it brings me no pleasure to announce this, but it's peak. the furry twink has done it again. total tumblr teen victory. i can't sleep at night and my life is irrevocably changed.
>>42910This.
It’s way more boring and hokey than Undertale.
>>42910>>42911The Zelda part was a little slow at times but I thought the chapter as a whole was very dynamic and fun especially with the way the different set pieces just keep coming at you one after the other.
Also idk the combat seems just as fun to me as Undertale's and it does a good job steadily escalating the difficulty of the bullet hell segments as you get to the later chapters.
>>42917There is one aspect where Deltarune utterly drops the ball. In Undertale, if you focus on combat, the bullet hell aspect, fight things, you naturally end up in genocide run facing tougher challenges. On the other hand, if you engage with characters, story, the world, there is more space for you to explore and discover things. This is inverted in Deltarune. Every chapter has optional things to discover, puzzle to complete, and the reward you get for it is the toughest fights in the game. It completely kills my enthusiasm when I go through all this trouble to uncover these secrets, only to reach a beefgate I cant defeat without 20 restarts I cant be bothered with. I basically ignored all optional contend for chapters 2 and 3, rushing through the story, because I knew it will throw me into some extremely frustrating fight. In chapter 4 you hear about magical axe for Susie I wanted to get, and it didnt sound like bonus boss, it sounded like bonus item. Cool. So I explored, solved the puzzles, gathered the notes to open the secret room with a magical axe… and another superboss. Fought him like 6 times already, managed to get I assume to one of the final rounds, but couldnt beat him. Probably could if I try half a dozen times more, but I dont want to. I dont enjoy bullet hell, I enjoy exploration. It just leaves such a fucking bad taste in mouth.
Now lot of RPG games have optional challenges like this, but those usually a.) have more complex mechanics, so figuring out how to defeat enemy is part of the challenge, and b.) combat and exploration are far more intertwined, you explore, find items, get stronger which lets you tackle stronger enemies, letting you get stronger, etc.
>>42979In Undertale you ultimately end up having to face "hard" bosses like Asgore and Asriel even if you go full pacifist, though. I think your complaint has less to do with the game being too hard and more with the RPG elements being essentially set dressing for a game that's mechanically trying to be WarioWare Touhou with cinematic characteristics. No equip or item really does anything other than speed you along fights where you can't mercy it up faster or make it so your mistakes are less punishing, sure there's stuff that affects grazing but that basically happens by default in most patterns due to how they're constructed (and there's a few cases where the fight itself intentionally restricts your TP gain for the sake of a set piece so grazing does nothing) so it's kind of irrelevant.
That said the difficulty curve would probably be quite a bit smoother if we already had a full game. Undertale's makes sense if you go Neutral > Pacifist > Genocide, i can imagine Deltarune's would if you tackled the optional bosses during a replay.
>>42985>No equip or item really does anything other than speed you along fights where you can't mercy it up faster or make it so your mistakes are less punishingBut can't you reduce almost every action RPG to this? I.e. ultimately the stats are just minor constraints on time/extra chances and control over the action part is what really matters.
Not that that's necessarily a good defense of Deltarune.
>>42985I wouldnt call Asgore or Asriel hard bosses, I had no problem with them, can Asriel even be lost, isnt that a scripted battle where you cant die? Whatever the case, they are a fraction of what you face on genocide route. In Deltarune also, I occasionally have to restart, but in general I wouldnt call anything I faced yet in main story hard (although currently I am stuck on titan fight). But lot of it I do find tedious, unrewarding, and the optional bossfights are very hard. As you wrote, RPG elements are shallow, in terms of combat though they were even shallower in Undertale, but Undertale had much richer interactions with game world outside of combat. In contrast Deltarune is purposefully build around your choices not mattering, but then you have to put in place something else that matters, and I feel like Toby failed in that. Yes, the writing is good, I am invested in the story, but the question I have to ask myself is, I am getting anything out of playing this game that I couldnt out of simply watching a playthrough on youtube?
>>42971I hated that guy. In a very nice meta-narrative touch, him forcing characters to play games that keep getting old tied to my own feeling of being bored with Deltarune, by the end of the chapter I wanted to smash his screen in. Unfortunately you get no such option. Similarly I wanted to freeze Berdly for being an obnoxious cunt, but you cant do that either outside of snowgrave route, and I cant do snowgrave route because I refuse to fight Spam-turbomegakriskilla-ton.
Loved the Queen though. My favorite character post-chapter 1.
>>42986In Deltarune there is so little equipment to be found, and it makes so little difference in combat that it might as well not exist, just doesnt add anything to gameplay. The only exception being items you get by defeating secret bosses, but because in comparison to those everything else is a cakewalk, if you can beat them, you dont need those items.
In most RPGs combat operates on two levels, pre-combat preparation (character builds, acquiring skills, items) and tactical choices during the combat itself (positioning, when and on what you use your skills and items). Neither of those layers exists in Deltarune. You dodge projectiles, that is is, thats all the RPG mechanics the game has.
>>42986Not really, that's more of a limitation of Deltarune's items than anything else. If items did stuff like give you a smaller hurtbox or change how fast the heart moves, or fuck if i know, let you loop around the box arena it would go a long way towards making the RPG aspect more interesting. But the gameplay is less planned around a central set of mechanics and more around giving you some cool new shit to do every fight so i imagine that's why Toby adds shit like (Ch.4 secret content)
a fight that you control via screaming into the microphone instead of interesting equips that probably would need a fair bit of playtesting each.
Also enemies have a really simple and easy flowchart to sparing them which doesn't really help and makes regular encounters pretty boring.
>>42995Bullshit, check these out:
Radiant Silver Gun (Alhamdulililah)
Gingaforce
∀kashicverse
Hellsinker
Jet Buster
ZeroRanger
Rainchaser
Blue Revolver
Any of the Touhou games
Anything by Milestone (Karous, chater and game, is grossly underrated)
Even most CAVE games have a strong bookends. ESP.RA.DE. especially.
Dunno if the anti-CAVE anon is still around, but I'm sure he'll have a load of horzies for you to enjoy.
>>42979>In Undertale, if you focus on combat, the bullet hell aspect, fight things, you naturally end up in genocide run facing tougher challenges.no lol
You have to GRIND EXCESSIVELY to get into genocide route. And I mean excessively. Killing every enemy you see will just put you in the neutral route. You have to stay in areas and walk back and forth until there's absolutely nothing left.
It's not "natural" at all. The vast vast majority of players who do it will already know about it ahead of time.
>>43025Brother, I gave you a whole list. In descending order of textuality. With two collections at the bottom.
Go wild.
>>43031The problem goes beyond merely not incorporated enough, the game utterly fails at communicating information to player, and most bossfights having their own gimmicky rules, so you cant even be sure if it does anything at a particular moment, and the wiki mentions it gets nerfed between in chapters. So what you end up with is an item which helps with TP generation, but the game wont tell you by how much, might not have an effect on particular fight, which the game wont tell you, and whose stats might arbitrary change, which the game wont tell you. So you just inevitably equip whatever gives you the highest defense, because avoiding taking damage is something you want in every fight, although the game still wont tell you how much of an impact it makes,, or whether it actually does work in every fight.
>>430424 out of 8. Halfway mark and everything.
>>43032I cosign this. The only use I've find for the TP items so far is speeding through the Jackington fight.
>>43052What is unhealthy about it? Other than the fact it means
I dont get to date Susie.
>>43008Yeah, the patterns are all almost completely designed around training you to perform almost entirely static Simon Says responses to patterns that barely change relative to what actions you take in-game (even actions disconnected from the dodging itself, such as ACTing) and oftentimes do not even try to check for and fight against instinctive "good" strategies the way great shmups do. Sucks and while that complaint only goes as far as the patterns being "good" and "enjoyable", if you compare it to idk, Sans' fight in UT, which tests memorization so much not just to make a challenge that's inherently time-consuming to overcome, but to give an experience that's intentionally frustrating, directly portrays Sans' strengths & strategy and motives for enacting that strategy in a visceral way, and also plays into the meta themes of the geno route, it falls short.
The
Roaring Knight fight in chapter 3 (and others), which also utilizes memorization and simple call-and-response patterns with the slightest spice of RNG as it's main method of difficulty, does so in a pretty uninteresting way despite it being a bit
fun. Yes it means that you have to play the fight a lot and yes it means that you have to "put in the work" to "overcome almost impossible odds", but this is generic enough to be applied to almost every boss, secret or not. There is not much to be gleaned from what the game is asking of you other than 1. there's knives and 2. you get fucked if you get hit. Often the interesting bits are constrained to story context or what things are or how they are presented rather than how they feel through play (example: chapter 4 secret boss using mechanics from the
Undyne fight), which obviously works well for dialogue and exploration, but coupled with the somewhat boring items and skills it makes the combat feel like more of an unfortunate necessity rather than something the game wants to deliberately play into the same way Undertale did. In that way, falling into a similar trap as JRPGs that use turn-based combat and stats just to portray "characters getting stronger" and "strong enemies requiring time and effort to defeat" in a very plain and restricted way that does not make the player's own strategy, choices or skill matter much. So if that's how it's going to be then IMO Toby could take a bit more inspiration from his alcoholic step uncle and make the patterns more fun to play through, i dunno. And make grazing matter more, it pisses me off that despite it being the mechanic that fights the hardest against boredom it's either basically automatic or useless due to gimmicky fight rules
>>43047A bit lame that he changed it, but i suppose he's gotta be careful after shit like the needle cookie incident
>>43060I'd argue that the end fight of chapter 3 is the only one fight with mostly patterns relying on skill. Or at least, more than memorization alone. Though even that fight isn't save from Toby-stank with the sword dance pattern.
Aside: from what I read, changing the rose was done to avoid getting the age rating changed in some countries. Apparently it's suicide symbolism iuyghurmany.
>>42979bro just admit you're bad at the game and you're mad that you have to get better at the game in order to beat the difficult secret bosses that are entirely avoidable.
it's not "dropping the ball" when your entire complaint is that you suck at the game.
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