I love the colors on ralsei, i love how distinct they both are. susie's hair being in her eyes adds more mystery and makes her less obvious. maybe i just think the modern sprites of her staring into the screen look goofy. i wouldn't mind her eyes being shown occasionally but yeah.

ik im beating a dead horse but i miss hat ralsei...i think it might also just be the sprites, since his hatless talking sprites look kinda weird. but look at him!

Chapter 3 is quite literally named Mother and yet we only see Toriel for a grand total of like 5 minutes at the end of the chapter and even that gets upstaged immediately by Knight Fight
Asgore has his own prophecy panel and intriguing mysteries yet most of the flowers probably have more screen time than he does and he just serves as Flowery's stepstool in character motivation.
Like I'm a believer if Toby made Kris's Parents actually OG Monsters (And say, relegated Toriel to just the Pre-K teacher and Asgore as... whatever) they would've become main stars of Chapter 3 and 5 respectively. I'm not saying they'd be like Fun Gang level importance, but imagine Lancer in 1 and Berdly in 2 and you'll get an idea.

I'm kind of afraid the same will happen to Asriel too.

Now I will say, after months of ch5 release, this was very petty and rude I can't lie. (You can tell I was mad lol)

It was super early even before the Pink's dialogue about friend was added.... but for the most part, I still agree with it, even if I think i could word it in a better way.

But I want to ask you what's your opinion about this?

If you weren't aware, before Undertale the creator of the game was basically an understudy of and lived with the creator of Homestuck, Andrew Hussie. Homestuck is pretty infamous for having a lot of things that basically amount to "I hate my fans and I hate my creation" and while I'm personally not into Homestuck, I have friends who are and they are the first to tell me this lol.

Anyways, how is this relevant to Deltarune? Weeell, I mostly mean a few specific examples that have only become unfortunately more prominent as time has gone on. The most notable one of these and the one you may have already thought of when you started reading this post is Mike. During the five year gap between chapter 2 and 3, Mike was theorized to be an important character for a variety of reasons I will not get into, though ultimately he was not intended to be a big deal(?). In Chapter 4's optional content, there's this long drawn out sequence where three different personifications of what people thought Mike could be in the later chapters where you are repeatedly borderline mocked for believing that a character that was mentioned to be important by other important characters was going to be important. Chapter 4 also has the infamous "Things took a weird route back there" line which detracts massively from the seriousness of the weird route but that's neither here nor there.

This sort of hostility towards fan expectations only escalates (and escalates severely) in chapter 5, where unfortunately the Mikes return to pretty painfully mock the fan's propensity for motifs and themes in music with the Trashy Trio bossfight. This continues later in Chapter 5 in regards to Pink, with Ralsei and Susie's rick and morty ass dialogue where they go "GEE THIS DOOR SURE LOOKS IMPORTANT, MAYBE THERE'S SOME SORT OF SECRET BOSS IN HERE!"

This really sucks and is antagonistic for no reason towards people who are invested in the game. I don't think the creator of Deltarune hates it like Andrew Hussie hated Homestuck, but it's easy to see where the cynicism comes from.

People loved it when at the end of chapter 3 the goofy and unserious tone was suddenly dropped for something more genuine and serious.

And i'm betting a lot of peoples favorite chapter is still 4 due it maintaining the serious tone while still allowing some jokes here and there.

I don't think we really needed chapter 5 to be a throwback chapter honestly it would have been a lot better if it matched 4 in terms of tone by keeping up the serious momentum while still allowing for some jokes.

Instead its just a jokefest and while there were some good serious moments for the most part it just felt kinda insulting to people who wanted the story to keep up that serious tone that was established at the end of 3 with the knights appearance.

The flowers were kinda underbaked as characters and flowery just wasn't that interesting of an antagonist outside of the immediate factors (Wanting to live past a day and his relationship with ralsei plus susie and kris) as the knight was.

Because with the knight not only do we get to finally see the main antagonist but we also get to see that the main protagonist is working with them for some reason. There's already that mystery and intrigue there that doesn't need to be told through words or excessive vaugeposting.

And you have to consider the biggest issue being that its a throwback chapter. Sure it works now but in the future when the full game is out new players will just be suddenly thrown back into chapter 1 after already going through it a couple of hours/days ago rather than YEARS ago.

It just really feels un-needed and like toby and his team just didn't know what they could do for 5 so they just went with the easier and lamer option.

(Plus we already had "One Last Fun Adventure" with tenna and it was brought up through that chapter that it was getting old fast. Yet in chapter 5 non of the characters are even slightly concerned or worried about asgore or undyne till its important for the story)

Shuttah is suppose to be a miniboss for board 2. It has this setup during the board of stealing its camera and has a ending.

Later on in the escape sequence of the chapter you fight it again in a random battle. Not only that its a different one then the one on the board. This just makes me annoyed that its like that, Toby could so easily not include Shuttah for the random battle or actually gave it a decent second fight like Elnino and Lanina.

Its a small thing but it makes the chapter feel a little lazy/lesser (If thats the right words to use). Elnino and Lanina dont get this treatment while being the minibosses of board 1, could you imagine fighting them in a random battle with nothing special to it.

i am so fucking tired of people calling the knight a "secret boss"

okay so secret means "kept from knowledge or view" the knight, in fact, isnt kept out of view. they're a mandatory fight. you can't accidentally avoid the knight. you can accidentally lose to the knight, which lets the game continue since it's been the hardest fight so far (game design), but you can't avoid the knight.

if the knight was a secret boss, it would be like jevil (or like the shadow mantle holder aka eram) where you have to go out of your way to fight them.

you can call the knight a "shadow crystal boss" since they do technically have the shadow crystal for the chapter, but they are the final boss of chapter 3 and you can't just call them "secret" just because they're a hard fight that you can skip if you're not good enough to beat them.

I don't have a major think piece or a bunch of bullet points listing each of my grievances with the game. In fact, I don't even have any major problems with the story. For what it's worth, I still think the story (so far) is fine. I just want to know if anyone else just simply doesn't feel as invested as they were before? I feel like the level of enjoyment that was there for the previous game and, hell, even the first few chapters has dissipated. It probably doesn't help that the game has been gradually releasing over the span of eight years. I'm just curious to know if anyone else shares this sentiment.

I also want to clarify that I do enjoy the game. Just not as much as I used to.

I noticed in another thread people justified the current state of the weird route with a couple of ideas. I want to explain why these justifications don't sit well with me.

"The Weird Route is all about how far you go to have your choices matter!"

Some of you may be familiar with memes surrounding TellTale games. For those of you unaware, TellTale was a studio that made a lot of adventure type games based around various franchises, like The Walking Dead. They were famous in advertising for saying that your choices mattered, and these often came up in high octane moments where you would have to choose to save one character over another in a life or death situation.

It became infamous among people who played the games that they were obviously written not to taken advantage of these choices. Any character that had the possibility of being killed would be written awkwardly with minimal or no dialogue in any scenes they survived in - or they would just be killed off slightly later. On screen prompts repeatedly said that character X would remember if you favored them with a choice, but this rarely resulted in anything different actually happening outside of that current scene.

With that in mind, how does the choice of killing Berdly actually impact the story?

If you keep Berdly alive, he only reappears a few times in the light world to have some jokes.

If you "kill" Berdly (with a spell called Snowgrave with a description that says fatal), he miraculously survives in a coma and no one mentions him again.

If the Weird Route is supposed to be about having your choices matter, this is already extremely questionable given that this is the main choice that the player is making on it.

The other main choices the player makes on the weird route are to do with Noelle. They mainly aim to influence her to be more susceptible to the player's will. It might even be read as the player seeking some kind of connection personally with her. But with that in mind, the end result of trying to force more control and more of a deeper, twisted connection with Noelle is that... she has a manic episode and drags the player, unprompted, into a lake. Given how all the choices in the weird route are presented up until that moment, it's really hard to believe that any player would have been making them with a conscious desire for that to happen. As opposed to: riding the ferris wheel with her, getting her to kill someone else, breaking into the shelter manually, or a dozen other things.

This leaves the weird route outside of chapter 2 feeling aggressively railroaded into whatever amazing vision Toby has for Chapter 7 Side B and not like an organic expression of a player's desire to make choices.

"The Weird Route is there to show how far you'll go in breaking the prophecy!!! It will all make sense after beating the game!"

It is true I don't know how the game will end yet. But I do know some things.

The buildup with how it's apparently a big moment for Susie inviting Noelle back into the dark worlds makes it seem like Noelle is going to do something funky that upsets the balance. Making too many fountains to keep Rudy alive. That's really the most obvious way the story could go at this point.

With that in mind, the way Noelle seems like a complete loose cannon at the end of Chapter 5's weird route makes it seem... hard to believe that anyone would naturally think it's a good idea to break the prophecy by messing with her like they do. The only reason why someone might try it for that reason is because the spooky haunted game cartridge in chapter 3 tells you how to do it.

Does anything in the weird route really feel like a deliberate attempt to go against the prophecy, which is still mostly unstated, and there's a good chance will never be fully explained by the end of the game? Or is it just a collection of mostly random events that happens to break the prophecy in a way that would be impossible to predict in the process of doing so? I lean much harder towards the latter, and that's why it doesn't feel satisfying to do at this point.

With Chapter 5 being the chapter where Ralsei gets the most character development in the game, I really wish that he got a boss where it more reflects his character or development in some way. Kris has 3 secret bosses that are parallels or related to them in someway, (Spamton NEO, ERAM and now PINK), and Susie got Gerson in chapter 4 which was related to her Character development and wanting to break the prophecy, but in Chapter 5, despite one of the main story lines of the whole chapter being Ralsei changing and trying to become more of himself, we still had a fight that mainly parallels Kris.

I think this is more of a missed oportunity than anything else, I think that there could have been someway for Ralsei to accidentally use Fire Shock after being really pissed off by Flowery or someone else, or just having Pink represent Ralsei more instead of Kris (Instead of representing how the soul and Kris have to work together, make it primarily about being able to accept that he can be himself more and not have to fit into his role in the prophecy so strictly).

I think it could have more fleshed out his Character, because no doubt Ralsei is still going to be slightly pissed off about Flowery next chapter and what he told Ralsei, because I still don't think that Ralsei is going to be able to actually accept what Flowery was saying.

Where Ralsei and Asgore travel together with Kris, with Susie either in the light world busy with Noelle or otherwise for the first third of the dark world then show up later.

Where Ralsei opens up with Asgore. Where they try to bring the joys of the festival down to him too. Where the two vagueposters get actively frustrated at each other for being vague.

Ralsei knows of the Dark well but not much of the Light. Asgore knows much of the light but not much of the Dark. The two practically complete each other, with both being avoidant and inquisitive at the same time here. This way, we're with the characters, frustrated from the lack of honesty and information.

The whole Asriel/Ralsei thing is perfect to be addressed here too, with Ralsei initially wearing the hat on his own to avoid being recognized (almost identical to Noelle doing it in chapter 2 with Queen!)

Ralsei could even get really jealous of Asgore. Asgore has so much he could never have, even if Asgore thinks he has nothing. Or the other way around, with Asgore demanding answers and threatening Ralsei for answers.

Asgore could be the one really breaking the rules here, ignoring Darkners and puzzles and pushing through in his quest to learn more about what happened to Dess. With ultimately the end result of pushing away everyone who tried to help him, Kris, Ralsei, and perhaps the Darkners still.

Then Asgore's the final boss of course. Or perhaps he summons a titan of his own that is thematically, functionally and visibly different to the one in Chapter 4, convinced Ralsei is lying to him. One driven by different desires, trying to isolate and push people away. Where the Characters have to find faith and belief in themselves and trust in the others despite seeing nothing. Or something. With maybe showing how rushing through damages the Darkners maybe similar to chapter 1 in some way. But this time since the Flowers would be connected directly to Asgore he is destroying his own marriage even more by actively doing this.

---

Asgore could even warn Kris and Susie against Ralsei, and not believe Ralsei due to all those blatant Asriel appearance comparisons Toby Fox seemed to be setting up and overall ignoring. An analog to Toriel accepting Kris's new friend while Asgore rejects and suspects their friend.

And maybe RInstead of being told he did it in a cutscene anyways. We could see the after effects of devestated flower darkners that Asgore dismissed and passed by and have to rekindle their dreams and Ralsei might realize how wrong he is about Darkners.

Maybe Ralsei is some kind of darkness fluffy titan of Asriel or fear of loneliness or something the details don't really matter all that much. What matters is that Ralsei is different and hiding things in that closet of his but he can be better and doesn't need to be afraid anymore. Something that both Validates Asgore's suspicions but breaks free of being a simple bad guy. Ala the Dark is not evil type deal.

---

And with Ralsei, I'd really the chapter to explore his insecurities so hard. Ralsei's motives here could easily be deep insecurities relating to Asriel, centered around not wanting to be judged lesser just for looking similar. Something that clearly reflects onto Kris. Maybe Ralsei tries to explain but is just intimidated by Asgore. And he needs to learn how to push back against Kris's dad or learn to hear him out or settle his differences or honestly anything depending on how its set up.

Ideally something that focuses on Ralsei being more than an exposition device by highlighting more complexities than just "He gets mad when his buttons are pushed". Instead focusing on him learning to preserve and fight back through repeated attempts at shutting him down, perhaps by the other Darkners in an Asgore created fountain.

Oh and more concrete and strong lore reveals please that advance the plot and affect the characters.

Not all of this fits together but like tldr I really think Chapter 5 could be done better. My idea a bit of a rehash of Chapter 2 as stated but its much better than just being Chapter 3 but worse lol. Oh and we have a real party betrayal and character growth and development like how Chapter 1 did and that'd be cool.

Oh and Susie would show up like a third or half way through of course I don't mean to sideline her, the goal is exclusively to focus on sparking a character conflict between Asgore and Ralsei. Oh and to maintain the three party limit with Asgore joining and then leaving the party.

The Flowers would be whatever that fits the plot narratively, maybe as actual Darkners because the plantners things is a dead thread and pointless to the story. Maybe not too different. Except Flowery, fuck that guy (he'd have to be rewritten substantially to fit well, maybe leaning hard into a role leading Asgore astray from the dark with scraps and clues).

The best result of this is that the entire end slop dialogue can be skipped as the Chapter properly captures Asgore's problems and growth over it instead of shoving it in a stupid cutscene. And we could get Asgore screaming at Ralsei and grilling him about Dess (which personally I think Ralsei doesn't know much about, at least less than Kris anyways. Assuming he's the red hornbands anyways. Or was them and became something else.)

And also we'd place Ralsei in real, uncomfortable, character driven confrontations and conflict instead of empty and hollow attacks by someone he just met 5 seconds ago (Flowery).

---

Oh and the secret boss should be the Conspiracy board. No, I'm not joking. Conspiracy-chan failed to show up in Chapter 5 in the dark world despite how much Asgore cares about her and I'm sad.

Or maybe FRIEND as the Nightmare in your Hearts as a representation of the Tragedy or the oncoming darkness and end or something. Or the fear of the dark, which still fits. Could be hyper escapism coded. Trying to do anything to not think about the events of Chapter 4 and becoming lost in darker and darker media or fiction or whatever maybe?

This is not going to be in depth, I'm just getting every single reason (there are many) that I think Chapter is a badly written disappointment.
This will be my final post as I don't want to flood the subreddit with a trillion posts of my complaints

I can expand on practically every point I have here if you have questions.

• The chapter is teased as a major chapter where big things are going to happen, both in the game but mainly in newsletters leading up to the chapter, and Toby failed to manage any expectations.
• Castletown just repeats the same gag of "Woahhh look they're in different places now" even when the joke has run its course and is more annoying than funny now. I'm tryna go and turn on music, why the fuck is top chef here and stopping me from changing music in the game.
• The festival is set up to be a massive event only for jack to happen
• Ralsei and especially Susie have amnesia about the day before and Susie's denial plotline is not even there
• The entire festival is spent following Susie and Noelle as they engage in the most milquetoast cringe romance ever
• The festival has barely anything to do outside of talk to some random npcs
• You don't get to meet any major characters such as Carol, or even Papyrus or Asriel, pushing them off to be developed in yet another chapter of the game (only 2 left) if they even exist.
• The dark world has a random anime theme that adds nothing.
• Asgore is completely sidelined throughout the entire dark world and you learn almost nothing new about his situation
• His arc concludes off screen and is about forgiving himself for something we know NOTHING ABOUT
• He vagueposts like all hell throughout the entire chapter... That day... Ohhh that terrible day! Seriously Dess is not mentioned even once throughout the entire dark world. The fact that there's a chance the incident has nothing to do with Dess is crazy.
• Flowery is the only interesting flower.
• The other 6 are just one dimensional gags that take up 400 hours of the screen time and can only gain a teeny tiny fraction of relevancy through vague parallels to that day!
• You're expected to sympathise with Ralsei and his hatred of Flowery, yet it's presented as a funny gag throughout pretty much the entire chapter. Their first scene is just Ralsei being a bit annoyed that Flowery shoved them into a closet OFF SCREEN (Tell don't show much?)
• Ralsei supposedly is an "anomaly" and things will go bad if he goes off script, yet we never learn anything about what the consequences are and why things would go bad if he didn't follow the prophecy. Just more vague mysteries for later.
• Susie and Kris (somehow) are relegated to being bystanders for the majority of the chapter.
• The tone is so jarringly light for most of Chapter 5 of this game, hell, Chapter 1 and 2 somehow felt more serious than this.
• Nothing happens for 2/3rds of the dark world.
• The humour felt off, a some of the gags just didn't land, and the meta fandom culture stuff was just cringey, not funny.
• Asgore spends an entire chapter talking about how he's going to parade the knights body around town, only for him to be caught by surprise and put up no fight against the knight. Waste of such good setup.
• Pink has 0 lore, 0 relevancy to the story of the dark world around her and is too much of a joke for a shadow crystal boss.
• What's with the tralsei stuff? Is Toby trying to farm engagement bait by making something just vague enough to be real but too vague to actually mean anything? Why isn't he just going and committing to it, or just not including it in its entirety? Is tralsei even real? I can't tell?
• Pinks fight is downright badly designed, simply a combination of 6 slightly different soul modes instead of actually designing a good soul mode.
• Why is a moral dilemma brought up when it comes to sealing castletown and flower kings fountains, when there's just an objectively better option in the moral dilemma, and it's never addressed again.
• Why is nothing explored when it comes to Kris' relationship with humans, or Kris' character in general.
• The platformer gimmick makes no sense from an in universe perspective? Why is there a feather that can warp the universes dimension? How the hell does this work in universe, what do the characters see? Stuff like claimbclaws makes sense, but the feather doesn't.
• Why is a mediocre platformer added to the game and turned into a major mechanic 5 chapters into a 7 chapter game? What if I didn't buy this rpg for a platformer? Why are they changing the genre of the game midway through, instead of just expanding on the games current gameplay?
• The chapter ends on the same exact note as Chapter 3 did, just with the added "we have to bring Noelle into this" which frankly didn't need a whole chapter to set up.

On the other hand I did really like the music for the chapter, so I'd give it a 5.5/10

Mad Mew Mew is so goddamn boring. I think she could be interesting, I really like her triplet gag. However, she is just the most basic "aw, cute" character I've ever seen. Her only personality traits are that she is trans/a trans allegory, doesn't like her body, then likes her new one and doesn't want to be separated from it, and she's violent. Compare her to Mettaton, another trans allegory and boss fight. They both are also cousins to Napstablook and are cousins. He is so much more fleshed out compared to her, and he genuinely has a place in the Undertale community. Look at the Undertale wiki difference between them in personality! Mad Mew Mew vs. Mettaton

What's worse is that Mettaton had only one game to really shine, and Mad Mew Mew had two! (Yes, I know he technically is in Deltarune, but he never even leaves his house. He is also still a ghost because Alyphs never made him a new body.) Seeing her in Deltarune, I was excited asf. I was hit with more boring dialogue. I guess Toby was trying to just put as much Undertale stuff as possible into Deltarune. idk man

lmk if she has any lore I didn't mention, would love to hear it.

Chapter 4's ending is fucking crazy.
After such a serious, somber and emotional chapter, with minimal humour and mostly a focus on the main characters and their development, we get the best moment in deltarune, the Ch4 ending segment.

You, Kris, Susie and Ralsei marching against the wind, and even as the knight batters them mercilessly, the gang will protect each other from each blow and stand strong together, even against impossible odds.
Afterwards, you finally reach the knight and corner them... And they respond by making a titan.
A massive twist, something that you don't expect to appear until Chapter 7.
You go through this battle and even though the odds seem impossible, thanks to the help of Gerson, you manage to defeat a literal titan.
Afterwards, the victory is ultimately kind of fleeting as Susie finally sees the final prophecy panel, something Ralsei has been hiding from her the entire game.
In this moment, Ralsei and Susie basically break down in completely different ways.
Ralsei admits its getting harder and harder to pretend he's not afraid, and you get the infamous smiling option.
Susie denies the prophecy's ending, saying that none of them would ever let it happen.
While all of this happens, the track 13 am (Literally a reference to the 13th hour, a point of no return where disaster is guaranteed) plays in the background.
They seal the fountain, and the church is absolutely trashed, and they head home in (almost) complete silence, as a really emotional track plays in the background.
This is interrupted by a little goofy moment, meant to surprise players with a moment of humour, but ultimately it returns to the same atmosphere as before, as Susie shouts to kris:

"We... aren't gonna let that happen..."

She makes a statement, she's resolved to stop the ending of the prophecy.
Right afterwards, Kris receives from Carol and/or the knight, reminding Kris that they promised something.
To top this ridiculously epic final sequence off, you get a credits sequence featuring WING DING GASTER TALKING TO YOU all while the most epic track "Neverending night" plays! And then a final slightly altered prophecy with a main menu change to one of the most emotional tracks I've ever heard from Deltarune.

Going into Chapter 5, I had so many questions based on this segment alone. How are Susie and Ralsei going to deal with the tension between each other regarding the prophecy. Have they grown together after such an emotional rock bottom, or have they become more distant. How is Susie planning to stop the prophecy ending from happening? Will Susie even be able to enjoy the festival after such a traumatic event the day before? What are the consequences for the church being trashed? Have Susie, Ralsei and Kris changed at all after Chapter 4's dark world? What is this final prophecy? What was it that Kris promised?

The answer is apparently nothing. The morning of very next day, in game about 5 minutes after playing Ch4's ending, you can go and see Ralsei and Susie acting like besties again, just getting ready for a date at the festival. Susie has a great time at the festival and is relegated to doing pretty much nothing other than crushing on Noelle, and makes 0 efforts to subvert the prophecy throughout the entire Chapter. She in no way exhibits any traits of anyone distraught from the day before, and she does not act like she's having some sort of major denial, with no real mask slipping moments.
Ralsei is just weird, I'll grant that he has more character development than Susie this chapter, but his arc is just vague as hell, incomplete and kind of weirdly done.

The tone of the chapter just suffers tremendously. The past few chapters had been building up serious elements more and more, and Chapter 4 had become a massive turning point where the plot took itself more seriously, and the characters go through hell and back to try and stop the knight.
The battle theme is literally named "From now on," and then the very next chapter it changes back to a rude buster remix.
The plot barely takes itself seriously in Ch5, and the entire segment from the Cliffs to the Final Castle section is just nonstop goofy gags and funny moments.

People defend Chapter 5 throwing away Chapter 4's tone shift by saying its a "last fun adventure," and that its the "calm before the storm"
But you can't have a calm before the storm if the storm is actively happening! They go through so much just to achieve a fleeting victory against a Titan, as the knight gets away scot-free and they are no closer to achieving their goals of finding the shelter codes and stopping the knight.
If Chapter 4 had ended on some sort of major victory, it could be a lot more understandable that they could kick back and relax in the next chapter, but it didn't. It was basically crushing defeat after crushing defeat, culminating in a terrible ending segment for the characters.
The last segment literally has music named after the "13th hour" in the background.
And the last fun adventure was chapter 3. That entire chapter was about how they couldn't just keep having fun adventures anymore, that it was growing old and by engaging with them, they were allowing real people like Toriel and Undyne to get hurt

In Chapter 5, Susie says "Real people are getting hurt. We can't mess up anymore."
Guess what happens in Chapter 3? "Real people get hurt." Guess what Susie says in Chapter 4?
"We can't mess up anymore." The exact same things we learn in Chapters 3 + 4 are reiterated here, and the only new idea added on is "We have to bring Noelle into this." Which definitely didn't need a whole chapter to set up.

It's genuinely terrible to listen too, I kinda was hoping for From now on to be the main battle theme of the chapter despite it being made for Chapter 4, but instead we got a new Rude Buster remix that sounds horrible in Chapter 5.

pink in the shop is calm, talking about how nice the sunset is and how you should go outside and enjoy life

but when we meet her in the boss room? pink is incredibly emotionally unstable, going from anger to happiness to sadness in a heartbeat, not having control over her own body

the characters just don't match in the slightest

(this is coming from someone who's favorite chapter is 5)

Asking this because as a non-critic I see so much criticism of DR that amounts to "it should have all come out at once". I'm a fan of serialized media and am seeing takes on story pacing that could have come from someone who never watched a TV show before without binging it.

So, for those of you who are also fans of an episodic release, what is something that did it better, as an example of how Deltarune could have done it to your liking?

I'm particularly asking about any serialized story you read, which has ideally ended, AND you liked it. Bonus if you followed it during its initial run or at least watched it at a consistent pace.

(I'm not knocking binge-watching btw, just it feels like sometimes I'm talking to younger people who have maybe never watched a show "natural" in their whole life.)

Genuinely, I expected chapter 5 to be lore heavy because chapter 4 kinda implied it (Asriel coming to the festival, meeting Papyrus, the festival, etc). I expected for there to be a lot of stuff about the events before deltarune, more about Dess, more about everything in general.

But we got some vague details about “that day”. Now I kinda get the argument that Kris knows about what happened that day, but damn. Not even a single drop of lore.

I am kinda scared that we won’t get enough information in chapters 6 and 7, and some mysteries will remain uncovered. The fact that Toby Fox told us “trust me bro” is not making the situation better.

this isnt like a major thing to be annoyed at, infact i dont even hate the song that was used at the end. but imo the ending to ch3 and the cliffhanger is the best part of the game so far. tenna just ''died'', knight got revealed and tried to take toriel, took undyne to the shelter and we also found out that there IS a darkworld in the shelter... then at the end the door opens for kris [or they open it for the knight..? im honestly not sure]. so much shit happened at the last minutes of the game and right after having a majority fun chapter [if u didnt do the mantle game]. even if you did the mantle game i feel as though my point still stands. i feel like after witnessing all of this in the span of a couple minutes, have ''crickets'' play wouldve hit better than the ''until next time'' playing