’s to signify party member storylines?
: “Well, I have GOOD reasons for taking the job. I’m dirt poor and work for table scraps from tech bros. Not to mention that of the three of us, I’m the MOST likely to be outed. You KNOW what happens when I get STRESSED…”
: “Did you finish your discussion?”
: “Not yet, Theo! Jeez, man, hold your fucking horses…”
: “What about you, Pax? I mean, do the RISKS outweigh the BENEFITS?”
: I picked 3, but I honestly do not care.
: “What’s my FUTURE in Pacifica? Even if I COULD get a real job, instead of hustling for shitty gigs that play table scraps… and even if I didn’t have to worry about one wrong WORD spoken in the wrong place at the wrong time.. there’s nothing here for me. No papers, no prospects, no FAMILY. It’s not LIVING, just.. EXISTING. Yeah, it’s WORTH the RISK. We won’t get another chance like this.”
: So what you’re saying is that your life is like a ride on a freeway? Dodging bullets while you’re trying to find your way? That there’s more to living than only surviving, baby you’re not there but you’re still trying?
: “When you put it like THAT…? I’d ALSO like a big payday, a ticket out of Pacifica, AND to not have to worry about being thrown in JAIL. Or WORSE.”
: “You think we can trust HIM?”
: “Theo? He’s odd.. but GOOD odd, like a dorky DAD. I think he’s legit.”
: “What’s HE getting out of this? Dude has a job with the PURITANS. I’m sure it comes with BENEFITS.”
: “Whatever his motivations, Theo’s the real deal. And so’s this job, Sai.”
: “…okay? So it’s settled?”
: “YO! THEO! We’re READY!”
: Next time, we’ll do Issue 1. This cover also sucks, but slightly less than the first one. How hard would it have been to at least get the characters on-model?
: I’d also like to point out that we just sat through twenty minutes of absolutely fucking nothing. Will the game improve? Nope!
