u/jacob8595_yahoo_com

What happens if people need to use the shelter?

"But they don't have the codes, so they can't get in."

Now the best case scenario is that suddenly everyone is very suspicious of the bunker and why it is handled in such a strange way, and are EXTREMELY motivated to open the bunker and make it far more accessible.

The worst case scenario is that everyone fucking dies in a storm or a natural disaster.

Note: Ralsei does say that he can't reveal everything. However, let's make the stakes very clear:

If Susie does not absolutely 100% trust and follow Ralsei, the chances of the world ending go up exponentially.

The only reason Ralsei should withhold information is if Susie knowing the information could actively endanger the entire planet.

Obligatory: https://youtu.be/7qAaJK7_zQc?si=8MJR7Hg7N_33olak

It's absolutely bonkers that nobody seems to really care about where Toriel is or what she's doing for most of the chapter.

Here is a comprehensive list of things that may occur to Toriel if they are not supervising her. all of which are confirmed to have happened in the past to other characters:

-She could get recruited by the Knight

-She could get seriously hurt

-She could actually die

-She could learn how to create dark fountains

-She could, without exaggeration, literally cause the apocalypse without even knowing what she is doing.

This situation should be very serious for Susie, and absolutely catastrophic for Ralsei. It is already a miracle that Ralsei was there in time to stop Berdly from accidentally summoning a titan, and the fact that this could happen again is just never addressed or even brought up as a concern.

So many people address criticisms of each chapter by saying things like "The chapter didn't have time for that!" or "That would take away attention from other things!"

I see these criticisms for other properties, almost always being about serialized television episodes, where each episode is around 15-20 minutes.

If someone is talking about one of 60 total 15 minute Avatar episode and says "I wish we focused on Katara here" a reasonable response can be "sorry, but this was an Aang episode." This is can NOT be said if each episode was 6+ hours long, and there was only 7 of them. Every chapter needs to do heavy lifting for every character present, which they simply don't.

Comparing to other long form stories:

By Chapter 2's ending, you could have played through Undertale in its entirety.

By Chapter 3, you could have watched the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.

By Chapter 4, you could have watched the entirety of Star Wars, including the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and the sequel trilogy.

By Chapter 5, you could have watched literally the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender

If this trend continues, you could watch every season of Breaking Bad in a row faster than you could complete your first playthrough of Deltarune.

"But Deltarune is a video game!!!" Someone should probably tell Toby Fox that. But regardless, let's compare video games instead:

Undertale could be completed before you complete Chapter 2.

You could beat Batman, Arkham City before you beat Chapter 3.

You could beat The Last of Us 1 + 2 before you complete Chapter 4.

You could beat Earthbound before you complete chapter 5.

And by the time Deltarune is complete, it will be comparable in runtime to Red Dead Redemption 2.

It is literally insane how little we know about any of these characters and this world when we are already pushing 30 hours into a game that takes place in a small town with, at most, only 4 main characters.

Source for playtimes: Search | HowLongToBeat

We don't know what the whole plan is, but there is a 0% chance that it will make any sense at all.

Before I go on my rant, just try and parse the Knight's absolutely insane actions in the third Chapter.

0. Some time before the Chapter 3, the Knight spoke to Tenna somehow...? Either by speaking to an inanimate television set and really really hoping they were being convincing, or by opening a dark fountain real quick (even though this Tenna would be different than Kris's dark fountain), having a chat, then closing it real fast so nobody notices. Both of these being done in broad daylight while Kris and Toriel are at school.

1. Kris opens the fountain.

2. Tenna locks Toriel into a ball for the Knight to come pick up ASAP.

3. The Knight accidentally gets their day planner mixed up and, in an astronomical coincidence, shows up at literally the last possible moment for the plan to work.

4. The Knight beats the Fun gang, then goes to kidnap Toriel.

5. In another absolutely colossal, monumental coincidence, Undyne the police chief strolls right in at just that moment so the Knight can kidnap her instead.

"But the police were called!!!" Awesome. That makes it much, much worse.

What happens if Undyne, whose only character trait is being cartoonishly strong, sees the Knight in the light world and just fucking arrests them because she thinks they slashed Toriel's tires? What if the Knight kidnaps Toriel and then gets seen by Undyne while escaping and gets mulched by the fish person that can bench press a car? What if Undyne just books it straight to the Dreemurr household and leaves before the Knight shows up? Or what if she hears strange sounds and goes inside before the Knight shows up?

Beyond that, what happens if literally anything except what actually happens, happens? What if Toriel wakes up and sees Undyne get kidnapped? What if the dark fountain is sealed before the Knight shows up? What if Undyne isn't present for any number of reasons? Would they have to kidnap Undyne some other time? What happens if anyone at the police station does the absolute bare minimum, and realizes that Undyne was investigating a potential crime, then suddenly goes missing?

And most obviously, what if Susie had a double digit IQ (Albert Einstein of hometown), and just told everyone exactly what happened? "I was out late at night and saw someone I didn't recognize dragging Undyne to the shelter." There are literally no other leads in an otherwise extremely important missing persons case. The bunker would be investigated and the game ends one way or another.

"But Kris is in on it! They made sure the plan went well!" That's an awesome factoid, but while Kris is in on the plan, they didn't actually do anything. We have a 100% full, unaltered account of literally every action Kris took, and they did nothing to actually guarantee the success of the plan aside from opening the fountain (and possibly the slashes during the Knight fight).

Rant time:

During chapter 1, the Knight's plan was extremely simple: open up dark fountains everywhere so darkners can rule. This was stated explicitly. There wasn't just minimal indication, but literally 0 indication that the plan was ever anything else.

This carries over into chapter 2. The Knight taught Queen that any lightner can open a fountain, and so Queen recruited Noelle specifically to open more fountains. This is basically a pyramid scheme, but it's still a reasonable plan.

Then, for one reason or another, Toby decided to rewrite the plan to be something far more obtuse, involving kidnappings, sacrifices, the bunker, etc.

Now, the Knight's plan either makes no sense, or only fails because the Knight is an absolute drooling troglodyte, and the game hopes that you don't notice by keeping information about the Knight to an absolute bare minimum now. Even chapter 5, which was probably going to be a big lore dump originally, amounts to "The Knight probably existed in the past... and uh... probably did some stuff..."

If the Knight's only plan is to cause the Roaring, then they can literally just do it, right? Just open a dark fountain, head to the next building over, open another dark fountain, repeat. Genuinely what the fuck are the Fun gang going to do about it if the knight just speed blitzes through town opening fountains non stop? Better yet, spawn a few titans in each fountain to be extra special sure.

In fact, no matter what the Knight's actual plan is, how does it hurt to just open up too many fountains for the Fun gang to deal with? Before they arrived, the Knight could basically do whatever they wanted (which makes it even more unbelievable that they haven't succeeded yet). So if the Fun gang are distracted, the Knight should be able to just kidnap whoever they want whenever they want.

This may sound harsh, but I think Toby is either completely incapable or completely uninterested in writing characters who actually make plans and have to stick to them. In Undertale, Asgore's "plan" (aside from the failed true lab) to just sit around and wait for the solution to LITERALLY fall into his reach, and after that, just sorta hope and pray that nothing goes wrong afterwards (which it doesn't. Hooray!)

But don't worry everyone, this was all foreseen by Le Prophecy which makes this actually extremely good writing.

1. Joker - Batman Arkham Asylum: Throughout the game, The Joker has been a scheming villain who is always multiple steps ahead. A point is made that he always uses goons for his grunt work, never needing to fight Batman directly because his plan is so well thought through that he's basically untouchable.

Then, at the end of the game, he just uses super steroids and tries to go blow for blow with Batman. It doesn't help that the boss fight itself is extremely easy, clunky, and pretty lame.

2. Heart of Darkness - Darkest Dungeon: Darkest Dungeon has some of the coolest bosses in gaming. There are some absolutely bonkers, out there designs in this game, inspired by eldritch horrors. If you haven't played the game, then trust me when I say that literally the ENTIRE game is just one massive hype reel for the final boss, which is kept a mystery until the end.

And the final boss design is just "What if there was a heart, and it was uh... big. And there's like a guy glued onto it lol."

These minor side quests would all be extremely easy to implement, and would have extremely low overhead. They even have no long term narrative consequences.

The dark worlds are still the real world, just viewed differently, right? Why can't we seek out and do optional chores like we could in the light world? It would help Hometown feel more realistic, and give NPCs more depth by showing them actually reacting to what we are doing.

"But it's all just a video game, so all the NPCs have to be unreactive robots with no goals beyond their programming! They can't be allowed to react to anything you do!"

If you use this excuse, you're just being insulting to Toby as a writer. You know what video games have? Reactive NPCs. You know what Deltarune ALREADY has? Reactive NPCs. They should also be reactive in ways you can influence and benefit from.

Superman & Kryptonite: Kryptonite being a weakness of Superman's only came about in the 1943 radio show, The Adventures of Superman. Superman's voice actor needed to work extensively, so the writers looked for any excuse to give him time off to rest his voice for medical concerns. As such, Kryptonite was created as a weakness that could incapacitate Superman, allowing for long sections where Superman's voice was not required.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Masks: In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, all the turtles wore red masks. However, when moving to an animated setting where large amounts of detail was lost, it was extremely difficult for viewers, especially young children, to tell the turtles apart. As such, the differently colored masks were created.

Star Trek Transporters: Originally, the plan was for the crew to take shuttles down to worlds whenever necessary, as would be expected in a Sci Fi show. However, creating prop shuttles would've been unnecessarily expensive, especially for their restrictive episodic TV budget. Instead, they invented Transporters, which are also quite reasonable in a Sci Fi setting.

1. The second Up Flow is meant to be a Down Flow. The combo will refuse to progress unless you input Down Flow while at the apex of his command throw. Even in the breakdown, the game says to input Up Flow, but only inputting Down Flow will let you proceed.

2. Connecting the TK Lightning after the command throw is ONLY possible by using Flow for extra horizontal movement before jumping. Ozai's other combo trials list Flow when necessary, so I don't know why this one doesn't.

I'm gonna be honest I'm peeved about the first one, but the second was actually really cool. The game encouraging the player to use Flow creatively to allow for otherwise impossible links was fun problem solving.