Why do Fidget's magic and Dust's dodges run off the same Mana Meter? Is it really Fidget throwing Dust around?
Could this work the other way around? E.g., Fidget using Dust's energy to cast projectiles? He is holding Ahrah in his hand all the time, so if Fidget has any actual connection to the blade...
Another possibility is that both are running off of the same mana source, but it isn't Dust. It's Ahrah. Dust's innate evasive movements are empowered by Ahrah's energy (augmenting the dodge with a sort of shroud to make Dust functionally invulnerable during them, but in a subtle way that doesn't make it as obvious to Dust himself), and Fidget is tapping into that same energy to cast her projectiles (thus why her projectiles are able to react with Ahrah's Dust Storm)
The Doylist answer is that Dust was originally going to be able to cast his own projectiles from his hand, but the animation was too disruptive to the flow of battle and there was a second character right there.
The way this game handles making choices is actually brilliant in hindsight; you're not just making a choice, you're deciding between which of Jin and Cassius' courses of action you wish for Dust to take.
The residents of underground city of Mudpot speak with a southern American accent. It's easy to pass this off as a style choice until you realize that the game refers to the four cardinal directions by how they relate to the world map (left of the screen is west, right is east, etc).
During the war sequence- no matter how vicious his fighting gets- Dust never strikes allied NPCs. However, this is also an example of Gameplay and Story Integration: Ahrah is a compassionate being, and (if Dust's ability to jump higher while attacking a target is any indication) is directing Dust's attacks to some extent. Of course he wouldn't attack allies!
It may also have something to do with how the Cassius part of Dust is an incredibly skilled fighter - he's good enough to just not hit allies.
However, if Dust AIR GRAPPLES A FUCKING AIRSHIP, the explosion will hurt both friend and foe alike...which makes sense, given that it's pretty much impossible to aim an explosion away from someone in the blast radius without a shield of some sort, and Dust can't do that.
Why does the evil presence in the box attach itself to Dust instead of Fidget, when she's the one who opened the box, not him? Because Dust's twinned souls make him demonbait, so of course it'd go for the tasty one.
In order to be able to buy forge-able materials in the shops, you have to take the material from a monster you killed, then sell it to a merchant. This is fine and all, until you realize that one of these items is a Dog Tag. How the merchant gets his hands on these can only be left to the imagination.
At the time Dog Tags becomes an available resource the war between the Moonbloods and Gaius' army is in full swing. It's not entirely unreasonable to expect that Moonblood soldiers sell or give looted dog tags to the merchant.
Alternatively, all the Merchant needs is one, and then he can figure out how to replicate it, what metals are used, what treatments have been done to them, etc. Once you sell him one, he can reproduce them through whatever means he uses
Going back to older cutscenes after The Reveal, realising that Ahrah has been lying to Dust literally from the minute he came into the world as a conscious entity, gave him a name based on what he is, and has been manipulating him the whole game to assure that he's a suitable Laser Guided Tyke Bomb to take out Gaius. And these are the good guys.
The Moonbloods are the good guys? Says who? While Gaius is certainly taking extreme action, he seems like a pretty reasonable fellow all told, and if you think about it, the Moonbloods brainwashed Cassius into doing their dirty work for them. If such mind control has been done previously, it is no wonder that General Gaius and the King wanted to wipe them out.
The Moonbloods didn't exactly "brainwash" Cassius (even though Gaius believes this to be the case), since both Cassius and Jin were already dead, or, at least, mortally wounded, having slain each other in a way that created a bond between their spirits, allowing them to be combined into Dust. This is why, during The Reveal, Dust seems to have regained memories of both. It's worth pointing out, though, that even Dust himself gets fed up with Ahrah's cryptic "guidance" on at least one occasion. Then again, since we never see the full extent of the abilities the Moonbloods possess, it's entirely possible that there have been cases of them doing something even more morally questionable: perhaps those who started the genocide knew something about them that we never find out.
According to Elder Gray-Eyes, everything Dust did was (somehow) Just as Planned. Including killing Fuse. Coincidentally, Elder Gray-Eyes is also the one who, to save his life, gave Fuse his magitech prosthetic armor that tragically induced Cybernetics Eat Your Soul and turned him into a rampaging genocidal madman who needed to be put down. Now what about Bopo's father's illness, and the unexplained "darkness" that ALSO turned Lady Tethys into... *drumroll* a cackling, effectively-genocidal madwoman who needed to be beaten with a sword until it magically went away?
I think it's more that Gray-Eyes saw what was already happening, and planned for Jin's compassion to rectify both situations. With Fuse, he may have seen Fuse slipping into genocidal hate, and subtly sent Dust after him, as well as sending making it so that Dust would stumble upon Mudpot. I don't think he directly planned for the surrounding events, so much as, at best, saw them, and planned for the Sen-Mitrarin to fix them by subtly sending him those directions
Saving Oneida and Geehan outside Aurora was explicitly also Just as Planned to test Dust's altruism towards strangers, and that event had such delicate timing that either Elder Gray Eyes can see the future with great precision or the giant attack was deliberately staged. Fuse also, coincidentally, happens to be the one commanding all the monsters.
May not have been something that precise, so much as a vague sense that SOMETHING was going to happen there and that it would be a good test of compassion regardless (even if the situation was something mundane like needing help with an injured person or minor disaster like a fire, if Dust stopped to help, it's a good sign). The monsters were just the "trouble" he sensed.
Trying to quantify the shadiness of a shady Dumbledore figure is hard, because the shady Dumbledore figure is inherently mysterious and hiding the extent of his powers. But with the window to prevent the violent extinction of his species rapidly closing, Elder Grey Eyes was on a time crunch to test his Laser Guided Tyke Bomb as fast as possible, and he only has one shot. Denham might have looked like an acceptable sacrifice to make sure that Dust understood, agreed with, and was willing to kill over Genocide Is Bad. Killing Gaius for that reason is literally Dust's primary purpose, so it's the most important thing to test.
Even while amnesiac and stifled by/conflicting with Jin's soul, Cassius is enough of a badass to trek across half of Falana and almost singlehandedly kill every predator and enemy soldier- including actual magical beings, mind you- that gets in his way. This while he doesn't even remember (consciously, anyway) whatever military training he got before turning into Dust. How many Moonbloods must this guy have slaughtered when he had full command of his memories, bloodlust, combat experience, and a national-scale army backing him up?
The number may be less than you'd think. Remember, Cassius was a Royal Assassin. He probably wasn't out on the frontlines of battle. Instead he was more likely sent in to deal with situations that required a...softer touch. Things like a village supporting the Moonbloods. Which is a whole 'nother kind of horrifying, but I doubt he had that high a kill count.
