Thinking about this now. I think that the game being a demo for a full game, and also offering no meaningful choices, basically means it had to rely on the charm of characters you only know for a few hours to be a conversation piece. As such, people made some fan art, speculated on its connections to Undertale, then…stopped.
These things need to have the incredible depth of Homestuck and Undertale to be talked about - otherwise, they are what critics always called Undertale (unfairly): Just some twee bullshit
I don’t think Deltarune is Just Some Twee Bullshit but it doesn’t really have anything to say that isn’t related to Undertale (yet). I’m hopeful for the full game but…there’s not much to say about this demo.
i think Toby Fox has said this is more or less the full game and that trying to fully realize Deltarune would probably kill him
i found Deltarune to be a very good and cute little Undertale gaiden, i don’t think there’s anything wrong with it just being that! Maybe we don’t need to say anything else about it. i liked that it tried to explore how a multi-character Undertale might work. i liked Susie.
i think people put a lot of expectations on UT/DR based on its popularity and its influences and this taints the discussion in a way that’s almost more annoying to me than the pissy internet toughguy gamer dickheads. You can see it in this thread too. just because the guy was inspired by Earthbound doesnt mean we need to expect it to be as good as Earthbound (and i still think people overstate that influence and understate the influence of Shin Megami Tensei and Persona)
Ah, this is a good take. I wasn’t tremendously impressed with DR in hindsight, but it takes a long time for me to warm up to characters. And the Undertale Gaidenness of it just sort of…overwhelmed me I guess? Like my brain was trying to make all these connections that aren’t really there. It’s just a cute side story. But I’m not really into that kind of thing, so…yeah
It came to consoles so I played it. Toby appears to be disillusioned with fans that put his work on a pedestal and scrutinize every detail, but then DR seems to be designed with that intent. I didn’t read into all of Undertale’s secrets so I hope the full game can stand on its own.
The battle system is much more interesting than Undertale’s and there is well-communicated feedback for the pacifist playstyle (unlike Undertale which felt like trial and error to me). I like it.
The game continues to be subversive for the sake of being clever which I didn’t appreciate. Being told that “you have no control” has been done to death IMO, and has been done with more tact too. Also the JRPGs that influence Toby are subversive in a much more earnest way.
I liked that DR appears to be lighter in tone than Undertale, but we’ll see how it plays out. I’ve already seen speculation that Ralsei is evil.
I finally got around to re-playing this. I’ve been meaning to do so after finding out the game has a pacifist route, but hadn’t gotten around to it for reasons.
While I already knew about being able to talk to everyone before leaving the dark world, I didn’t know that doing the pacifist route also makes Kris not actually throw knives at their soul during the stinger at the end (or is this a version change? idk). I feel like this implying that although “you’re choices don’t matter” (much) with regards to the fate of the world and all that, they will matter in determining what kind of person you become.
I don’t buy into the Ralsei is evil theories, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what exactly the fallout of sealing the dark fountain was (does the card kingdom even exist anymore? who knows)
So many of the townspeople are like “let’s do something tomorrow” that it’s kind of annoying. I almost have a feeling that something bad is going to happen in town between the end of chapter 1 and when you finally get out of school the next day.
Wherever we’re going in the dark world next I don’t think it’ll be a revisit to the northeast classroom again. Possible places we’ll end up could be the other unused classroom at school, the bunker south of town, or Asgore’s barricaded closet (srsly what is he hiding there?).
…there’s a lot of stuff i’d like to discuss, but so much of it is contingent on stuff we don’t know yet that this entire post kind of feels dumb. (just release the full game now toby goshdangit)
In conclusion, this scan of a famitsu interview (and Toby’s tweet where he mentions that he uses Japanese every day now) is making me reconsider where exactly/how high Toby is setting his sights when looking for a team:
Didn’t I read something Fox wrote about how he was never going to “finish” Deltarune because it took so much time and effort just to release the thing he did and he doesn’t want to devote literal years of his life to it?
Nah, he did say making the demo had been lots of work so he needed to assemble a team and we shouldn’t expect the full Deltarune very soon, but that he’d still make it.
Sorta. He’s going to try finishing it, but if he doesn’t finish it within a certain timeframe he’s going to give up (hence the business with assembling a team).
finally played this and watched some fan theory videos on youtube or whatever
it feels like this is toby fox’s attempt to make a more “normal” jrpg, at least in the sense that it’s not going to have this insane meta-narrative that undertale had. so far what meta-narrative exists seems to rebuke the meta-narrative ideas of the original undertale. but this is being done in such an over top sign posted way that it makes me feel like it’s a setup for things get subverted in future chapters.
so much of the game’s overarching plot seems to focus on asriel’s return, and kris’s relationship with asriel is a major subtext for all the events in the dark world. some have theorized that the plan for the game is to be 7 chapters, one for each day before asriel gets back from college. and each day has a new adventure to the dark world where we learn more about the backstory.
but if that’s the case that’s like… extremely ambitious given how large chapter 1 is and it makes fox’s attitude a little more understandable.
tbh I kind of hope the plot of this game is a little more surface level. all the meta shit in the first undertale just kind of bored me, and the actual content of the game was so good that it didn’t need it. I feel the same way about deltarune so far and it’d be nice to not have to deal with as much annoying fan theory talk.
also a lot of the criticism in this thread is whack
toby fox is a great writer
he just isn’t particularly high brow
his characters actually have a lot nuance than most pop fiction I’ve encountered lately
I mostly get annoyed with all the meta stuff
that said I fell down way too deep into the delta rune fan theory rabbit hole yesterday and replaying the game I already see so many holes in all the popular theories about what the game is really about
I feel like the real meaning behind “survey program” is that toby released this demo for free so that he could get a feeling for all the absurd theories people were going to make and then subvert them as much as possible in the final game.
all the gaster references and weird callbacks to undertale feel like bait. the whole “your choices don’t matter” thing feels like bait too. so much of the stuff in this game is just so clearly signposted and on the nose that I can’t help but assume it’s part of a more elaborate ruse.
I also kept waiting for the punchline, the whole thing was too neat. I kept waiting for the floor to collapse. It didn’t occur to me that the punchline might be the full release in 5 years or whatever
This isn’t an argument, because it’s obviously fine not to, but i just wanna say i really dig the meta stuff in Undertale, especially with Gaster who’s conceptually one of my favorite metafictional ideas in a video game. A character who has been dummied out within the fiction and whose presence is limited to files and ghostly messages hidden in the code?? absolutely hell yes to that
yeah I’m definitely down with all the gaster lore, I think it’s cool as hell. I really just felt the whole chara backstory was kind of forced and more convoluted than it needed to be. and the whole “every playthrough is canon” thing. idk.
I only played through undertale “once” (well, twice bc I did the requisite neutral run and then true pacifist run) and of course never encountered any of the spooky gaster stuff. I really wanted to do a genocide run but the idea that that would be stuck on my game file permanently discouraged me (which honestly I think is super cool). and what I had played already ran such an extreme course of emotions on me, from terror to heartbreak to joy, etc, that by the time I was finished I felt like “that was amazing and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced but it was so much and I feel like I never need to experience it again” so I never did.
but I wish I had replayed it more obsessively because there is so much weird hidden stuff that you’re almost always going to miss, and it’s a bummer only finding out about all the gaster stuff from youtube videos instead of at least experiencing some of it myself firsthand.
I feel like in some ways it’s the closest thing to a theoretical “icebergvania” that I’ve come across, even if by now pretty much all of the hidden things have been mined out.
