My Deltarune Theories!

Dess is this game’s Asriel stand-in

More specifically, everyone was hung up on how to save Asriel in Undertale but there’s no real saving him in there. In the pacifist route you do get him back but only for a little bit, but it’s not really meant to be. He still reverts to being flowey and all arguments about where the line between flowey and Asriel can be drawn aside you’re not getting the Asriel from before he died back. It really shows given how people are absolutely clamoring over the fact that they want to see a grown up good ending Asriel in Deltarune and really want him to show up in the game.

I think this game is going to be a little about that, about how the fandom kept looking until everything hit dead ends and the speculation (will the genocide route have any hints for getting Asriel Back? If we figure out gaster would that possibly reward us with getting Asriel Back?) of it all. And all the fan creations and things where people were coming up with ways of justifying getting that version of Asriel back adding more fuel to the fire rather than letting him go.

It’s curious that it seems like between the dreemurrs (in undertale) this is the same issue. They both desperately can’t seem to let go of Asriel in their own ways and this is seen in all the game dialogue and related content. Or at the very least they cannot let go of Asriel the child they lost too young, and not the current version if you do count Flowey as Asriel and not his own distinct character. I love how some people play around with whether or not Flowey does or does not Count as Asriel in what I call XTREME CHARACTER GROWTH, but the point I’m making here is simple.

You are never going to get the specific version of Asriel from Before he fell down back. You can get him back a little bit in either playthrough, be it in the pacifist or that very brief moment in the Genocide route ending before you cut Flowey down, but you’re never going to get him back completely.

While you can SAVE Asriel, there’s no saving Asriel from his fate.

I don’t think we’re meant to be able to Find and / or save Dess. Just like Asriel in Undertale I really think it’s always going to be just out of reach. If we do get her back in any capacity, it’ll be like flowey where she’s notably changed and different, and it won’t be the same version of Dess that went in (be it through character growth or some sort of weird darkness corruption or some other thing).

We are not going to be able to get Dess (The version of her from before she disappeared) back. It’s yet to be seen if we do get her back and she’s absolutely changed directions as a character or if it’s another Flowey Adjacent situation or any other possibility. For all we know we could wind up finding her and she’s the knight and mean or She’s decided to leave and change her name to find herself away from family, the possibilities are endless since we’ve only got two chapters worth of material to work with.

It simply will not be the same if we do get her back, and there is no recovery of how Dess was before she left, like regardless of if you count Flowey and Asriel as the same person or different people in undertale there’s no permanent way of getting the Asriel that fell down back.

The best counter argument to this would likely be “well Asriel’s Right There?!?!”, and sure, Deltarune’s Asriel is alive and kicking and just at college, but he’s also not filling the same narrative role here as he was in Undertale. The game makes a point of showing that a lot of the characters don’t fit the same spots they did in Undertale in the Deltarune universe. In Deltarune he’s off at college and could possibly come back during college breaks, while in Undertale he is a child taken before his time. This is to say in Undertale he’s the centerpoint of a tragedy of which everyone’s mourning over while over in Deltarune he's just off at college (and everyone misses him but missing a person in this case is not the same as grieving over them).

In Deltarune, I really suspect that Dess is the center of the tragedy here, of which everyone’s got opinions about but since it’s a small town rather than across the whole of the underground there’s smalltown politics™ on how people are handling that. Whatever it was, and this is fanon speaking here, seems like whatever happened with Dess was so Bad it made Toriel Divorce Asgore on top of him losing the position as police chief (much like how in undertale the loss of both Chara and Asriel was enough to cause the split between these two).

That being said Asgore and Toriel just have big divorce energy so if something did happen to dess I do not think that necessarily alone would make them get divorced, just that it is likely the last straw on the camel’s back. Not enough by itself to cause a divorce but after a long string of other issues it would be a dealbreaker.

Whatever happened was significant enough to at least cause two broken-adjacent households between the Holidays and the Dreemurs if how Kris’s and Noelle’s implied home lives are anything to go off of. This is speculation since we currently only have two chapters worth of information and none of it goes into the nitty gritty of what’s going on at the Holiday’s or what exactly caused the Divorce but the writing on the wall is very much planted at this point.

I think a crux of the game (though perhaps not The Crux) is that none of our choices is going to get Dess to appear. The Choices don’t matter, the ending will be the same and Dess won’t be there to see it.

Big Family fight in chapter 6

My one big theory is that Asriel is gonna come back earlier than a week and that during his brief stay there will be an actual family feud that comes to a head.

This kind of leans on speculation that i've seen and heard about Kris' Relationship with Toriel and Asgore as their parents (for example this video), and while I don’t wholesale subscribe to the train of thought, I do agree that it seems like there was unintended family preference for Asriel over Kris, and while they do still love and care about Kris, Toriel and Asgore aren’t in touch with Kris. And on top of that they’re struggling with the more human parts of Kris with regards to their upbringing and either one or both have been just avoiding it and being in denial of it, not wanting to really deal with it and assuming if they ignore it hard enough it’ll go away (or that alternatively in a loop of assuming the other parent is dealing with it so they don’t have to deal with it).

There will be a disagreement that comes to shouting and then there will be throwaway lines from either one or all of the other Dreemurs that “things have really gone south since Asriel Left” which will get interpreted by Kris as “Kris just isn’t enough to keep the family together” and Kris takes that Very personally as a teen does when they’re coming of age in a rough living situation.

One thing it could be a fight about that I could buy was that Toriel and Asgore didn't divorce on good terms but both decided to simply Lie to Asriel about the status of their Marriage / Divorce (since it is remarked that the divorce seems to have happened after Asriel left for College), and both hard pressure Kris to keep up the facade while Asriel's in town. Then once Asriel susses it out (regardless of whether or not Kris spills the beans), they both get upset about it and either they get upset at Kris, or that they do not get upset at Kris but Kris still takes it deeply personally and decides to just leave while everything else blows over.

Like this feels staged to be a big coming of age story and major conflicts with parents are often a big and common thing in them.

Kris will then just disappear into a dark world and the story will pick up with Susie going out to find them, since nobody else in town knows about the dark worlds and on top of that it seems like Kris’s family is clueless to figure out where they went after the big fight (because of being out of touch with Kris as previously mentioned).

I don't think Chara / The first fallen child is necessarily evil outright

Consider: If they wanted to destroy everything the same way the player would at the end of a genocide route, they had the means to start doing so a lot sooner.

You need naught but a Human and a Monster soul to pass the barrier, and Boss monsters souls persist after death (though only a little bit, window for grabbing them is much smaller than a Human's). They were living with boss Monsters. It would not have been difficult to get a boss monster soul.

I do believe the whole thing with accidentally poisoning Asgore was a genuine mistake. It very much seemed like if they were really that sort of heartless while being surrounded by boss monsters they would have / could have dispatched them much sooner.

It begets the question: Why the plot to get Asriel Across the Border then? It is super morbid but They just as easily could have gotten Asriel's soul, crossed the barrier, and started slaughtering humans if they decided not to stay and start massacring monsters first.

They hated humanity, but not monsters. It's kind of ironic that they're a lot like Asgore in that they're slow to action.

Much like how many people assume / I think it's a genuinely good criticism to point out that Asgore's Plan was built on false hope (Not keen on violence, Asgore’s plan of taking the souls of humans who enter the underground while secretly and hypocritically hoping that no more come to the underground rather than committing to the war bit of taking one soul and exiting the barrier, killing enough humans to break the barrier and then restarting the war outright), for a kid who seemed to mostly believe the Kill or Be Killed Mantra they decidedly didn’t do a lot of killing during their stay (and if you assume narrator!Chara is canon it seems like even this could be swayed to full pacifism).

It seems like they only whip around and turn on us the player once they’re backed into a corner, like how Asgore seemed to not be keen on doing much anything about the war unless he had to, and even then only delaying and prolonging the issue. Or how Flowey was perfectly fine letting everything happen in the genocide route until he saw us at new home and then still didn't do anything until the Asgore encounter.

I take what happens at the end of the genocide route one of two ways. I think worst case scenario they only get to being that way because we made them get that way to become stronger. Best case scenario they think they’re doing their one good act by taking out the villain of the genocide route (us), and worst case we made something just like us and it very quickly turned on us once we got in the way, much like how we the player very quickly turn on flowey in new home.

That being said I think it’s honestly more fascinating / fun to play around with it such that chara isn’t as bad as the player is / can’t be that bad without outside influence (like the player) pushing them to that point. Kind of like a Noelle situation except Chara in this case would stall to right before the very end to assert some sort of control over the situation rather than Noelle who does stand up for herself after being forced to kill berdley to decide that she’s leaving the situation (which is well before the chapter 2 boss in the weird route).

Deltarune 7 RETURN OF OZMA

It is a dumb little theory not even concerned with the main story content in the slightest but it’s about the secret superbosses you can find in each chapter

Either the very last one before the ending or the penultimate one is going to Functionally be Ozma. No, not wizard of Oz series Ozma, but Ozma from FF9, one of the more notorious endgame secret superbosses (within that game).

Regardless of how all the other bosses run it’ll be ozma (but not actually ozma) by meeting 3 requirements (of which the superboss Ozma from FF9 is a really good example of)

1. Be incredibly difficult to fight and win. I’d say either on par with True Hero Undyne / Sans or more difficult than either of those fights. The sort of difficulty that really demands that you get really good at the game enough to exploit in your favor or simply decide it’s too hard to fight and not worth the reward if you can't hack it.

2. Be abstract. Compared to other secret and non secret bosses in ff9 Ozma is just… the epitome of one of these things doesn’t fit in in terms of visual design. FF9 has a lot of really engaging boss designs and then Ozma is just a marble-like orb made up of two rotating hemispheres.

3. Absolutely be difficult to even get to. This feels more like time-honored rpg / rpgmaker game tradition but if deltarune is metatextually going to be saying something about the recent trend in games for the “best most truest ending ever” to be locked behind 5 guides and / or super obscure things to be doing to unlock the “correct” ending out of a plethora of other endings, it’s going to be a sidequest that takes at least 6/7 or 7/7 chapters to actually meet all requirements to do. Whether or not this will have any bearing on how the endgame of Deltarune goes is still up in the air.

Ozma is the example I’m using here for that type of secret superboss because it meets all three requirements. It is a very difficult boss that is difficult because it’s built to force the player to be really good at strategizing (at least prior to the internet and internet guides being as widespread as they are now), you really gotta be good at FF9 and have a great understanding of it’s battle system as well as the party member options you have in order to work around how brutal Ozma’s set up to be (like Ozma fully abuses the ATB system but it’s also set up that if you have mastered the game’s very crunchy combat system it is doable, though not easily doable). Like mentioned earlier Ozma looks wildly different from everything else in the game in terms of bosses and boss design. Ozma is exists in a weird “guide dang it” deal where you gotta unlock the area to find it through other sidequests, there’s very little if any mention of it anywhere in the game, and other sidequests do in fact influence the fight such that to fight Ozma and have it go moderately okay you definitely gotta do other sidequests. It’s not the same flavor of mean as Cynthia’s deliberately designed to be terrible garchomp but it’s a force to be reckoned with.

This also makes it distinct from other types of superbosses / secret bosses like the ilk you see out of Kirby games where it’s just either Final Boss+ or a boss that is very fun and lore relevant. The flavor of endgame superboss that you’ll see in chapter 6 or 7 will feel like it comes out of nowhere, probably difficult enough out of the expectation that you’ve done everything else so you must certainly be good enough to face it (and if not it’s gonna be a hard time).

Cards & Games theme speculation

The main chapter end bosses are gonna be a combo of chess pieces and playing card stuff

Ya got

• Ace
• King
• Queen
• Jack

For cards  in terms of ranks that are special outside of 2-10 and

• King
• Queen
• Rook
• Bishop
• Knight
• Pawn

For chess pieces.

So, my thought is that we so far have king and queen so that leaves

Knight, Pawn, Bishop, Rook, Ace, and Jack

All this out in a list it looks like

1. King
2. Queen
3. Jack
4. Rook
5. Bishop
6. Pawn / Ace
7. Knight

This list is making some assumptions like pawn / ace being interchangeable when realistically any of these are likely interchangeable with each other outside of the knight, whom is noted throughout both chapters as being important, as well as the King and Queen who we’ve already seen. Like outside of those three particular figures, it really does not matter what order they’re in and whether or not they keep one or drop one in order to make the 7-chapter model fit (and this also assumes the game will stick to 7 chapters; it’s not likely but Toby could always decide at a later point to make more chapters than 7).

This also assumes the knight’s going to be the endgame final boss and is last, and while I’m not going to be that person and assume toby is playing tricks at every opportunity, I can just as easily see the knight being the late game boss or not the late game boss (this is separate from my Ozma superboss theory that posits that the very last endgame superboss will be unwieldly difficult to fight without real knowledge of Deltarune’s combat system kind of like how Ozma is in final fantasy 9 and how other late game superbosses tend to be in rpg games).

I am framing pawn / ace as being interchangeable given that both pawn piece and ace card can be deceptive. Depending on how ya play chess pawns can upgrade to full queens if you get them across the board and ace cards in the standard French deck are noted as being considered the highest-ranking card depending on how you play (above even king / queen).

This is not a hard and fast rule in the slightest. This is one of those theories wherein I fully do not doubt that it could easily be proven wrong.