20 replies to this topic

[Anthus]

It showed up fine for me? I dunno man. Maybe someone cut a fiber-optic cable?

Beat it*. More thoughts

I beat the king, and made it back to the school and town. I.. kind of expected it to end, since I thought it was gonna be like the end of a chapter, but here we are. Haven't done anything else yet. Anyway, I liked what I played over-all. I did a pacifist run (didn't KO anything, and only accidentally attacked something a few times). I know I said I don't like the idea of having to replay a game a different way to see an alternate ending, but I am inclined to play again, and just slay everything and see what happens. But apparently, it isn't very different this time around? Idk, I only read some of the spoiler'd stuff here. >.>

 

One thing I've noticed here is there are almost two battle systems at odds with each other here. You have the ability to attack stuff, and gain levels, or you can talk your way through it. Cool concept, but in practice, this choice is only an illusion cause the game clearly had one preferred way in which it is meant to be played. I haven't done this myself, but apparently, you can't actually KO enemies. Assuming the king was the last thing, I have a good impression over-all. The dodging stuff is just as fun as it looked from the various videos I watched for the first game, and the writing; the bread and butter of these games, is good too.

 

All in all, I must've liked it, cause I want to play more (and will do so after this post, I just thought this was a good spot to take a break). For the 'two battle systems' thing I mentioned, it may end up being better if the story outcome isn't hinged on that one thing. I already see after continuing that it lets you have up to three saves, so that's a step in the right direction. It's hard for me to get into turned based games, and I did find myself getting a bit bored at times when I realized I was basically just reading a book, but hey, it was a good book. For the battles to not feel like they must be played a certain way, I think some of their weight needed to be taken off the story, which is what it seems like here. Again, very early impressions, haven't even technically beat it yet, and am basing some of this off of spoiler'd stuff. >.>

 

And for what I said about using "all new characters" I get the Alphys, Toriel, and Asriel are not new, but they didn't even acknowledge the events of Undertale, so they might as well be new characters. I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and wager that this would probably take place before Undertale, but who the hell knows. That is a rabbit hole I'm not going down... again.

[The Satellite]

Finally downloaded and beat it today. I enjoyed it. Then later on I learned the ideas for this game actually predate Undertale itself. Toby explains it in-depth here, with some screenshots as well. Very interesting read.

 

The important cliffnotes: This game is more difficult for him to develop than Undertale was. He wishes to finish the game, and release all the "chapters" in one purchasable package down the line, but he has no guarantees that'll actually happen. He plans to get a team together, but admits he has no directorial experience so he has no idea how well it'll go.

 

I wish him the best. 

[Anthus]

I'm on my second playthrough, and this happened.

https://www.youtube....h?v=AqJc2hXf-gI

[Ether]

Hi! I like Deltarune and I want to talk about it. A lot. I played it in November and have just spent the past two months being quietly obsessed with it.

 

Spoiler

Kris

 

I'm putting them first because they're the player character, but I have a major blindspot around them. I'm a dumbfuck who didn't realize until Chapter 4 that they were a separate person. (If I'd been playing chapters as they came out, I'm pretty sure I'd have agreed with the entire rest of the Internet when it was spelled out, but as it is, I just figured a rival hermit crab was fighting me over my nice empty shell, and kept repeatedly getting frustrated at the game not letting me ask/say what I wanted.)

 

They already had a cage with a bloodstain before the start of Chapter 1! What is the deal with that??? Have we been possessing them since earlier than Thursday and had our memories wiped? Has something else been possessing them before that point? (It's worth noting that there's another memory wipe, between Chapter 3 and 4. Both times, Toriel speaking was the trigger that jolted us back into alertness.)

 

It doesn't seem like Kris's relationship with Asriel is as good as everyone in town seems to assume. Did he know about this situation with the cage?

 

I have no idea what Kris knows and doesn't know about our true nature. What Carol told them and what they've figured out on their own. Like, if you do the Sword Route, it's got to have at LEAST crossed their mind that they're a character in a video game.

 

I think Kris has triple trucies but I'm not sure who the third faction would be. (It'd be pretty cool if Carol and the Knight weren't on the same side and don't want the same things, but as far as I'm aware they both wanted Undyne kidnapped, sooo....)

 

Susie

 

Susie Deltarune is the best character. She isn't my favorite character (Ralsei takes that spot) but her being the best character is just an objective statement of fact.

 

It's tempting to look at just how fucked up Kris and Ralsei are and trust Susie to be the one who fixes everything. This is probably a mistake. She's under a lot of pressure too, and that's a really heavy burden to put on anyone, and, uhhh...that whole timebomb with Kris is still there.

 

I feel like out of the three main protagonists, Susie is the one who'd be the most chill with the SOUL. (I think Ralsei is rationally afraid of us, and Kris, uh...has made their feelings on the subject known.) But that depends REALLY heavily on the framing of the reveal, and it's not gonna be us who decide how that happens.

 

Even though the other two are worse, Susie is still a bit of a hypocrite around keeping secrets! Not spreading knowledge of the dark worlds everywhere is probably prudent because of the whole Roaring thing, but she was telling Noelle that it was all a dream even before she knew about that. Sooner or later, the secret has to get out. After all...what's the point of taking up the white pen of hope, just to create a work no one will ever read?

 

Ralsei

 

God, Ralsei is fascinating. Like, Undertale has meta-aware characters, but they'll casually use that awareness to psyche you out. Here we have someone who knows what side of the screen he's on, and is just...trying desperately to keep us happy and not tip us off or ruin our immersion. This poor kid.

 

(I'm not sure if Ralsei knows that he's literally in a video game? My current lean is that the Lightners are "real" people in a simulation, which the player's interface has been grafted onto. But regardless of what he thinks of the Lightners, he definitely knows that he, personally, was created to be a cheerful guide NPC for people in a higher reality.)

 

It's kinda fucked that Kris and Susie have never even interacted with him as an object, but somehow he's still worse than any other Darkner at seeing himself as a person. I think his time in isolation and his cursed knowledge, and potentially also a feeling of guilt around sealing fountains (he can see the aftermath, he has a vantage point that we don't), have made him very, very good at rationalizing things. The world can still be just, it's not like it would do this to a real person.

 

(Also I think when he talked to Kris in private, he botched it by telling them that sucking it up and being a good vessel was Just How It Has To Be. This is why his tea score wasn't very good.)

 

During the tea party in Chapter 4 he mentions he got help from Swatch. That's good! I really hope he's making Darkner friends, but I'm kinda suspicious that he isn't.

 

I think Ralsei has fire magic, and has had it the whole time. With that said, I don't think his problems are really the kind that can be solved with violence, or that getting better at violence is a good stand-in for empowerment. I don't feel confident here, but I'm gonna guess that his fire magic is kind of like Noelle's ice magic, where it's inherently destructive in a way that normal attacks aren't, and he's been scared that the player will go for a Weirdlike if he tips us off. So allowing us to use fire magic could be a matter of increased trust in the player, maybe? (Ironically this'd mean that he'd be more reticent toward players who'd actually want to use it. I'll also go a step further and say that, as long as this is a videogame and true communication is impossible, trusting the player is inherently an irrational thing to do.)

 

I saw a theory video that posited that he's a goner, and that actually seems plausible to me! I can elaborate on this, including implications and reasons why it might not be true, but I feel like for the most part it does a better job of clicking the weirdness around him into place than any other theory I've seen.

 

I don't think Ralsei is doomed by the prophecy. If he's doomed, it's because of his nature as a Darkner. He will always be the imaginary friend who lives in an imaginary castle in a storage closet, while his Lightner friends grow up. He will never feel the sunlight on his fur. He will never go to the festival. But maybe, someday, the festival will come to him.

 

Dark Worlds/Darkners

 

Man. Darkners as a whole have been done kinda dirty by the narrative so far. As much as I like Ralsei, he's not a good stand-in for his entire race, and I desperately wish that other Darkners would get more character development outside of their introduction chapters.

 

What is even with them? Why doesn't the prospect of sealing fountains seem to particularly bother them? What do they experience when there isn't a fountain, or when it's sealed? Do they experience anything at all, or are their histories all just from Last Tuesday? Tenna is the only Darkner so far who's really voiced any kind of strong preference over remaining animate but purposeless in Castle Town vs being put back to work, but I'd really like to know more other Darkners' thoughts on this!!

 

Also it's kind of fucked up that there's a race of people whose purpose is to serve another race of people and they get depression when they can't serve, isn't it??? Again, I really don't think Ralsei should be the only lens we're viewing this through! But like, it's very clear that Ralsei is not okay, but why would what's not okay for him be totally fine for every other Darkner?

 

This is the one place I'm the most worried that the rest of the game will keep glossing over it. Darkner welfare is such a fascinating can of worms. I'm not even getting into the half of it here.

 

(My current guess is that Darkners do retain a consciousness and have interactions with each other when there's no fountain, but that their form and surroundings are more...indistinct. Similar to Ralsei's room, maybe. I don't think the fountains have been said to create darkners, but they have been said to give them form, and credited with creating their worlds. But it's all very unclear.)

 

Time in Castle Town seems to be wonky. Like it's passing much, much faster on the inside than in the Light World, so they're perceiving months or years in between visits. (I don't think it's keyed to real world time between chapters, because Ralsei's dialog doesn't change if you play everything in a straight shot.)

 

I was always going to do pacifism, but it's not fully clear to me why pacifism = recruitment, or if filling up Castle Town is building to a purpose. Again, it's...very unclear to me what Darkners actually want. I'm not sure if this should be here or in the Ralsei section, but it does seem out of character to me that he'd advocate robbing a public library.

 

It's very, very weird that there's a grand fountain in the storage closet of a public building. It can't have been there that long, and it cannot possibly stay a secret for much longer. But...it also probably shouldn't. Castle Town getting discovered isn't the same as it getting sealed. (If the game wants me to seal the fountain, I will riot.)

 

Evil Groupchat

 

Like with Kris, I don't really know much yet? I don't think they have any interest in starting The Roaring, or at least not without some extra conditions we don't understand yet. It's been clearly established that the Knight--and presumably any Lightner--can trivially summon a titan whenever they want. (It's very interesting that Ralsei didn't anticipate the titan fight and was terrified the whole time, while the Knight was completely comfortable summoning one as a distraction, incidentally.)

 

Back at the start of Chapter 2, it's Kris who tells Susie that they should go to the library. Whatever their plan is, we haven't been foiling it, we've been helping them carry it out.

 

It seems pretty obvious that December Holiday is the Knight! This on its own explains almost nothing. I kinda hope that it turns out she sucked as a person before all this. Not like horrible psychopath with no redeeming qualities bad, but her past self is on too much of a pedestal right now when we know barely anything about her, and I don't trust it.

 

I think Asgore is a patsy who's being manipulated. I don't have much here. "Old friend" is an interesting turn of phrase when he was talking in Carol's room. From context it seems like he was probably talking to an object, but, well...an object isn't necessarily just an object in Deltarune. Does that mean he's had regular contact with a dark world? (Also he should get over Toriel and quit stalking her etc etc.)

 

Carol manipulated Kris into taking the SOUL. That implies that she had the SOUL to implant in the first place! Somehow.

 

The Weird Route

 

I'm a big softie. I'm never, ever doing this. That won't stop me from watching videos, of course; it's here for a reason.

 

Back in Undertale with Genocide, even if you played completely blind, you kinda knew what you were doing and where you were headed, right? You were murdering everyone. Your future actions would consist of continuing to murder everyone. And the route culminated in you murdering everyone, albeit with a little assist from Chara at the end. Simple enough. This time, well...

 

Do you want to kill Susie and Ralsei? Do you not want to kill Susie and Ralsei? Do you want to kill one but not the other? Do you want to kill Kris once you've fully co-opted Noelle? Do you want to free them, once you've secured a replacement? Do you want to get more hosts instead of stopping at 2? What's any of this even for?

 

I don't know what the fuck Weird Route players are trying to accompish, and as of January 2026, neither do they! This isn't me moralizing about a videogame or anything, this is an objective statement of fact about the paradox of the Weird Route. Here in this game about fate vs agency, the most rebellious thing the player can do is ???????????????.

 

Miscellaneous Theories and Predictions

 

The final tragedy is the Cage and the Girl fighting to the death, I think. It just...lines up with the evidence the best out of the theories I've seen.

 

I think Hometown is diagetically...a simulation? Something. It's cut off from the outside world. I'm not sure if it's diagetically a video game exactly--I feel like Ralsei would know if it was, and he seems to believe that the Lightners are more real than he is, when this is factually incorrect. (Assuming that this is true and there is no outside world, the Unused Text is most likely Asriel. I don't think there's any reason for Dess to pull double duty here, she's busy being the Knight.)

 

I'm not sure if the vessel ever shows up again, but if it does, it's a person in its own right and not an ethical Kris alternative.

 

The player seems like the most likely Angel candidate. I mean, we are a being from a higher reality who will have to leave when it's over, one way or another. Banishment is as good a diagetic reason as any. With that said, the line about the Angel meeting with its desire seems hard to pull off, because millions of people have bought this game and who can really say what any given individual wants?

 

I'm not sure how I feel about the shadow crystals. It's weird that a better outcome would be locked behind fighting half a dozen superbosses, and that at least two of them involve traumatizing Kris, right?

 

There sure does seem to be a lot of foreshadowing for Kris losing a hand! (Or possibly having already lost one and gotten it replaced, somehow? Like, maybe that's why they can rip the SOUL out?)

 

Rudy seems like he's gonna die. I don't think Dark World magic can save him; that's a resource that Carol would almost certainly have access to. Now that I'm thinking of it, I wonder if he's already been taken to one to try that, and just isn't blabbing about it.

 

It seems like the Shadow Mantle was previously in Card Kingdom. Seam was convinced they had it before realizing that it had gone missing, and that cloak that flutters off of King after you beat him had a silhouette very similar to ERAM. It's also interesting that that pixely Card Kingdom tree seems to keep showing up in Kris's repressed memories, and it's worth noting that this makes the abandoned classroom a second possible location for "where the forest would grow," but I don't know what to make of this.

 

FRIEND is not very interesting to me so far. I don't think Noelle is the Girl, unless the Weird Route subverts that somehow. I don't think the inferno of jealousy is Ralsei's doing, and whatever it is, it's not going to be as on-the-nose as "jealous fire mage sets everything on literal fire out of jealousy," nor will it be the emotional core of the chapter.

[Ether]

Deltarune tomorrow! I should probably get other thoughts out of the way:

 

I still have no idea what's going on with Gaster, but my current best guess is that all of this has happened before in some form. That original iteration is the world that Gaster (and Sans) originally came from. Something went very wrong there, and Gaster's made this simulation with us in it out of a drive to see it set right, at least in some form.

 

I don't think the festival is all it's been cracked up to be. Like...it's a small town fair, it might be the most exciting thing that happens all year if you've got nothing else going on, but is it actually more fun than a dark world? (There might be something spooky like a prophecy tie-in, though. I've seen a theory that it's religious in some nature, and that's why church took place on Saturday this week when QC has talked about church as a Sunday thing.)

 

Rudy might die, but it makes more sense to me at this point that his sickness is a push for Noelle. She doesn't currently know for a fact that dark worlds--where people can be healed with just a spell--are real, but it's inevitable that this is going to come out. (I still don't think that using a Dark World to heal a Lightner's terminal illness is possible, but it doesn't need to be possible. Noelle just has to believe that it could be.)

 

Before I was thinking of things in terms of "It's weird that Ralsei is so convinced he's selfish when other Darkners clearly enjoy nice things without feeling conflicted about it," but I think the specific nature of the things Ralsei wants do, in fact, put him in a separate territory. He wants to be real friends with the Lightners. He wants to go to the festival with them. He wants to buy Susie real ice cream. The things he wants are fundamentally the same as wanting to be a Lightner himself, which we haven't seen from any other Darkner except Spamton. In a fucked up Darkner way...yeah, I can see how that could be construed as an uncommonly selfish desire. (He has no excuse for not eating his own cake, though, that's just basic self-loathing.)

 

I'm more torn on whether Darkners have an existing consciousness outside of Dark Worlds or if they really are fully Last Thursday'd by the dark fountains, now. Obviously both interpretations are really fucked in different ways, they're still fully conscious people regardless, so!

[Ether]

also I think Dess is the knight but my backup crack theory is that it's Weird Route Timeline Noelle From The Future

 

I don't know why the contrarians are all Rudy Knight/Papyrus Knight/Asriel Knight, all three of those are absurd. These people aren't scared of women enough.