thinking about how the balloon variation of the chapter 5 ending has the SOUL positioned between kris and susie, like a little heart between them on this romantically-coded walk back home
and it's only at the school that that's no longer the case (with the music 'walking home' going silent as the chirping of crickets takes its place)
left with their heart on a string
not to mention the idea of being walked home/to school got brought up as a date idea several times during the Pink fight
yes it is!
specifically, the entire mew mew fight is a parody of tokimeki memorial, a long-running dating sim series.
in tokimemo, you can ask your love interest to walk home together (or, if your love interest likes you enough, they'll invite you *looks at susie*)
and the walk home is basically a mini-date!
aaaaaaaand if your love interest REALLY likes you, you can trigger a confession scene when they walk you to your house (though it'll always get interrupted)
tl;dr yes it's a throwback to an old romance trope and one that's explicitly referenced in the game itself with mew mew and tokimemo!
it was really cute how Susie and Ralsei got so into it when Kris got a right answer, like they were clustered around Kris's 3DS getting hype for when it looked like they were winning their dating sim game.
your description triggered a weird memory about me reading something about a dating sim where someone got eaten by a bird, so I looked it up and it seems like Toby did an interview about playing Tokimeki Memorial (and fully made that shit up).
it's a good thing no one in deltarune has ever.............gotten eaten.....by birds...............
