did you guys already talked about this scene or not ?
I know it, & I've thought about it a lot.
Funnily enough, this thread was just criticizing how "copies are monochrome" could refer to games, but I had thought about that.
en.wiktionary.org
Monochrome doesn't strictly mean "black and white". It can mean being a single colour.
& in Mancountry, the Forgotten Man says that the whole world used to look like this.... In a room where everything is a shade of green, evoking old Game Boy displays. In a sense, this could be monochrome.
I've wondered if Deltarune is a video game diegeitcally.
Like, it is to us, the player, but.... As the fleeting prophecy panel says:
"The Legend of this World.
<Deltarune.>"
On one hand, it is shattered by Kris & Susie, possibly foreshadowing that the legend, the prophecy, shall be shattered by them.
& in the prophecy panel that we can't see, which Ralsei tells Susie is, to his knowledge, is what the angel actually looks like, prompting Susie's unnerved response of "I don't know about that, man".
For us, all we can see where that panel is is the darkness of our screen, as if intended to show our screen's face dimly in the screen's reflection.
Meanwhile, Gaster seeks "my Deltarune". His own. He says it is far from complete?
& promotional materials say Deltarune is waiting. What waits for someone for itself to become complete? A game. Or rather, the story that plays out through the player's input.
Gaster's world tells us that he wants his own version of Deltarune. Deltarune is the legend of this world. His own version of the legend. His Deltarune.
Admittedly, something doesn't need to be a game for someone to get their own version of it, especially if it's also or originally a legend. Stories can be retold is a major theme.
Yet Gaster can make a save menu (That gets mysteriously replaced, his commentary removed, after Chapter 1.), make a character creator, alter our reload points, & comment after the credits....
Is he modifying the game? Making his own version? His own version's menu is just black with green lines, & the game over is black & white, his text is black & white, & there's scarcely any colour in the Goner Maker beyond that of the Depths background image.
Is it the original version of the game? Or some modified version by Gaster?
If Susie isn't the girl, if Kris & Susie are shattering the prophecy, then how could this be the original Deltarune, if Deltarune is the legend of this world, & its path is being defied before it could even be completed once?
Susie cannot be the "wrong" hero if that role is never predefined by being taken by someone else.
Internally, the "striped bird" found in the library is called normalnpc.
(Another NPC with a strange internal name is most_improved_1997, a mouse/mole-like NPC with a big hat he apparently uses to store leftover pancakes to bulk up for his "rugged body". His hat in fact gets 1 pixel taller every appearance, him appearing in Chapters 1, 2 & 4.)
In Chapter 1, Ralsei mentions the TP Bar being on the left.
In Chapter 4, Ralsei tells Kris to run left, when it would be backwards from the party's perspective. Left would be a 90 degree turn from forwards, but they need to make a 180 degree turn.
Ralsei knows of how we perceive things.
In Chapter 4's Weird Route portion, the SOUL can move via the choicer box to get into Noelle's room.
& though I have not reviewed it recently, the SOUL's movement seems odd. Perhaps it's not meant to be diegetic & just a property of a 2D game emulating a 3D space, but think about how the SOUL moves:
For example, in the Holiday Home kitchen, it can move up past the counters to go further into the kitchen. Near the fridge's lower door. Keep holding up, & it will move closer to the vent near the ceiling, above the fridge.
When did the SOUL change its axis of movement?
From our perspective, it moved up in a straight line, but in the game world, it moved from over the floor near the kitchen's door, towards the ceiling, as if in a diagonal. Yet if you go straight to the right, towards the piano, it stays level with the floor.
In the living room, going up stairs goes up them, but going up near the table that held the snack tray stays level with the floor.
It could just be game mechanics, as said, but I imagine the SOUL's movement, even if comprehensible to see, is strange.
Another thing that could just be game mechanics as much as oddness of the SOUL is that thoughts are in text boxes; If the SOUL can move along choicers, then are the text boxes diegetic? Are they only a product of the SOUL's perception?
There are moments of spoken dialogue without text boxes, which are the exception. That suggests text boxes are the norm of communication in Deltarune's worlds. Albeit, with audio, since people can still hear. (Ralsei can hear Kris's choice differently because of Kris coughing over a word, Kris can cover their mouth when made to speak to Susie at the lake after Chapter 4, & in the church, many of the responses to their dialogue choices are as if they only said the word. Like Noelle talking about musical keys when the topic "key" is chosen, or one of the Cattenheimers talking about "code" or "lock".)
People clearly hear words from text boxes.... The Knight's laugh has no text box but Susie hears it & responds to it.
It's puzzling. Are text boxes just game mechanics, & no more than a shared means of communicating to the audience alongside sound effects?
& one other note, there's the Forgotten Man.
If the Forgotten Man was met in Chapter 3, he appears in Hometown right before entering the first
Dark Sanctuary. Once it rains after Kris and Susie leave
Noelle's House, inspecting the entryway doors of
QC's Diner will point out that "
a customer in the back notices you. He holds up a takeout box and taps it, happily."
If he can exist in both the Light World & the Dark World, then doesn't that imply he's speaking about the world as a whole? He speaks of the world's history (Earth being covered in water, dinosaurs still being around, an ice age, etc.), & in Chapters 3 & 4, his segments seem connected to Kris's history, which is in the Light World.
& yet, he taps on a takeout box, as if happy it's tangible, or exists.
He said Mancountry was the only place he can talk anymore. But he can appear in narrative.
A partial existence, a limited ability to access the Light World?
If the Light World is without magic, why can something strange, seemingly supernatural happen in it?
Likewise, Dess is thought to be lost in the depths/the code, based on the dialogue from UNUSED. (Though hearing scratching goes against this.)
Anyway, if The Forgotten Man's claim is true, that the whole world used to be monochrome in green, which we know to be just like how Game Boys would display graphics....
When considering our perspective, The Forgotten Man, Dess, Gaster the prophecy....
I'm not sure what to make of it, what ramifications it has....
But it seems like Deltarune is diegetically a video game.
What do you all think?
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