How Toby Fox successfully surprised us a second time

Is it too late to write a blog post for fifth week? I hope not, because I’m making one now. Anyway, there are going to be some spoilers for Delta Rune and also Frog Fractions 2 in here, so if you want to avoid those, don’t read this.

How do you make a follow-up to a game that was good in part because it surprised players? Undertale came out of nowhere, so players came into it with no expectations. Even if they knew beforehand that they didn’t have to kill any enemies, unless they went out of their way to find major spoilers, they would be caught off guard by the many other ways in which the game subverts our expectations about an 8-bit-style RPG. These range from things as small as Sans and Papyrus speaking in different fonts and shops not letting Chara sell items to big moments like Sans telling Chara what LV and EXP actually stand for and the boss fight with Flowey. These subversions weren’t the only thing that was good about Undertale, but they were what made it memorable, and without them the game would not have been as successful.

The problem with making a sequel to a game like that is that fans of the first game are not only expecting it to be weird, but they’re expecting it to surprise them in new ways. Additionally, these fans talk on the internet, and they might predict a surprise, or worse, predict something better than the surprise that the developer didn’t think of.

One example of where this failed is Frog Fractions 2. The first Frog Fractions was a flash game that surprised players by frequently switching genres. Before the sequel was released, players had to complete an ARG that involved finding puzzle pieces hidden in the files of other indie games on Steam. This is weird, especially because an ARG crossing multiple video games was unprecedented, which only built up expectations for the game itself. When Frog Fractions 2 finally was released, it turned out to be basically a linear extension of the first game. The core idea was the same, it was just longer and incorporated more genres. The ARG turned out to be better than the game itself.

Toby Fox managed to avoid setting expectations too high for the Delta Rune demo by avoiding hype altogether. Until the day before its release, nobody knew there was going to be any kind of follow-up to Undertale, and even when it was released, it was claimed to be a “survey.” It takes a little while for the player to realize they’re playing a game. This allowed the game to replicate the environment Undertale was in when it came out, where players came into it without expectations. Delta Rune then acts unpredictable by keeping some things from Undertale, changing some of them, and dropping others, seemingly at random. Many of the original characters are still there, but they have different memories. Other characters are new. The bullet hell combat is still there, but it now rewards the player for getting close to the bullets. Combat is now party-based. You can sell items to shops. There are enemies that look like Sand and Asgore, but are completely different characters. Possibly most strikingly, the player still has choices, but most of them are meaningless. The ending of the demo is also surprising in a “why the hell would anyone do that” kind of way.

Of course, now people are going to have all kinds of expectations for and predictions about the rest of Delta Rune. We’ll see if Toby Fox can surprise us again.