Mana, The Legend of Zelda, and Deltarune
So people have been asking a lot of questions about my earlier post. Yknow, the one with this:
Which I figure is fair because I too did not have a lot of information at the time. I was going to wait until I had finished Final Fantasy Adventure to make this post but I got very very stuck so uh. I'll just make another post when I unstick myself.
First order of clarification buisness: Saw a lot of folks in the tags of the last post just referring to this as Final Fantasy. You all aren't exactly wrong but I need you to understand Final Fantasy has about a million different games and you have gotta specify which spin off or else we all get really lost really fast. This is Final Fantasy Adventure, released in the UK as Mystic Quest and rereleased sans Final Fantasy lore as Sword of Mana on the GBA.
Essentially, the unique lore presented in Adventure was used to create a separate series called the Mana series, which exists to my understanding in a sort of quantum paradox of both being and not being Final Fantasy. I think thats probably all of the background you need for now.
Anyway now to the point where I talk about Deltarune:
This is absolutely a callback to Final Fantasy Adventure.
So, I'm just going to say things I know for certain and stay clear of theorizing bc I really do not understand in any capacity what this all means.
The egg room in Chapter 3 is the only place you can speak with the Forgotten Man, a character who is a pretty direct reference to the first Mother game's Magicant. Magicants in the Mother series are a sort of dream world constructed from a person's memories. In the case of Mother 1 it's the Magicant of the titular mother, Maria, who raised the game's main antagonist Gyiyg. It is worth noting that in order to progress past the Forgotten Man of Mother you must promise to forget him, in Deltarune you must do the opposite. His dialogue only progresses if you promise not to forget (which hey wait isn't the main theme of this game entitled Don't Forget. Thats probably important.)
This screen that preceds your encounter with the Forgotten Man, however, is a callback to Wendel in FF Adventure, being the exterior of the building where the Heroine is able to speak to the ghost of her mother and learn of both her family's history protecting the Tree of Mana and by extension the world at large, and the duty she is charged with to do the same. (I have heard rumor in the comments of the last post that this screen is also used preceding the final dungeon, but seeing as im stuck I can't independently verify.)
The Forgotten Man also says this:
Which with the "green-scale" graphics of this room I believe could be an allusion to the Gameboy, and the games hosted on it that Toby Fox derived ideas from in order to create Deltarune. Or, alternatively, it means something else entirely.
Im absolutely certain I've missed a lot here, as I'm fairly certain the rest of "Man Country" references another game, but I'm not certain of that yet so uh.
The Legend of Tenna
Chapter 3 contains a lot of almost meta narrative allusions to games. As with the Gameboy green-scale seen within the Egg Room, theres also the NES style graphics of The Legend of Tenna and its alleged predecessor uh
Mantle? Or maybe Manhole? I see most people call it the Mantle game so that's what I'll be using.
So this is the bit where I get to talk about the Legend of Zelda and the Mana series.
Final Fantasy Adventure was an attempt to make a Final Fantasy game in the style of the original Legend of Zelda. However they're... Tonally dissonant from each other. LoZ is a jaunty adventure with upbeat catchy music while you solve puzzles and slay monsters. FFA on the other hand uh. How do I put this. Theres an aura of tragedy about it, with its simple recursive melodies and the tendency of your traveling companions to die on you (or in a particularly memorable case have to be killed by you).
The Legend of Tenna more directly mirrors the gameplay of LoZ, pretty obviously actually. You don't need me to tell you this. The only exception to the fact is the party system. The main party in Deltarune of Kris, Susie, and Ralsei has always played with and subverted the standard "The Hero, The Girl, and The Mage" party that seems to have originated from the Mana series (more specifically Secret of Mana) so it was pretty neat to see Susie and Ralsei given the same sort of free movement ai that made Secret of Mana so impressive, especially over contemporaries like Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 (1994) (There was never a vol. 2)
Mantle, meanwhile, features FFA's reliance on combat over puzzles and, most notably, the gameplay quirk of progression via breaking environment obstacles. In Adventure this mechanic is reliant upon finding different weapons to take out different obstacles, for example the Battle Axe can cut a path through the trees, but it is very much the same mechanic and one I haven't seen in any other LoZ derivative. (Those are a whole niche btw and one I love very deeply).
Yeah. The Sword Route derives from Sword of Mana, who would have ever guessed.
I do find it interesting how Toby Fox mimicks the composition styles of these two games for the atmosphere though. Using the distinctive percussion beat of the field theme from LoZ in SWORD and those haunting simple melodies from FF Adventure as a basis for Glaceir (typo deliberate). I wish I could find a clean rip of these tracks to show you guys but alas, the closest thing I found was piano midi.
Anyway, this devolved from me discussing lore to me rambling about games that I like but. I hope some of the information here is helpful to people better at theorycrafting than I.
