DYUWOH

live a live starts off as kind of an "anthology" of sorts. you get your pick of seven different protagonists in seven different points in time, and at first none of them seem related to each other. the chapters all play differently and can be played in any order, and you can absolutely see the throughlines that would come to influence undertale. besides the well-known connection between "megalomania" and "megalovania" (one of those excerpts above comes from this interview featuring toby fox and live a live's composer yoko shimomura, which expands on that a bit more), the "twilight of edo japan" chapter has you playing as a shinobi infiltrating a castle to rescue a political prisoner, wherein your choice to kill or spare the enemies you encounter can affect the ending to a subtle extent. you get special rewards for killing no one at all, or for killing Everyone (neither are an easy or straightforward feat). i'm sure that sounds familiar. the main character of the chapter will keep a verbal tally of all the lives he's taken throughout it, emphasizing how much the life of every enemy weighs on him. less drastic than the way undertale would execute on that idea, but the influence there is obvious.

in the interest of brevity im going to tldr pretty hard here but the gist is that once you clear all seven chapters through those seven different points in history, you'll have noticed there are certain elements that crop up in each chapter. the spectacular closing track of "megalomania" will, for example, play at the end of each one for the climactic final boss fights, and each final boss is named in a distinct way that hints that they're connected. OD-10 the malicious supercomputer from the distant future chapter, O. Dio the raging bandit from the wild west chapter, Odie O'Bright the murderous pugilist from the present day chapter, and so on. all of those names sound awfully similar, and this is for a reason. however, it's not until you've bested all seven chapters that an eighth chapter opens up: the middle ages.

the middle ages starts of as your very classic bog standard rpg. you play as oersted, a hero and swordsman who's just won princess alethea's hand in marriage in a tournament. but when the terrible "lord of dark" abducts said princess, it's oersted's job to rescue her. he recruits his friend streibough, a mage who competed against him in the tournament but nonetheless volunteers for the cause, and off he goes. the full story is a pretty substantial one - in addition to streibough, oersted also connects with hasshe, the man who used to be the kingdom's most beloved hero, now turned hermit and misanthrope, and his magician friend uranus, and they join his quest. but when they reach the lord of dark's domain, alethea isn't there. half the party gets killed in the process of turning back to the kingdom; not only do they return empty-handed, but both streibough and hasshe are gone. worse, during the night, oersted confronts a specter that looks like the lord of dark, only for it to be an illusion.

when the smoke clears, it turns out oersted has been tricked into murdering the king in cold blood. the entire kingdom that once lauded him as a hero turns on him immediately, calling him a demon and a monster, the true lord of dark, and oersted is thrown in jail. with the last of his strength, uranus frees him and pleads for oersted to keep his faith, insisting that he can prove them wrong and clear his name by saving the princess. oersted intends to do just that, but then he learns that his friend streibough isn't dead at all. in fact, streibough orchestrated most of this. he faked his death. he planted the illusory lord of dark, causing oersted to kill the king. streibough, festering in envy over oersted claiming alethea's hand, did all that he could to make his friend fall from grace. he challenges him to a no-holds-barred fight one final time. when oersted triumphs and kills his former friend, alethea emerges from the shadows, heartbroken that her true love streibough has been slain. she pulls a juliet and kills herself rather than betray their love, leaving oersted alone and heartbroken.

now here's an important aspect that goes relatively unaddressed but is very noticeable throughout this entire chapter: unlike every other playable character, oersted is a genuine silent protagonist. throughout the bulk of his chapter, he expresses virtually no narrative agency whatsoever. and this stands out in the context of live a live! even player characters like pogo (who is from a time before spoken language existed) or cube (a little robot with no conventional means of speaking aloud) can express themselves and exhibit more agency than oersted does. unlike any of them, he never says a word. he never speaks up or defends himself from the kingdom of lucrece as it turns against him.

it's only at the very end of his chapter that he turns towards us, the audience, and speaks aloud. not just because he is no longer silent, but because he is no longer just a protagonist.

betrayed, embittered, and utterly beyond hope or redemption, oersted is at his lowest. he did everything that was asked of him, and yet he is hated and reviled. named demon. monster. so why shouldn't he be one? he renounces his humanity, casts aside his old name, and claims a new one - "odio," which translates to "hate" in romance languages like latin and spanish. oersted, so warped by his own misanthropy, scatters aspects of himself throughout time and space, and these are the final bosses you've been facing all the while.

the middle ages chapter is considered one of the highlights of live a live, and for good reason. it plays heavily on expectations, demonstrates how a classic heroic story can turn into a genuine tragedy. the english translation in the remake goes above and beyond by having every character speak in iambic pentameter. because as spiteful as oersted/odio becomes, it's impossible not to see where he's coming from. he was screwed over profoundly at virtually every step of his journey through no fault of his own. it doesn't make his decision to write off all of humanity throughout time and space any less horrifying, but you can see how he got to be that way. you can see what pushes someone to become that kind of monster.

now this isn't actually the end of live a live. there's one more chapter, and depending on how you play it, it can go one of a few ways. you get your pick of any of the eight protagonists for the last chapter - because you can pick oersted/odio. and if you do, you basically get to do a villain boss rush and play as all the final bosses in each chapter, rewriting history so they win and odio gets his victory. or, if you're losing badly in any of those fights, you can just hit the "armageddon" button, which fully detonates every single time period and ends the whole world (not unlike the way you see the "no mercy" route in undertale come to a close, which culminates in you erasing this pointless world utterly). either way, no one actually "wins" here. if you armageddon, odio wipes out every timeline out of spite, because if he can't win then no one can. otherwise, odio spends the ending credits desperately screaming at the player to believe in him, for he is the hero true, and he roams what's left of lucrece in utter isolation. it's a bitter and terribly revealing aspect of his character: at the end of the day, what odio wants, and what oersted has always wanted, is simply to be loved and accepted and told that he was doing the right thing. even as he became his own antithesis, he never stopped craving that.

BUT! if you pick any of the other main characters, you get a more satisfying end to the story wherein all seven characters are abducted from their respective times and spirited away to the kingdom of lucrece, now bleak and bereft after odio basically purged all of its living inhabitants. there, you pick through the ashes of odio's monstrous deeds and connect with six other strangers out of time. once you assemble a full party, you can make your way to odio and confront him for good. after you best him, you'll be faced with a familiar choice: to kill him, or to spare him. predictably, killing him doesn't yield a terribly satisfying ending, and strands the heroes in the desolate kingdom of lucrece. the evil is gone, but they can never return home. sparing him, however, nets you the best and most satisfying ending of the game, wherein oersted reaches a sort of peace before fading away. except...

well, the remake does something funny. it adds a whole new remake-exclusive bossfight with odio in his purest form before you can get the golden ending. it's the only fight in the game that takes you out of the four-party-members-maximum arrangement inherent to the game. fighting him takes all seven of the other protagonists acting in tandem. and even then, it's not enough to beat him. not quite.

it takes oersted, registering the genuine horror of all he's become, reconnecting with his latent humanity, and physically ripping himself out of the manifestation of his hatred so he can deal the final blow and destroy it for good. it's a nice closer, and the game ends with oersted sending all the other characters back home and fading away, presumably unable to continue maintaining his existence now that he's cleaved himself from the hatred that consumed him. his final words are ones of caution: that anyone at all has the potential to become as monstrous as he was, with the right incentive. that's his thesis, in a sense. any one of the other heroes you played as could have become what he did, under the right circumstances.

so yeah, the remake has an addition that is very, VERY undertale. i've seen people compare it to the asriel dreemurr boss fight at the end of true pacifist, and not without reason. it's a very neat full circle moment, because undertale got a lot of its inspiration from live a live, which in turn got a little bit of inspiration from undertale for the remake (and i'm not purely talking out of my ass for this; during the live a live 25th anniversary concert, a little flourish was added to megalomania as a purposeful nod to undertale). and once you step back and look at oersted's story in particular, it's difficult not to see the overarching parallels there. oersted has a very similar character arc to both flowey/asriel and "chara"/the fallen human. you can see in both of those characters the bones of oersted from live a live. the remake's english translation gives oersted some very shakespearean dialogue that would not sound out of place coming from the fallen human. and i think it's worth noting that oersted's story ends in the same bittersweet way that the dreemurr siblings' does - namely in that he's made peace with all the worst parts of himself, but cannot continue to live on in the doomed world he's created.

so what's this all have to do with kris and deltarune?

well, i'm pretty averse to making any super decisive statements given that, at the time of writing, we only have chapters 1 to 5 of deltarune, and not the whole story. but just as i can see distinct parallels between oersted and certain characters in undertale, there are absolutely some connections we can draw between oersted and kris, who definitely exhibits some of the same traits we see in asriel and chara.

that first parallel toby mentioned in the interview is the biggest one. he refers to them both as "a sword-wielding fantasy knight, who may play another role than just a a simple 'hero'," and while their contexts are very different, it's still true. oersted is both a hero and a villain at different points in his story, and depending on the actions of the player, he can die a hero or a villain. kris is, likewise, simultaneously both a protagonist and antagonist in a sense - their goals are not 1:1 with ours, or at least they're not willing to chance that their goals are aligned with ours. they are, to some extent, working with the roaring knight, thus far the most obvious antagonist of the piece. so like oersted, one could reasonably call them both a protagonist and antagonist, depending on one's point of view. time will tell how potent these parallels might get.

the second parallel that comes to mind is also pretty muddied based on kris's very unique role within deltarune, aka as a playable character who purposefully separates themself from player control and uses that to their own ends. but it's worth noting that for the bulk of oersted's playable sections, he goes unvoiced. again, he only starts speaking once he has made his full-blown descent into villainy. it's only once he has renounced his humanity that he starts exhibiting actual narrative agency. kris, conversely, is and has thus far remained explicitly human, and while they go unvoiced, they absolutely exhibit narrative agency outside of player control. they choose how to deliver dialogue to make their real feelings apparent, they communicate with other characters beyond the constraints of the game, and they will act without player input, both with and without the SOUL. so both are playing with rpg conventions regarding the classic "silent protagonist," but in very different ways. that's more meta-textually interesting than anything, but it's still pretty neat and there could be very well be payoff for this with kris down the road.

the third parallel comes back to the notion of a "hero." in both cases, oersted and kris are, in-universe, defined by their roles as hero. live a live lacks any kind of overarching prophecy or fate-writ edict that claims oersted must be a hero; rather, he is deemed one by everyone around him. he is a talented swordsman who bests every other opponent in the tournament hosted by the king, thus winning the princess's hand. when the princess is captured, the overwhelming societal expectation is that oersted will save her. he was promised to her and she to him. he is, to everyone else, a hero. it stands to reason that he should do as a hero would, and rescue the king's daughter, slay the demon that stole her away, and save the day. because that's what a hero does. oersted acts in accordance with everyone's wishes, and this is ultimately what bites him in the ass. him being labeled a hero essentially does nothing but ruin his life in the long term.

kris is likewise saddled with the role of "hero," this time by a prophecy that the narrative repeatedly stresses cannot be defied. deltarune naturally does a lot of playing around with what constitutes a "hero," and there's a lot of ambiguity in the language, such as who "the girl" in the prophecy really is. (that ambiguity is in part why i imagine the alternative weird route is possible in the first place, but i digress.)

so within the context of the prophecy, kris is by definition a hero. but their importance to the prophecy (at least as based on what we see in chapter 4) is rooted more in what they are, not who they are. they do not have hope crossed on their heart. what makes them important is that they are a "cage," a vessel containing a human SOUL, likely because a human SOUL is essential to sealing dark fountains. and there is some of that in oersted's story too, because by the end of the best ending he makes the explicit argument that he himself was nothing special. nothing about him made him uniquely capable of becoming the lord of dark. it was something he chose to be after reaching a low enough point. it was, in a way, the only way he could express any agency within his narrative.

and that's another mark of similarity. kris and oersted both hit the predetermined boundaries of what they should be capable of in their own respective stories. both wind up breaking those boundaries to their own ends - kris to do things without the SOUL's input or knowledge, and oersted to cast aside his humanity and become something else entirely. the nature of the way they're defying expectation is very, very different, but i'd say the connection is arguably there. again, time will only tell if that parallel gets more potent later on.

there's also the question of their histories. oersted and streibough are implied to have been friends for quite a while. it's not known to what extent, but streibough addresses oersted with friendliness during the tournament, and when he volunteers to help his friend rescue alethea, oersted is familiar enough with him to accept the help and not find anything suspicious in that. yet by the end of the middle ages chapter it becomes apparent that a huge rift has formed between them, seemingly unbeknownst to oersted. streibough implies long history of jealousy, furious at always being overshadowed by his friend's heroics. it was oersted claiming the hand of alethea, whom streibough was in love with, that really sent him over the edge. there are potential threads we could draw between kris and noelle in deltarune there - the sword-wielding hero and their magically talented friend who were once close but drifted apart over time - though hopefully it won't grow as tumultuous as oersted and streibough did. funnily enough, the weird route doesn't really line up with that dynamic at all, at least not as of chapter 5's release; however horrific the situation is with kris and noelle as they descend into the lake, they're committing this self-destructive act together, and not tearing each other apart in a fit of hatred, even if there's no question that kris doesn't want to be doing this.

(there are more potential threads i could pull there with some extracanonical material we get in live a live's crossover with octopath traveler, which focuses on the middle ages characters exclusively, but the canonicity of that is kind of debatable and this post has gotten long enough already lol)

this next parallel is one of the more obvious ones, but it's also kind of vague because we can't say how much of a motivating factor it is for kris, even if it's an indelible aspect of their character, but both oersted and kris are deeply, terribly lonely people, and that informs their actions accordingly. the end of oersted's route in the final chapter sees him roaming lucrece, alone, and ultimately finding no satisfaction in it. he is victorious but unloved, and the game makes clear that there is tragedy in that.

and kris...well, kris's loneliness is pretty much a given. they're the only human in hometown. prior to the story's start, they only had one consistent friend in their brother, and he's at college. their family loves them, but their family is also fractured and unlikely to mend itself to what it once was. the fact that kris is as isolated as they are is one of the reasons why the core relationship of kris, susie, and ralsei is so compelling - because all three of them are deeply lonely on some level, and were compensating for it in different ways. kris acted creepy and off-putting, susie put up the front of an aggressive bully, and ralsei was a people-pleasing doormat to the extreme. connecting with one another allowed them to discard those mechanisms and become more true to themselves and become more honest with themselves and each other. yet even then, kris is working with the knight to an unknown extent. ralsei knows a lot about the prophecy and its machinations and how the world works, is called an "impossibility" by flowery, and yet player insight into this is limited. susie, who trusts both her friends, is thus far from our perspective taking it as a given that they're with her every step of the way, and does not know to what extent this might not be true. and that's to say nothing of noelle, and her whole deal. but all over kris's story, there are elements of them being alienated and alone and wanting to reach out the the people they've come to treasure, but being limited in their reach. they made a promise. they're working at cross-purposes with these people. they have their own motivations.

i can only hope that their story doesn't end the same way oersted's does.

but one of the biggest takeaways i get from the similarities between oersted and kris, however, is the way both are portrayed in their respective source material. namely in that both are introduced in a way that essentially primes the player to interpret them in the worst faith imaginable - only for the camera to pull back and contextualize them more fully. we meet odio as a villain, first and foremost. we meet him as a villain seven times over before we're permitted to get a glimpse at who he was before that, and what circumstances could change a heroic knight into an avatar for hatred. likewise, our first exposure to kris is that of a kind of creepy, lonely kid who everyone knows but not a lot of other characters profess they like all that much. NPCs question kris's unusually talkative nature when the kid engages them willingly in conversation, asriel is all but stated to be their only real friend, and people who played undertale beforehand certainly noticed their striking similarity to a certain other child who favors wearing green-and-yellow striped shirts - a child that we only get to "see" in real time at the end of undertale's bleakest, most devastating route. that final frame of deltarune's chapter, featuring kris pulling out a knife and flashing a sinister grin at the player, is easy to interpret as menacing.

but over time, we have gleaned more from kris beyond that. we see them befriend susie and ralsei, reconnect with noelle, and express themself in ways beyond player input. i definitely still see a lot of people professing that kris "seems super evil" and a general lack of trust in their motives, but if i can hazard a gentle prediction, or perhaps just a hope and a dream...i would venture that perhaps we have not seen their middle ages chapter just yet.

because if there's one thing toby's historically done very well, what we've seen repeatedly in his works, it's his demonstration that an antagonist is never just an antagonist. asgore is not a one-dimensional tyrant of a king in undertale; he made a terrible decision in a moment of grief and rage and was unable to take it back. undyne is not purely an unrelenting pursuer attacking you throughout waterfall; she is motivated by kindness and love for her friends, and wants to see monsterkind freed. flowey is not spiteful for the hell of it; he's a dead, traumatized little kid who lost everything and driven to push the boundaries of what's possible because he can't fathom anything mattering anymore. tenna isn't just a television host who wants to keep you in his game forever; he's terrified of letting anyone go because he doesn't want his existence to end, to be seen as obsolete.

that's a consistent thesis we see in toby's works: people are not evil Just Because. people aren't born malicious or spiteful or petty; they are made that way by their circumstances. and this might not excuse their actions, but it contextualizes them. that's what live a live's middle ages chapter does for oersted: it contextualizes him. it shows us why he became what he did, and then the game asks us to show him the kindness he craves but never received. depending on which character you play as in live a live, oersted will receive final words that can vary from commiseration to admonishment to a simple hug. regardless of what he's done, you spare him nonetheless. it's the same thing that undertale asks us to do with asriel and even, to an extent, his sibling. not necessarily forgiveness, but understanding and peace. i'm predisposed to be terribly sympathetic to kris myself, so i can't wholly step away from my bias there...but i'm also terribly sympathetic to oersted.

we have not seen what prompts kris to make a "promise" that puts not just them, but their family and possibly all of hometown at risk. we get suggestions that they are conflicted about this promise, whatever it entails. we get implications of someone desperately lonely, someone whose sense of identity and self-worth is so bereft that they seem willing to follow up on that promise to an extent.

so what makes kris into someone who makes a promise like that?