#i kind of enjoy the trope when Traveler is just being themself during the whole game and doesn't live any romance | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

raceofathousandants · 4 years

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it’s undertale day! so on my undertale blog, i will post some words i wrote about deltarune when i played it a while ago.

deltarune (chapter one) thoughts loosely gathered

intro was silly (in a kind of serious way) and i liked it

so it's an AU...? but the undertale canon is no stranger to those, given how many versions of the story existed in the game, so i'll take it

(in between these two bullet points, i played the whole game.)

i feel like it was working with some pretty tired tropes... prophecy, fated heroes, darkness versus light, restoring order, illegitimate king, traversing checkerboard area, card suits (which has especially been done a million times before and feels like kind of a lazy motif to fall back on when you want to make four things easy to distinguish). maybe trying to subvert some of these tropes, but really, much of it seemed to be played pretty straight. struck me as sorta lame

i liked "lightners" and "darkners," good words

took me a while to Get the name "rouxls kaard," and i own that.

rouxls kaard, definitely not mettaton, oh, CERTAINLY not mettaton. just a whomst'd've who is glamorous.

i liked the various animations for the characters

ralsei was obviously an anagram, but idiot me didn't think about it harder than "it anagrams to... israel..?" and managed to be caught mildly off-guard by the Big Reveal

although come on, ralsei is clearly shown to be as black as a spirited away soot sprite the whole time. for it to merely be his hat shadowing him... his pitch-black fluff is fluffing OUT FROM UNDER the hat! that's some dishonest spriting right there.

lancer got me. i went on the whole predictable opinion arc from "ok this dweeb is the forced antagonist, i get it, waiting for it to be funny" to "i love him"

still mulling over susie's character arc... definitely not undyne, trying extremely hard to make sure we know she's not The Undyne of Deltarune, so she just becomes a character who... really values her own aggression? maybe she really likes being monstrous because exerting power over others is the only way she knows to get what she wants, and because she's never been close to anyone, she doesn't understand/care about whether her behavior really hurts people (although it's clear that she enjoys the THOUGHT of hurting others). maybe it's that she only develops a semblance of empathy once she gets close enough to someone (lancer) that she can put herself in his shoes... but like, as meaningful an arc as that is, it's also pretty one-dimensional. your typical lonely person narrative, but instead of just being lonely, she's lonely AND vicious-- then, after the power of friendship, she's Not lonely, and she questions (and perhaps abandons) her tactic of being vicious to everyone indiscriminately. i don't know...

berdly's funny face sprite was inscrutable. i could tell it was supposed to be a joke but i couldn't even see a face in there, so it didn't hit the mark

very interesting how after the Main Story (i guess) is over, you can walk around the entire town and there's a bunch of worldbuilding, including big dialogue trees with many people. you can see how kris is someone familiar to, if not strongly valued by, pretty much everyone... and it builds up asriel's legacy as the Overshadowing Much Better Big Brother Whom Everyone Loved, which is something the game is trying very very hard to make clear (without spelling it right out) : kris's feelings of inadequacy in comparison to asriel.

so by the time you go to bed and prepare to finish the game, you have a better sense of who kris is and how people see them-- not as the respectable leader-type role they played in the broom closet, but just as a kind of inadequate, neutral nobody. yet even knowing that they are looked down upon to a degree (including by themself), it's still a shock when they do the thing at the end... like, you were in THAT MUCH pain? and now you're going to take that knife and serve yourself not one, but TWO slices of pie? that's why you took out your heart, right? to make room for pie?

i haven’t given a ton of thought to the implications of that action because i don’t feel like it right now. it’s just obvious that self-hatred is deeply involved

callbacks. there's a lot of them. alphys being a timid teacher is kind of funny. alphys's monologue to kris about some TV show was not very funny. i guess you're supposed to go, "haha, same old alphys," but idk, the joke didn't land for me. meeting sans. hey, it's sans undertale! i admit it, i felt a feeling. and the prospect of setting up a playdate with papy was like, "ok, when is the next chapter coming out? i'll pay whatever it takes." it worked to build anticipation, but that's all i have right now, i guess?

did i get a bad ending? i didn't kill anyone. was it a bad ending, or was it an intentional, inevitable cliffhanger? oh, it's the latter. i had to look it up... it seems there's talk about why deltarune has only one ending, while undertale has many. but now that i think about it, isn't it obvious? it's because it's only chapter one. if you had many different endings for chapter one, you'd have many different starting points for chapter two, and that's no good.

so. during the Big Reveal, when we see ralsei's face... susie definitely recognizes him as asriel, right? everyone in town knows him. why would susie be the exception? i think that's why she then hurries kris out of the room. maybe.

looking back, traveling through the environments of the game didn’t inspire the same feelings of wonder and delight as the environments in undertale. maybe just a little bit. when players are certainly going to compare a sequel to its predecessor, i think the sequel really has to shine, at least in certain ways, and i feel like deltarune missed a few marks in that respect.

in conclusion... many elements of the story were somewhat tired or flat, but in the end, it had a good undertale feeling, and i'm anxious for the next part of the story to come out already.

oh and the music was great, Obviously

i wrote all of the above when i first played the game, like, a year and a half ago? and JUST NOW, on september 15th, 2020, i finally noticed that deltarune is an anagram of undertale.................................... no comment

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