Thoughts on Deltarune Chapter 3 & 4

This post will contain full spoilers for Deltarune Chapter 1-4 and Undertale.

Coming straight from YOUR house, it's the new Deltarune chapters! They're out! They're great! Of course they're great. Undertale is my favorite game ever made, and it seems likely that Deltarune will take that title when the story is complete and we've seen its emotional climax to understand the full extent of what Toby and co. are cooking. We're only halfway through, but it's clear that this story is going places, man.

I've given myself a little time to digest Chapters 3 and 4, and while I don't have it in me to do a full formal review or anything, I do have some scattered thoughts I'd like to put out there. So here's something that's more like a compilation of smaller blog posts (by my standards) that I'd write on specific topics, all thrown together into one big post. Read on for some stuff I really liked, my thoughts on the fandom's reactions, and speculation about where the story will continue to go from here.

The importance of Chapter 3

Chapter 3 has been very well received, from what I've seen. But there's a common sentiment that, compared to the drama and lore reveals of Chapter 4, it's kind of a fluff chapter—perhaps even outright filler, depending on who you ask. I'm here to say that Chapter 3 kicks ass and is important to the overall story.

While Chapter 3 is definitely the most lighthearted chapter to date, there's still a lot of character development along the way. For one, it continues to flesh out the friendship between Susie and Ralsei with lots of time for them to bond, and it gives us more insight into Ralsei's mindset. His fears, his insecurities, the way he views his role in the story and the nature of his very existence. (More on that below.) And then there's Tenna, who, yes, is an extremely silly villain. But he's also used to highlight the fractured nature of the Dreemurr and Holiday families, showing how they've drifted apart and grown jaded from the perspective of the TV they all used to watch together, who's since developed an abandonment complex. (I'm reminded of when people online poke fun at cartoon nostalgia by going "man, cartoons were so much better when I was a little kid and also my parents weren't divorced," except here it's the TV itself that's nostalgic for those good old days.) All of this is obviously crucial to the story, even if it's not lore about the Knight or the Dark Fountains or the Titans or Gaster or whatever.

And also, y'know, the Knight appears to fight you at the end. Which is awesome. But the whole chapter leading up to it is also awesome!

There's a lot of jokes, yes. But the jokes are good! Fans tend to focus on the lore and theories and Snowgrave and whatnot, but like Undertale before it Deltarune is like 75% a comedy by volume, and it's one of the funniest games I've ever played. Toby's got a whole team of amazing collaborators now, and they're going all out on the absurd gags. They will go to damn near any length for a bit. Bespoke art and music, shifts in the gameplay, you name it. The climax of this chapter is a whole WarioWare-style microgame gauntlet boss fight where you're occasionally challenged to play along with the boss theme as part of a Rock Band-style rhythm game! We are so blessed to live in the timeline where Undertale was a smash hit so that this game can exist.

But I also think it's easy to forget that, despite the episodic format, Deltarune is supposed to be all one big game. In a few years it will be complete, and that'll be how everyone experiences it for the rest of time. So new chapters need to not only be paced and structured to be satisfying releases on their own, but they also have to work as part of the whole experience. And this means that sometimes you need a change of pace so that the rhythm of the story doesn't grow repetitive. It'd get stale if every chapter had that same structure of starting out in the Light World for a bit, having a Dark World adventure with a new classmate or two, and then wrapping up with a walk around town in the evening, which was presumed to be the formula for every chapter based on the first two. So now we've got a third chapter that's focused entirely on the main party going through a minigame-heavy Dark World with no new companions, and a fourth chapter that goes back and forth between the town and multiple iterations of the same Dark World, where the new companion character is someone we didn't even realize was on the table in the first place.

Similarly, sometimes you also need a lighthearted breather chapter between more serious story developments, to give the player time to digest what's happened so far and allow the big dramatic moments to stand out more in contrast. This is storytelling 101, and Undertale was structured exactly like this. Between the emotional departure from the Ruins following the fight with Toriel and being stalked through Waterfall by Undyne as you learn about the plight of the monsters, what do we get? Like an hour of solid slapstick, visual gags, and puns with Sans and Papyrus. And between Undyne and Asgore, what do we get? More comedic antics with Alphys and Mettaton! These games have always been like this, and they're all the better for it. Toby lures you in with the comedy and then goes in for the kill with the drama. This game has like a dozen YouTube Poop-ass jokes about random stock explosion effects, and also I already know the ending is going to make me cry my eyes out. That's the beauty of this series.

Frankly, the fan responses make me wonder how Undertale would've been received if it had been released episodically to an eager fandom like this. Would the goofy Snowdin section have been called "filler" by fans if it was its own chapter, just because it didn't hit the same as having to fight Toriel? Would the namedrops of a mysterious "Dr. Alphys" have lead to speculation that she was a super sinister and badass character, only for fans to be disappointed when she ended up being a socially anxious weeaboo who you never directly fight as a boss? Would people trawling Toby's Tumblr for hints at what would happen in the story think that Apple Girlington would be a secret boss?

Hopefully the gentle teasing of the Mike fight was a wake up call for this type of fan theorist. Toby wants us to be engaged and to ask questions about Kris, Ralsei, the Knight, the prophecy, Dess, Carol, Asgore, the Weird Route, etc., but it's also important to remember that a lot of the game is just silly fun. Not everything in this game is going to be hype moments and aura and reveals about Gaster, and it's not the end of the world when your theory based on extremely thin evidence is wrong. Or maybe the theorists will just take the Mike stuff personally and get mad. I don't know. Who cares. Just don't go on Reddit. Problem solved.

These are just the inherent struggle of releasing a story in a serialized format instead of all at once, I guess. But I think the pros outweigh the cons here, as getting plenty of time to sit with each new release has been a lot of fun, and vastly preferable to having to rush through a 30-hour RPG as fast as possible to dodge spoilers.

The music

The music continues to be awesome. Pretend to be shocked. All the new battle music is great, and "The Third Sanctuary" is an obvious standout, but I want to point to "Paradise, Paradise" (the background track for the second co-op game segment in Chapter 3) as one of my favorites. It's not particularly flashy, it's just a really great laid back NES chiptune track, and it's been stuck in my head frequently as I think back on the chapter.

I also have to say that I love that Tenna's boss theme "It's TV Time!" is a tribute to the Konami Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. It's absolutely slathered in Turtles in Time orchestra hits, and to my ear the 8-bit sections also remind me of the NES TMNT games. It's not an influence I expected, but it's extremely welcome.

Ralsei

Prior to Chapter 3, it was clear that Ralsei was hiding things from us. A lot of people took this in a sinister direction, thinking he might end up being the true villain of the story. I didn't necessarily think this was a certainty, but I did think it was a possibility. I mean, we still don't know what exactly his relation is to Asriel, who was the true villain in Undertale. But Asriel still ended up being a sympathetically tragic character we defeated with a hug, so I figured even if Ralsei turned on us it wouldn't just be because he was secretly this deranged murderer or whatever.

Coming out of Chapters 3 and 4, we've now got more insight into Ralsei as a character. And I think the possibility of him being a villain is off my radar. Maybe I'm just falling for Toby's Trick and it's all a misdirect, but it seems like Ralsei's cageyness has been thoroughly explained by the prophecy talk in Chapter 4. He knows the whole prophecy, including something very bad at the end, and he doesn't want to burden Kris and Susie with that knowledge, so he's been trying to tell them as little as possible. He just wants to play his role as their guide as they stop the Knight and save the world, carrying as much of the burden as he possibly can for them. After all, he's not even a real person like Kris and Susie are. Right?

While on that subject, I want to highlight the jokes about Ralsei turning into his Fangamer plushie. I saw a couple random posts calling it an ad for the merch, or otherwise just writing it off as a joke and nothing more. But to me it was one of the little touches that grabbed my attention the most.

See, Toby's been very particular about which Deltarune characters do and don't get merch. The Darkners are all fair game for basically anything, but the Lightners? They might appear on a poster or something, but you aren't going to get a plushie or a Nendoroid figure of Kris, Susie, or Noelle anytime soon. As Toby explained in a Tumblr post on the subject:

This is an intentional decision.

I wish I could explain more now, but when I consider everything, I don’t think certain official merch (plushes, etc) of certain characters feels right for this game. Since Chapter 1, I told Fangamer that some characters would be more or less off limits after a certain point, and this feeling has only gotten stronger over time. These characters include Kris, Susie, and Noelle.

Other times, particularly with Dark World characters like Spamton, I consider the game setting and think “the game is improved by selling this.”

This has always fascinated me. Given the Darkners are literally the embodiments of inanimate objects in the game, I always took this as a step to reinforce that idea in the real world. A pair of Suselle plushes would sell like hotcakes, and Toby surely knows this, but within the game those are supposed to be real people, not your playthings. (Notice how, despite being the real hero of the story who often has little asides of her own, you never directly control Susie. And on the route where you DO assert control over Noelle, it's played as extremely sinister and wrong.) The Darkners, though, ARE your imaginary friends. So being able to own a plushie of Ralsei that you can gently tuck into bed or one of Spamton that you can pour milk all over and slam against the wall plays into that perception that they aren't real. The merch isn't just merch, it's being used as part of the metatext of the game. It's shaping how we interact with the cast outside of the game itself.

So when we get a chapter where Ralsei outright says that he's not real, that he's a personification of an object, that he should take the brunt of the suffering and hide his fears because his feelings don't matter as much as Kris's or Susie's, and that outside of the Dark World they need to make real friends... and then minutes later there's a gag where Ralsei gets turned into a marketable plushie worth $32? That's not just a meme reference or a shameless plug. That's reinforcing his whole character arc.

Ralsei explicitly going "I am not real and it's wrong for me to make you worry about me" is also a complete inversion of the way Undertale wanted players to engage with its characters. It makes me wonder what the game plan is here. Obviously, we do love and worry about Ralsei. But I could see the story going either way. I could totally see an ending that embraces Ralsei's personhood where they all get to be friends forever. Or I could see one where the story ends up being about the dangers of living vicariously through escapist fantasy, where Kris and Susie have to say goodbye and grow up, having been touched by their experiences in the Dark World but not allowing it to take over their lives.

Or, y'know. Based on their reactions to the end of the prophecy, I could see a version where Ralsei has to die.

Man, I don't know what's going to happen with Ralsei. But whatever happens, it's going to make me cry.

The events at Noelle's house

This whole section was just really good. Easily one of the highlights of the new chapters. More Suselle is great. More insight into why Noelle is the way she is is great. The oppressive cheeriness of the year-round holiday decorations in this great big McMansion where only two people live is great. The part where Kris tears out the soul and acts on their own, though, and you have to navigate the house as the little floating heart? Holy shit. Fantastic. The hard line between the player and Kris as a character continues to be one of the most fascinating elements in Deltarune, and I'm stoked to see how it all plays out.

I do love the detail that after ripping out the soul to stop the player from seeing the code to the shelter, Kris just goes and makes some chocolate milk in Noelle's kitchen. (Or are they making pilk? It's unclear what the bottle is, I guess.) Kris comes off as super menacing and sinister in previous scenes where they rip out the heart, and they seem to be working for the Knight or something, and of course the similarities to Chara's color scheme in Undertale have always raised red flags since the very beginning. But then we have little moments like this where they just come off as a kid, or the fact that Kris seems so disturbed by what the player is forcing them to do in the Weird Route. Who's really the good guy and the bad guy in this scenario? Only time will tell.

The Holiday house sequence also added a ton of fuel to the fire when it comes to fan theories about the Knight, who we finally saw in person in Chapter 3. Given the antlers, it seems that we're supposed to think the Knight is one of the Holidays. (It could theoretically be a red herring, but this is clearly where our heads are supposed to be at at this point in the story.) But I keep going back and forth between whether I think it's Dess or Carol.

Dess is the obvious option. She's a mysteriously absent character who keeps getting brought up over and over again who seems to have been the victim of some sort of tragedy. Dess's absence is haunting the narrative. She's also an old friend of Kris's, which would explain why Kris is working for the Knight. And she literally had the code to the bomb shelter where the Knight is keeping people. Did she get lost in a Dark World in the shelter, maybe, and turn into the Knight in the process? Or did she die and get revived in the Dark World and become the Knight, like how Gerson was revived? A lot of it adds up, and it would be a direct parallel to the way the seemingly dead Asriel Dreemurr ended up being the true identity of Flowey in Undertale.

But the fact that Dess would be such an obvious parallel to Flowey makes me consider the other option: Carol. She comes off as incredibly intimidating the moment she walks in, and she's on oddly good terms with Kris, seemingly even speaking directly to the soul with a red "you." Is this because Kris is taking orders from her? She also owns a katana, like the Knight has. She's always vaguely "busy at work," so we can't keep tabs on what she's doing. A hidden scene even shows that Asgore, her personal gardener, is in possession of a black shard like the one you get for fighting off the Knight in Chapter 3. Again, a lot of it adds up. So I keep going back and forth on who's the likely suspect and who's the red herring between Dess and Carol, or even the idea that they're in cahoots.

(Speaking of whatever happened to Dess: The meme right now is that Asgore ran over Dess. I don't think that's what Asgore's big fuckup was, nor do I think it's what happened to Dess. I feel like Carol would be less eager to have Asgore in her house as her personal gardener if he killed her daughter, y'know?)

I've also been thinking about the two characters the Knight has kidnapped so far, Toriel and Undyne. Both of them are authority figures to the kids in town, and assuming that one of the Holidays is the Knight, it's possible they're being targeted for failing to protect Dess.

But there's also the fact that both of them are Undertale characters. And the way that the returning Undertale cast is being used is another thing that fascinates me in Deltarune.

The Undertale connections

I'm a little obsessed with the way the Undertale characters in Deltarune all kind of... suck?

I don't mean that I think the writing is bad or anything, because it's not. But everything feels off. When I first launched the mysterious "survey program" on that fateful Halloween morning in 2018 and was met with the first chapter of Deltarune, the game's introduction seemed tailor made to make you think you're being dropped into a story set after the pacifist ending of Undertale. But everything's just a little wrong. You're not controlling an older Frisk, you're controlling some new character named Kris. The monsters' lives are more mundane. They don't seem to use magic, they aren't in the positions and relationships they're "supposed" to be in, and we're seeing a hell of a lot of their flaws. Alphys isn't an inventor who makes robots and sci-fi gadgets, she's just your dorky homeroom teacher. She's not even dating Undyne! Bratty and Catty aren't friends. Mettaton seems to still be a ghost and won't come out of his house. Neither will Papyrus. And despite living in a slice-of-life AU where Asriel never died and Asgore never killed six kids (at least, we have to assume), Toriel and Asgore are still divorced, and we don't get to see Asriel because he's gone off to college. If anything, Asgore is more pathetic and desperate than ever.

Part of this might just be to make it clear that we're in a different world with different versions of these characters, but it also sets a very different tone for the new story. We're not following Frisk, who becomes everyone's little buddy. We're following Kris and Susie, two troubled teens. They aren't going to relate with the authority figures in their life. They aren't going to become besties with their teacher or a local cop or the guy who runs the corner store. Kris isn't going to have a fun fantasy adventure with their mom. The adults all seem woefully oblivious to what they're going through. They're trying to be supportive, but they really just don't know what's going on. Even if they did, I doubt Kris would accept help from most of them. Instead, Kris and Susie are going to connect with each other. (At least, I hope Kris is genuinely friends with Susie, and that it's not just the player soul forcing it on them...) So, through their eyes, we see the returning adult characters from Undertale as more flawed, and occasionally a little more off-putting. Kris is at that age where they're starting to see the adults in their life as their own people with their own flaws, and that can be difficult.

The depiction of Toriel at the end of Chapter 4 is one of the most clear examples of this. Toriel's always been defined primarily as being a kind, caring mother, but now we also see the side of her that's messier. She's still a nice mom who's trying her best, yes, but she's also an older woman who went through a difficult divorce, her kids are old enough to be independent, and now she's finally figuring out how to have a little fun again. This results in her getting wasted and partying with Sans (who, from Kris's perspective, is just that weird guy who started working at the corner store two days ago), dancing the night away while blasting music in the living room.

It's largely played for laughs and is pretty innocent, but after Kris and Susie being put through the wringer in Chapter 4 it's still jarring, reinforcing the growing divide between Kris and their mother. Toriel just does not get what's going on. She's living a whole different life from Kris. You really feel for Kris and their repressed rage towards their life in the scene where they're just trying to get some sleep and you can still hear the muffled music and Toriel and Sans's text blip sounds through the wall as they're drunkenly partying. That's a classic troubled teen experience right there. It's honestly kind of visceral. It's, like, the most real scene Toby's written to date. But also... how could Toriel possibly know what Kris just went through in the Dark World? She doesn't know the Dark World exists! And even when not possessed by the player, Kris seems to be hiding everything from everyone as part of whatever scheme they're plotting with the Knight. As far as Toriel knows, Kris was out working on a school project or whatever with their new friend Susie, who just spent the night and went to church with them. She thinks Kris is doing great. It's an unflattering depiction of Toriel, but I still understand where both she and Kris are coming from, and that's what makes it so great to me.

Speaking of Sans, the new chapter has only reinforced the long-standing fan theory that this is the same Sans as we saw in Undertale. If you haven't heard this theory: in Undertale, it was implied that Sans had come from another world somehow, and that he'd given up trying to find a way to go back long ago. And in his worskhop, if you previously spoke with an NPC who said we'd meet a girl named "Suzy," you could find a drawing of three smiling people with the caption "don't forget." Y'know, like the main theme of Deltarune. He also has an implied connection to Gaster, who's presumed to be the disembodied voice talking to us through the fourth wall in Deltarune for a variety of reasons. All of this seems to point to the idea that the world Sans came from was, in fact, the Deltarune world.

Now we have a new piece of the puzzle: a new version of the Undertale track "It's Raining Somewhere Else," which played during the chat with Sans in which he first brought up his relationship with Toriel. The new one plays in Hometown at the end of Chapter 4, and it's titled "The place where it rained." I don't really know how exactly the stories will connect, but I'm sure there's something going on here.

A thought I keep going back to is the fact that the Dark World more closely resembles the world of Undertale than the town does, and that when the Undertale characters go to the Dark World they look closer to their old designs. Toriel is depicted as a queen, and Undyne even gets her magic spears! This makes me wonder if the apocalyptic Roaring, where Dark Fountains take over the world, could somehow lead to the creation of the Undertale world. But I also wonder about the Weird Route, and how events might play out differently there. Does it fuck with the prophecy? Is Noelle the real "girl" described in the prophecy, and is the player's manipulation of Noelle the real thing that will lead to that final tragedy? If so, is it specifically the Weird Route that reshapes the world and leads to Undertale? Does Sans have to flee the Deltarune world when shit goes south in that route?

It's too early to say what exactly is going on, so I'll refrain from formulating any concrete theories based on incomplete information. But there's a hell of a lot to chew on here, and it's fun to let the mind wander like this. I couldn't be more excited to see how the story continues to play out.

Other thoughts

• I would still die for Susie
• Basically everyone predicted the villain of Chapter 3 being a TV head guy in a suit, but the fact that he's depicted as a 3D pre-rendered 16-bit sprite and does mocap dances was a total curveball. An inspired decision. I was absolutely gobsmacked by that whole intro video.
• It's so funny that we got Spamton, the guy who's basically turned himself into a shitty knockoff of Tenna, before we got the real Tenna. It absolutely wouldn't have worked as well if they were introduced the other way around.
• When Tenna asks you a question about Kris's family in the quiz show and you hover over the wrong answer Kris will literally force you to pick the right one. Great touch.
• I looooooove the co-op Zelda segments in Chapter 3 and the way they replicate the feeling of playing a game with your friends and messing around with each other.
• Rouxls getting fed up and pulling out the laser pointer to guide Elnina and Lanino's attacks was one of my favorite gags in either chapter.
• I love the funny faces Elnina makes. She's like a Fraggle to me.
• I can't believe it took Toby this long to do YouTube Poop sentence mixing jokes in a game given how many he's done on social media, but the YOU'RE TAKING TOO LONG gags killed me.
• I somehow never expected Gerson to be a major character in this, let alone to be the MVP of Chapter 4, but it seems so obvious in hindsight.
• Thank god Chapter 5 is out next year

And that's about all I have to say for now, I think! Naturally, feel free to share your own thoughts on this stuff in the comments below.