Toby Fox Speaks About Deltarune, Shows Off Concept Art In Interview With Nintendo Japan

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Deltarune Concept Art
Image: Gigi DG

Deltarune Chapter 2 is out right now on Switch, totally free. It’s from the same creator that made Undertale — in fact, the title itself is an anagram of Undertale — and to celebrate the release, Nintendo Japan secured an interview with Toby Fox himself.

A massive disclaimer here: there are large parts of the interview that Google Translate didn’t really do very well with, so apologies in advance… but here are some highlights!

“My feelings now are… tired. I want a day off. May I [speak to] Mario for a moment? “Take me to Yoshi Island”. I also want to eat that green fruit with an extended time limit. If you eat it for breakfast, you can oversleep for 27 hours a day, right?”
– Toby Fox on how he’s doing

Fox actually hired a team of people to help him finish the game (you can see full credits here), and he speaks about how that affected the development:

“The time it took to develop “Chapter 2” itself was actually a year and a half. There were a lot of things before we could start full-scale development. However, three years is long… I feel a little sorry for making everyone wait so long…

I programmed “Chapter 1” and “UNDERTALE” all by myself, but now I can’t program for a long time because I hurt my wrist. So, “Chapter 2″ is about 90% programmed by another member of the team. Yes, I’ve become a director from this time (imagine a professional dog in a beret).”

However, leading a team brings its own challenges, and Fox says that “instructing people is easy” but actually getting them to make what’s in your head is “10.2 times harder” than doing it yourself.

Concept art by Gigi D.G., who worked on the game
Concept art by Gigi D.G., who worked on the game (Image: Gigi DG)

As for Chapter 3, Fox says (jokingly!) that the development time gets extended by a year every time someone asks when it’s coming out. It looks like there are 7 chapters planned, and Fox says that they’re still coming:

But serious story, once Chapter 3, 4, and 5 are finished, I would like to release them. It took a year and a half to develop Chapter 2, so it’s a simple calculation… yeah, that’s a lie!? Help!

Finally, a fun fact from Toby Fox, who studied Japanese and was able to assist in the localisation of the game, which was done by industry legends 8-4 (who also localised Return of the Obra Dinn, Hades, and Firewatch):

The Japanese word ??????(glamour) has a slightly different meaning from the English word “glamour”. In English, it means “luxury” or “glossy”, but in Japanese, ?????? means something like “big boobs and big buttocks”.

For the first time, I knew that the BGM of “UNDERTALE” against Mettaton and the Japanese title was “Brilliant Death Fight”.

The original English title is “Death By Glamour”, so if this is a title like “Killed by Glamour'” in Japanese… Japanese people [would] say, “Mettaton is an enemy who suffocates the player with big boobs and buttocks.” I might have misunderstood.

Goodness.

The rest of the interview is full of spoilers, so we’ll leave it there, but if you want to check it out for yourself, head to the Nintendo Japan blog!