Undertale/Deltarune

Even in neutral routes, she has such a strong will that she can ward off death for a short period of time. She is really just so full of determination I wonder if she could overdose on it.

Bocaj: Well, there is one person who will never have to make that realization.

Yeah but Undyne has to come to terms with anime not being real. So it balances out.

What are you talking about? Anime is real.

Does she, though? I feel like she'll make anime real when she sees the sad state of affairs on the surface.

We don't ever see what the world is like here.

So there's a chance(and I choose to believe) that anime actually is real in this universe.

So if Undertale at its core was about Videogame Cruelty Potential - reigning in our RPG instincts to slaughter everything that moves and treat NPC's like actual people - we were all paralyzed to learn just how much impact our choices had. Whether it was killing somebody to get what we wanted, finding out that savagery or kindness affected the game world, getting a rundown of our character at the end of the game. ^note Oh and meanwhile there's some ghost guy who has little to do with the plot and everything to do with the plot

Deltarune is like "punishment" then - none of our choices matter. Characters have names, personalities that change independent of us, Susie outright blaming you for walking too slowly, and even our avatar ends up throwing our "control" away and locking us out of the narrative. ^note Yeah, good luck writing a chapter two to this. Who do we control in the sequel if the whole point is telling us "we don't matter."

I can't help but feel this is equal parts pretentious and fascinating. I don't know how many different ways you can say Humans Are the Real Monsters in a video game - but Scott Cawthon and Toby Fox have certainly put in the effort.

Edited by Soble on Apr 6th 2020 at 7:47:14 AM

Undertale at least said "yeah you could've done better" or "well you dun goofed."

Deltarune says "screw you" and leaves me wondering "where do we go from here?"

For me I'm deeply curious as to how Undertale's deconstructive nature is going to work in this. None of the fights in Deltarune kill anyone, not even Susie's rampage at the start has a body count, so what is the game trying to tell us? It includes Undertale's conversation mechanics to avoid fights and gives you a happier ending if you avoid them, but then it tells you your choices don't matter. Kris initially appears as much of a player avatar as Frisk, but then they start acting on their own accord several times.

I would say that there's still plenty of room to explore how "your choices don't matter" affects the player and the metatext of the story — both in terms of how the game could further cruelly subvert player choices and make them irrelevant [I expect something along these lines to happen with the outcome of Pacifist and "Violent" resolutions to the Card Kingdom plotline], and also the small but not insignificant things that do wind up being maintained, even if they don't seemingly make a major difference [even if it's as small as, say, what you have Kris name the Fun Gang]...

But I do think the bigger way that idea will be explored is going to be through the characters, the text itself. I feel like, already in Chapter 1, we can see many ways the certainty that "choices don't matter" — and how that translates to, roughly "who you actually are doesn't matter, who other people/society has decided you are is what matters" and "You Can't Fight Fate" — is central to a lot of the dilemmas that these characters face.

Like, to focus on the most clear example... Susie.

She is a feared and thoroughly despised bully... because that's what she is. It doesn't matter if she only became so because that's the role that was ascribed based on signifiers that she could not control and misunderstandings she had no ability to correct... As far as everyone but Kris, Ralsei, and Lancer are concerned, that's just who she is. And she knows it. It is the pain of knowing this fact that leads her to so quickly doubling down on it, and thinking that she was an idiot for hoping otherwise.

She is the first person who tells Kris [and thus the second to tell the player] that their choices don't matter. And upon reflection of her entire arc throughout the first chapter, I cannot imagine it is possible that she didn't say so while reflecting on what she's come to see as the fact that her choices don't matter either.

And in this, we have not just a theme to explore, but also to push against. It's not a neutral statement... it's antagonistic to at least one member of our central cast. And while Susie's made some progress on that by the end of Chapter 1, I have absolutely no doubt that she's going to need to fight against her own reputation and past again and again throughout the full story.

(I will not get into it in detail here, especially because it's much more speculative right now, but... I feel like how the sentiment of "your choices don't matter" being taken as irrefutable fact, and how it is repressive and harmful, will be even more important in Kris' character arc and internal motivations.)

Edited by RegisteredUser on Apr 6th 2020 at 11:22:57 AM

(2) In most RPG's we're used to But Thou Must! and An Adventurer Is You being the reason we do things. Go on a quest, make allies, make choices that make your character stronger.

In Deltarune you go on a quest that your companion doesn't believe in (Susie outright tells Raisei they have the wrong person). You don't make any genuine connection with your allies (Raisei wants to see you again, Susie wants to go back, but Kris is silent on the subject). In the end your character literally throws you in a cage, throwing away any "strength" they might have gained through your decisions. You can't leave the cage or make decisions for Kris.

Edited by Soble on Apr 6th 2020 at 8:20:15 AM

the fact there is aparently a game data in the otherworld before you started kinda said a lot, the game treat more as it was kris journey and you are trying to hijack the whole thing.

Changing topics but... I loathe Gaster as a character. I couldn't really figure why until I looked at Half Life Alyx and how it handled the G-Man: a similarly, inexplicable, conceptual entity that haunts the game's lore/setting. He's the kind of enigma that Gaster should be - having actual presence, driving the plot in mysterious ways. As inexplicable as the G-Man is at least he exists as part of the game's plot. It's enticing to think about his motives and actions.

Gaster? Gaster offends me. He adds nothing and does nothing. He doesn't interact with any characters, isn't mentioned by any important characters, doesn't affect Frisk or the game's ending, doesn't have anything to do with the barrier or Asgore or anything. You could remove him from the game and change absolutely nothing.

I wish Toby had either done more with him, or excluded him entirely. Whether he's truly relevant in Deltarune remains to be seen, but I feel like it's going to be to Undertale what "the box" is to FNAF - something the creator teases as being crucial and vital to the franchise overall that ends up mattering little and exists mainly to drive Mat Pat crazy. He's vestigial in the worst possible way.

Edited by Soble on Apr 12th 2020 at 8:12:15 AM

Hello, Soble. How's your day?

Gaster is good because he's an official Creepypasta.

Gaster adds that nice bit of mystery into the game.

I prefer a mystery that matters and coalesces than one that just lingers.

Imagine if someone wrote a murder mystery and then interrupted that story with "but there was another murder that had nothing to do with the first that the protagonists don't care about and will never investigate, and doesn't actually affect the murder they do care about." I mean, yeah, so what was that murder about? but then why should I care if the author didn't?

There are plenty of stories that leave loose ends, but they aid the plot. Gaster doesn't. He doesn't fit into the game's morals or themes at all from what I see. He doesn't even really affect the plot or gameplay. ^note At best Sans has "Gaster Blasters" but we don't know what that means, and it doesn't really feel like it means or matters much.

That there's just so much work put into cataloging information we have about Gaster that boils down to having absolutely no information about Gaster irritates me immensely. It feels like a cheap hook, what one would call a "nice bit of mystery" except I've seen "nice bits of mystery" that influence the plot and don't feel as cheap. For an indie game released to such acclaim, Gaster feels like one of Undertale's weakest points.

Especially when this is a game that invites so much fan participation which leads to dozens of webcomics and fanart that actually give Gaster a presence/role, making the character seem vastly more important than he really is.

Gaster is meant to be representative of Dummied Out content. He's not supposed to impact the plot in any way because he's only meant to be an Easter Egg. Obviously, there's a deeper idea with him, but Toby can't make him too prominent because of his underlying concept of being a character who retconned himself out of existence.

I imagine he's meant to actually be important in Delta Rune

Don't count on it, I figured that was a bunch of deliberate bones thrown to the fandom but not with any intention to commit, since Toby is a huge troll and everything.

On one hand there's a ton of hints in the demo, on the other hand it feels weird for Toby to canonize Gaster as an actual figure after Undertale went so far in burying him.

To be perfectly fair that may be why he is going to be central to Deltarune.

Given that Toby conceptualized Deltarune long before Undertale, I kinda assumed the Gaster stuff in Undertale was just very long-term foreshadowing for him having a bigger role in Deltarune.

Wait what?

Deltarune was the game he originally wanted to work on and Undertale was the "first idea was unrealistically big idea so let's do smaller one first"