#it feels weird to take this class after already learning about special relativity in depth in modern physics last semester lol

[links-studies]

I've been getting into doing my homework digitally lately using Notion, since it's a lot easier to type and use equations on there than it is for most of the other programs I've tried. I also feel like I'm saving a lot of time & saving my hand a lot of pain from having to sit there and write equations for pages and pages despite my disabilities haha.

[cracking-the-mind]

My Thoughts on Delta Rune

This is probably going to go all over the place but I just need to put my thoughts down somewhere before I can really go forward with any of my speculations.

I’ll give you the tl;dr version first: The game is not finished yet (obviously) and it could GREATLY go with some expansion on its game mechanics and enemies as well as giving depth to the secondary characters in the story. That said, what we’ve received in the first chapter is something that I still enjoyed greatly and is something that I’ll be thinking about for months to come. I’ll be patiently waiting for the next chapters.

I’ll stick my in-depth analysis under a cut for you to save people from a wall of text.

I guess we’ll go in chronological order? Right, okay, the beginning of the story. It feels... incredibly melancholy and lonely despite the people waving at the car as you drive by and the happy music playing. Your/Kris’s entire side of the room is devoid of decoration save for a red wagon and a bird cage that I’m not even going to touch with a fifty foot pole for right now. You then learn that Asriel’s your brother and that he’s gone off to university, leaving the small town he lived in behind. And from what you gather as you go along in the story is that you two were inseparable and him leaving had apparently taken a toll on you. Now it’s just you and your mom in a house that feels all too big for the both of you. It’s just you.

Now, the beginning school bit left me on edge for the sake of how it could hit so close to home for so many people. The social outcastedness despite how others may (poorly) attempt to include you. It’s... jarring in a sense. Now, you’re left without a partner in group work due to you being late. The teacher then pairs you up with Susie, the other social outcast/bully in the class, but sends the both of you off to get chalk before the work can begin. If you go around and talk to everyone before leaving, they give their condolences and are already planning your funeral because Susie is apparently going to murder you.

And, well... she threatens you like she’s going to. And the part that gets me is that for the whole time...

you don’t fight back.

As Susie slams you up against the wall of lockers with one hand and threatens you again and again, you do nothing. You hang there limply without moving a muscle.

Though plot armor prevails and you survive (if you were murdered, what kind of story would the first chapter be? Actually... that’d be a very interesting ending point but I’m not going to go any further with that.) and you continue to storage closet that’s black as pitch. Lo and behold, an entire kingdom of Darkness is in that storage closet. You and Susie are separated briefly and you’ve somehow changed clothes in to something straight out of a JRPG. Spoilers, you’re in one.

And thus, you and Susie both wander the paths before stumbling upon a section of a kingdom that has a giant geyser spouting from it. And there, you meet Ralsei, and prince from the Darkness. He claims you’re both heroes that are destined to save this place. Now, as much of a giant prick Susie has been to you so far, I relate to her in the sense that she doesn’t want to have any part of this weird acid trip that she’s having and just wants to get back. (Even though she is apparently okay with apparently letting everyone die around her if she doesn’t cooperate. It’s a tough pill to swallow and I don’t necessarily blame her for trying to call the bluff about what Ralsei is saying.)

Before that, you end up meeting (and fighting) Lancer, an enigmatic person? monster? who’s apparently been tasked with capturing or dispatching you under the king’s orders. You eventually get the advantage in the fight and he flees. Now given a real taste of the things going on in the kingdom, Susie begrudgingly agrees to go along with it and the adventure truly begins.

Whew, that went on a lot longer than I thought. I’ll try and keep things a lot briefer now.

I’ll be honest, I really didn’t trust Ralsei at first. He explains things in thorough detail a lot and was always kind and patient, even if very a little gullible, from the get go. Plus, it always felt like he was never surprised from any kind of event in your adventure. Though he does end up being a staunch ally all the way through even though he was the person who made Susie defect because she was very un-hero like. Perhaps it was just my skeptical nature that distrusted Ralsei so much? Who knows.

Lancer reminds me very much of Papyrus in a sense. Despite their vocal reasons of why they’re doing such a thing, what they apparently needed the most was a friend. And that comes in the form of Susie. They get along like two peas in a pod when they’re designing their ‘evil’ schemes. He’s incredibly nonsensical ( He doesn’t even have a walk animation! He just slides along the floor.) and seems to be motivated mostly by his own whimsy. I’d even call him immature at times. He has some incredible facial expressions, boy howdy. I snorted very loudly when I saw that facial expression. You know what I’m talking about. He enjoys digging holes for some reason? And then putting salsa and other various things in them?? Even though he’s clearly stated that he’s one of the ‘bad guys’ he doesn’t hesitate to join up with you for a little bit to just chat and such as you’re walking. Though he does inevitably lock you up once he realizes that you’re going to have to leave and take down his dad, the king.

I’ve read a few things where people really did not like Susie, despite how she grows as a character. She acts very much like a brute and doesn’t bat an eye at beating people down for her personal gain. In the beginning, you can’t control her in battle and you have to use your first turn to warn others about her attacks. Susie leaves the party constantly and is vocal in that she hates that she has to put with this hero crap. She’s realizes this (most likely even before she even fell down) and decides to just roll with it. She lets herself be placed in the brute category so people don’t have expectations from her. And from that, she ends up isolated. Though once she ends up becoming a ‘bad guy’ for a little while, she legitimately enjoys herself as she’s scheming with Lancer. Though with that, there’s a side of Susie that most people aren’t likely to see, a side that cares for her friends. She gives Lancer that fruit from the tree that he hasn’t tasted even when she’s hungry and she praises them both for their work. With Lancer, she could just be herself and be accepted for who she is. Which is why she ends up feeling so betrayed when Lancer locks her up with both you and Ralsei when you reach the castle. In her battle with Lancer, I was so torn in what I wanted to do, but I ended up forcefully moving the soul to hit Lancer’s bullets until he moves them out of the way. When she realizes what she’s doing, she first continues to attack until she ends up purposefully missing, stopping the battle. From there, they have a heart to heart and I couldn’t help but smile as she realizes that her actions have been getting others hurt and what’s worse, she ended up hurting her friend because she wouldn’t listen. While she doesn’t show it in an outright way, she comes to rely on both you and Ralsei and will listen to commands you tell her to do. (Also, if you go back and do group ACTs against different enemies, you get some fun dialogue.) She even comes around and deems you and Ralsei her friends after your fight with the king. Her motivations/backstory clearly do not excuse her actions, but they do help explain why she acts a certain way. And when she does try and change herself, I find that to be incredibly admirable.

Also, I don’t think this bothers much explaining, but the music holy SHIT. Toby Fox still has not disappointed in the slightest in any of the music so far

Now that that’s over and done with, I’m going to go through the world, the enemies, the battle system, and finally the ending.

The world itself is incredibly linear. And yet, I didn’t find much problem with how it was laid out. It has secrets and it rewards you for finding them with maybe different gear or an item. It rewards you with information if you perhaps talk to people more than once or with hints about how to spare an enemy. Though a complaint that I would have is that it’s certainly too small. I felt like I was blazing through the world and missing things when I was not, in fact, missing anything. It did so well in immersing me in the world with the game play and music that I lost track of time.

The enemies are all unique (barring the stronger versions in the castle. I feel like that that’s almost obligatory for every kind of RPG.) and have different kinds of ways to spare them as well as different kinds of bullet patterns. This kind of ties in to how short I find the game is, but I found the enemies to be lacking in variability so the fun of the encounters kind of wanes quickly if you backtrack at all. Additionally, I found the enemies to all be incredibly easy (bar one). For my first run, I had a total of one Game Over. And that’s including my fight with the King and the Jester. On a different note, both the King and the Jester were my favorite fights, too. One for the difficulty and one for the creativity behind it. You can guess which one is which easily enough.

Speaking of Battles, the battle system itself is an improvement from the criticisms that I could understand some had with Undertale. You now have three party members that have different abilities and stats and you can all do group ACTs. If you plan correctly, you could probably finish a fight with multiple enemies in around two turns. There’s now a tension gauge that allows you to do special abilities for the characters and even rewards you for being daring in the bullet patterns. Now, with that, the fights are quick but end up getting repetitive relatively quickly due to it. That also coincides with the enemy variability, but I’ll stop from beating a dead horse.

Now, once the King has been dealt with and the Fountain sealed, you and Susie are cast back to their regular world. It’s now well past school time, and you and Susie split, with her talking about how she wants to go back to that world tomorrow. And now, the entire town opens up to you to freely explore. There’s plenty of faces, both old and new, to talk to. And with happy music playing, it’s like Undertale’s last hurrah where you could go around and chat with everyone.

But even still, the world seems very... cold. Your classmates around the town are all shocked you’re still alive, but apparently don’t care enough about you that you didn’t return from the supply closet for hours when they just talked about how you might’ve gotten killed. Undyne and Alphys don’t even know each other, even when they live in such a small town. Gerson is dead and the ones from the Determination experiments have all passed. Several people remark how you’ve changed for the better for some reason, which is good. Though they then also passively remark how weird you were previously. Catty and Bratty hate each other and call one another posers. The bunny running the diner gives you a hot chocolate out of pity when she started reminiscing about you and Asriel visting and getting hot chocolate every Sunday. Asgore, your father, lives in abject poverty. He lives above his flower store and its sad the kind of living conditions he deals with. If you read the notes on the floor, he’s past due on his rent and he’s mocked about giving away flowers out of kindness and needs to start selling them. Still, it’s heart wrenching to me that Toriel kept the kids and the house while Asgore is left with pretty much nothing. And Toriel still hates his guts when you give Asgore’s flowers to her.

Sans and Papyrus have just moved in to town with Sans apparently taking over the local grocery store. There was something about the way Sans acts to us that just rubs me the wrong way. He gives us a fake phone number for crying babies and then jokes about how he fucked your mom last night. It’s not even that stupid punning that he does, it’s just being rude to somebody he just met. What is also concerning to me is that Papyrus hadn’t left the house yet. He’d probably be one of the first people to be running around, introducing himself to people, don’t you think?

Anyway, now that that’s all done and you’ve talked to everyone, you’re tired and you go to bed to go to school the next day. And then during the middle of the night, Kris is thrown from their bed and begin walking like someone possessed or a zombie of sorts. They then proceed to dig in to their chest, wrench out their SOUL, and throw it in to the bird cage in the wagon. And then, out of nowhere, they produce a knife and smile a too broad smile. And then it ends.

Okay, inhale... exhale. WHAT THE FUCKKKK. I’m sure the rest of the people who played this game weren’t entirely expecting that ending. But now, it leaves everyone with even more questions.

My overall thoughts on this game are still incredibly positive and a lot my criticisms have to do with the length, which is something that shouldn’t be much of a problem once another chapter is released. Though what is sad to me is that a lot of what made Undertale endearing to me has been altered in to something more depressing. Or unwelcoming even. Though I don’t have to compare it directly to Undertale due to, as Toby said, it not being related to Undertale much at all. Just a similar set of characters. However, this is still the first chapter and the lore and story has still much to be explained and divulged. I eagerly await for more.