Dispatch is a visual novel with a simplistic “Dispatching” minigame attached to it. The core of the game is, in truth, the visual novel, with the titular Dispatching minigame serving as a gameplay element to spruce up the story, give it some context, and also give you the chance to get some extra dialogue.
You play as Robert Robertson, AKA Mecha Man, a superhero who goes to work for SDN as a “Dispatcher”, someone who works with other superheroes to coordinate their movements, in order to afford the repairs for his titular Mecha. However, you aren’t just coordinating any team of superheroes, but the Z-team, a group of former supervillains who are being rehabilitated by working for SDN as corporate superheroes, going out and helping SDN’s subscribers (as well as, sometimes, the rest of the people in the city, including the mayor).
The city is overrun by superpowered gangsters, but starting out, your heroes are sent out on largely inane tasks for subscribers, ranging from fetching coffee for a rich man to cleaning Karen’s house (yes, her name is Karen) to dealing with various unsavory tasks like toilets overflowing. However, your “heroes” will sometimes be called upon to deal with more dangerous or serious tasks, and as you progress through the game, the funny inane tasks end up becoming background noise as more dangerous and significant things become more and more prevalent.
This dispatching is interlaced with the main story of the game, of Robert getting to know the team better, of his relationship (potentially romantic) with Blonde Blazer, a premier superhero for SDN who is also his boss, as well as with Invisigal, one of his team members, a former villain who was a thief with the power to go invisible as long as she holds her breath. Your team are a bunch of criminals and misfits of various levels of apparent evilness, and early on, many of them are quite ill-behaved, with them sometimes committing crimes like drug use or arson while on shift (Flambae has a particularly high score for the team due to the many fires he’s responded to, almost as if he knew they were going to happen beforehand…).
This is a typical Telltale style “choices matter” narrative, where, in fact, your choices only matter a little; in the end, there’s really only really five major plot threads:
• Who you choose to fire from the Z-team
• Who you choose to replace that person with
• Who you choose to romance (Blonde Blazer or Invisigal)
• Whether you choose to be a hero or an anti-hero
• Whether you are a good or bad mentor for Invisigal
The game/visual novel is not actually all that long, which actually has a somewhat negative impact on the plot as a whole; for instance, the choice of who to fire happens quite early in the game, and ends up mattering quit late, but you actually only spend a very limited amount of time with the heroes on your team by the time you make this decision, and even throughout the game, most of your time and focus is spent with Invisigal.
As a result, while this firing decision is supposed to be a huge deal, it actually feels pretty weak; you barely spend any time at all with the person you choose not to fire. Because the person wouldn’t necessarily be there, they chose not to make them a big part of the plot, but this undermines the gravity of the choice. Moreover, because the choice feels arbitrary, and like it is forced drama (it is pretty obvious that whoever you fire is going to end up being a villain you’re going to have to confront at some point), it just doesn’t land – it feels like a kind of blatantly flagposted thing that they set up to make it feel like there was some sort of impact, but because of how little time you spend with most of the characters, it just doesn’t land.
Moreover, the rest of the Z-team are not very heavily developed; you do get to see some of them a bit, but they only get so much screen time, and are not really the focus. As a result, despite them ostensibly being a significant part of the plot and your team, it’s actually kind of limited how much you end up caring about them, and it doesn’t help that they get a lot of their screen time in a backloaded fashion (the end of chapter 5 through chapter 7) which means that the characters you spent a while dealing with aren’t really that instrumental to the plot beyond their collective existence – their designs are cool, and they are well voice-acted, but apart from Invisigal, the part they play in the plot is kind of incidental.
It is unfortunate; the characters are all implied to have interesting backstories, and to be interesting people, but your visibility on them is limited for people that the main character eventually refers to as a “fucked-up family”.
As such, most of the development is of Invisigal, Blonde Blazer, and your coworker Chase, who sits in the desk next to yours; Phenomaman and Waterboy get some development as well, but only a little more than typical members of the Z-team.
It all feels a bit rushed, or like there were too many characters relative to the time you could spend with them.
This is the greatest weakness of the story as a whole; the story has nice dialogue, the characters look cool and are nicely animated (if at a generally fairly low frame rate), and there’s this general outline of a story and plot that unfolds, but in the end, it feels like they had a lot more ideas than they had money to create this nice-looking, well-animated pseudo-movie/TV show. As a result, it all feels kind of truncated, and while having swift pacing is not a bad thing, I think they had more ideas than they could actually develop in such a short number of episodes with a short run time. That’s not actually a bad thing per see, and it’s fine for the Z-team to take the back seat to the “main plot”, but it feels like they didn’t actually give even the main plot enough space to breathe, with Shroud, the main villain of the story, getting pretty limited development and screentime.
That isn’t to say it is bad – the moment to moment is good, and there’s a lot of fun, funny dialogue as well as pretty good serious dialogue. I think they somewhat undermined themselves at times, though – Robert swears a LOT, and it actually makes things a little monotone, as Invisigal is very foul-mouthed too, as is a lot of the Z-team. It would have worked better to have Robert swear less, making him seem more aligned with the more “heroic” heroes more (rather than the more foul-mouthed villains), and have him swear only when he’s leaning into trying to make himself seem more personable to his teammates, because as-is, the game kind of undercuts itself by making everyone too sassy all the time, which can both undermine some of the more dramatic moments and also just makes the character dialogue feel a bit too samey at times.
Shroud also has the issue of not feeling very consistent; he becomes a lot more foul-mouthed in the final part of the final episode than he was earlier in the story, which was a nice contrast to the foul-mouthed people who surrounded him. This is a weakness in writing which undercut his voice.
If you are the type who doesn’t like a lot of swearing and kind of raunchy humor, this game is likely to be off-putting. But if you do like that sort of thing, it’s very likely to scratch that itch. Dispatch certainly is very funny, and there were a lot of quotable bits throughout, and I liked that about it a lot, and there was some solid situational humor as well as some pretty good slapstick as well.
For all that I said above, I DID like the ride of the story overall. The first chapter was very good – probably the best part of the whole story – and they have several good moments at various points in the plot where Robert is trying to bond with people. It has a lot of good action scenes as well, and does a pretty good job of being like an animated comic book.
Overall, Dispatch had a good story. The “game” part of it was honestly pretty barebones, and pretty clearly in service of the plot as a whole, but the plot as a whole was good. But the pacing isn’t what it could be and the characters often ended up a bit shallow, and some things ended up feeling kind of arbitrary, particularly in chapter 3.
I’d say this is worth playing if you like visual novels, and like your stories with a fair bit of irreverent humor, but if you’re more interested in actual gameplay, this is really only barely a game – the real fun of it is VN and story, with the Dispatching being an enjoyable little minigame but not meaty enough to be the core axis of engagement.
4.5