Dispatch episodes 3 & 4 impressions — Trying to be a phoenix

Another week, another pair of Dispatch episodes. This time, we’re out of tutorial town and focusing more on the titular job, bookended by lengthy narrative adventure segments. It’s still rougher than it should be, with visual and auditory oddities, but the parts that really matter are starting to hit their stride.

A complaint I had about the first two episodes of Dispatch was that the dispatching part and the narrative felt very disconnected. Well, episodes 3 & 4 improve on that in a nice way, even if the connection still feels very one way. In episode 3, the Z-Team are at each others’ throats due to the lowest performing member being cut by the end of the work day. If you try and pair them up, it’s almost guaranteed that they’ll try to sabotage each other. This means, of the two heroes you sent, only one will actually arrive while the other is stuck in a dangerous situation. If you can’t help them out of it by choosing the correct option, they’ll be injured and possibly even downed for the rest of the shift. In episode 4, after cutting someone from the team, you’re inundated with more jobs than your now smaller team can handle. Both are very interesting ways of conveying the difficulty of managing the Z-Team.

How you play in the dispatching segments still doesn’t affect what happens in the story. For example, in episode 3 the team member I cut happened to be the one I sent on the most missions. I think it would have been more interesting if who got cut was decided on through the dispatching rather than as a binary dialogue choice. 

We also dive a bit more into the romance this time, with Blonde Blazer or Invisigal, and I have to say Invisigal really comes off like a creep in those scenes. A relationship with Blazer would be an HR violation, but Invisigal seems like she’s trying very hard to create 10 HR violations at once. She’s been like this before, stalking Robert in previous episodes, but the added possibility of romance makes it feel less like you’re mentoring a troubled person and more like these acts are supposed to be attractive. It feels like the writers didn’t see any problem with it because she’s a hot woman, but if a man said or did any of these things most would immediately see it to be as creepy as it is. There are ways to get her irreverent attitude across and make it appealing, but this is not it.

Thankfully, most other characters are a lot more interesting and likable. There’s a great scene midway through episode 3 that makes the Z-Team try harder and be more genuine during dispatches, and you see that through their incidental dialogue and banter. Flambae is still a troublemaker, but now he’s more professional when it counts. Prism remains full of herself, but turns it into more of an advantage in jobs focused on PR. Punch Up might have seemed like a meathead, and he’ll always choose violence when its an option, but he’s more thoughtful than I initially gave him credit for. It’s still not much and the focus is mostly on Invisigal story-wise, but they’re slowly getting me attached to this team and their quirks. 

Stat wise, I’ve been having each hero focus on their strengths rather than covering their weaknesses, and it really pays off when you get a good team together. I’m very curious to see how my decisions here will affect dispatches down the line, and if we’ll get more sabotage situations, so check in again next week for my impressions of episodes 5 and 6.