YOU ARE MISSING SOMETHING IMPORTANT.
The popularity of ANY Undertale or Deltarune character in the margins of the internet cannot be understated. I’ve seen more ‘exotic fanart’ of a personified CRT television set and a minuscule click-bait sales advertisement than I think anyone should reasonably be expected to play unwilling host to. People – fans, will romanticize and sexualize just about anything, whether you’re a five second joke character or the most whacky and desexualized of inanimate objects. And so they should, as they like.
But is Tenna really that interesting? Is he even that funny? Coming hot off the tails of Chapter 2, which prominently features a similar (but in many regards more complex and interesting) light-hearted ‘villain’, Tenna often times feels like a less successful retread of Queen and her strings of inauthentic internet jargon punctuating her fairly villainous pursuits. I think everyone at this point expects a degree of duplicity, intentionally or unintentionally, to the actions and thoughts of the characters in Deltarune. Just like in reality, cognitive dissonance comes in every shape and size and resides in every brain and most actions we as humans take. Tenna displays some small degree of this, he desperately wants to become relevant again in the lives of his family, in a world where televisions and the programming on them once commanded great adulation and excitement, a sense of mass discovery, a sense of community and family, he now sits dusty and for the most part disused – he has no control, and no ability to bring his family together again. With on-demand media, computers, smartphones, and the like – this is true for many families. Television is often times portrayed in media in the 70s and 80s as this exciting, unifying force in the family home, with everyone crowded around the small picture gleefully absorbing the latest installment of this or that. People still have televisions and use televisions (for the most part), but their lives are no longer revolving around scheduled media – instead, media revolves around their schedules instead.
Tenna is very much a bittersweet and sorrowful sort of character under his wackiness. He isn’t evil, he isn’t mean-spirited, and anything showing to the contrary is just a facade. He just wants his family back. It isn’t lost on me or anyone else how truthful (if not purely romantic) this view of television and its importance in our homes has dwindled with the onset of new technology. But there’s something about Tenna and his ‘sweet-precious-silly-good-guy’ shtick that sort of rubs me the wrong way. Although just as silly and wacky with her noblewoman’s laugh and disdain for anything that isn’t her, Queen is very much a villain for her chapter, and wants to expand the cyberworld even further and work with the Knight to create as many dark fountains as possible. Her hot-and-cold, back and forth villain to friend dynamic is equal parts engaging and endearing and keeps the player guessing at what’s going to happen next with such a capricious antagonist, and a thematic echo perhaps of Mettaton. It isn’t that Deltarune can’t have completely good characters, or characters that seem a little too designed to illicit the same cute-attachment draw as a Minion or any Disney joke animal, but Tenna feels like an odd choice of ‘antagonist’ for Chapter 3, a Chapter that lacks any real tension outside of the Weird Route and finale.
Tenna and his views of the world seem only to be colored as ‘correct, but that’s just how it is’. As if there’s no flaw in his perception outside of keeping the Fun Gang spinning their wheels spending time with him. Queen’s perspective of the world and her ability to feed people information ad nauseam, keeping them trapped in a room made of their own search inquiries, pretending to be people’s ‘friend’ when she literally couldn’t care less, and ultimately having incorrect information about the world and how it works – completes her as a character and brings the thematics of this chapter around beautifully. Tenna does waste time – lots of it. But even then the gang and him treat it as ‘time well wasted’ being spent with him as a ‘family’. He has some flaws in his thinking but it all wraps around to him being this sympathetic and ultimately ‘noble’ and ‘just’ sort of character, without exploring any unique flaws or angles to this particular fantasy world of escapism. Furthermore, ‘Television’ and ‘Video-Games’ in this chapter seem to be used almost interchangeably thematically. Tenna isn’t worried about games – half of the Chapter is spent with him on the couch playing them. Historically, after Television, games have been attacked and cited as an influence that pulls children from reality and from their families just as strongly as the internet. It’s only the internet that worries him, the dissolution of the family unit. He’s an uninteresting character. He’s occasionally funny, he’s well designed, but he’s shallow.
If some of Tenna’s actions felt more purely selfish, with no benefit for the gang, or if there was some way to incorporate the negatives of television consumption into his arc and Chapter, giving rise to some sort of tonal back and forth – I think players would likely not have felt so conflicted about this mini-game heavy Chapter. Would there be less television-oriented nudity on the internet? Maybe.
What Used To Be
The horror-like sections of Chapter 3’s weird route involve traversing a small in-game game world reminiscent of Link’s Awakening (or maybe even more like Oracle of Ages/Seasons at times). These sections are the most tense and interesting parts of Chapter 3, eliciting the same kind of organic discovery and sense of adventure as the GB/GBC titles. Breath of the Wild famously ‘reinvented’ and streamlined the open world game, taking what used to be a figurative feeling of exploration and turning it into a literal one. In older game titles, exploration and adventure was almost always dependent on the player – there’s swathes of things to discover and explore organically in titles like Oracle of Ages or Final Fantasy VII, for instance – for those who are bewitched and enthralled by the game worlds. Breath of the Wild reconfigured this idea into it’s least common denominator – even for those who are not engaged and immersed in the game world, there is still a sense of ‘discovery’, a sense that you might be doing something for the very first time, that every time you turn on your console you enter terra incognito. The idea that older titles lacked open world elements or that there was less to find and explore is a very recent and shallow view of classic titles – and a shallow view of games in general. I have read and heard of people who look for ‘one game’. One game to endlessly explore, to endlessly farm, and endlessly explore. Blatant escapism aside, this isn’t the wonder of games, nor is it the art of them. This sounds more like an emotional crutch, an escape from one endless landscape of tasks into another. All good stories must have an ending – and no good game goes on forever.
Final Fantasy VII has a wonderful open world to explore in parts as the narrative progresses. You’re given many different means of traversal across it’s various landscapes and oceans, submarines to explore the seas, an airship to explore the skies – and there’s dozens of bosses, new areas, new items, magic, equipment, and challenges tucked in every nook and cranny of the overworld. Rebirth creates a ‘modern’ simulacrum of this only the likes of which a modern production can halfheartedly regurgitate. There are no open skies, no world map to explore, no various means of traversal. There’s one buggie that you can drive to one location. And there’s one Tiny Bronco you can drive to two locations. No submarine. Nothing is seamless. Everything is a cordoned off area. a 30-year old game has a more seamless and expansive overworld than a modern remake of it with a budget four times as large – sitting at 300 million. VII took a year to make. Rebirth took five.
We’ve lost a lot of progress over the years, to keep up with technology. Do I need to see Cloud Strife’s eyelashes in every scene he’s in to feel like I’m immersed into his world and that his world and experiences are real? No. Do some people? I suppose. Why else would we be doing it? There’s a perverse obsession that’s arisen with ‘realism’ and ‘hollywood’ and ‘cinema’ in games. They used to be so wholly unique – nothing on earth looked like them or felt like them. I think Chapter 3 is trying to touch on these ideas. The horror of being forgotten, the horror of a world lost, and the horror of being remade into something different.
MIKE, the Music, please!
Chapter 3 & 4’s soundtracks are, awful as it is to write this, some of the most disappointing – if not the ONLY disappointing soundtracks I’ve ever heard (and not heard) from Toby. Mostly consisting of remixes of Rude Buster, I was constantly surprised, that is to say – let down that mini-bosses lacked any original compositions for their encounters. Lanino and Elnina, Tenna’s right-hand-weather-people don’t even have a unique boss theme. K. Round, a once-off character you don’t even see again after his battle in Deltarune Ch.1 has his own dedicated boss track that is never played outside of his battle. Toby always uses similar leitmotifs and remixes them into interesting and surprising tracks at different tempos – but they only get Ruder buster which is then played many different times for many different encounters interchangeably with Vapor Buster. That’s not one but two retreads of the main battle theme – and they aren’t even remixes, they are just different tempos.
TV World feels a little too similar in tone and affect to Pandora Palace, and while ‘It’s TV Time’ is undeniably good, it lacks some of the same tension as Chaos King and Attack of the Killer Queen. Black Knife is so jarring and cacophonous that having to listen to it while fighting the Knight is more torturous than the actual battle. Raise Up Your Bat is good, and I look forward to hearing that motif again.
Chapter 4 has some good variety, Ever Higher and From Now On are great standouts of form, and Dark Zone is a personal favorite from this pair of Chapters, and one of the only Boss Tracks here that truly feels as strong as anything from Chapter 2’s incredible set. Spawn and Guardian are again cacophonous, I understand why thematically, but I also think something can sound both intimidating, otherworldy, arcane, AND be pleasant to listen to. I think one of the biggest disappointments in Chapter 4 was Hammer of Justice, which sounds like it has no idea what it’s trying to convey. There are so many motifs and tempos and instruments happening in quick succession and all at once that it just sounds like a panic attack set to music. I wish instead it had focused on one or two instruments like the banjo and the drums like the middle part of the track does with the ‘Freedom’ motif. The bells, the guitar, everything all at once is absolutely dissonant, and it’s a shame considering.
I was disappointed with the music this time around, there were simultaneously not enough and far too much all at once. However, considering the mile high amount on Toby’s plate, the concerts, the streams, the story, the art, design, etc. I think it’s unfair to place so high an expectation on him alone for every individual aspect. That said, I would like to hear more attention be paid to the music, more time given to it, and more care and one-on-one development given.
The Ol’ Jitterbug
Color me ‘so surprised’ and also so genuinely baffled at the amount of contention that final scene created online. I’ve read take after take, some more insane than others about the meaning behind it, how Toriel should be disgusted with herself, how she’s ruining the (Christian, obviously) sanctity of marriage, and so on. Apparently people (I use the word lightly, as I cannot help but shake the feeling that it is a majority of nauseating prepubescents writing these outlandish takes) believe women are only women when they are madonnas.
Toby has spoken in the past that his characters are in general meant to have flaws. All people have flaws, whether they like it or not, and the sanitization of media and ourselves to think otherwise is sick and unhealthy. Just because a woman becomes a mother, doesn’t mean she stops being a sexual being. It doesn’t mean she stops thinking autonomously, it doesn’t mean she sacrifices her own happiness 100% of the time. Anyone who says otherwise isn’t a mother – or is absolutely going to suffer a nervous breakdown sooner than later. Besides the fact that the religion practiced by the Lightners in Deltarune is very obviously NOT Christianity, and therefore we cannot hold the beings in that world to the same Christian values on sex and family that many do in the Sates, we also lack a definitive timeline for how long its been since Toriel and Asgore divorced in this world. If anyone would hold a lonely, divorced, woman to the same self-righteous and hypocritical standards they would hold a staunchly devout Christian mother, they should absolutely reevaluate their relationship with women and what standard they hold any human being to in the real world. If they have been divorced for longer than one or two years, it is absolutely healthy and responsible for Toriel to be attempting to move on and find companionship elsewhere. We still only have glimpses in this world as to why the Dreemurs divorced in the first place. If it’s anything similar to Undertale, where Asgore’s cowardice, indecision, and ultimately, quest for vengeance separated the two of them on ethical and emotional terms, then who can blame Toriel for trying to find some companionship when her ex-husband is (apparently) pursuing a sexual relationship with the Mayor, barely paying any attention to their troubled child, harassing her any chance he gets to the point of obsession, and eating platters of deli meat in broad daylight outside because he was told to – displaying that oh-so charming lack of dignity or self-respect he’s known for in this world.
Toriel could be paying more attention to Kris – I don’t disagree with this. But as someone who has been a weird teenager, there is only so much helicopter parenting you can commit to before you make your child act out even worse than they might already be doing (to some healthy degree as a teenager developing an ego). She ensures they are fed, chastises them for making a fool of theirselves at home and at school, ensures they go to church, and has a clean, safe home for them to return to. What else can she do at this point, without following them around with a ruler and chastising them before they become some sort of basement-dwelling, socially inept, Norman Bates-like character with NO redeeming qualities at all? Toby plays with the idea that evil might be instilled at birth, or created, or developed. We don’t know where Kris’ character is fully going at this point, and how much of their acting out is fully justified. So making moral judgements on Toriel for how they are now is more than presumptive.
Having a new beau over for a harmless glass of wine while you cut up – ever so slightly, while listening to goofy old-timey victrolas, doesn’t make Toriel an abusive harlot. As uncomfortable as it is for some people, our parents are sexual, social, beings just like we are who yearn to be accepted and loved. If you, or me, or Kris, has had to awkwardly come to terms with this at an inopportune time, I have no doubt the universe weeps for us. But the world does not revolve around us, and it certainly (at least I think) doesn’t revolve around Kris. Divorce is hard. Being a human is hard. Being a child is harder. But we are our strongest and most empathetic when we realize that none of us have it easy, and that all of us are doing this for the first time (most of the time).