I Think I Miss 'Dispatch'
Almost a year later, AdHoc Studio nailed something many superhero adaptations still struggle to understand.
It's almost been a year since Dispatch dropped, a reminder I've mostly received thanks to my TikTok algorithm taking a brief break from Star Wars debates and Kingdom Hearts clips (that D23 news really did a number on whatever code they have on me, I guess) to show me a litany of edits inspired by AdHoc Studio's episodic superhero adventure game.
What struck me most about the pivot, aside from the uncanny weirdness of just how much TikTok is capable of taking every bit of data it can about you and turning your eyes to bits of content, is a lot of these edits were pretty much the same thing: very little of the superhero elements of Dispatch were at the fore, and the game element even less (I liked the cooldown-driven mission dispatch sequences, but I thought at the time, and still think, I would've liked Dispatch a lot more if it were an animated TV series and not a video game).
It was all a similar pattern: Bershy's "Radio" blaring through my phone as Robert and the Z-team partied together, getting up in their messy apartments, eating together, talking, laughing, arguing in the break room. The presence of the housewarming party at Robert's apartment could only be matched in these edits by the karaoke night fight scene, and even then, it was the hangout parts of that moment that persisted, not the actual brawl. No Mecha Man, no last battle at the office with Shroud.
Dispatch was bursting with this kind of intimacy that made it so charming and engaging than perhaps any of its mechanical hooks ever could be to keep me playing throughout the weeks of its release. It made me realize even now, almost a year later, a lot of superhero stories outside of comics are still lacking something that has kept me coming back to the genre over and over in my life: getting to discover what the shape of these characters was outside of their superheroic personas.