Haven't The Foggiest

Well-designed video game music is like a well-designed video game story, in that it's extremely tricky to make and requires juggling a lot of moving parts. Like a film's score, it needs to align both narratively and visually with the medium it was made for, but it ALSO needs to align with gameplay mechanics and an enormous variety of gameplay experiences. Music is often the emotional vehicle that drives the player's moment-to-moment feelings during gameplay, and as a result the best video game music is very good at capturing distinct feelings and moments.

As an example, the beautiful and poignant compositions of Minecraft's Daniel Rosenfield were recently added to America's Library of Congress. Minecraft wasn't added, just the music. Building on this, I still remember that some ten years ago Toby Fox's Megalovania was played for the previous pope by the Vatican's orchestra. They didn't even know the song originally came from a video game; to them it was just good music that they thought the pope would enjoy.

The true strength of this design strategy is most apparent when looking at the game's vast selection of cosmetics, because it's truly impressive how recognizable the characters' faces remain regardless of what's added to them, none more-so than Heavy. That man's mountain-shaped skull and hawkish nose are so well-defined that even covering his face entirely with a mask can't prevent it from remaining readably "Heavy:"

This unintentional strategy of designing the facial structure first and applying cosmetics after is something more modern hero shooters could benefit from. Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, and even Valve's own Deadlock's character designs occasionally suffer at-least slightly from "same face syndrome" (ESPECIALLY the women!) which renders said characters unrecognizable the moment you change their accessories. This is a major problem when your gameplay and marketing rely heavily on character recognition, and funding relies heavily on selling character accessories!

And Flowery and the Flowers trying to protect their World of Fantasy for Asgore’s sake and their own sake. Protecting it with all of their might… But it turned out to not only be not what Asgore truly wanted…

But it was inherently temporary for them as well, it would’ve eventually killed them.

But it was still such a beautiful dream, while it lasted.

And also, Asgore’s own goal was a Fantasy in it and of itself. The idea that just proving that ‘it wasn’t his fault’ and that he was 'right' and punishing the person responsible would just immediately fix his life was a Fantasy, to cover over how much of it was more because of his own obsession and guilt. And by the end of the Chapter he has to confront it.

And then also, Rudy’s faking ‘getting better’ for the sake of Noelle backfiring on him in such a horrible way…

And you also have Pizzapants at the Festival, the Fantasy of Pizzerina’s existence finally collapsing in on itself, and yet the only paths to Happy Endings seem to be the one that maintain the Fantasy on some level and not the one path that reveals the Truth… or so it seems for now…

Susie’s optimism and trust in her friends is still a powerful force, but it’s becoming more and more like willful ignorance of Kris’s shadiness…

And just… Susie, in general…

One of the most interesting aspects of Deltarune's story to me is the way its unique worldbuilding can force its characters to sometimes counteract narrative convention. Here's a great example:

Basic rules of storytelling would dictate that it will feel incredibly contrived for the protagonist to suddenly find the shelter code they need without any foreshadowing earlier in the chapter, making this moment something one could easily consider a mistake... but here it's a necessity.

Deltarune is a story where the audience (player), protagonist (soul), and secondary antagonist (Kris) are forced to share a single perspective most of the time. This means that information the audience learns is also information that Kris and the soul learn, and since Kris is opposed to the soul's objective (entering the shelter), there are times when the audience CAN'T be allowed to learn something to ensure Kris (or the soul) can't intervene. Before chapter 5, it's primarily Kris using this dynamic to deny information from the soul (especially in the Weird Route) however it's deliberately done so in a way that strengthens the mystery elements of Deltarune's story. Chapter 5 is the only time we've seen another character use the same strategy against Kris.

In fact, before Deltarune I had actually planned out a whole game that was going to use the player-is-unwittingly-controlling-a-character-against-their-will idea that we see with Kris and the soul. I was a little crestfallen when Toby beat me to the punch on that, but he's also explored the idea in a lot more interesting ways than I was ever going to.

In general, I believe the value of storytelling in games is an under-appreciated art. I had a whole argument with my dinosaur of a game design teacher over it back in school, as he held to the old 90s-era belief that stories in games are nothing more than a background element used to offer the barest contextualization to gameplay. The primary argument I had was that literally everything humans do is defined by stories. Our memories are structured as narratives, we literally call the documentation of our past "his-story," and the thing that keeps fandoms alive long after a game's relevance otherwise would have ended is story and character. Gameplay moments stick in our brains only when they form memorable narrative patterns.

Hilariously, we actually both used the exact same games as proof of our beliefs, that being Portal 1 & 2. My design teacher argued the Portal games were nothing but puzzles with the barest minimum of stories, but remained relevant to this day because of their revolutionary mechanics. I argued that Portal's undying fandom despite its games being over a decade old was due to the second game's excellent writing. The gameplay was revolutionary, sure, but what gave it lasting power was the story, setting, and characters. Sure, games like Tetris or Minecraft can get by on immaculate gameplay alone thanks to their replay-ability, but most games are very much a one-and-done experience that rely entirely on storytelling to stay in your brain.

As in, no it isn't healthy for Susie to sleep in that closet and fully replace real connections with imaginary ones, but that doesn't mean those imaginary connections don't matter, either. The power of storytelling allows our minds to temporarily go mad and become fully enveloped within imaginary worlds, and even after the story is concluded, those worlds continue to exist within our heads. You have the power to create your own "dark world" at any time.

Well, on some level that started already in Chapter 4, with the Hammer of Justice introducing the idea of Lightners being reborn in Dark Works as Darkners under very specific circumstances.

But the Flowers really put that point front and center. They are living things that receive some sort of Wish-Fulfillment in the Dark World, much like how our Lightner characters receive cool outfits and powers… but the main Wish being fulfilled for them is having a higher form of consciousness and a more anthropomorphic form, like how Darkners come to life in the Dark World. Flowery’s portrait is Black-and-White, much like the Lightner characters, because he is a kind of Lightner as far as the metaphysical mechanics of Light and Dark function… except he also has colorful Darkner-like Golden eyes.

And so much of the conflict of this Chapter is based on their unique liminality. They’re Lightner enough that being reduced back to their Light World ‘inanimate’ form feels much more like a death to them then it feels to a regular Darkner (who can find contentment as inanimate objects, as they are ‘alive’ from the Dreams the Lightners associate with them)… but also Lightner enough that they can’t actually survive for long in the Dark World, their physical bodies still have their regular physical needs, but unlike Susie, they also can’t exactly pull out of the Dark World, grab a snack for nourishment and then pull back in.

And then the Secret Boss is another kind of Liminal being, a more traditional Darkner (in the sense of a truly inanimate object come to life) that’s also being brought to life due to being possessed by a Lightner ghost. Another sort of unique being who is not quite as Ontologically Doomed as the Flowers, but struggles with figuring out what her identity is in her own way. She feels more at home with other Liminal Beings like the Flowers, despite being technically a different kind of being.

All of this feels like build up to exploring the nature of Ralsei, the so-called ‘impossibility’, who already has some of their own ‘Liminal’ elements - they look much more ‘like a Monster’ than any other non-Gerson Darkner, they can appear and survive in every Dark World, and from a meta-narrative perspective, their role as a Darkner Playable Party Member seems to clash with the game’s meta-commentary making Darkners to be like a whole species defined as Video Game NPCs on some level.

They don’t quite seem to match any of the ‘Rules’ of the Liminal Beings we know of so far. Resurrected Lightners like Gerson are specifically mentioned to only appear in very specific Dark Worlds, so this is like the opposite of Ralsei’s situation, and even with their white fur, their portrait seems considerably less monochromatic to me than Flowery’s. But I think this is still a thematic build-up being done to explore different kinds of liminality between Light and Dark and how they affect the relevant characters, before we get into the particular kind of liminality that Ralsei represents.