This article is the continuation of a post from last month. The first part can be found here.
Since the first chapter of DELTARUNE dropped, the world has become very strange, hasn’t it? It sure is nice having an old familiar story and characters to come back to again and again. After years of waiting, DELTARUNE Chapters 3 and 4 released together as a paid release this summer, and did not disappoint.
DELTARUNE is weird because it wasn’t originally intended to come out this way. Toby Fox, the game’s legendary creator and composer, originally planned for the game to be a single release, and ended up changing plans partly for his own sanity. He’s definitely turned it for the best, though — episodic releases means the fans have time to speculate about new mysteries before future chapters give answers, and that translates into sustained interest over time!
Toby Fox himself has become something of a celebrity. Undertale’s soundtrack, entirely composed by Fox using free Soundfont instrument banks and the relatively affordable music software “FL Studio,” has inspired a wave of fresh new game composers. Fox himself has been paid to compose for the Pokémon franchise, including major recurring melodies in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. His music has been sampled, remixed, and played in front of the Pope (yes, really), and he’s collaborated with the online music scene’s best of the best. But DELTARUNE is not like any of these. DELTARUNE is actually the game that convinced Toby to get into RPG creation in the first place, after its ending came to him as a vivid fever dream while he was in college. In a confusing way, that makes DELTARUNE simultaneously Undertale’s predecessor and its follow-up… art is weird that way. Some of the music from his earliest attempt to “make the game with that ending” seems to have ended up in Undertale too.
Regardless, Toby Fox has gotten better since that first attempt. A lot better. Comparing Undertale’s already-phenomenal soundtrack to the newest tracks from Chapter 4, it’s clear he never stopped honing his craft. I’ve always felt like he mixed his most complicated drum parts too far back, and yet Chapter 4 has a number of evocatively drum-centric tracks with bold, beautiful mixing.
Toby Fox soundtracks have always been events to look forward to. This summer, as I was booting into Chapter 3 for the first time, my last thought before I pushed the start button was “I’m finally going to get to listen to the new music.” DELTARUNE doesn’t just have a good soundtrack; it’s one of the few games I really, truly do Play For The Music.
Once again, unmarked spoilers follow — including spoilers for endings and the game’s weirdest secrets!
Let’s get technical for a bit. Last time, I spoke a little about the “Freedom Motif,” a shared melodic gesture that all the secret bosses seem to use. Well, shared melodies are what Toby Fox is famous for! If you’re not familiar with the term “leitmotif,” it just means any melody that gets tied to a specific thing in a story. Character leitmotifs are common, occasionally playing together when characters fight together, most often standing on their own. Leitmotifs can represent a place, like Chapter 2’s Cyber World melody or the recurring arpeggios heard throughout Chapter 4’s Dark Sanctuary. Ideas and emotions can have leitmotifs, though Toby doesn’t often do emotion motifs — the Prophecy underpinning the game’s plot appears to have its own leitmotif, heard in Chapter 1’s Legend sequence and flowing through the vaulted halls of Chapter 4’s various church tunes. Leitmotifs can develop, evolve, and give rise to completely new leitmotifs: snippets of the Legend motif can be heard in Chapter 4’s Dark Sanctuary, but they quickly get bent into a new shape and become a unique “Dark Sanctuary” theme. With all that in mind, there’s one particular leitmotif that I think is deserving of special analysis…
That’s right! Tenna’s theme from Chapter 3!
Tenna is the central figure of Chapter 3, the head of the TV studio world where the entire chapter takes place. It’s not unheard of for a character’s leitmotif to play in their home — Queen’s mansion and Noelle’s house, for example — but Tenna is different because the ENTIRE world of Chapter 3 belongs to him. That puts him in an unusual position where his theme serves as both his character’s and the world’s leitmotif. 15 out of the 35 tracks used in Chapter 3, plus three unused ones and a hidden Chapter 4 track, are made from Tenna’s theme, and that’s not even counting the peculiar fanfare melody that seems to be shared between Tenna and Spamton! And Chapter 3 does some funky stuff with the world, which means Tenna’s theme gets developed in some unusual ways.
If any one track could be considered Tenna’s quote-unquote main track, it’d be “MIKE, the BOARD, please!” It plays when Tenna is in his element, TV-hosting it up at the side of the stage, and naturally it features Tenna’s theme front and center:
But within minutes, Tenna sets the heroes to playing an 8-bit game-within-a-game, and his theme gets reshaped into a gung-ho, adventurous area theme evocative of The Legend Of Zelda, “Adventure Board.” It’s recognizably made from Tenna’s theme, but it’s also… sort of its own thing?
And the 8-bit game keeps delivering variations of Tenna’s theme. “Raft Ride,” a cute lilting waltz, is used for exactly what the name suggests. “Board Clear!” is a celebratory victory theme. When the second area is reached, “Paradise, Paradise” bends the melody into a relaxing 8-bit bossa nova track:
By the 1:22 mark in this song, the melody is pushing the limits of recognizability. The tide has carried us from our familiar spot, bit by bit, to a new stretch of the beach. But, if you look carefully, it’s still the same beach… new territory on the same Tenna theme we know and love.
Which makes it striking, almost a little off-putting, when you find this changed melody used as the foundation for another 8-bit track, lurking hidden in the fringes of the TV studio:
This version of the game is old. Older than Tenna, untouched by his influence. More primal, somehow.
Untamed. Unsafe.
Why does it sound so familiar, all the same?
Video games truly are difficult beasts. In film, time is scheduled: the same moments happen in the same order, at the same time every time. A song can be written to sync with these scheduled moments, or the moments can be scheduled to sync up with the music. But in a game, the action flows at the whim of the player — this run faster than the last, or in a different order. The player might completely skip certain parts. Syncing music to this interactive chaos is one of the great challenges of game music, and you can bet Toby “I Composed Undertale” Fox is up to that challenge.
Frequently, DELTARUNE will sync fun little background elements up to the music. The painting traps in Queen’s mansion pause breathing fire to laugh in sync with the music. The first time I played, I happened to time my cutscene reading just right for the traps to come on for the first time right as the laugh was playing, which means the oh heck they’re breathing fire moment landed as an unforgettable beat drop. Chapter 2 has even better examples, including one entire fight whose bullet patterns are synced to the battle music, but later chapters don’t lag behind. In early rooms of the Dark Sanctuary, a chorus of beautiful water maidens fades in and out in sync with the choir, and Chapter 3 includes a full-on Guitar Hero minigame!
More interesting, perhaps, are the two examples in Chapter 4 where the game drives the music instead of the music driving the game. A certain boss fights you in the dark, forcing you to listen for which direction attacks are coming from. The music for this boss, “Ripple,” drops all melody and chords, letting the sound take center stage atop a bed of driving drums. Meanwhile, hidden in a secret minigame, falling raindrops form a gentle aleatoric soundscape, each drop playing a soft note as it splashes the ground:
Chapter 4’s music in general is equal parts staggeringly beautiful and groovy as all get out. For all that I hyped up “Dark Sanctuary” (and as much as I desperately wish I could remember where I’ve heard toms used like this before), it’s not anywhere near the best track in the chapter. “Second Sanctuary” and “Third Sanctuary,” two very similar yet very different tracks, are some of the wildest listening from the new chapter, driven in no small part by the absolutely insane time signature changes in “Third Sanctuary.” “Ever Higher” puts it down Sega Genesis-style, adorably serious marching snares over FM brass and synths. “SPAWN” feels lifted straight from an early ‘00s game with its tambourine-heavy breakbeat. “Neverending Night” is just straight-up a better version of “Dark Sanctuary,” though with a different melody. The Light World music gets overlooked a lot, but “Old wooden rafters” and “Hymn” feel very familiar as a church-going Christian from birth.
And of course, my absolute favorite track from any chapter of the game, old or new, is definitely “From Now On (Battle 2),” Chapter 4’s new main battle theme: a rapturous blend of sparkling chimes, a soaring MIDI disco ensemble, and pumping electronic workout beats. It’s so good, I even went and recreated it just for the joy of it. But I don’t know if I can legally embed that version, so here’s the original instead:
The new chapters also find new ways to reuse Undertale music. Chapter 3 is a bit obtuse about it: “Glowing Snow” develops the leitmotif from the three seasonal “Uwa! So [___]♫” tracks from Undertale’s options menu, and Tenna plays bites of Undertale characters’ themes when he mentions those characters. Chapter 4, though, goes a little bit crazy with quoting Undertale. For starters, Undyne’s entire character theme is modified and redeveloped into a theme for the Old Man, who fans of Undertale will recognize as Gerson, one of Undyne’s mentors. A more obscure couple of songs, “Spooktune” and “Spookwave,” get developed into the delightful Halloween jazz piece “A DARK ZONE,” which might be the best boss music in Chapter 4:
Once that’s over, the night air after the adventure ends is filled with the sound of “The place where it rained,” a near carbon copy of “It’s Raining Somewhere Else” with Sans the Skeleton’s theme removed — already a standout track in Undertale, its mere inclusion in DELTARUNE (not to mention its name) also has staggering lore implications.
Part of the appeal of DELTARUNE is that the deeper you dig, the more you can find. The game doesn’t stop providing new music the whole way down, not even once you’ve dug into secrets no gamer is meant to find. We already talked about the Weird Route in Chapter 2, but the rabbit hole doesn’t end there. Not by a long shot. You haven’t even met the man behind the tree yet.
There is a room in every chapter which very rarely appears between two other rooms. I don’t remember if I first found this on my own or if I had help, but in any case, there is a tree in the room. There is a man behind the tree. This is how you obtain the Egg. It’s a little different in Chapter 3, but the gist is the same: a man behind the tree gives you an egg.
The man behind the tree has his own leitmotif.
Thus far, this song has come in three variations, all as perfectly strange and detached from the rest of the game as the rooms they play in. The first two, used across the first three chapters, are cheerfully off-kilter; the fourth feels unreal and detached, hauntingly non-sequitur as the hospital room it plays in. These were originally composed as Yume Nikki fan tracks, so they follow the pattern followed by that game’s music: repetitive, very short, concerned with setting the mood in a dreamlike world. The melody of the egg room is memorable enough that it can stand alone without a long track structure to support it. Come to think of it, writing Yume Nikki-style music seems like a good exercise for game composers.
But the most striking musical moment in DELTARUNE, and arguably the best music, isn’t any of these. It’s not so hidden you have to break the game to find it; neither is it public enough to appear on the official soundtrack. It’s not an adventurous outset, it’s not a daring escape, it’s not a desperate hidden boss fight. Instead, it’s a quiet moment. A character tangled in circumstance, overwhelmed by the weight of the world, seizes a moment to themself — and chooses to go play piano.
The character plays eight songs. Some are arranged from the game’s soundtrack, some are new and unfamiliar. The music sounds raw and unrehearsed. Aside from one other piano track and a handful of vocal parts, these are the only true live-tracked songs in the game. There’s something pure and powerful about a person figuring out the music as they go, improvising on their instrument with their hands and their heart uniquely their own for once in their life, and the music they play is as raw and emotional as it comes.
It’s very possible that these recordings are of Toby Fox himself playing. He is a skilled pianist, and the playing style does match the recordings of him which are floating around out there. If it is him, then… there’s an interesting story to tell. Because as Fox himself reported in 2020, he suffered from severe hand pain during Chapter 2’s development. To avoid hurting himself further, he had to take a break from playing piano. For him to then tell a story of a person able to finally play piano again, hidden within his masterwork… well. We don’t know the specifics, but might this be a personal story being told here?
If nothing else, they are eight spectacular little songs.
The release date for Chapter 5 is not set in stone yet, but we know from the game itself that it’ll be sometime in 2026. Thank goodness it’s not “another 2 years,” to quote Sans the Skeleton.
