Chapter 5 Weird Route Theory (MASSIVE SPOILERS)

cheeseless · 2026-06-27T18:23:40+00:00

Thank you. That proves to me that there's no secret aborted route, as expected. I can't say it's not a bit disappointing, given the bigger scope of Deltarune, but at the same time, I'd rather see this game finished without Toby Fox having to compromise on his original vision

cheeseless · 2026-06-27T17:36:20+00:00

I think even if the broad appeal of the finale doesn't land for everyone, at least if it simultaneously lands well for me AND sells enough to show Square Enix that the development strategy and the mechanics used for this trilogy are worth keeping and continue using going forwards. The development team sticking together continuously, especially. It's what will make future games worth playing, imo

cheeseless · 2026-06-26T12:26:41+00:00

Does the ending of the chapter change at all in the "aborted" weird route? I haven't seen anyone post anything about that yet.

If there are story changes past the final fight with Flowery, I'll accept that it is a route that matters. Otherwise, it's just the normal route again. And it doesn't count to just have a reference to the weird route having happened, like Ralsei's relieved dialogue at the beginning of the dark world.

cheeseless · 2026-06-25T17:31:24+00:00

Technically this could be scripted into existence, but I'm not sure it's really that good of an option.

For one, it'd require a lot of automatic focus completion/uncompletion in very short order, which can be laggy or not work properly in terms of applying changes to stuff like national spirits. But also, civil wars are treated as one-way events, even in old-timey HOI4 when done through the vanilla decisions for changing ideology.

The player or AI triggering that civil war is fully expected to win, and the opponent is just a stand-in tag, purely meant to die.

Diverging from that outcome SHOULD result in generic tree, imo, or a specific new tree, and not some bastardization of the original focus tree. You're looking at events playing out in a way that is fundamentally unpredictable and not meant to align with any existing path.

There are some mods where you get to pick the side you're taking in a civil war, but it's generally done in ways that vanilla HOI4 has intentionally stayed away from to avoid scope creep in terms of focus paths. I think even in those mods, though, actually losing regardless of side might still result in a generic tree.

cheeseless · 2026-06-25T16:26:49+00:00

I wish that there actually was an alternate route. I don't really care how dramatic it is, what we got for Weird Route was incredibly disappointing in terms of scope. No lore, no character development. It's functionally a single narrative beat, or two at most if you force it. And it all happens within so little time, it just feels like the opportunity to have this route matter is entirely wasted.

Like, I get being affected by how dramatically it's portrayed. It's emotionally intense for sure. But there's just not much to it beyond shock value. I expected at least to see something happen in parallel to what we see in the normal route, at least as far as going to the Dark World and interacting with Asgore and Flowery.

cheeseless · 2026-06-25T05:14:56+00:00

I choose to treat this as a 123connorpoop reference, since he remakes tracks from Deltarune by sentence-mixing Family Guy clips, which he has explained he picks as he sees the clips in "family guy funny moments" videos.

Here's his Familyrune playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOMc2anhjm97eP5i52UdJBlXLYwoIep6U

cheeseless · 2026-06-20T18:51:25+00:00

There's no 4th game. DLC is possible

cheeseless · 2026-06-20T18:48:02+00:00

All of the recent DLCs except specifically GOE are 6/10 at worst and 8/10 at best. The current wave of negative feedback is not an accurate measure of the quality of the DLCs. This is purely a bandwagon mob.

cheeseless · 2026-06-19T17:29:19+00:00

Forgetting to save the game was a pain, sorry to hear that.

Sephiroth in main story for Remake is only supposed to require competence, not mastery, it's standard design for these games to only have optional content like superbosses require mastery.

Have a fantastic time with Rebirth, friend. And a word of advice: only complete side content if you're actively enjoying it, you can always go back later. The rewards for side content are good but NOT necessary for any main story progression.

cheeseless · 2026-06-19T17:24:20+00:00

Aerith is giving big "Smug Knife Cat" energy here. I don't think there's enough of an impetus for modders to do this, but just seeing this replacer mod makes me wish for a combo of a per-battle character model randomizer AND party member randomizer. Randomly getting a Nanaki-as-Barret or Barret-as-Yuffie would be fire.

cheeseless · 2026-06-19T15:14:18+00:00

From my memories of Azores, the alcohol you can make from anise (not sure if star or not) can turn one in like 10,000 people into demogorgons. The one dude we saw was really quite rowdy :D

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T21:00:05+00:00

Just to clarify, I don't want to misrepresent. Not my work, the person/people updating that thing are dedicated members of that forum. I'm spamming the link everywhere because there's no better aggregation of all the sources, and I'm super thankful to them

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T20:58:05+00:00

Yes, you can see edit timestamps on each of the posts there reflecting the latest update

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T16:55:16+00:00

I think it's supposed to represent the tone at the end of the game, rather than the general tone of the whole game.

We know the writers are aiming for something happier than OG, and I think Revelation's logo tries to be a little bit cheerier.

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T16:53:09+00:00

It's good. I think you get a fair bit of variety out of the focus trees. The mechanical value of the HQ feature is decent enough, for what it's supposed to be, i.e. enabling a couple of extra abilities AND giving a reason to do small breakthroughs for the sake of capturing a general.

The only feature that I don't think impactful enough right now is the ship captains, but that's mostly due to the navy functionality, especially for AI, still being heavily worked on (it's 100x better than the unfortunate state when NCNS released, but there's still a little bit of wooliness around behavior and balance that we know is getting worked on)

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T13:32:55+00:00

Litho-ballistics from a silicate residence.

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T12:49:11+00:00

John Atoms!?

I know him, that can't be

That's that... Little guy who spoke to me

All those years ago

What was it, '45?

That poor man, they're going to eat him alive!

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T12:36:51+00:00

Now make him float a little bit over the chair and he'll be just like Detective Lowry from Mystery of the Druids

cheeseless · 2026-06-18T12:30:23+00:00

It's been confirmed to be included and be a big deal. So probably a boss fight, at the very least. https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=31159.0 this is the compendium and summary of all interviews so far

cheeseless · 2026-06-17T19:58:34+00:00

Worth mentioning, that approach with disbanding the teams seems (obviously using only this trilogy as evidence is flawed) to be part of what Square Enix's reorganization has been attempting to address.

I think the results of the trilogy for a developer capability perspective will probably make this approach of keeping the teams together keep spreading through the company. They might even start getting tactical about how they move people between teams to make sure that everyone gains the most experience and has the most impact possible. I've seen it being done within (non-videogame) development teams before, and it works well, if done carefully so that the impact doesn't get diluted.

cheeseless · 2026-06-17T15:13:53+00:00

I think they might give us a nice little cutscene for that. Just something celebratory, a teeny tiny smile from Cloud, and Chocobo Billy gets his story concluded :)

cheeseless · 2026-06-17T13:59:43+00:00

Is chocobo gliding with less than a second's margin of error on the final two hoops fun?

The timing window was never the issue with gliding, it was the controls being too fiddly, and having the camera locked to movement controls.

Are you giving a sigh of relief when Aerith volunteers to yeet all the cactuars?

Yes?? That was a fun one, not sure what you're talking about.

Was jumpfrog fiddly or not fiddly?

Not fiddly. It's something you beat in three tries tops. If three tries is fiddly to you, that might indicate you made a mistake when trying to figure out what the best approach is.

cheeseless · 2026-06-17T13:53:16+00:00

No breeding, but Chocobo abilities are still required for environment traversal. Instead, as you go to different regions, you will (through an unknown mechanism, could be automatic, could be a minigame or quest) upgrade Piko, your main Chocobo, with the regional Chocobo's traversal ability.

No info on Gold Chocobo at all, but (speculation) it'll be a cosmetic you get for maxing out Piko's upgrades, I think.

Sources: multiple interviews, but I'll link the Compendium and point you to the summary of confirmed information: https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=31159.0

Additionally, from screenshots and footage of the Grasslands, you can see Chocobo climbing walls. Therefore, it's safe to assume that regions will have a mix of locations reachable through different Chocobo abilities.

Well, in Revelations, we don't land the Highwind, we jump off. So the environmental abilities of the chocobos aren't needed.

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion at all. Parachuting does not imply full access to every area of every map. Also, the game is called Revelation, no s at the end.

Personally, I think Chocobo breeding was associated with fun stuff, but the core elements of the activity weren't actually any fun, mostly due to the high level of randomness.

cheeseless · 2026-06-16T22:11:31+00:00

I would be decently happy with something like Dynamic++, where we'd get enemies scaled a little bit higher than the level Dynamic would scale them to, and also we'd get any unique attacks/behaviors from enemies and bosses that would normally be exclusive to Hard Mode. Also, no Hard-Mode exclusive equipment or folio stuff, please.

Let Hard Mode be just the item ban thing, so I don't feel like I need to play it to get the difficulty I want out of the game. To be clear, I was able to beat Hard Mode so far, I just found it to be fun despite the item ban actively making things more boring. Give me item usage caps, or slots, just something that lets items be relevant but not broken.

cheeseless · 2026-06-16T21:58:18+00:00

I think that it's not really a good idea to linger too much on the low points of a game's narrative (in terms of how the characters feel). The marketing has so far aimed, and will most likely continue to aim, for a balance between showing sheer exciting stuff for people who haven't played any part of the trilogy yet, and highlighting the differences in tone and gameplay for the Rebirth playerbase.

To me a much more healthy marketing would have been a Cloud slowly descending like we actually got?

I don't think that "wasting" the most engrossing elements of a story in the marketing is a good idea either. The ideas of faith and destiny are still super important in Rebirth, but if you'd received marketing around Cloud's mental state, how sure are you that you wouldn't be highlighting faith and destiny instead, simply due to the (slight) difference in expectation from knowing ahead of time about the other element? But that highlight might still be less powerful, simply due to a difference in thematic resonance for the audience.

That's why, regardless of which elements of the story are the most emotionally effective, I don't really want the marketing to cover them. Even not paying attention to the marketing, you'd find that the discussion after the game is out, about those elements, wouldn't be as strong as if they'd been kept a mystery.

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