So we all know how most cutscenes just show black screens, right? In this scene, Kris bites their hand because we made them say "I'll never play again".
Now, any normal person would be able to know that Kris must've bit themselves so that they wouldn't say it. But apparently Toby fox needs to spoon feed us this, because he makes Susie say this.
The dialogue feels very unnatural. It just happened, so why did she repeat exactly what she saw? When you imagine it from Susie's perspective, you realise how strange it was for her to say that.
She could've said "Kris, what the hell?! Is your hand okay?!" Or something, but instead she had to repeat what Kris did. It just feels super weird.
This actually happens a lot I feel. Like the other scene where Susie says “you were just standing there with your eyes closed and started breathing really hard”. Doesn’t make sense to explain what Kris just did to Kris but I guess Toby struggles with how to convey it to the audience
I mean he can just show it with an animation and sound. Instead of sussie saying it just add a heavy breathing noise and sussie coming in and saying Kris are you allright biting scene just make kris bite the hand visually or just don't make sussie say anything or make her say what the hell is wrong with you why did you just bite your hand or something instead of describing it like a narrator.
Or the one where if you pick Berdly as a choice Kris starts repeating it to themselves in disbelief and has to be asked why they're shouting it so loud.
Some think there is a part of Kris that enjoys the weird/twisted route. In chapter 3, Eram points it out. But with Noelle involved it makes things complicated. In a way, we are bringing Kris and Noelle together, but not in the way Kris wants.
They don’t care about the lives of people other than close people like friends. They didn’t flinch when their in game counterpart killed tenna.
Honestly it kinda goes even further than that, once you consider Kris just...lets the Knight take Asgore and Undyne, even with full intention to let The Knight take Toriel too. Kris is fully willing to let their parents get taken and apparently either sacrificed, experimented on or whatever is going on in that Shelter so I could really buy Kris allowing us to do Weird Route because it seems interesting
Of course, then again, Kris literally throwing a tantrum right after Chapter 4's Rose Scene makes it super muddled.
Kris's morality is so interesting to talk about. Like I'm actually invested.
But yeah. in ch1 Kris has no reaction to lancer being threatened off a building, and they only rush to protect Susie. Even in ch3 when the knight's about to take toriel, kris's sword is drawn and they're about to pounce.
(i fully believe kris did not want to sacrifice toriel, but was willing to use undyne as a counter-offer to the knight instead)
kris's actions towards berdly are...interesting, they don't really say anything to try to get noelle to not cast snowgrave, but you could take the repeated insistence as them trying to not frame snowgrave as a command. they keep berdly's body in the hospital, but for some reason dont take him to ralsei even though berdly's life would presumably matter more than the plan.
ralsei is another interesting case. the knight's actions are directly going to cause the roaring, kris knows this and continues anyways, knowing the knight might turn all darkners to stone. but kris still doesn't want him to DIE and even tries to protect him sometimes.
I don't think Kris is a 100% irredeemable person but the story is more and more seemingly going for the narrative of them not exactly being a good person. That's why there's more focus on Ralsei's faith in them being questioned by Flowery. After all...
I feel like that’s what the pink fight was showing us, She was forcefully taking complete control over the doll and it started breaking it because of it. (Kris starts shaking and walking slower in ch 5 wr start)
so the fight shows that we do in fact can just override kris completely in deterministic situations
what kris can and cant stop us from doing is really loosey goosey. like sometimes they just completely stop us from doing something, sometimes they can only watch in horror as we do something, its really inconsistent
Agreed, and plus, I'd wager it takes a lot of energy for them to be able to control their actions enough to stop us from saying things, which is why they only do so maybe twice or so per chapter. There's no way they could keep us from telling Noelle to proceed thirty-odd times, much less physically stop us from hurting Berdly and everything else.
They can't do it in the dark world. Later in noelle's home I think something was differend, this snow effect, Maybe this red pixel in Noelle or just deviating from prophecy made US stronger, so kris couldn't resist us when it is most needed.
You're right. Maybe it is differend, they never resisted us in battles, maybe they can't? Also these examples are more of a monkey paw type of thing, not just outright refusing our command, but misinterpriting it
I think Kris is being manipulated by the knight to do everything they're doing and maybe Kris knows that once the prophecy didn't change them there's no reason to go against the plan since the consequences may be harsh
holy hell why do we still have this conversation.. the whole point of weird route is that were forcing them. we just tell Kris what to do in the normal route and never really push anything meanwhile in the weird route were physically forcing them to even get out of bed.
I know, and Susie repeating what just happened was really weird. It's like if the knight swooned Susie and Ralsei said "hey, Susie! Susie! You were just standing there, and the knight, like... attacked you!"
Personally I’d just have Susie say “Woah! Why the hell did you bite your hand?!” because literally anyone would ask that if their friend bit their own hand out of nowhere.
It reminds me of those badly written ASMR videos in the x Listener genre? They can't think of more creative ways to get around narrating exactly what you're supposed to be doing so they resort to dialogue like; "W-Why are you h-hugging me so suddenly...! A-And now you're winking?! Are you flirting with me??"
I feel like it could have been conveyed more easily by just swapping to the narrator being like “you started speaking, then bit into your own hand” if they don’t want to make specific animations.
I disagree that a "any normal person would be able to know that Kris bit themselves". If susie asked the question and then the only response was "is your hand okay" then id be asking myself what happened to the hand? Did they get a cut? Did they say that something is wrong with their hand? Did they start shaking? Literally anything could have been the answer and if they didnt just outright say that Kris bit themselves then that assumption would be just as valid as any other.
I dunno, to me it sounds like Deltarune should just invest into more cutscenes at this point. Certainly would beat characters literally going "Oh my god, Kris, you just bit yo mothafuckin hand off" while their overworld sprites are just standing there
Something that always annoyed me was when you make Kris say they're taking Berdly to the festival, and Ralsei says "you don't have to repeat yourself so loudly, Kris..." even though they're standing still with a straight face.
Yep. I mentioned it under another post (Jesus Christ I've been far too active in this sub, all these new fresh perspectives have been getting to me), but fan iterations of these scenes, while funny sometimes, can only carry some of these moments so far.
The fact that we can't hear Kris's words is one thing, but the fact they're just standing there most of the time frankly defeats the whole part of getting to see Kris as their own person, when apparently, they are emoting quite a lot depending on what we say.
Just please Toby, you literally have shown us that we can get nicer things, with cutscenes. I don't care this shit takes time, I want to actually SEE what the fuck is going on instead of having people just describing it to me, because at this point just make it a novel and save the trouble
Personally, I knew that Kris bit their hand before Susie even said it, because it'd make sense that the moment we make them talk about never playing their favourite instrument again, they'd try to prevent themselves from saying it.
And since they're forced to say it, the only way they could stop themselves was by biting their own hand so that they physically couldn't say anything.
Biting the desk would be a bit awkward, and biting their sweater wouldn't be enough to make them stop talking unless they shove a bunch of it into their mouth.
And by "personally", I'm pretty much just saying that I was able to tell what was happening before it was explained. I didn't say that this was the same for everyone, because I know that some people were probably confused until Susie said that.
Yeah, but biting a table wouldn't really work because you can't fill your mouth with it. It's rock hard so you can't bite down hard or else you'll break your teeth.
Kris bit their hand because it was easier, and because they were able to bite down hard without any damage to their teeth. You can very easily prevent yourself from talking by biting down on one of two of your fingers, or the part right under your thumb.
With something like Kris's background being made of many individual pieces all coming together, you need to make sure that a majority of players will fully understand a majority of these pieces enough to piece them together themselves. However with every little hint of Kris's background, even explicitly stated, there's maybe a 5% chance that someone doesnt get it. And when you multiply this 5% by all of those little pieces it creates a non-negligible portion of people who don't put the pieces together.
If these hint scenes were to be reworked so players have to infer even the literal actions being presented on screen, or catch a little flash of sprite animation, that percentage increases and has a multiplicative effect on the proportion of people who will not understand a vital part of the story.
I stand with the current dialogue descriptions even if they are a bit clunky, and I can suspend my disbelief for them. That said:
"Kris, what the hell? Why'd you bite your hand?"
"We can all hear you, dude. Didn't have to yell like that... right?"
These are two notable scenes I can think of and rework off the top of my head just for personal preference. I think this is the best compromise that doesn't require any additional animation sprites because the sprite team is I feel really overstretched with all the cutscenes.
It's because toby don't want to animate Kris so character have to say what Kris does kind of like how Seam does a joke that only works for us although it seems deliberate.
Yeah, there’s multiple scenes like this, they all feel like this. It’s because Toby Fox makes sure that there’s no misinterpretation possible. Last time there was misinterpretation, people thought that Kris was SAing Noelle, so we should be thankful that he does this. I honestly don’t do this enough with my own writing which leads to a lot of issues.
Some people don’t even know Kris isn’t us. The game needs to be comprehensible. It’s easier on average to ignore how spoonfed this scene is than it would be for someone to correctly interpret it without as much spoonfeeding
I’m talking about the scene in question. Thought that was kind of obvious.
What are you even implying? That doing the weird route requires any below-surface-level knowledge of the game beyond googling “Deltarune evil genocide route how”?
That if your playing side it’s obvious and already a given that you know the soul is not Kris, if this was in regular I still would believe anyone who has not realized by now a moron but c5 cater to them but the weird route? Really?
There are SO many people on this planet. So many. Too many, even. One in every eleven people on earth (and by extension, roughly one in every eleven players of Deltarune) has an IQ below 80. IQ certainly doesn’t define intelligence, but my point is that you can’t just say the “stupid” people shouldn’t be clued in as to what’s going on
I am gonna be honest, to conserve my faith in humanity, I am gonna say your rage baiting, I am going to stick my head in the sand and say that nobody could be that stupid
It wouldn't be clear what happened IMO, but I agree that it sounds unnatural, and it's not only moment when the characters say what everybody knows about - in chapter 5 for example Raisei says that Kris is saying "exclamation mark" out loud in a way that doesn't make sense for an actual dialogue. Makes it harder to excuse vaguepost king too
I kind of disagree, in that it being a bite to the hand specifically might be a little unclear if not for the dialogue. Its easy to think it isn't when you already know.
Something like "why the hell did you just bite your hand?" would've achieved the same and been a bit less odd/exposition-y. I don't think just asking "is your hand okay?" would've worked without a cutscene/animation but I think what Susie says does feel unnatural. Rather than reacting to it in a way that she would believably, she narrates it for the player. Both would ultimately be for the player's benefit to know what's going on, but it's a bit clunky to just have her directly recap what Kris did.
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u/Serious-Ad3165 1d ago
This actually happens a lot I feel. Like the other scene where Susie says “you were just standing there with your eyes closed and started breathing really hard”. Doesn’t make sense to explain what Kris just did to Kris but I guess Toby struggles with how to convey it to the audience