The Undertale and Deltarune communities have... shall we say... interesting priorities.
I've known this for years, since I'm an avid fan of both, but it's definitely gotten on my nerves more and more with the expansion of the fandom after Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4, and something I've noticed in particular is the absolute joke that the Roaring Knight has become.
There's this attitude in the fandom since the new chapters of Deltarune that the Knight is some kind of pathetic pushover that gets completely slaughtered by anyone it happens to come across. It's mostly jokes, but in my observations it's seemed to genuinely taint a lot of real discussion made by the fandom. It genuinely infuriates me as someone who considers themself fairly versed in the lore of Deltarune, and who tries to have genuine discussions, only to be pushed aside by people so thoroughly irony-poisoned it was like they had ingested lead- I was actually told at one point that I had a mental illness for saying that the Knight could probably beat Gerson.
Even so, I feel like my hatred for these people doesn't go nearly as far as the person who made the mod I'll be discussing today. I was browsing GameBanana one day when I came across a mod titled "DELTARUNE CHAPTERS 3 AND 4: ROARING FRAUD MOD." I groaned as I immediately recognized the two-word buzzword phrase that most people who underrated the Knight used, but out of morbid curiosity and a hope that this was ridiculously bad enough I could cover it for my YouTube channel, I gave it a click. Immediately, I noticed that the description for the mod was pages upon pages of circuitous AI-generated text, seemingly from a text model not entirely sure what happened in the new chapters of the game; the Knight was referred to multiple times by he/him pronouns and it was said that it met the main characters in the final chapter of the game. With absolutely no indication of what the contents were other than some kind of bashing of the Knight, I decided to download it.
Running it through an antivirus a few times gave me an all-clear on potential hazards, so I injected the necessary data.win files and booted up Chapter 3, waiting to see if the game was changed at all.
For quite a while, it just... wasn't.
I stayed on the main route, thinking that having the mantle wouldn't matter- my initial assumption was that the joke was you'd be able to beat it without the mantle because it's such a pushover. But I got to the end, fought the Knight, and... yup, the Knight slaughtered the party and I got Gaster's retry text, like always. I hacked in infinite stats and beat the Knight without the mantle... no changes there, either.
I was quite confused at this point. Why advertise a mod- a pretty large one at that, in terms of filesize- if it just didn't do anything? So I decided, going against my initial philosophy, to pick up the mantle and try to defeat the Knight that way.
THIS was where the meat of the mod lay, to my confusion. Ramb's text was edited to be a bunch of really dry and uncreative snarks against the Knight, often throwing in a "bloody" or "innit" for good measure. For example, the last time you talk to him, all he had to say was "roaring fraud innit its bloody cooked-" no caps, just as typed, not even a punctuation mark. I'd type out more of them, but they were pretty much just the same kind of diatribes that you'd find in the comment sections of anything related to the Knight on the internet. I'm sure, if you're still reading this after my very pointed intro, you're just as sick of them as I am.
After fighting an unchanged Mantleholder and grabbing the Shadowmantle, I figured NOW was when changes would come.
I was right, but looking back, I kind of wish I wasn't.
The fight immediately began with edited, poorly-written Susie dialogue.
"ha h! your fraud! we gto the MANTLE yroue COOKED!" Susie said, with a seemingly random choice of her "let's go back there tomorrow, alright" face from Chapter 1 as the dialogue plate and the word "COOKED" in an ugly, rapidly-flashing red color I had to avert my eyes from. I wasn't even close to epileptic, but this was just too much.
The Knight responded with a roar, and the battle began. However, the music was different- rather than being Black Knife, it was a loop of a remix of the opening section before the melody dropped. The bass was played on an extremely clicky, warbly synth, and it was overlaid with loud, clashing orchestral drums with a movie trailer-style impact every 16 bars. The closest released song I can think of to describe what it sounded like was the intro of RednasVGM's Black Knife Remix.
The text, predictably, simply said "beat thier ass" rather than the usual "The ROARING KNIGHT appeared" text. I, having put the mantle on Susie, chose to attack with her and defend with the other two party members I expected a one-hit KO or at least heavily buffed damage, but to my surprise, something different happened.
A purple "MISS."
I was completely shocked by this, but not in the horror way, moreso in confusion. Why bother making a mod advertised to cater to the "Roaring Fraud" powerscaling crowd, if you were going to seemingly either up the Knight's defense by a ludicrous amount or make it so that attacks could miss- which they almost never can in base game except in Hammer of Justice, which was intentionally made to show the Old Man's power level compared to yours?
I had no time to process this before the Knight spoke- in the same distorted, shaky text that appeared over the phone in Chapter 4.
"FALL."
Suddenly, the battle box appeared, but it was only barely bigger than the SOUL, trapping it in there with no movement possible. A ring of swords surrounded the box, and they attacked, much like the pellets surrounding the soul in the Omega Flowey battle in Undertale- yet another intentionally unwinnable battle.
At this point, I had figured out what was going on- I wasn't stupid. This was a satire mod. Bait and switch the player and then blindside the hell out of them. An admirable strategy to be sure- at least in my eyes- but one that made less sense to me the more I thought about it. Why advertise it with ChatGPT writing? Why not clarify ANYTHING you were supposed to do? Why have such crappy writing at the beginning when from the implementation of the shaky text alone it was clear that they had quite a bit of programming experience?
Either way, as soon as the bullets hit, I was in for a shock- both Kris and Ralsei got SWOONed. But they weren't just downed with -999 HP- they were WIPED. Their sprites turned red and disintegrated as Susie's sprite looked completely shocked, turning up and down with custom sprite work to react in horror to their annihilation. I swear I saw a single blue pixel of tears forming in her eyes as she returned her focus to the Knight, too angry to speak.
I checked my items- since I had stocked up on TVDinners beforehand in the event of the Knight once again being difficult despite the name of the mod- but I simply got a "denied" sound in response. I tried again and again, but to no avail- I was locked out of items. Far too late, I noticed- each time I had clicked the button, the icon had darkened, and after the amount of times I pressed it, it faded to black. Then the HUD simply smoothly compressed inward- as if the option was never there. Desperate, I checked ACTs, only to find the same story. Each button faded until the only one I could interact with was "FIGHT."
And so I fought again- and once again, another miss and another undodgeable attack, this one without dialogue. This repeated several times, and each time, the pitch of the music drooped lower and the tempo became slower.
Eventually, Susie spoke up again at 5HP. The music changed again- this time it was a slow rendiion of Lost Girl played on what sounded like a church organ fed through a guitar distortion plugin.
"D-dammit..."
The Knight struck again, and now she was at 4HP.
"I lost."
Another strike. 3HP.
"All that damn bravado, and I still got wiped."
2HP.
"There's nothing for it now... I guess I have to go the way my friends did."
1HP.
"Do it now."
The attack began, and the swords surrounded the SOUL... but they didn't budge. After thinking this was a crash and almost going to close out of the game, Susie spoke again, the music stopping.
"H-huh...!?"
The Soul began to squirm outside of my control in the miniscule control it was given, but it was unable to escape the grasp of the box.
"Kill me!" Susie shouted, slashing at nothing repeatedly as each sentence took up a new dialogue box. "Kill me already, damn it! I don't have any reason to keep going! My friends are gone!"
Susie fought and missed again after a long, silent period in the holding box.
"I SAID KILL ME!"
No dice. Attack, miss.
"IS THIS SOME KIND OF JOKE TO YOU?!"
The Knight spoke again.
"NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL."
Susie responded with simply "..."
"YOU MUST NOW PERSIST. STAY IN THIS DOOMED WORLD."
With that, the Knight faded, and text appeared where the battle results would usually go.
"The ROARING KNIGHT ran away."
After a long pause, her sprite shaking and trembling, Susie fell to the ground in front of the still-unconscious Toriel. Attempting to press any buttons did absolutely nothing. This persisted for over 20 seconds until... the game played the "long Weird Route jingle" from Chapter 4 and then abruptly crashed.
I felt quite a few emotions in response to this, but I mostly felt vindicated, admittedly. Someone finally gave the Knight an actually interesting and ominous battle, and it seemed like they actually had something to say.
Even so, though, I noticed that there were still modifications made- specifically, ones to Chapter 4.
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Author's Notes:
We are BACK!
As I said before, life got in the way, long story short. Glad to be back, though.
This was inspired by a video by the awesome workingself on YouTube. I decided to expand upon it.