OK. I need to talk about this game or my head will explode.
Me if I don't make this post ->
Here, I am
vomiting out my thoughts. Unlike some of my other media posts, this is not a careful, meticulous read on something that's been stewing in my head for a while. These are immediate gut reactions.
I am not here for its gameplay. I do not care about its gameplay. (Unless it is somehow relevant to something else - story, themes, aesthetics, etc. - which does happen to some extent.) Because I do not care about its gameplay, I watched the game and did not play it. If you legally require thoughts from me, it looked like interesting ideas but potentially too easy / boring.
Everything else going forward is not talking about the gameplay (for its own sake). There.
Summary
I will be real. I did not have a super positive opinion of this game. However, I understand and expect that many people will be overjoyed with this game and love it, and these people may not enjoy reading this less positive commentary. I completely get that and have no judgment your way. If this is you, go have fun. Seriously! You deserve it. For those of you still with us, welcome aboard.
Relative to expectations, I think this game is comically bad. Wow. I went in with a mix of skepticism and optimism - I thought the first two chapters were fairly flawed as a standalone, but I went into Chapter 3 with some hope that the game would "grow the beard." As Chapter 3 progressed, it did some things I thought were cool, it did some things I thought weren't cool, so my opinions were bouncing around a lot. By the end, though, I realized that my hopes were unfounded. This feels like, the
Archer or
Supernatural era of Deltarune. I don't know if I'm more peeved or amused.
Positives
A lot relating to the visuals. A lot of the new characters have charming design, and Tenna's stylization is excellent. It makes fun scenes more fun and serious scenes more intimidating. Tenna's special text and presence on the interface is amazing. The green room is charming, the star rooms are funny, and the contrast between the colorful intensity of TV Land versus the barren monochrome snow outside is excellent.
The lead-up to the secret boss (the pixelated one who drops the cloak, not the Knight). The lead-in is very organic, and the imagery of a stationary looming Kris watching your pixel gameplay is great. The little English accent guy who watches the room where you play is quite interesting, I like him. The various games before the pixel boss fight are an interesting reimaginging of prior Genocide / Weird route total killings. These "real" pixel games also are a great foil to the game show equivalents, feeling more free and open
because you went through a compromised, restricted version. Love that.
Game show is a very interesting premise that brings and keeps the main characters together in a novel way, and helps them do things besides tag along. I admire the chapter's commitment to the atmosphere - IT'S TV TIME! is a classic.
There's a lot of clever and smart character interaction in situations, reaction to situations, and writing thereof. Susie switching your controls around is exactly the sort of thing she'd do. The main 3 generally feel more realized than prior.
Negatives
Good lord. I keep getting distracted by the prior chapters and Undertale fangames, because they are more (positively) memorable and I'd sometimes rather think about them.
I cannot remember one music track.
While there's a lot of smart character writing, there's a lot of jarring, forced, and silly writing too. There's some "idiot plot" moments where Susie clearly hears Tenna actively scheming against the group but only reacts vaguely suspiciously. A lot of dialogue is like... I don't have the right words for this. I'll try and explain.
It's not
literally this meme - character's don't
literally say things like "I feel angry." What I'm getting at is like, the clumsiness, the ham-handedness, characters saying obvious or unrealistically blunt things in a way that people don't talk. For example, near the end, Susie's writing very bluntly sets up Tenna for a motive rant, and I groaned. Susie's very serious backstory drop was so forced I actually physically started cringing. These examples near the end were easier for me to remember, but like it was a recurring on-and-off issue.
I'm going to create another character-writing-issues section for Tenna specifically. Good lord. Chaos King was unabashedly evil, Queen was more Chaotic Neutral, Tenna is... whatever the plot wants. I'm not saying "he changes as the plot goes on", that would obviously be fine. I mean the narrative randomly flashes between "he is abusive" and "you should sympathize with him." He pity-manipulates the party into playing with him, and openly schemes to take them down, and Susie will react like, "I'm mildly suspicious but dang your insecurities are valid bro, I'm with you." Then he'll treat his employees like props and trash and try to kill the party, but then the narrative expects you to feel super bad for him because h-h-
he just wanted to be LOVED!!! 
I of course understand that a character can have flaws, even serious ones, and still evoke symathy - I'm saying how this game executed it was jarring and unearned. I feel no sympathy for him and just want him to go away.
I'm making
another separate section for Ralsei. I was very interested in his 'Am I important?' arc as it started up, and it had some good moments, but I started not caring so much. With the very clear and obvious Light World / Dark World crossing-over now, it feels kind of moot and irrelevant, like surely you can find some way to physically exist if the real-world shelter can magically fill with evil black smoke. I'm really not sure how much the game is committed to this arc, both from the mootness and because it gets somewhat scattershot attention in the chapter.
Maybe more fundamentally, the development of the arc felt off. Susie quickly says that, regardless of his physicality, he's real to her and Kris, and that's what counts. Near the end of the arc, though, we have a pretty similar repeat, where he worries about being real and Susie says something similar. I get that concerns can take more than one conversation to resolve, but I did not see the character progression.
I'm making a
third separate section for the Knight. OMG. What a shoddy 7 year reveal. I was already disconnected from the weak scene before her appearance, and after Suzie's bizarre spotlight (literally!) monologue, she just... appears from... you know off screen over there. As some Thing. That's the Knight I guess! And it's presumably Dess I guess! I alternated between involuntary cringing and laughing. It felt like watching a amateurish fanfic play out on the screen. Also she contributes nothing to the plot besides... yet another cliffhanger for the next chapter! Yay!!!!!! And also you can beat her with the secret boss's item but winning or losing has minimal immediate relevance either way. So the secret boss deal feels way less relevant itself. Yay!!!!
While I like the pixel game in context of the secret version, I do not like it in context of the game show. Like yes I understand that, he is a TV, game consoles are plugged into the TV, yes. But it's totally lacking in the flair and aplomb of Tenna's style. It's just so dry and odd. It subverts my expectations, but
for what? What is this game format choice, versus anything else, trying to say or do versus any unexpected gameplay style? (I don't really care about his budget justifications, which I treat as a handwave versus like something meaningful in-universe.)
This question might be one of those I ponder a bit to see if I'm missing something. Like there's a reading here saying "Tenna is an old TV that is falling out of favor, the pixel game is an old style of game that is falling out of favor," but this seems like a fairly surface-level broadening of the message versus like delivering a powerful new insight. We'll see I guess.
Let's talk broader. Various parts of this chapter feels like a 'greatest hits mashup' of Deltarune / Undertale, and not in a good way. I'm not deriving a lot of new meaning out of its settings, themes, and characters. It introduces two major new characters, and I think they're both very badly written. Tenna is unsubtly similar to (and actively involved with) a past popular character in Spamton, and his writing trajectory is like Mettaton but less good. Speaking of Mettaton, we already did the Sudden Wacky TV Quiz + Fight + Cooking Challenge Gameshow!!! with another TV in Mettaton. The one thing I meaningfully noticed about the new score is that it had some remixes. Many of the funny bits are with old characters in Lancer and Rouxls, with Rouxls getting more
novel development than most new characters. When I'm thinking "Wow it's so cool for the broader Undertale / Deltarune Deal that Ch3 introduced _____," I do not know how I'm filling that blank.
Going into Ch3, I felt like the first two chapters were isolated vignettes hinting at a shared connection, but not really having a lot to say about what that connection was. I was coming in with more questions than answers, and with a desire to have questions answered. Aside from the question of who the Knight is (I assume Dess? Which like, OK, that's fine), I feel like I have more new questions than answers. This series feels like one that is juggling a bunch of possibly interesting ideas for the sake of hooking you in, but disappointing you in the end, because it in the end doesn't seem to have much to Do or Say with these ideas. I feel like I'm being led on and am about ready to give up caring.
Super epic that the "LOVE WINS" progressive nonbinary lesbian game introduces polyamory exclusively as a funny joke that makes the prior partners uncomfortable and everyone knows is doomed to fail. Very cool.
Gacha machine skull emoji
Wellll that's a relief to have on a page somewhere. Maybe I'll revisit this, maybe I'll go through and see Chapter 4, fuck I'll probably look at least a little, but my chance of serious investment in this game is probably severed.
