Yup that was the issue, used 7zip, switched to winrar and used proper name encoding and that fixed the issue.Stuff like that is usually the result of game files not having the correct Japanese filenames. For instance, my sound effect files look something like this.
View attachment 1056133
Be sure that all of the files have been extracted properly, preferably with Winrar. I hate to say it works on my machine, but it does. As far as I can tell, I never encountered such an error. If I were to guess when this happened (and this is a guess), it might be the first time Rust laughs in the intro. Game can't find that audio file because it doesn't have the right name. Best advice I can give.
Thanks again.