Undertale

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Spram
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Re: Undertale

Postby Spram » Mon Dec 07, 2015 11:39 pm

Newbie wrote:
As long as we're mentioning its influences, it's helpful to look at the way Earthbound presents the player with ethical dilemmas without explicitly modeling and cod equivalent to raising children with sockpuppets, and then having the sockpuppets beat the children while they beg to have the company of human beings, all while being told, "Dodge! Dodge!" Undertale is the Allegory of the Cave, except the shadows are shadows of caves.


I can't tell if this is earnest or insincere.


How about pretentious?

He's right about Undertale's enemies being just wacky cartoons. I didn't really feel bad about killing them or felt good about sparing them. I think this would have been true even if they were people, even photorealistic people.. because in the end I know this is just a game and I guess I've played too many games to care about npcs who just exist to be an obstacle that has to be surpassed. The RPG battles are too abstract to make "fight" and "act & Mercy" too different from each other. They're just different pieces used to solve the puzzle and proceed. You might find former enemies you spared later in the game, but the vast majority will just be there as a generic npc who gives away a line of dialogue, only the big bosses made a real difference and there are only 4 of them, one which is a killer robot who's "death" would benefit the world.

Papyrus was too nice and dumb to take seriously. Undyne was too fucking crazy to take seriously and Alphys was just annoying (which is sad because she's the character that acts the most like me). Flowey was juststuck in his own Groundhog daywhich was interesting but I still found him annoying. I vote for Sans for best character in the game.

I got to Sans in Genocide mode today (no way I'm even trying to beat him, so I watched a youtube video) so now I've experienced almost everything the game has to offer and my biggest complaint is how my two neutral runs were too similar to my no-kill run. I think it's unfortunate how the game spoils itself by literrrrally telling you to find ways to not fight and having "an RPG where no one has to die" as it's tag-line. I liked the music and there were plenty of surprises, game gets a 4/5 from me.

I bet this game wouldn't have the huge following it got if it wasn't for Toby Fox working on Homestruck (something I know exists but have no idea what it is other than it has a lot of weird fans). Yes I'm envious.

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Re: Undertale

Postby zaratustra » Tue Dec 08, 2015 6:24 am

Well, strictly speaking, the entity whose death most people would benefit from is the player character. The challenge of the pacifist path is convincing everyone else you're a nice enough person to be allowed to leave.

I'm not sure what you mean by "take seriously", Spram. They're cartoon characters. -Your- character is a cartoon character, he/she wears ballet shoes as a weapon and a cowboy hat as armor. In fact, they're more 'modern 00s cartoon' styled in that each character has two well-delineated, conflicting traits, and the plot comes straight from having those traits get in friction.

MarsDragon wrote:I eagerly await zara and Esper telling me about how wrong I am to not have the right feelings about a video game.


geez, sorry I got excited

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Healy
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Re: Undertale

Postby Healy » Tue Dec 08, 2015 1:43 pm

So how long do you guys think it'll take until Megalovania gets sampled in an actual, for-reals-released-on-a-major-label rap song? (I mean, it's been out for a while before Undertale came out, so maybe it already happened.)
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Re: Undertale

Postby Esperath » Tue Dec 08, 2015 4:51 pm

link?
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Healy
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Re: Undertale

Postby Healy » Tue Dec 08, 2015 6:01 pm

Oh, I'm sorry, to my knowledge Megalovania hasn't been sampled by any major rappers or hip-hop artists yet; I was just asking how long it would take until it did. I didn't mean to mislead you! I should probably edit my post to be clearer.

Uh, unless you were talking the earlier versions of Megalovania? Here's a Youtube video of them all.
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Spram
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Re: Undertale

Postby Spram » Wed Dec 16, 2015 10:20 pm

zaratustra wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by "take seriously", Spram. They're cartoon characters. -Your- character is a cartoon character, he/she wears ballet shoes as a weapon and a cowboy hat as armor. In fact, they're more 'modern 00s cartoon' styled in that each character has two well-delineated, conflicting traits, and the plot comes straight from having those traits get in friction.


SPOILERSSSS!

I like most of the characters. By not "take seriously" I meant that I didn't really care if I killed or spared them. Killing them didn't make me feel sad or guilty and sparing them didn't feel like I did the right thing. I just felt I was doing something in a video game.

The fact that most enemies were things like tsundere plane, vegetables and other whimsical creatures just made me feel less about them. It's like the violence in South Park: Crudely drawn animated children getting hurt is different from seeing a live action Kenny get killed.. but the more you grow and experience life and notice how movies, cartoons and games are made the less things that happen in them affect you. Killing Papyrus was just another way to proceed in the game programmed by Toby Fox.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, I found the genocide route interesting (despite being more boring), but other games have done things like this.. In Strife a decision you make half-way through the game takes you in two completely different directions with two different and conflicting endings. The third time I played Mass Effect 2 I made sure Garrus, Tali and others died just to see how Mass Effect 3 handled their disappearances.

Undertale just happened to be like this all the time in a compact 6 hour game so the changes are more noticeable. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game. I'm just saying that I didn't feel like the game's message of killing=bad really thought me anything other than I can get a different experience depending on how I play.

Of course, Sans knows this and tells you so during the last battle.. but I didn't see it as Sans talking to me but Toby Fox writing sentences that would appear in a game if I did a certain thing... and for that Sans in my favorite character.


I'm just cynical and lost my childhood innocence.

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Re: Undertale

Postby nosimpleway » Wed Dec 16, 2015 10:38 pm

Spram wrote:but the more you grow and experience life and notice how movies, cartoons and games are made the less things that happen in them affect you.

Spram is full of LOVE.

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Re: Undertale

Postby Esperath » Sat Dec 19, 2015 6:13 am

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Re: Undertale

Postby Esperath » Sat Dec 19, 2015 6:33 am

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Healy
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Re: Undertale

Postby Healy » Sun Dec 20, 2015 10:13 pm

Who wants to hear my hot take on Undertale shipping? None of you? Too bad!

Okay, so I can at least understand most of the Undertale ships I've encountered just fine. Sans and Toriel I get, they get some nice scenes in the game and both love shitty puns. Alphys and Undyne are canon, no confusion there. Mettaton and Papyrus aren't as out there as you might think: there's a couple of phone conversations you can get where it seems Papyrus has bit of a crush; Burgerpants and Nice Cream Man are a little weirder, but, like, I get the dynamics behind it, and at least this way the fuckcat's happy. And while I'm not gonna even pretend that I don't think Sans/(insert self-insert here) isn't deeply weird, I can at least see the appeal.

But Sans/Grillby? Motherfucker, what is even there to ship? Grillby is just the guy who owns the bar where Sans likes to hang out; he gets like two lines of dialogue. There is just no chemistry there, people. (Which is pretty ironic for a guy whose head is permanently on fire.) Do these guys write epics about Norm falling madly in lust with, with whoever owned the bar in Cheers, uh I think his name was Sam? I never watched that show before. But anyway, do these people do that? Because that is the extent of the chemistry on display: some guy frequents a joint that the other guy runs. So yeah, I think I kind of hate this ship.

(Also it doesn't help that I find most drawings of Grillby completely off-putting in a way that's hard to put my finger on.)
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Re: Undertale

Postby Blossom » Sun Dec 20, 2015 11:11 pm

Sans and Toriel is about as canon as the other canon couple. The way they're holding hands in the Pacifist ending, and all.
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Re: Undertale

Postby nosimpleway » Mon Dec 21, 2015 2:07 am

Healy wrote:Grillby is just the guy who owns the bar where Sans likes to hang out; he gets like two lines of dialogue.


Dialog as translated by another character, who admits at one point it has no idea what Grillby is actually saying.

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Re: Undertale

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 03, 2016 8:02 am

This game.

Aw, I don't gotta tell you guys.
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Re: Undertale

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:27 pm

I finally had to look something up and feel kind of bad about that, but not too bad, because I was genuinely stumped.

Normally I have zero qualms about just looking things up for games, but something about Undertale made me want to play it all the way through without having to look anything up. I already kind of bent that rule because inventory space is so tight that I didn't want to toss away any story items, so I peeked at older gear and such to see if they mattered later before selling them.

What's funny was the Toriel fight was actually no problem for me at all - sparing her seems pretty straightforward, as long as you knew that it was possible, and the game does tell you that - it's not some kind of meta-secret. Also, well, geez, how could anybody kill Toriel? I mean, yeah, I do know exactly how, because video games, but ugh. I think I'd have stopped playing if that was mandatory. But that would be a very different game anyway.

No, I got stuck on the Undyne fight. At one point I had even tried attacking her but being unused to attacking I never hit her anyway, so figured that wasn't what I needed to be doing. I successfully realized that you could flee, and did several times. I just failed to realize you could run forward.

:B
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Esperath
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Re: Undertale

Postby Esperath » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:56 pm

The thing with Toriel is that you get two seemingly conflicting messages from the frogs in the ruins. One says "one day you may need to spare someone who doesn't have a yellow name," whereas another says "once a monster is weakened enough, it may no longer want to fight." They're both true (the first one really only applies to Toriel, whereas the second applies to the game in general), but if you try and pursue the second strategy against Toriel, the game suckerpunches you by causing you to auto-crit when she's at 1/3 health, immediately killing her when you'd normally be plinking for 5-10% a hit.
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Re: Undertale

Postby Friday » Sun Jan 03, 2016 5:15 pm

The thing about Toriel is she's absolutely a sucker punch and that's completely fine. It's okay. It's a GOTCHA! It's fine that it is a GOTCHA. The game is not insulting your intelligence by doing it. I don't know why (some) people are upset and are taking it as some sort of insult. You can fucking reload your save. The game even tells you to do it directly afterward through Flowey. Of course, then he trolls you for doing so, but that's the only in-game penalty, if you can even call it a penalty.

I don't understand the people who are upset that they killed Toriel. Did they forget they could load the game? I mean, I killed her and didn't load, but the very first thought that occurred to me when I killed her was "I could load this, but nah, I'll just play it like this".
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Re: Undertale

Postby Friday » Sun Jan 03, 2016 5:19 pm

This kind of thing actually goes a little bit deeper into my theory of game design vs whiny people, in that whiny people insist games have to be "fair" on first time playthroughs (i.e. best possible result attainable without pre-knowledge, fuck ups, or death) which is fucking stupid and no that is not the case shutup. It's okay that a bird knocked you into a pit and you died. Try again. Yes, if it happens a bunch the game is either poorly designed or Masocore, but being against birds into pits as a thing entirely is stupid and you're dumb and Medusa Heads will hunt you in your next life and they will knock you into pits/spikes/more medusa heads
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Re: Undertale

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 03, 2016 5:28 pm

I kind of forget the exact details now, to be honest. I recall attacking her, but I think I backed off once she's obviously not trying to hurt you anymore. Not sure why that made intuitive sense to do so, but it did.

I mean, in real life, it would make obvious sense. But in video game logic land I think it just boiled down to "Okay, I'm not in imminent danger of dying/losing anymore, so I can take time to try things and figure out what I'm supposed to do."
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Re: Undertale

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 03, 2016 5:38 pm

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Re: Undertale

Postby Spram » Sun Jan 03, 2016 10:09 pm

I killed her because unlike you people I don't have stockholm syndrome.

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