Deltarune Ch. 3 Secret Boss + Spoilers

For starters, I think the biggest thing I wanna talk about that I didn’t want to mention in the main review is the game boards with the Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening inspired gameplay and artstyle. Zelda is one of my favorite video game franchises, so my jaw dropped when I first started playing these segments. I LOVED them… at least, when playing through the game normally. I thought these segments were implemented extremely well, and felt very authentic to the source material. The way they’re framed as a couch co-op session with the Fun Gang bantering back and forth while having fun, was immensely endearing. It was clearly meant to capture that feeling of growing up and playing video games alongside a friend or relative, and the special memories that can be made when doing that. Sadly, I grew up alone, so that aspect didn’t affect me in the way I would’ve liked it to.

Next thing I wanna touch on is this Chapter’s Secret Boss, which… I have a few words regarding. In Chapter 2, if you talk to Seam in the Dark World after you defeat Spamton NEO, he’ll mention that you need the Shadow Mantle in order to defeat the next Secret Boss. The Shadow Mantle is acquired in Chapter 3, but the process you have to go through in order to get it is rather extensive and easy to get locked out of. You’ll need to get an S-Rank on each of the Zelda game boards. While I did have a suspicion that would be the case, I still failed to get an S-Rank during my first playthrough, so I had to play through pretty much all of Chapter 3 again. Thankfully I kept my save from right before the first game board, so I at least didn’t have to play through the beginning one more time. After you finish a game board with an S-Rank, you can go into the S-Rank Changing Room. Here, you’ll encounter an NPC named Ramb, who tells you that the games you’ve been playing are altered by Tenna. He shows you the path to a game console where the unaltered versions of the Zelda game boards can be played.

The unaltered versions of the game boards are mostly the same, except almost all references to the TV World and Tenna have been removed. It looks even more like an old school Zelda game on a Game Boy Color. Instead of enemies that are themed around the enemies commonly found in the TV World, they’re different. They bear a stronger resemblance to enemies commonly found in the Legend of Zelda, as well as some Undertale characters. One enemy in particular is a yellow sunflower that shoots projectiles at you just like Flowey does in Undertale. The goal of the unaltered game boards is to find the sword, and then use the sword to kill every single monster in the game. This will upgrade the sword and allow you to cut down obstacles such as trees that block the way into sections you normally wouldn’t be able to access. It’s funny, one of the first thoughts that came to mind when I started the Zelda game boards was “I wonder if I’ll get a sword”. Lo and behold, here it is… and it sure is put to use here. In the early days after the Chapter’s release, as the method of acquiring the Shadow Mantle was discovered and shared with the public, I was initially hesitant to follow it because everything about this was giving me bad vibes. The fact that I NEEDED to kill all of the enemies made me feel like this was a way of triggering a Weird Route, so I waited a few days to see if another method of acquiring the Shadow Mantle could be found, but as of writing this, nothing else has been found, so I think it’s safe to assume this is the intended method.

I’m very mixed on this process. From a storytelling perspective, I absolutely love it, since it provides some big albeit cryptic hints towards Deltarune’s future. The way the Ice Palace parallels the Weird Route makes me feel like the unaltered game boards essentially spell out what has happened and will happen across the entire Weird Route. You kill and you kill and you kill. You get Noelle to join you, and with her help, you kill Berdly. Then, you kill, and you kill, and you kill, and you kill some more until you reach the end and both Kris and Noelle are “USED UP” in order to acquire the Shelter Key. The third game board forces you to kill Susie and Ralsei in order to progress into the final dungeon-like area, where you once again need to slaughter everyone in order to get your sword to max level. Then, you’ll be able to access a recreation of the Shelter that can be found in Hometown. It’s here that you face what is essentially the “final boss” of the Zelda game boards: a sadistic, laughing shadow creature that taunts Kris regarding their search for the Shadow Crystals, how it won’t change anything, and suggests they’re merely doing it for fun.  After beating this final boss, you’ll be able to access the room with the Shadow Mantle, which can only be reached after you make Pixel Kris exit the screen you’re playing the game board on, after which, it will slash at the REAL Kris with its sword before leaving altogether. Then you take back control of regular Kris and can enter the screen for yourself to grab the Shadow Mantle. It’s all very surreal and unnerving. It essentially weaponizes nostalgia in a way that makes for genuinely terrifying storytelling, and I LOVED it. That being said though, the fact that it’s so easy to get locked out of these segments in a way that forces you to replay all of Chapter 3 is more than a little frustrating.

With the Shadow Mantle in hand, you can now face this game’s Secret Boss, who actually appears at the end of the Chapter’s main story. The Secret Boss for Chapter 3 is The Roaring Knight - the alleged creator of the previous Dark Worlds. When you initially face off against The Knight, it’s during what appears to be a scripted encounter. You take an enormous amount of damage from their attack patterns, which are insanely difficult to deal with, and dying here will cause the ending cutscene to play out where the Knight attempts to abduct Toriel before being stopped by Undyne, who is then captured and taken to the Shelter in Hometown. With the Shadow Mantle, the damage from her attacks is normalized, however the fight itself is still extremely hard, and I still haven’t beaten it as of writing this review. The Knight by far is the hardest challenge Deltarune has to offer at this point. It took me three hours to beat Jevil, and I can tell it's going to take me just as long, if not longer to beat The Knight. I might update this portion of the Pastebin with my experience of the Knight fight once I beat it, but I won’t make any promises.

While the community has been debating on the identity of the Knight since the release of Chapters 3 and 4, I think it’s as plain as day who the Knight is: it’s Dess Holiday, Noelle’s sister who we know from Chapter 2 went missing a long time ago. There are several things that led me to this conclusion: the Knight has a tall and feminine figure, as well as antlers on their head, meaning it has to be either Noelle’s mother or her sister. However, there are two things that make me believe it’s Dess: when the Knight summons their sword, it takes the shape of a baseball bat initially. We know that Dess used to play baseball, and Noelle mentioned in Chapter 1 that Dess would hit Kris with a bat whenever Kris would play jokes on Noelle back in the day. The Knight also has a form they can morph into that strongly resembles a baseball. It’s these baseball allusions that I believe are the key factor in determining the Knight’s identity.

One last thing I want to touch on here in the spoiler segment of the review: during the final game board when retrieving the Shadow Mantle, you encounter Tenna in a long corridor before you reach the Shelter, questioning to himself where it all went wrong. He blames his old partner, lamenting how he was going to “make him a star” and that he gave him “all that he had” so that he would tell Tenna “his secret to being a Big Shot…”. He mentions how just when he had finally gotten his partner to sign a deal, his partner got a phone call, turned pale, and ran out the room, never to be seen again. When Tenna picked up the phone, no one was there.

I think based on Tenna’s words here, it’s very clear that Tenna’s old partner was Spamton, and that Tenna was likely the secret to Spamton’s initial success in the Cyber World before he lost everything. There’s also a hidden scene that you can encounter in the TV World: if you find the Secret Bonus Room, enter it, and proceed onward, you’ll reach a backstage area where you can find a lone wardrobe. Opening it will cause a Pipis egg to drop out of it. This alerts Tenna and forces the gang to hide from him when he appears. However, if you defeated Spamton NEO in Chapter 2 and have the Dealmaker equipped, Spamton will actually leave your inventory and confront Tenna. Tenna will humorously freak out before questioning what the hell Spamton is. He then covers Spamton in foam before retrieving the Pipis egg and taking it somewhere safe.

Based on this interaction, we can glean a few things. Yes, Tenna and Spamton did have a history together, but whatever split them apart wasn’t Tenna himself like we had long believed. It was some third party. We also know that Tenna likely harbors some very complicated feelings towards Spamton and his disappearance. You’d think that he’d be harboring nothing but rage towards Spamton, but I think that the Pipis egg is meant to be a memento of Spamton that Tenna treasures dearly. All that being said though, for whatever reason, Tenna doesn’t recognize Spamton in his current state. It might be because Spamton’s appearance might’ve changed after his downfall, or something happened to Tenna that altered his memory. Either way, the fact that he doesn’t recognize Spamton is very interesting. While you could write this entire scene with Spamton and Tenna off as just a joke, having that context of Tenna’s laments from the final unaltered game board dramatically recontextualizes this scene, and I think that’s absolutely brilliant.