Deltarune
Genre: RPG
Summary: (from the game’s official website)
Dive into the parallel story to UNDERTALE! Fight or spare your way through action-packed battles as you explore a mysterious world alongside an endearing cast of new and familiar characters.
Availability: PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5. It does not have high system requirements so most PCs can run it. Works perfectly in Proton for anyone who uses Linux (such as Steam Deck users).
Time to Beat: Depends on how many chapters we do. For the club I would probably suggest chapter 1, in which case about 3 - 6 hours probably
Personal Opinion: I’ve played Deltarune in both Japanese and English, and both are well worth experiencing imo. I think I may enjoy it even more than I enjoyed Undertale overall. This might be an oddball recommendation because it is not originally a Japanese game, but this localisation is strong enough in my opinion that it’s interesting to experience anyway.
Pros
- Fantastic story and characters
- Music slaps (The World Revolving, my beloved)
- Great Japanese localisation that manages to preserve the game’s humour
- Quite short (if we only do chapter one)
- Potential for spinoff club following the later chapters
- Chapter 1 is free! The game has a generous free demo, that includes the entirety of Chapters 1 and 2 with no restrictions.
- Not too much kanji
Cons
- Some characters have insanely difficult dialogue (Rouxls Kaard)
- Not complete (chapters 1-4 are available but there are more chapters yet to come, they will be free updates to the game).
- Not originally Japanese (personally don’t think this matters too much, but worth being upfront about)
- Puns (it doesn’t rely too much on puns thankfully)
- Not too much kanji
- Auto-advancing text in intro sequence (not much outside of that, and when it does come up outside of that intro it isn’t important)
