Phantom Dust - Plot

Plot

The story begins with a band of humans fighting their way to a pair of capsules suspended on an arch over an arena-like structure. A narrator describes the state of the planet: Earth is a wasteland, with its inhabitants suffering from amnesia and living underground to escape the mysterious dust that covers the surface. The Espers, a group of humans with the ability to control the dust to create a variety of skills, go onto the surface to search for the Ruins, a memory embedded into the minds of everyone living underground.

Two men are taken from the capsules. One is the protagonist, who the player controls throughout the game. The other is Edgar, found with a locket containing a picture of a woman. They find that they are also Espers and join the search for the Ruins in the hopes of finding out who and what they really are.

The woman in the locket, Freia, is an independent Esper who tries to stop the protagonist from returning to the surface. Edgar, feeling a connection with her, eventually leaves the rest of the group and joins with Freia. When the protagonist meets Edgar once again, the latter says that the protagonist betrayed him in an earlier time before their memories were lost. After one particular battle with Freia, the protagonist receives a special memory box (a data-storage device for capturing images and sounds).

From the memory box, it becomes apparent that Edgar was an astronaut who had been sent to the event horizon of a black hole far away from Earth. Upon his return, Edgar discovered that, due to his travel at relativistic speeds, the three days he had passed in his ship had translated into over 10,000 years on Earth. In this time, Humanity had destroyed on itself, totally ending civilization as he had known it and covering the surface with a mysterious dust. Alone with his thoughts, Edgar learns that he can control the dust to a certain extent, and begins to remake civilization from out of the ashes with his new-found powers. He is eventually able to create Freia, his girlfriend at the time he had left for space, and then the protagonist, who had been his best friend. The rest of the world before followed shortly after.

Upon seeing this, many of the illusions Edgar had created were unable to will themselves to exist any longer and disappeared; the box was kept from the rest for fear of the same thing happening.

Another memory box reveals that Edgar had unwittingly embedded the image of the Ruins (the last place he had been with Freia before he went into space) into the minds of the illusions he had created, and released a massive wave of energy that destroyed most of the surface world and erased (nearly) all memories, except those of the Ruins.

After the protagonist fights one last battle with Freia, she hands over an important memory box she has found in Edgar's ship. It revealed that after some time Edgar became disillusioned and sullen by the current state of the planet and the illusions he created, deciding to destroy everything and everyone including himself. Freia was unable to stop his suicidal attempt. The protagonist arrived to stop him, with both him and Edgar dealing out a very powerful psychic blow, creating a huge crater and rendering both of them into a coma. Freia installed both of them into the capsules to keep them alive.

Freia reveals that she knows the truth about Edgar's creation of her and the protagonist, but somehow both of them did not disappear. Unfortunately, Freia believes that Edgar has no use for her and has abandoned her. The protagonist is helpless as Freia slowly disappears before his very eyes.

Upon finally defeating Edgar, and new copies of Freia and the protagonist, the player learns that, 3537 days (roughly 10 years) since his return to Earth, Edgar's human body had been unable to process the dust and eventually broke down. Before he died, however, he created a double of himself, to maintain and "restore" the world after he passed on. Humans are extinct on Earth, and only the illusions that the last human being had created carried on their tradition. However, unknown to the original Edgar, the double was a defect and ended up being a pessimistic shadow of himself, destroying instead of recreating the world. Upon learning the truth about the original Edgar, the Edgar double is also unable to maintain his will and disappears into dust.

The protagonist buries the original Edgar's remains in his ship, along with the final memory box. The final shot shows him walking off into the desert after apparently having restored the planet as the original Edgar's double was supposed to have done. However, in this final shot, the protagonist's footprints in the sand trail off, with him nowhere in sight.