i'm the way that they made me!

I have quite literally not been so fixated on a character since the actual Hatsune Miku. Like yes Noelle is my favorite character in the game (and I’d say one of my favorite characters in fiction alongside like Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Basil Hallward from the Picture of Dorian Gray and like Forrest Gump) and I probably am going to go through a heavy fixation on her just like I did in 2021 all over again in a few months but….

Right now my thoughts are SUBSUMED by Pink. Like overwhelmingly conquered by her. She has gotta be my favorite boss I’ve ever fought and I just wanna talk more about what makes her so great in my ongoing series of extreme Pink posting. I still have so much to say about her character even after my Pink Lore post but right now I just wanna talk about the gameplay.

The purple soul mode was always my LEAST favorite in Undertale. Like yes it’s a little fun and some cool things were done with it, specifically with the big muffin guy who chases you. I just felt like most of the attacks were pretty same-y because they all just had movement in the y coordinate be restricted to specific locations. It was fun because it was well designed but it wasn’t fun because interacting with it was inherently fun.

Deltarune has totally changed this. Every soul has gotten a lot more mechanical nuance of course, feeling out the charge frames on the yellow and orange souls in order to properly take advantage of their new abilities, grazing being a super rewarding and fun mechanic to make bullet hell and RPG blend more authentically, and the green soul kind of just being the same thing but with diagonals added this time. But the purple soul mode has just been developed to an insane extent. I think to demonstrate that point I have to lay out what all has been added to each soul mode:

Yellow is sideways now and can charge a big shot. It is fun to charge a big shot, it’s great to feel out when it’s ready to use, or use funne glitch and spam if you’re on PC. Still not a huge change, but it’s nice to have.

Green soul got diagonal blocking. It definitely adds some difficulty and nuance and makes you think really hard about where the shell is getting deflected to, but it’s the most similar to the original soul mode.

Orange soul is brand new and it’s really interesting because it is always moving but it slows down as it charges. It’s kind of like the slick star from Kirby Air Ride? It’s really fun and compatible with how I like to play games, but it’s ultimately a simple mechanic to just have a charge that leads to a boost of speed and the ability to wreck blue shit.

Now nothing is wrong with mechanical simplicity and I’m not saying anything bad about any other soul mode, they all are very fun and the bullets around them are super well designed, but purple goes insane.

For purple, the ability to move sideways in grids was added and each attack was given custom strings. The feeling of switching is also a lot more visually responsive and tactile, making it feel less like a flash game and more like Frogger, which is kind of huge for such a highly developed secret boss as Pink. This already allows for so much creativity, like only four points extending off of a center point, a full grid, a super specific path you have to input quickly, and then also just more Muffet style attacks except way faster and harder. Then, they added the freaking 3D thing where you’re being chased from behind and have to go further forward but as you advance you get tinier. It’s really hard. If it were a minigame it would take me an hour to T rank it. It’s still really fun though. The most important addition, though, is the TP gain and loss mechanics added for this fight.

Like most chapter five bosses, as well as most secret bosses, the fight is advanced with acts that cost TP to use. But because grazing is a much more difficult concept on purple soul, you instead have to collect pink hearts to reassemble a shrunken TP bar. This means you’re constantly trying not only to avoid attacks but to get to the points that restore your TP so you can advance the fight. It’s so much fun inherently because it pushes the risk vs. reward way up. And, even more brilliantly, Ralsei has an act in this fight that increases your max TP by 14, which is a lot, making him the central character of the fight from a gameplay point of view, which strengthens the narrative parallels. The Knight did the same thing by making Susie the main party member due to her high damage output. And, just like in that fight, our main party member for the fight is the one who talks. It’s great. I love it. I’ll talk about why Pink is turning Ralsei trans later.

The dating sequences are also just delightful. The fact that in the middle of this frantic and amazing fight you have a date sequence based on choosing puns is amazing. I really would love to have just a list of dozens of potential prompts and have a minigame version of this in Castle Town. I would absolutely T rank that shit and love every second of it. Please give Pink a Castle Town activity I would be SO happy.

The final super attack being a super fast input hostile date feels almost like a payoff of the dates from Undertale. Like finally a date that can kill you.

I also love the attacks that use the Switch Undertale bullets because I played Undertale primarily on Switch (about fifty hours on steam and over 200 on Switch). The best part for me is absolutely the part where she knocks the bullet box around like every time something like that happens it’s awesome but this is the coolest one.

And man the visuals with all the dummies waving lighters and the lip synced idol animations for the one red soul attack and how many sprites they gave her and her freaking portrait and visual novel art and her theme song which is so brilliant and perfect and frantic and fun and so so well arranged and composed and just AHHHHHH

Pink is everything that makes me love every other secret boss times a million. I guess all she lacks is like a super mysterious and foreboding presence, but ghosts are still mysterious in Deltarune and she absolutely is a character with intrigue because of some of her shop dialogue. I’m interested in knowing more about her and I think some people are being insanely uncharitable towards her and I think it’s because they can’t imagine a goofy trans girl with Miku in her theme is actually lore relevant. I think she’s as lore relevant and as complete of a character as somebody like Spamton, don’t get me wrong, she isn’t as narratively essential as the Knight or even Gerson, but I couldn’t imagine chapter five without her.

Jax doodles (TADC escape au)