Deltarune starts off with a false choice in letting you create your avatar. However, when you actually go through the selections, there's something neat at work. First you choose your head. Of all the options, only two do not have longish hair: one is bald, the other is short hair with a tuft in the front center. Next, you choose the torso. Similarly, the options are mostly identical. The differences are a little harder to see due to the 8-bit art style, but there is a short sleeve option, a slightly larger torso in a shirt, a button down, and perhaps the shirt style in the form of a jacket. Finally, you choose your legs. There are no real differences between the legs, other than the last option which has the dividing leg line to the right as compared to the others which all have it to the left.
I think this speaks to the concept of character customization and identity. On face value, it seems like the player has an ability to make choices about what their avatar will look like. But in reality, with options that are so similar and only two or three differences---a problem that is exacerbated through the art style as differences are not that distinct---what exactly are you choosing? What stands out enough: 1) to choose that specific option or 2) to be different from the other options to the player? These questions tease at the concept of identity.
How do you want to present your identity within the game, if at all? If you want your avatar to look like you and you have short hair, but you don't like the short hair option, what do you draw on to make the selection between baldness and long hair? Or if you have long hair, what distinction resonates enough with you that you will choose it? The same questions go for the clothing; why will you choose the shirt with buttons over the shirt without any? If you want to make up a character and give them a body, how will you make your choices? What in these options identifies with or as that character?
Even though ultimately in Deltarune, these decisions don't matter, character customization at the beginning of a game serves to help immerse the player within the game's world by letting them create something personal to them. The avatar can be themselves or be a character they are building, but consideration is required by the player at every level of the process---even if all they think is "I want to hurry up and finish" or "I like this". But by having to think about these, the player creates a bond of relation to that character; it may not be your identity, but it is an identity that you created.
I really like that commentary about customization as well. I actually kind of hate character customizers in most single player games because, like deltarune kind of says, it doesn't really matter. Your character is almost always decided before the game starts, and to me it has always felt like a weird prompt to put a facial identity with a story I don't know yet. The limiting factors in deltarune help allow some room for player immersion while also preserving a consistent identity.
(here's to hoping character customization actually affects gameplay in an upcoming game like cyberpunk 2077)
It's an interesting take to look at the starting point of the game to analyze. Truth be told, I saw very little variance in each appearance, so I did not tend to pay it much mind. It seemed neat, as the previous game Undertale did not have this option but instead just had a name input. Unlike Undertale though, you don't even get to pick your name. This part of the game I thought just simulated life. No one gets to choose how they look entirely, especially not what torso they prefer. Most do not get to pick their names either, without going through some sort of transformation to their entire personality. As such, I felt it more relat…
Your final point reminded me of one of my favorite games, which also happens to have sparse character creation options: Fire Emblem Awakening (Spoilers for this game). Much like in Deltarune, you're more likely to create a new identity rather than your own identity, given the limited options, but I still found myself referring to the avatar with first person pronouns and treating them as a stand-in for me. This became more difficult as the game progressed, since they had their own personality and dialogue, and later learned that they possessed the bloodline of an evil dragon which they could transform into, a trait I cannot identify with. A more recent entry in the franchise, Fire Emblem Three Houses, had…
In a way, Deltarune's refusal to allow the player to create their own character is its first step in making the player of common video game tropes. Even though games are tacitly supposed to be self-inserts, where the player is an extension of the character, they rarely make an effort to shape the protagonist in that way. Games that try to offer the player a choice to be someone new come off as insincere when they don't let the player be themselves. Deltarune takes that insincerity and channels it into its larger message that choices sometime don't matter.
When I first opened Deltarune, before I knew the stunt the game would pull with removing my ability to choose my own avatar, I remember being frustrated by the apparent lack of options for customization. The main reason for this frustration was because normally, when I design avatars, I make them look as much like me as possible, and I couldn't do that within the game's constraints. Within the context of your blog post, however, this raises an interesting point: why do I have this instinct to make an avatar as similar to me as possible, even when it's clear that I won't be able to do so because the options are too limited? Why don't I ever choose to…