Deltarune / Shout Out

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General/Multiple Chapters

The name of the battle theme, "Rude Buster," appears to be a homage to a PC-98 Shoot 'Em Up game titled Rude Breaker.
The mechanic used for gaining TP is essentially the graze system from Touhou Project, complete with a near-identical sound effect.
Just like in Undertale, Deltarune has specific references to Falcom's forgotten dungeon crawler series Brandish, particularly the scene where Kris and Susie's falling to the Dark World, which references the intro◊ of Brandish 1 where Ares/Varik and Dela/Alexis fall to the underground ruins◊, while Kris' Dark World outfit gives them iron armor and a cape, which alongside their Hidden Eyes creates a likeness◊ to Ares/Varik.
In certain areas, you'll be treated to some pitch-bendy sine wave ambience that resembles the kind you would hear in EarthBound.
Much like the Onett PD in, again, EarthBound, the local police department — Police Chief Undyne in particular — has the exit to town sealed off with a barricade and police tape for no particular reason.
The "Give it a gift" section of the character creation has five options. The first four (Kindness, Mind, Ambition, and Bravery) are a pretty clear allusion to the four houses in Harry Potter.
One of the stats is "Guts", which is rated by a number of flame icons instead of a number.
Catty's dad is an overly friendly male purple cat who seems to be very chummy towards Kris and refers to both them and Asriel as Douglas, standing in front of a broken grill, altogether referencing Mr. Dink from Doug. The broken grill specifically references an Imagine Spot from the show that became the subject of Memetic Mutation for its over-the-top nature.
In Chapter 1, Toriel asks Kris about the game they and Asriel used to play, asking if it was called Super Smashing Fighters, and mentions how Asriel liked "the green lizard," referencing Yoshi. And for a triple whammy of references, she then talks about how Asriel hated "that book about eating green eggs" after his father cooked some eggs that were decorated to look like Yoshi's eggs. Chapter 2 would continue references to Asriel's love of Yoshi, as Alvin remarks that when Asriel was younger, he would tearfully confess his sin of "dropping the lizard in the pit to jump high" in a video game. This is a reference to a stage in Super Mario World where you have to dismount Yoshi over a Bottomless Pit in order to reach a hidden exit, sacrificing Yoshi to do it.
In the Chapter 1 Epilogue, you can speak to Burgerpants about some of his co-workers, one of which is Purple Guy, who he's not even sure works there.
Checking out one of the holes in Lancer's room leads to a line saying "You found 20 Rupys in the hole! Unfortunately, that's not a useful currency here...".
When you meet Onion and they ask for the human's name, your options are "Kris" and "Hippopotamus". In Chapter 2, browsing the magazine racks in 'Sans brings up a similar message to browsing in Legends' bookshop.
Both the game itself and supplementary material mention Minecrap, a nod to how Inspector Gadget pronounces the title of Minecraft in Minecraft With Gadget.
- If you manage to recruit Hacker into your town, you can chat with him on the giant stone pillar west of the town's entrance — he'll say that the town is nearly as good as the one he made in Minecrap. Another reference to Minecrap is made by Spamton on the Weird route.
- On the Spamton Sweepstakes website, the comments section on one of Noelle's blog posts has Berdly mention that he started a Minecrap session with the person who kept prank calling him.

Chapter 1: The Beginning

Lancer's declaration that "he's the bad guy."
One of Lancer's threats to the party is to smash them into blood. He pulls out a bucket as part of this threat, to keep the blood from making a mess on the floor. Naturally, because of his Playing Card Motif, the bucket has a spade inscribed onto its side.
- Another Homestuck reference can be found when first encountering and speaking to Jevil from outside of his cell. If you refuse his offer to play his game, he'll exclaim, "HOW CAN YOU REFUSE, WHEN YOU ARE ALREADY PLAYING...?" — referencing one of Lord English's signature quotes, "HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO OUTRUN ME, WHEN I AM ALREADY HERE?"
Among other stats, the "Machine to Thrash Your Own Ass" can be rated on "gun's".
If one talks to Rouxls Kaard after starting his first puzzle, he will verbatim quote I. M. Meen. The dialogue after completing his second puzzle ("Can we see it?" "No.") references the "steamed hams" meme.
Alphys will try to give you her 28-season DVD collection of The Symptons, a sitcom about a middle-class monster family. She also goes on a brief rant about how she prefers the seasons where they had animal-based mecha to the ones where they had vehicle-based mecha.
The way the song title is shown when you enter the Field is similar in style to the Touhou games. The song in question is clearly inspired by Touhou music as well.
In one of its flavor texts, Rudinn states that it has no strong opinions one way or the other.
The Forest Maze section (named as such if you save the game there) is a Super Mario RPG reference, complete with following the other characters to find your way through — or, in this case, to find the wrong way through.
While battling Jevil, one of your party members can use an ACT to "make something spin around", in reference to the Mad Duck's equally vague description of their Mana Burn ability.
The sounds that play when K. Round grows and shrinks are based on the ones used by Mario upon using and losing a power-up.
Jevil's voice clips in the fight against him were inspired by Joker from Fighters Destiny, who uses similar voice clips. The "I can do anything!" and "Metamorphosis!" voice clips are additionally inspired by the Loose Clown series of LINE stickers, to the point where both of Jevil's stickers in the Deltarune LINE series parody them.

Chapter 2: A Cyber's World

The passage of the book Berdly reads in class begins with the first two lines of A Tale of Two Cities: "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times".
If you equip Susie with the Silver Card or Dealmaker, she says "Money... that's what I need.".
If you equip the Silver Watch to Susie, she'll say "It's clobbering time.". If you equip it to Ralsei, he'll say "I'm late, I'm late!".
Talking to a Jigsawry at the Castle Town's cafe will have it say "Lemonade? ...please.", a reference to a line from the sanitized Itchy and Scratchy short from S2E9 of The Simpsons.
When Lancer enters your inventory as a key item, his initial quote is "Hohoho! I'm a tough boy! Treat me like one of your ITEMS!", referencing a line of dialogue from EarthBound that an NPC tells you upon getting an Exit Mouse ("He's a tough boy. You can treat him as one of your items.").
Another Lancer-related EarthBound reference comes if you talk to him twice when you first gain control over the team in Castle Town near the start of the chapter. He'll tell you that you "won't get through your teen years without at least one Egg", a reference to an egg-seller in EarthBound who gives a very similar response if you turn down his offer to purchase an egg from him.
The giant toilet sprite is placed as a roadblock in Cyber City doubles as both a Development Gag and another reference to EarthBound. The text states, "For some strange reason, a giant toilet-shaped toilet is blocking the way", referencing the similar line "For some weird reason, a pencil-shaped iron statue is blocking the path" in EarthBound.
If you inspect the gold statue of Berdly when you find it in the toilet, it'll state "no problem here", the default phrase that appears when using the "Check" command in EarthBound.
When Kris and Susie first enter the library to study for the group project, Susie says "screw it" and opens up the door to the computer lab so that "they can play Space Pinball", which is how they find out it became a Dark World in the first place. "Space Pinball" is a reference to Space Cadet, a pinball game featured on consumer copies of Microsoft Windows.
When the Delta Warriors pose after first reuniting in the Cyber World, Susie performs Crono's Victory Pose from Chrono Trigger.
The chapter in general makes liberal use of the "Hoo" voice effect from the infamous you've been gnomed video.
The music-themed rebels in Cyber City introduce themselves as "Sweet Cap'n Cakes", a nod to Strong Bad's made-up crazy cartoon "Sweet Cuppin' Cakes" on Homestar Runner. K_K even plays a song similar to the tune played by Keyboard Strong Bad, which is listed in the Deltarune soundtrack as "When I Get Mad I Dance Like This".
- Also, after defeating Queen in the Punch-Out style arcade game, her on-screen (vector-based) character's head explodes using a very similar graphic to the one used in the vector game portion of "video games".
One of the three rebels in the Sweet Cap'n Cakes fight is named Sweet. Ralsei and Susie variously interpret the name as being like "suite" or like "sweets."
Ralsei and Susie's dances during the fight against the Sweet Cap'n Cakes trio are copied wholesale from one of the dance cycles in the Signature Scene of A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Susie is doing Linus's dance, and Ralsei is doing 5's dance.) invoked
- Also, the moon outside Noelle's bedroom looks like a baseball, a reference to a story arc in Peanuts (later recreated on The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show) where Charlie Brown starts seeing the moon as a baseball.
During the dance party after pacifying them with dances, Sweet Cap'n Cakes will dance together in a way reminiscent of Danjo.
How does Susie make Ralsei dance? She screams "Happy Feet" to him!
- Also counts as a reference to the Wombo Combo meme from Super Smash Bros. Melee.
The way Queen's dialogue is formatted is almost a dead ringer for Kanaya's typing quirk (capitalizing the first letter of each individual word — the difference being Queen sometimes still uses punctuation, whereas Kanaya doesn't use them at all), with occasional mood words in parentheses and chatspeak sprinkled in.
A piece of concept art by staff member Gigi DG features a note giving away that the entrance to Queen's mansion was designed after "that toy story ride," specifically the Tokyo DisneySea version of Toy Story Mania! (whose entrance is a giant grinning effigy of Woody's head).
The swan boat section of Queen's mansion in which you have to activate a lever to make an obstacle disappear is one to the pedalo sections of Off. The neon green battery acid on top of the pedalo even matches the odd background colours of the game.
Berdly's Dark World design is a dead ringer for Falco Lombardi, to the point where his death sprite in the Weird Route resembles Falco's reflector in the Super Smash Bros. games. Additionally, one of his battle flavour texts has him crush his Smart Scouter in his hand out of frustration. Finally, he complains about cheating in a puzzle by comparing it to wavedashing.
- If you shine the bluebird spotlight on Berdly during the third box puzzle, he'll demand that Kris stop taunting him, and say it's lucky they aren't online or else... they wouldn't be able to taunt! This is a reference to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which disables the use of taunts in online play.
If you backtrack to room in Queen's mansion filled with statues of Queen after fighting Spamton NEO, the Hacker will talk about his intent to mod Super Smashing Fighters and add his favourite cartoon characters into the game.
Queen's design is a more humanized version of the Xenomorph Queen.
Queen's habit of causing everything she throws to explode also brings to mind one of Master Shake's running gags.
A recurring puzzle involves using arrow blocks to make groups of running mice turn around and reach a goal.
One of Mauswheel's battle dialogue is "(Rolling around at the speed of mouse...)".
If you choose "DON'T TAKE DEAL" when Spamton asks you to take a deal in the fight against him, he'll namedrop Deal or No Deal, falsely describing it as "THE TV SHOW WHERE THE PEOPLE WHO DON'T TAKE THE DEAL GET FILLED WITH BULLETS FIRED FROM THE HOST'S MOUTH!!!"
If you press F1 for Help during a fight with Spamton, a tiny angel with Spamton’s face will fly down and heal you. The angel's body sprite, and the pattern in which it flies down, are very similar to the animation of the Raise spell in Final Fantasy VI.
Kiwami Japan gets referenced on a couple of occasions:
- One of the items Queen gives to Kris is based on their search query, "sharpest kitchen knife jello"
- Asking Kris to click on a Poppup may show them an ad for a video about making knives out of spaghetti.
If you buy the Keygen from Spamton and then ask him about it, he will say nothing but "KEYGEN," and start flashing rainbow colors while dramatic chiptune music plays. This is a reference to, of all things, the classic YouTube Poop "The King Downloads Sony Vegas" (epilepsy warning), which itself nods to the prevalence of chiptune music and rainbow colors in keygen, cracktro, and installer programs among digital pirates and demoscene creators.
During the house building minigame duel against Rouxls Kaard, most of the lines that appear in between turns reference SimCity in some way, asking for more public transit, or Residential and Commercial zones.
Before the fight with Spamton NEO, he asks, "[Heaven], are you WATCHING?" This evokes an infamous line from Junko in Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. The line in question, "Chang'e, are you watching?", precedes a similarly intense boss battle with a similarly obsessive character.
- If you win the battle through violence, he'll mock you for thinking you won because you depleted his "8000 life points".
During the boat trip ride through the acid river with Ralsei, you will be stopped midway through by Rouxls Kaard, who greets you both with, "Chips Ahoyeth, landlubbers!"
The arcade game and the final bossfight against Giga Queen are both one big homage to Punch-Out!!. Ralsei's suggestion to "Dodge, then counter punch" is ripped directly from the first Punch-Out game. If you run out of HP during the Giga Queen fight, you are even met with a Non-Standard Game Over screen featuring your mecha on a bench and sadly hunched over, with an option to "retire".
- The Giga Queen fight also announces the start of every round, much like how Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat do the same.
Giga Queen's design looks remarkably like White Diamond. As a matter of fact, Queen's entire reasons for her actions are similar to White Diamond's as well; both are Anti-Villains of the Well-Intentioned type who genuinely want to do what they think is best for their people and they think that their people would be happier if they followed their rules and did exactly as they said, but they're both going about it the wrong way, and they eventually realize that their plans aren't worth carrying out and that they'll actually hurt their people if they succeed.
- Giga Queen's head also looks incredibly similar to Metal Sonic.
At the beginning of the mecha fight, Giga Queen exclaims "Finally... a worthy opponent..."
The floating, rotating banana that you can collect while driving the car is virtually identical to the floating, rotating banana collectables in the Donkey Kong Country games.
When fighting against Ambyu-Lance, the Flavor Text says it "puts a clown nose on to make you comfortable".
Near the very end, Ralsei exposits about an apocalyptic event called "the Roaring" in which "Titans" rise up from the earth, not dissimilar to "the Rumbling" from Attack on Titan, another doomsday scenario involving Titans.
The word "schway" is used as slang for cool, just like in Batman Beyond.
Queen's proposed "robot face" for Noelle, which also appears scribbled on the box that Noelle wears as a Paper-Thin Disguise, is a crudely-drawn rendition of Twitch's :) emote, a simplistic smiling robot.
The background when Queen contacts you via Video Chat in her castle features her in front of a pastiche of Bliss, the default wallpaper for Windows XP.
The Hacker refers to your task of finding all the blue checkmarks as a "Checks Quest". The checkmarks themselves are a reference to Twitter, where site-verified users are often called "blue checkmarks" after the symbol used to denote them.
Not only does Spamton NEO sport an Arm Cannon vaguely reminiscent of a Mega Man (Classic) Mega Buster, he also fires out egg-shaped projectiles called "Pipis" which explode into several smaller Spamton heads when they reach your screen. This is based on the Pipi enemies from the same series, a bird robot that drops eggs which hatch into several smaller copies of itself when they hit the ground.
There is an Addison that sells tea based on the flavor of your teammates. When drank by their respective team member, they only taste water, but other people's tea taste like how they imagine that person. In Wayside School, the students receive ice cream that functions similarly.
The boss theme against GIGA Queen, "Knock You Down !!", is a shout-out to Live A Live and the battle theme of the modern-day chapter, "The Strongest", of the same name.^noteLive A Live even has a giant mecha battle in it, albeit in a different chapter. Toby has previously referenced the game with "Megalovania", titled after the Live A Live song "Megalomania". Additionally, the double exclamation marks at the end of the title are a reference to the "Right On!!" quote that plays at the end of every successful battle there.
- The theme also uses the same sound-font as the OST for the Power Rangers SNES game. Not coincidentally, this is a franchise famous for its climactic giant Combining Mecha fights, and it's being used for a climactic giant Combining Mecha fight.
Rudinn's bio in the Recruits section has the phrase "Shine on, you lazy diamond!" at the very end, riffing on the Pink Floyd song "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".
Ambyu-Lance's bio in the Recruits section states that they're "not down with the sickness".
When you look into one of the baskets of fruits in Sans' grocery store, it states it contains "grapes, melons, oranges, and pineapple smells".
The Snowdin Canine Unit in this game are a gang of criminals called The Wet-Nose Bandits, and they mention preparing to sneak into a big house over the holidays before they "were attacked from the shadows by something merciless."
The low-res wireframe render of Queen's head, which appears when starting Chapter 2 and as one of her attacks during her boss battle, resembles the Sigma Virus from Mega Man X2.
If you don't use ACT against Berdly on your first turn in the first battle against him, he tells you that you're meant to use the coasters you're riding on as bumper cars, which he refers to as playing "bump of chicken", which is the name of a J-Rock band best known for composing theme songs for games and anime such as Tales of the Abyss, Final Fantasy Type-0, Granblue Fantasy The Animation, March Comes in Like a Lion, and Last Hope (2018).
Queen's head has words flash across it from time to time, bringing to mind a similar visual gag used by the members of Daft Punk when in-costume.
On the bullet board, Sweet Cap'n Cakes are represented by 3 monochrome robots made up of white lines, with circles for hands. Combined with the music-based nature of their fight, their appearances are a dead ringer for Vib-Ribbon.
One of the lines Poppups say is "GOKARMASHI O INARY....?", referring to Godkarmachine O Inary, a boss from Mega Man X3.
Talk to Berdly before the final fight with Queen and he'll try to con a True Love's Kiss out of Susie with the phrase "How about a kiss, for luck?"
After Queen forgets to capture Ralsei due to lacking enough cages, the scene cuts away with an Iris Out on her face, complete with almost the same sound effect as when you complete a level in Super Mario World.
One of Susie's new sprite poses in this chapter (first seen when Noelle interrupts her and Kris before they head to the dark world) is very reminiscent of Iyami's classic "shieeeee~!" pose from Osomatsu-kun and Osomatsu-san.
After Susie and Ralsei split off from Kris, checking Lancer will have him say "Split up? We'll solve this mystery fast! You? You can be the un-talking dog," referencing Scooby-Doo's tendency to have the gang split up.
The Thorn Ring and the yet to be usable item related to it, the Twisted Sword, are very obvious references to Dark Souls.
If the player gets Undyne to accidentally free the Wet-Nose Bandits by asking her about the Dark World, Napstablook will play an alarm song on the police station's boombox called "Chill jailbreak alarm to study and relax to", a nod to the prevalence of livestream channels on YouTube that constantly play lo-fi Hip-Hop for use as background music during day-to-day tasks.
Carrying over from Undertale, the Loox encountered outside Asgore's shop in the epilogue has the internal filename "Mike Wazowski", referencing its resemblance to the Monsters, Inc. character.
After defeating Spamton NEO non-violently, the track that plays is called "A Real Boy!" This is, of course, a reference to Pinocchio, a story about a sentient wooden puppet who wants to become a real boy.
At one point Ralsei suggests solving a puzzle by having all three party members enter one teacup. Susie responds with "...well, I don't like doing it but it works".
The last phase of the Spamton NEO fight on the Weird Route sees him massively boost his defense with a move he calls his "Bluelight Specil", referencing the "Blue Light Special" gimmick by the American retail chain K-Mart, where discounted items are highlighted with blue siren lights.
Spamton on the Weird Route refuses to be an "Extra Boss"— while the concept of a Superboss isn't unique to the series, and the phrase "Extra Boss" sees usage elsewhere, the term is most commonly associated with the Touhou Project and the bosses of its Extra Stages.
Queen often throws her wine glass full of battery acid, and it explodes. This is very likely a reference to Dracula's famous wine glass toss from the beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
Queen: Don't Worry That Was My Throwing Glass It's Safe
When fighting Berdly on the roller coaster, Susie's bumper car looks very similar in design to the boots worn by a certain magical princess from another dimension.

Shout Out / Deltarune

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