Deltarune Ch5: Festival Day ★★★★★
Deltarune continues to be absolutely stunning. Hilarious, tragic, challenging and effortless. Had me giggling like a fool as much as it had me in tears. The scenes with Susie and Noelle were delightful and Ralsei’s growth in this chapter was particularly lovely to witness, while the strength of Kris’ dissociation and dread that bookends the chapter hang over everything in a delightfully terrible manner.
The new gameplay systems were delightful and the entire sequence building up to the final boss was enrapturing and I love how it’s also used to the $!$? Squad’s growing independence. I only wish there was more challenge with them, though with climbing from the previous chapter making a return perhaps that will built on in future as well.
Nostalgia for both Undertale and the early parts of Deltarune itself are both played really hard here that’s in wonderful tension with everything hanging over the party and makes me very curious about what comes next, especially with the newsletter calling this “let’s have one more fun adventure.”
The rest of this is going to weave between thematic analysis and crank theoryposting:
In chapter four the most obvious potential twist would be that Noelle, not Susie, is really meant to be the girl mentioned in the prophecy. Ralsei, after all, said that ribbons were meant to be worn by Susie, who refuses to wear them (though she does acquiesce to this in chapter five). Presumably Ralsei’s understanding is that the ribbons are for “the girl”, a role that Susie might not be suited for. I thought that perhaps this might also be such an obvious twist as to distract from other potential reinterpretations of the intended heroes of the prophecy, such as the vessel that one creates on making a new save file, rather than Kris, being “the cage, with human soul and parts.”
The implementation of achievements in the Playstation version of the game (of all things) lends credence to the notion that, while the words of the prophecy must be fulfilled, there may multiple ways of fulfilling them, and that the game’s advertised “one ending” might have a strong degree of flexibility to it. Perhaps characters’ roles in the prophecy are not just going to be used as narrative twist, but something that might be changeable depending on player action? And perhaps the girl might be a third person entirely. It would be cruel, after all, at this point, for the story to insist that Ralsei must stick to their defined role
There is such interesting thematic contradictions in this game. One cannot live in fantasy or turn back time. As fun as the dark worlds are, as delightful as all these little weirdos we meet are, they can only dream for short while while their stories are being told. To try to hold on to them forever will only invite disaster: The Roaring, or at least obsessively arguing with people on Tumblr about headcanons forever and making oneself miserable. But at the same time we do love these little weirdos and we want to see their dreams. Ralsei, the fictional character, does exist purely to fill a role in a story, but Ralsei, the darkner, hates their role in the story and themself and they do not want to be bound by prophecy where they are the prince with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Deltarune gives us a wonderful fantasy world and beats us over the head with the fact that we cannot live there, that the dark world cannot last and its food does not nourish, but we still want to see these characters’ dreams. And surely we must hope that Deltarune is not too cruel as to at least let Ralsei be a princess before the end, even if there must a prince.
So maybe Ralsei can be the girl? Even if the girl’s fate is a tragedy, too. Maybe “no one can choose who they are in this world,” but perhaps we can still choose what our story is, even if that story has to come to an end eventually.
On the more crank side of talking about Ralsei: What are they in the light world? They presumably must correspond to some sort of object, but they can move freely between all the different dark worlds, which suggests a physical presence in different places in the light world (though Spamtom also moves around, somehow). People have suggested that Ralsei is something that Kris carries around with them, but they can be seen in the Castle Town with Susie at the end of chapter five and nothing in Kris’ light world inventory screen is suggestive of them. My tinfoil hat theory is that they are traces of Asriel’s fur scattered around his old haunts and Ralsei can be present anywhere that still has lingering trances of Kris’ brother. If a dark world is opened somewhere Asriel has never been then Ralsei will not be able to go there.
And one other question that hangs over the story: What is in the shelter? Most speculation I have seen in this direction assumes something sinister and terrifying, that there must be some horrible secret buried there. But this is Deltarune: What’s in there is not going to make you scream, it’s going to make you cry. I think it’s a very old dark world, Home from Undertale to Castle Town’s New Home, full of little weirdos who will welcome you with open arms and delighted to meet new lightners, with the bittersweet tragedy that you’re there to seal them away. Specifically I think it is Asriel and December’s old dark world perhaps left there from when they refused to fulfil the prophecy themselves when they were younger and seal it away. Refusing to let the story end and inviting disaster on everything instead.
Going further with this: Perhaps they even somehow deliberately made Ralsei as a guide for next set of heroes to try and fulfil the prophecy while steering them away from their dark world, carving out an exception for themselves. Des never left the dark world, Asriel moved on. Perhaps Kris was in the original party too, they’re certainly in on whatever’s going on in the shelter now at least.
As one last thing I’ve seen people connecting Seam saying that shadow crystals are made of broken dreams with Noelle saying “the dream never happened” on the aborted B-side, which makes me wonder if there might be a tertiary route for creating more shadow crystals by shattering people’s dreams.
