I still haven’t booted up Deltarune, the follow-up to 2015’s biggest surprise, Undertale, but even though I haven’t played a second of it, I’ve found it hard to escape one part of it specifically: the music. I watch a lot of music reaction videos, and as such, the algorithm tends to feed me professional musicians reacting to new songs by my favorite bands. More recently, I’ve been getting a lot of reaction videos to game music, whether that be Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s eclectic, multi-genre-spanning soundtrack, or now Deltarune’s ethereal chiptune compositions. I always knew Toby Fox, the lead behind these games, was a stellar composer, but it’s nice to have a reminder with Deltarune’s latest chapters.
In a previous life, I was a music educator before I pivoted to the equally precarious job market of digital media. It’s not often I get to put on that old hat for this job, but watching professional musicians react in real time to some of the bonkers compositional choices Fox makes in Deltarune’s soundtrack has been a marriage of two of my passions. The first time I heard “The Third Sanctuary,” one of the incredible tracks from Deltarune’s latest chapters, was when a video of game music cover band Lame Genie’s drummer, Kyle Sawaia, blind reacting to its odd, shifting time signature, crossed my For You page.
First off, props to Sawaia for keeping up with those time signature changes on the fly. Second, Fox’s compositions didn’t need to go that hard, and yet he did it anyway. I still don’t really know the context for when this track plays, but it is not only a compositional feat; it also evokes a frantic, emotional battle between two tragically opposing forces. Is that what’s happening when you hear the song in-game? I have no idea, but hearing it out of context only made me want to boot up the game more to find out.
Lame Genie isn’t the only group of musicians in awe of “The Third Sanctuary” and the rest of Deltarune’s incredible soundtrack. Dozens of reactions from musicians have been sprouting up on TikTok and YouTube.
I’m the type of person who can listen to a song hundreds (if not thousands) of times on loop without getting tired of it, but eventually you do lose that initial awe you feel when you hear something for the first time. Watching others experience something is about as close as I get to feeling that again, which is why I’ve started watching more reaction videos to music and other media. In cases like Deltarune, musicians reacting to it drew my attention to something I hadn’t really been paying attention to. Most of my exposure to Fox’s music has been through his work on the Pokémon franchise, but it’s nice to be reminded that he’s cooking when he’s working on his own stuff, too.