Friday wrote: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
Okay, so Undertale is both emotionally manipulative and preachy. I mean, that's the point of the game. However, I can see why people got pissed about the whole Toriel thing; I'd compare it to a forced tearjerker in a mediocre movie. If you're watching something and you're not terribly invested in the characters, then suddenly there's this scene that was run through focus groups to elicit MAXIMUM TEARS, it feels like sloppy storytelling. The tears don't feel like a natural extension of your feelings toward the characters. In particular, if you thought the tutorial area was too (boring/hard/repetitive), which can apply to a reasonably large subset of your playerbase, then your gameplay experience to that point is sort of weak, which makes the suckerpunch feel even more contrived.