Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q65,63/narrative
I don't think it's actually that games have a worse grasp of narrative now.
I think what's actually happened is that _players_ have gotten increasingly bad at understanding narratives over time, and games have adapted themselves to that to still get recommended by players. Game developers probably have a reasonable grasp of what a narrative is. I mean, Hollow Knight contains a lot of buried narrative, all the worldbuilding actually relies a lot on fictional history timelines and thematic antagonisms as they would appear in any narrative. But the difference is probably that developers realize that the average person is unbelievably bad at narrative analysis and sees all stories as essentially unpredictable, and so whenever there is narrative in a game they have to feed it to you through this explicit retelling of background stories as if you were picking up and reading a book inside Minecraft. They may take the "explicit" story and then drop out a bunch of details to make it feel more mysterious and open to interpretation but either way it's still like stories are tossed into a game as easter eggs and you go around picking them up, and then the game is picked clean and has no more story to offer any more.
I get what your actual point is about classic games — it's not that the story in Mario 64 is a masterpiece as a story, or Hollow Knight's story is literally worse "as a book", it's that the medium of the game is not treated as a story and the story is tacked on. Spyro the Dragon would be my favorite example of a game that actually allows its game world to roleplay its story. The way realms are physically connected through portals allows going between levels to be a diegetic event. The act of entering the levels and looking around becomes a diegetic depiction of the story of a protagonist exploring an entire world he probably hasn't been to every corner of before. Has Spyro ever _been_ to the Dream Weavers world before now? We may never know, but the intro cutscene showing things being normal and then the act of showing an absurd number of levels on the screen one by one certainly does bring up the question. It isn't really about the quality of the narrative "as a book", it's just about the fact developers have forgotten to make use of the power of intuition in making the experience of narrative antagonisms in a game "immediate", like the character's first person experience is telling part of the story. Video games as a whole are amazing. A video game can flat out create a "lived experience" of a fictional character standing in the world as if that character was conscious, although the only consciousness is the player. (This concept is really simple at its core, not inherently 'complex' or 'advanced', really hard to describe to someone who doesn't already get it, and much easier to understand if you've ever tried to read Heidegger's work Being and Time where he uses all sorts of weird terms like "process of Being" and "being-in-the-world" and that goes on for hundreds and hundreds of pages.)
By that standard I'd say Deltarune is actually doing really well at using the medium of games itself to tell a narrative, through things like the Shadow Crystals and egg man and the Friend faces, etc. A lot of indie games and games period don't really achieve that, like, maybe OneShot would genuinely qualify here as a subtle failure because if I remember right there are a lot of cases of "storybook easter eggs" just being thrown into dialogue. Pokémon might be another halfway example in the way it puts down a mandatory evil organization plot in the middle of everything that will mess with replayability after billing itself as the best and most popular game about simply exploring a new world; in a way you could say OneShot has 'Team Rocket syndrome'. But there might also be other games like OFF that are indie games but don't fail the Team Rocket test. OFF is a linear narrative with limited replayability but at the same time, every single object and interaction in the game serves _as the narrative_ . Every single interaction in OFF actually feels like the game is roleplaying the story, or the game objects and player are roleplaying the story, instead of the game just feeding you stories in a dialogue box or throwing in the equivalent of an anime episode into the main plot that takes center stage but functions like an easter-egg storybook, being self-contained in all the wrong ways.
So... there is this "art installation" on a couple game stores called The End of Gameplay. The point of it is to present game mechanics in an unstructured way, so you can play them, but a few mechanics tell a story themselves without being a structured journey that rewards you like an RPG, or a game with a lot of padding between the story. I think this is very relevant to discussing Deltarune. I think Deltarune is a _lot_ like The End of Gameplay in that it's trying to do a whole lot with environmental storytelling and exploration while not making how good players are at the game seriously matter. A lot of the comments on the last video were saying either that putting more story events into a Deltarune chapter would be bad (more story), or that Deltarune shouldn't be a novel (less story), but I think both of those miss how Deltarune actually tells its story. Deltarune is chock full of story — if someone was to write out a summary of all the story in Deltarune right now, it _would_ look a lot like a novel. People have said before that Deltarune "couldn't be a movie" and honestly I really don't agree with that; a single movie would be a bad choice but a book, comic, or even an animated show would not actually be a bad adaptation as long as it was able to get across one of the core ideas which is the conflict between the people in the game world and the player/Angel as an unknowable eldritch entity. It would read like one really specific Let's Play of Deltarune, but if and only if Deltarune already exists, then it would work.
So, with Deltarune itself... what I feel is that packing more story events into Chapter 5 wouldn't necessarily be bad, I just think the method of doing it and the content of the events suggested on this channel were a little incorrect. The quickest way I can summarize it is you missed the point of what the Roaring is supposed to cause when it happens, so after that mistake, all your added events were based on speeding up an alternate Roaring with an alternate payload or "punch line" that wasn't what everyone expected after Chapter 3. What I think is that if you had a correct model of what the Roaring was — which in my understanding, is fundamentally based around thoughts, fears, and secrets escaping from inside characters — and focused on Deltarune as a whole as more of a scavenger hunt where characters stumble into things that will eventually become terrifying or dangerous if they keep looking, then, yeah, maybe you could fit in a few more story events into Chapter 5. If you've watched through the last episode of The Amazing Digital Circus... well, think about how characters break apart into bizarre abominations throughout that. I see the Roaring as vaguely like when a psychologically broken character cosmically tears open and it results in a weird landscape full of monsters. This hint would make vastly more sense if you knew about the character that goes in the last episode and everything about that character's character arc. Like, that is Deltarune and the Roaring to me if it was much more visually dramatic and ate up the world; I think The Roaring is "diegetic" and just a force of nature too but it also has a metaphorical meaning. Dess has some kind of secret that can't be let out that nobody really knows about right now, and the Roaring Knight is actually defending that secret and also keeping Asgore from blaming Dess for "making Dess go missing". (If you ask me, I have a theory that Dess is a trans man and is actually shadow-puppeting the entire existence of Gaster and Gaster followers because he, Dess, has a lot of power now and has wildly taken control of the game world. I think there's going to be an _absolutely wild_ omega-universe-rift-Knight battle in Chapter 7. 'Kris, stop running away, you're either on my side to re-make the world or you forget me'. But you can make your own conclusions, as long as you take into account the eggs / egg man, the closets, and Pink.)
I think replayability was one of the core design considerations for Deltarune, so adding too many intense scripted animations is inherently bad for that, although things like platforming sections, secret bosses, or in theory action-RPG gameplay are still fine. Toby does make allowances for a couple of impactful animations of course, like Ralsei crying in Chapter 4 or the section where the party is running toward the Titan (gameplay), but they're often very restrained. It's like additional animations happen mostly when the characters are standing around looking real and being animated at much too high framerate to make the characters more sympathetic, but otherwise the game falls back to very basic things like dialogue, encounters/bosses, and exploration to tell its story. The mundane is a really big part of Deltarune, even when things get really bad.
So... have you ever tried to analyze a Mystery story, like in the mystery genre?
I was re-watching "why Chapter 5 failed" and that occurred to me. It says, "Deltarune's entire story revolves around one certain gimmick: withholding information", and I said "wait a moment."
For example you could ask, is Deltarune better/worse at its combos than an Ace Attorney game? The structure of the games is actually more similar than you would think: an Ace Attorney game consists of episodes, and self-contained mysteries happen in them, but then threads open up in each case that carry across to the other cases.
Personally... it could be that I wasn't paying attention well (I was only watching the game, not playing it) but I actually found the first three games a little frustrating because it seemed like there were telegraphs being set up and then they were so loosely connected that you really couldn't guess the answer to the mystery even though that is in fact a crucial element of gameplay in the games — through the trial gameplay the game basically quizzes you on whether you're picking things up and whether you're focused on the exact thing it wants you to focus on. By the final cases in a game it feels like it's doing this thing of setting up telegraphs and then... it just sort of spontaneously makes up twists and acts like you should have known them.
I think that line of thinking is similar to what you have to do to properly judge Deltarune. As far as I can tell, Deltarune is actually a lot better structured than Ace Attorney games because all the evidence scattered throughout the game in environmental storytelling really does allow people who are paying close attention to it to piece together the thematic antagonisms and events that appear to have happened in the past. In my mind it's already possible to guess what the biggest reveal in either Chapter 6 or 7 is although we don't necessarily know which chapter it will come up in or exactly when.
So I think that's part of what the problem is, that mystery stories naturally tend to put all the interesting events and "ironies" way in the past and not really tell you what the story is even though it _happened_ and everything that happens in the present is _affected by it_ . I think there are going to be better and worse ways to do that, and some beginning writers (I'm thinking people like Scott Cawthon) will try to use the fact past events are hidden to not analyze them and create fake depth where it looks like events happened but they really have no idea what's there.