[LES] Deltarune isn't Undertale
I finished chapter 5 recently and wanted to see what people on the internet think about it (rookie mistake). I have mixed feelings on this chapter, but I quickly noticed that people dismiss a lot of criticism of this chapter (and the game as a whole) by saying “Well Undertale did it to and you LOVE Undertale don’t you?”
And to that I say [title of the post].
1.Undertale takes a few hours to finish, even when you account for backtracking needed to get True Pacifist.
Deltarune, including Chapter 5, takes at least 20-30 hours to finish, easily more if you want to see everything. It will probably reach 40h or 50h mark when the full game is released.
It’s like comparing a movie to a show with multiple seasons, or a short story to a 1000 pages novel. You can’t apply the exact same rules to both and expect it to work just as well with how different the scopes are.
2.Undertale was a full game on release. Deltarune is a chapter-based game with each chapter released every few years over 8 years so far.
Once again, a self-contained story that you can finish in a few hours after its release MUST have a different pacing and story structure than one with multiple separate chapters that were released years apart. Deltarune is de facto a series of games rather than a single entity.
On this note, I HATE the argument that Deltarune is supposed to be experienced as a whole, so we should just ignore the fact that there have been multi-year long breaks between chapters and treat them like they were all released at once.
Maybe it was Toby’s intention for the whole game to be released at once, but this is not the reality we are living in. Most people will experience Deltarune in the form of multiple chapters released over a decade with long breaks between them, not as one long game with each chapter happening right after the last one. If waiting is part of the experience, then it has to be accounted for when judging the game.
I’m sure that in 2030 we will get video essays saying how much better the game is when you don’t have to wait for new chapters, but that time has not come yet.
3.Undertale wasn’t perfect.
Yea, it’s a good game, but the story certainly isn’t the most amazing thing written in all of human history without a single flaw. There are parts that could be improved, and you would expect an author to get better at his craft after over a decade of work. Pointing out that both games have the same flaw doesn’t instantly absolve Deltarune of its problems.