This started as a ZDK12 theory sideblog, then went through a few passing phases as a (cringeworthy) reblog dump. Now, it's basically an Undertale theory and datamining sideblog. I'm more interested in speculation about Chara and their role in the game I am about Gaster stuff, so expect a lot of Big Time Fucko.
like the thing about "this can't just be a me and you thing" is that kris is definitely upset about it but all of their distress is 100% going to be directed inwards at themself. like if they have even one single thought about how they feel like susie or noelle are leaving them behind or how they feel hurt by them growing closer it will immediately turn into the strongest wave of self-directed hatred possible. they literally think they're evil for being alive. they believe they are intruding on all of their friends' lives and making them worse just by being around them. they're not gonna be wishing noelle was dead or something they will be wishing they could isolate themself so hard that they never existed so they could undo all the harm they think they've caused their friends
I am personally of the opinion that part of the (doylist) reason that the dialogue choices when talking to ralsei are Like That, is because ralsei ultimately needs to define their own identity for themself. constantly asking "is this okay?", constantly trying to define themself by what other people tell them they 'should be', is part of the problem. ideally, the choices should illustrate that you cannot choose what ralsei is. whether you support them at every moment or shut them down completely, they still have to decide for themself how that makes them feel. nothing you do can change their conclusions, only how they get to them. and one day, they will ask you a question where it will not matter what you say, because they have already decided.
we don't talk enough about how susie was chasing those prophecy panels about The Girl and those are what led to the final prophecy. I'm sure that means nothing
so in addition to the broken sword and scarf i think one of susie's axes will be broken by the knight and therefore become an option to synthesize with the pure crystal
... Yeah, I think that makes sense. The "Broken Sword" seemed like just a one-off Spamton Gag in Chapter 2, but the fact we got another "Broken" weapon for a different Party Member seems to make this a pattern... Plus, both the S. Potion and the TrueTie establishing the possibility of Spamton's items having a hidden use...
If you do the Chapter 3 Secret Boss (presumably required for the Pure Crystal) Susie has already chipped the Knight's blade, maybe they're planning to 'return the favor'?
“Dark World food has no nutritional value, she can't eat breakfast there” I have great news about the breakfast situation implied by someone eating classroom supplies the moment they get to school
screenshotting prev tags because it's important. toby's been around the block! he knows how many artists and writers and musicians were inspired by the works of fiction he's created! he's seen the messages everyone sent in for the 10th anniversary of undertale! i would be a ridiculous heel turn for him to be like "actually that's stupid and you need to stop investing yourself in this"
Oh yea, an interesting thing about the breadcrumbs glitch...
Part of how it works is that every individual sub-map in Mother 1 is actually... stored as One Big Map. Very, very literally. The green grassy space is a contiguous walkable area, a true open world. Everything else - building interiors, caves, etc - is stored in the gaps within that area. And then, what space is left unused is... grey.
The world map of EarthBound Beginnings is humongous, and a significant amount of it cannot be seen during normal gameplay. Due to its size, view it here. (Note that the ripped map does not display any objects or NPCs, only the layout of the world.)
Notably, the entire game takes place on one giant map (a trick later repeated for the sequel). Several areas are spaced out with grey filler consisting of random overworld tiles.
Exploring these areas is possible using the bread crumbs glitch in the Japanese version, or by using the walk-through-walls Game Genie code (AEOTEOAP) in Beginnings. Use bread crumbs to refresh the screen once you are in the desired location, or the area will appear to endlessly loop.
For speedrunners, of course, the most important places to traverse send you directly into the endgame - such as walking into the scripted cutscene (a desolate lavender area) that sends you directly to the final boss. You could use it to go anywhere, though, if you wanted - such as unused locations.
There are actually two versions of the Glitch: the famous Famicom version, which lets you skip from the early game to the very end; and the GBA version, which is less popular with speedrunners due to only becoming available during the midgame.
Famicom Version:
A glitch involving the use of bread crumbs allows the player to reach an out-of-bounds area of the map in the original Mother. To activate the glitch, Ninten must never use bread crumbs, and then must subsequently rescue Pippi. If Pippi starts a trail of crumbs and then is delivered safely to the mayor, the player can choose to talk to her to obtain the items from her. Since each character has a separate variable for bread crumbs, and Ninten has not used them yet to set the variable, the crumbs that Pippi hands back to him lead to the default location on the map. The glitch can be canceled by using Bread in certain locations, which can be used to skip a large section of the game. If the player moves too far in any direction, the game will create large amounts of glitched blocks that Ninten cannot pass through.
This method of the glitch was fixed in the English prototype and Mother 1+2. The player can still go out of bounds using the bread crumbs on any other version, but the only legitimate method other than this one is the one at Mother 1+2. To make the GBA method work on the original Famicom and NES prototype versions, a walk through walls cheat is needed to access the specific spot used in Mother 1+2.
GBA Version:
There's another method, which can only be done legitimately on the GBA port (it can work on the original NES version, but it requires a walk through walls cheat because the movement on this version is grid-based, which doesn't allow the player to go to that specific spot). It involves going to a specific spot near the Reindeer train station. The player has to use the Bread on that spot then immediately use the bread crumbs to go out of bounds. Just like the original method, it allows the player to walk anywhere on the map. It is however not commonly used in RTA speedruns due to the fact that the glitch only occurs on the middle part of the game, but if the speedrunner didn't lose significant time on the previous segments, this glitch can still significantly save time by skipping the need for obtaining the eight melodies.
On the one hand, Chapter 5b of Deltarune is very strongly alluding to the idea of using this wrongwarp to skip straight to the ending. On the other hand, everything about 7b's development preview suggests it's actually going to diverge... a lot, from Chapter 7a. Different maps, different cut-scenes, different enemies. You don't encounter "new" cut-scenes or enemies when doing the Breadcrumbs glitch. But new enemies are being developed for 7b... and it seems to be the task furthest behind in development.
I wonder what old games 7b will have allusions to that we can't even begin to predict yet...
Unlike Mother 1, whose content is mostly used, Mother 3 contains vast swaths of unused content, and is itself a whittled-down version of what was originally a more ambitious project - the N64 version was supposed to have multiple villages, for example. Obviously, the Mother series is far from Toby's only inspiration, but I've been an Earthbound fan longer than I've been an UTDR one... so it's what I know, lol.
I do think a lot about how Chapter 3 alludes to the idea of "unused/cut areas" heavily. You can catch a glimpse of Northernlight on the Island Board, but even if you raft all the way there, while Tenna isn't there to stop you... you can't open the Ice Key door outside of the Mantle game, the "original" game. The City Board, a meta example, is actually unused "in real life" - originally intended for a third round by Toby and co, now only present as reduced versions of itself - the ruined and railroaded Doom Board, and the barren lifeless City in the Mantle game. It adds to this sense of something that was cut.
I think people (myself included in some cases) in this fandom are really too willing to say something that they've fully imagined would be narratively dissatisfying. it's like idk. I think it depends
maybe it's just an extension of that "why would I imagine a game I like is going to be bad" thing I talked about awhile ago, but it genuinely is starting to bug me how many posts I see that dismiss a vague idea because it "wouldn't work narratively" (even when I agree). it's just like.. well idk maybe it could. maybe the narrative isn't going the way you think it is based on the half of the story you've seen. maybe it would use that idea in a completely different way than you're imagining and it would rule. maybe the writing would rise to support the idea instead of getting shoved to the side in the way you're imagining.
and that's definitely not to say that there aren't some things that would genuinely be unsatisfying, no matter how they're written. it's just that I think what a lot of people are grasping for in these posts is something more like "I wouldn't like (this specific scenario I've imagined for) it"
related to that last post actually, it's been bugging me to see people conflate the idea of toby fox 'not making characters Pure Evil' with the idea of 'never portraying a character as "villainous"'. or frankly even just 'always having a sympathetic motivation'. like to me the key to not writing Pure Evil into your story is to give your characters like. depth and motivation. and not to suggest that they're like, completely irredeemable (whether they're actually 'redeemed' within the story or not). whether or not you can sympathize with or justify their goals, actions, and/or reasoning yourself has very little to do with whether or not they are actually being portrayed as Pure Evil
#I know I was talking about FRIEND before but in this case I actually think about this a lot with carol #like personally I find carol a wildly compelling character and simultaneously do not find her very sympathetic at all #like sure she 'lost' her daughter. but there is all evidence in the world that carol did not treat her (or noelle) well #and that dess would have left eventually anyway #like carol 'losing' dess was kind of a foregone conclusion and it's only really the circumstances that makes carol at all sympathetic for i #but just because I can't sympathize with carol doesn't mean she is suddenly irredeemably evil #because she is still very much written as an actual person reacting poorly to a bad situation #so like. whether or not there is /actually/ a world where she /does/ become a better person doesn't really matter #so much as the fact that she is written in a way where it is even possible to begin with
I find any insistence that gaster encounter in deltarune would be "too confusing for casual fans" a little silly because like. even the most casual fan, the fan who's never seen even a single pixel of undertale, who boots up deltarune will immediately be confronted by the gonermaker sequence right. and they'll probably also see the same very distinct text show up on death screens/the knight fight/the chapter four credits and like. wonder who this mysterious voice is. so then if the Guy From Voice shows up and says Hi I'm Guy From Voice then I think the casual player is gonna be like ohhh okay it's Guy From Voice
like if the writing of this purely hypothetical gaster encounter did lean very heavily on the assumption that everyone playing already knows him because he is Gaster from Undertale then yeah that probably would confuse some people! but also why would that be what you assume would happen
I did not even know people were saying this what? This would be like saying Dess encounter would be too confusing for people who didn't pick up on all the hints she's gone missing
I find any insistence that gaster encounter in deltarune would be "too confusing for casual fans" a little silly because like. even the most casual fan, the fan who's never seen even a single pixel of undertale, who boots up deltarune will immediately be confronted by the gonermaker sequence right. and they'll probably also see the same very distinct text show up on death screens/the knight fight/the chapter four credits and like. wonder who this mysterious voice is. so then if the Guy From Voice shows up and says Hi I'm Guy From Voice then I think the casual player is gonna be like ohhh okay it's Guy From Voice
like if the writing of this purely hypothetical gaster encounter did lean very heavily on the assumption that everyone playing already knows him because he is Gaster from Undertale then yeah that probably would confuse some people! but also why would that be what you assume would happen
I was never a fan of universal mother theory but I like it even less now, and you might be thinking "oh, because people use it as a way to insist that toriel is abusive/neglectful/alcoholic/etc?" and like that is part of it yes. but also I think it's such a shame because it means a bunch of people are just like.. ignoring what queen's relationship to kris could imply about their relationship to carol?
like I think it was always a stretch to say that queen acted anything like toriel, but "You Do Not Do Crazy Things Like "Have Opinions"" is something I could almost believe carol would say to kris verbatim. the relationship between queen & kris is just way more comparable to the relationship between carol & kris than it is to toriel & kris
I mean. the entirety of the screentime queen and kris have together where it's just them is spent with queen trying to force kris to work together with her. with the goal of finding her surrogate daughter figure who's actively trying to run away from her. who kris also happens to know the exact location of and is keeping from queen. does that not ring any bells. any at all
I do absolutely think there's something funky up with "aborted" weird route just because "why was your hair all wet?" is so.. specific? like. their hair would dry faster than their clothes, wouldn't it? wouldn't you notice if their clothes were soaking wet? something up with that
