Deltarune Ch. 1 Secret Boss + Spoilers

Aside from refreshing myself on the plot of Deltarune up to this point, the other reason why I wanted to replay the game was because I had yet to take on either of the game’s secret bosses yet. As such, this was my first time encountering Jevil.

Jevil is interesting… while you can miss him since he’s completely optional, he’s the first sign that there’s something more to Deltarune than the surface level adventure. He’s also another indication that Deltarune has ties with Undertale’s biggest unsolved mystery: W. D. Gaster. Chances are, if you fought Jevil, then you’re likely the type of person who already knows who Gaster is, so I’ll try to be brief: Gaster is a character that was briefly alluded to in Undertale. He was a scientist for the Royal Family before he fell into a machine that tore his body apart and seemingly split his consciousness across dimensions. Throughout several areas in Undertale, there is a tiny chance you might encounter strange, grayed out NPCs known as Goners, each of which will say something hauntingly cryptic and vague when spoken to before disappearing. One of them is holding onto an object that resembles a head, and if you speak to them, they will mention Gaster’s accident and state that they’re “holding a piece of him” before they disappear. There is also a mysterious door you can find that will take you to a grey room with a malformed looking sprite inside. Approaching this sprite will cause it to disappear, just like the Goners. While it’s never been directly confirmed, it’s long been theorized that this strange sprite was Gaster.

After speaking to Jevil in his cell, he’ll tell you to speak with the shopkeeper in order to figure out how to open it. The shopkeeper, Seam, who can be found in the Field area, will tell you about how Jevil went insane one day after he “met a strange someone” and that he was ordered to lock him away. He specifically mentions that the words Jevil were saying made his worldview “Dark, darker, yet darker”, in reference to a journal entry written by Gaster that can be found in Undertale’s files after you datamine the game. He’ll give you a piece of a broken key and tell you to find the other two pieces, both of which need to be found in the Field area and then brought to Malius the Smith over by the bake sale in order to repair the key to Jevil’s cell. Once that’s done, you can open his cell and start the fight.

While Jevil’s dialogue doesn’t explicitly mention his ties to Gaster in any way, it does call attention to what I believe is going to end up being one of the core topics of Deltarune’s narrative: freedom. His words directly contradict the beginning of the game, where you’re told your choices don’t matter and that nobody can choose who they are, as if your fate is predetermined. Jevil rejects this notion completely, he doesn’t see the world that way at all, which is why he believes himself to be “free” compared to everyone else, despite being locked in a cell. After all, he “can do anything!”. I personally believe that Jevil serves as the template for all future secret bosses, given that Spamton lost his mind under similar circumstances. I’ll talk about this some more when I review Chapter 2 and discuss Spamton NEO. Assuming each Chapter will have a secret boss, I’ll be making a Pastebin reflecting each one as I go along.

As for the fight with Jevil itself, it was BRUTAL. Took me a total of three hours to beat him. I ended up pacifying him, which might be the harder way to do his fight, but it was worth it to me. I really struggled with so many different attacks, namely the stupid circle one, as well as the carousel of horses/ducks. That being said, it was super satisfying overcoming it. Now that I’ve beaten Jevil, all of the other fights in the game have felt like a cakewalk in comparison, which might be an unintended consequence of making Jevil so difficult compared to everything else in the game so far. I’ve heard Spamton NEO isn’t quite as hard as Jevil is, so I’m hoping it doesn’t take me as long to defeat him.

That’s about all I’ve got to say regarding Jevil. Everything about him and his background is shrouded in so much mystery and DARKNESS that there’s not a whole lot I feel I can comment on. I do hope that we get a little more insight into his backstory in the future, especially since Seam is still around. A part of me feels like Seam might also be a secret boss in the future, especially if he listened to Jevil’s words and they affected his worldview to such a negative extent. If that’s the case, it might be dangerous having him in Castle Town. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…