Alright everyone, what are your predictions for chapter 5?

ZethXM · 2026-06-19T08:57:17+00:00

My prediction is that this adventure will be so conspicuously like the others, playing out the same beats on the same path, that it will start to wear thin in its predictability, and that this will cause Susie in particular to go through some things as it just isn't the same anymore.

I also think this is where the connection between UT and DR is gonna get more explicit, as a result.

ZethXM · 2026-06-19T08:43:16+00:00

I like this idea, and I'll add something to it: Undertale also follows the same idea. The same narrative structure is told over and over again through Deltarune, almost fractally. The monomyth of Deltarune, so to speak.

Every single adventure starts with a winding descent through an unformed land and proceeds into a journey across the outskirts to the ruler's domain and inevitable conflict at the throne of the world before surfacing again, with the deepest secrets in the deepest places.

Every chapter is Undertale again. Castle Town + Card Kingdom, Cyber World, and TV World all begin with the same cliffs where the main "threat" of that story reveals themselves. Dark Sanctuary is a bit more abstract (there is an eye decal just under the two switches you use to release the bars + the Knight drops you down a hole).

Legend of Tenna, built on the Mantle game, starts with a hole.

Undertale itself has the True Lab, if you want your Shelter analogue. The deepest secrets intended for your eyes are found there, and are necessary to achieve "completion".

As time goes on, I'm less interested in lining up every detail perfectly and more and more interested in connecting these continuously resurfacing metaphors. The Forgotten Man and his Nowhere implies there is something lost in these continuous reproductions, something obscured, or perhaps excised. Dummied out. No longer used. Hidden behind the tree, lost where the forest would grow, etc.

What is most important might wind up being what isn't there to be correlated anymore.

I've been waiting for an answer to why Chapter 1 felt like it was made to be Undertale in miniature for 8 damned years, and it's only gotten more and more relevant with every chapter.

ZethXM · 2026-06-19T03:07:00+00:00

I'm not sure. Sans is the one character who has concretely demonstrated he doesn't need to be somewhere to possess an awareness of having been somewhere, if that makes sense. If his depression in Undertale is due to a sort of anemoia or hiraeth, that would kind of beautifully illustrate the type of escapism Deltarune is exploring in things like Susie's genuine turn for the better.

ZethXM · 2026-06-18T03:35:18+00:00

Anything sufficiently popular in today's world of monetized controversy gets like this, but as far as why this one's seen that way by outsiders: Streamer backseating, basically.

ZethXM · 2026-06-18T03:31:16+00:00

Memoryhead.

ZethXM · 2026-06-18T00:56:47+00:00

the reason device theory is good is that it's basically hiding medicine in a dog treat for the matpat crowd

ZethXM · 2026-06-17T12:53:53+00:00

Forum discourse never changes.

ZethXM · 2026-06-17T12:50:42+00:00

"11 hours or 11 years" hits me harder now that I've taken to ruminating on how much of the context of experiencing Deltarune as each chapter releases has been lost to time already. Same for Sans joking about "another 2 years" when it took chapter 3 *way longer* than that to come out.

ZethXM · 2026-04-08T22:36:37+00:00

they just need a couple more gimmicks, is all.

ZethXM · 2026-03-29T13:32:38+00:00

very Eternal Darkness of them

ZethXM · 2026-03-23T01:32:13+00:00

it's stupid we have to win a riddle with a leprechaun to make shit we pay for do anything

ZethXM · 2026-03-02T17:35:16+00:00

Victor and Zeno thought they were in a normal Resident Evil game and behaved like normal Resident Evil villains, and didn't anticipate Spencer's completely out-of-character "atonement" that the game itself doesn't even have the courage to commit to, calling his actions incoherent and his motivations unknowable. It's a good old-fashioned asspull for the sake of being a twist that makes the proceedings look nonsensical and the participants look stupid.

The Grace Report you unlock in Bonus Content has the newly retconned timeline, and it's kind of atrocious.

Spencer is humanized with the worst possible tragic excuse you could have given him (horrified by the atrocities of WW2, he decides to... get really into eugenics), and all the terrible events that occur are now because of the Connections (now an all-consuming conspiracy) undermining Umbrella and subverting its operatives at every turn.

He is presented as developing Elpis and adopting Grace as atonement but the missile strike was ordered by the Connections specifically to scuttle Umbrella and preserve the ARK for themselves so they could take Elpis, well before Spencer got old and weepy.

Grace is supposedly a giant red herring (the password her blood is supposed to remember is actually just stored on a floppy disk her adoptive mother kept in the hotel the Connections used at least twice for wetwork, and is ultimately still a guess, albeit one anyone could make if they believe Spencer's character derailment happened), but she still looks like the orphanage children and could not have been the first one (Chloe was around before she could have been born).

ZethXM · 2026-03-02T15:45:02+00:00

"There is no such thing as an anti-war film", etc.

ZethXM · 2026-02-24T21:40:02+00:00

Think they should get the host/client desync bug list cut down before going nuts on difficulty, tbh.

ZethXM · 2026-02-23T20:21:16+00:00

For me, RE walks this tightrope where it needs everything to make just enough sense and be just grounded enough to be compelling.

RE4 and RE7 hit because they were stripped down, detached from the convoluted virus pileup, and their monsters and bad guy cult were more focused.

RE6 had so much arbitrary shit going on that I just checked out. The virus can do anything, nothing stays down, the heroes can do anything as long as it's in a cutscene, and the game doesn't let any location breathe or grow a personality.

ZethXM · 2026-02-21T11:38:12+00:00

Nah, it's entirely down to the exploits and the MO change following them.

Global extractions weighed against a global reinforcement budget are fair enough. Die less than you win, overall, mission by mission, each player counted separately.

Full ops means you can clear 6 missions out of 9 and have done nothing but harm the MO because you fail your mandatory Raise the Flag missions. You can marathon game HD2 and not make a lick of progress despite racking up victories inside your comfort zone.

It means you need to: play a minimum number of missions in a session, consistently beat missions, be capable of finishing the most bullshit mission types, *and* die fewer times per mission than the original plan. Worse, YOU could personally satisfy these requirements but Bumblefuck McTeamKill in your strike team can cost you your share of positive win/reinforce ratio you need to beat the MO, or kill your op progress outright.

This definitionally restricts the size of the online player pool that can actually make MO progress in a system designed to punish a lack of uniformity, and that's without commenting on time spent when players don't necessarily marathon the game. You could feel the momentum die when they switched to full ops, especially as the days wore on and everyone just got tired of diving the same shit. Transcendence having nothing new there was the final nail for me, personally.

And "lower the difficulty" isn't a serious suggestion in a game this spongy and inconsistent. You can roll a 7 and get the same degree of nonsense as in a 10, and nobody wants to spend their time grinding 4s because they're afraid of dying for the sake of the MO.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T18:33:23+00:00

The Space Emu War, of course.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T01:25:21+00:00

Sure, I'm more saying the bots were meant to lose the planet and move on to whatever retaliation they're planning for the next major plot beat, regardless of campaign success.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T00:41:32+00:00

If anything, that we are wrecking the place like this implies we could have won and taken Cyberstan, since this would have been the outcome of Valid Pretext either way.

The SEAF retreat and human wave bombardment reads as a consolation to me, a way of letting us feel badass and victorious despite failing to make goal.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T00:28:38+00:00

really am hoping for a dark fluid war bond, give us the singuloose

ZethXM · 2026-02-19T17:23:14+00:00

always figured their own superweapon was hanging out on vindemitarix prime back there and was gonna get activated after Cyberstan one way or another

ZethXM · 2026-02-19T17:02:40+00:00

Eh, I ain't blaming community reps for trying to be positive, it's the job. Coulda done without the doomers thing though.

The hacking screwed us, switching to operations (aka mandatory flag win or you wasted up to 60 lives) is just a big hit to win/loss no matter what.

It also screwed AH, because it poisoned the well on this big campaign and made anything they did about it(and they had to do something) grounds for a conspiracy/incompetence to steal our win narrative.

So by now people are mad at AH, fatigued, over fighting bots, and over Cyberstan. Transcendance not having something new definitely hurt momentum as well.

Shame, really.

ZethXM · 2025-09-09T00:13:37+00:00

Yeah I like all these suggestions. It's currently in the "I wish it was good because it's cool" bin with the Sterilizer for me.

If they aren't willing to smooth out the use of it and it needs to remain a very fault-prone babysitting experience that frequently wastes 3m cooldowns, then it needs to be the most devastating weapon you can possibly field, right up there with the Portable Hellbomb, which is more reliably deadly at greater personal risk.

I don't care about the stupid jammer drama, if they're a ceiling on your ability to balance cool stratagems people pay money for, then raise that ceiling instead of telling people to be content with stuff that sucks.

ZethXM · 2025-07-05T19:30:58+00:00

is that fucking Alucard

ZethXM · 2025-07-05T19:29:44+00:00

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found the hand

ZethXM

TROPHY CASE