I hate how all my Undertale complaints sound really petty and stupid. XD
I've never liked how you don't get a proper final boss fight during a pacifist run. I'm not a fan of Omega Flowey being unable to kill you either, but at least there, Asgore serves as a pretty good final boss. In a pacifist run, what, the final boss is Metaton? , I get the point from a storytelling perspective, but as a game, I was always kinda dissapointed by the Asriel fight.
Edited by GNinja on Mar 20th 2022 at 6:30:06 PM
Kaze ni Nare!Omega Flowey CAN kill you. I've died to him three or four times
The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.He's fudged to look far more dangerous than he actually is, but on the scale of "bosses that can't actually kill you", he's at least got a lower score than Hyperdeath Asriel.
Suddenly I'm... still rotating Fallen London in my mind even though I've stopped actively playing it.So, having just finished Deltarune Chapter 2, I really hope Toby isn't pulling a Spec Ops: The Line with this whole series, where he criticizes the players for playing the game that he decided to make.
Because a lot of the stuff between Kris and the SOUL makes it very clear that Kris is being controlled against their will and they're VERY much aware of it. Short of just not playing the game, you have no choice but to do this, so I hope the story doesn't give the player too much shit because, again, there's literally nothing you can do. This isn't like a Genocide playthrough where you have to go out of your way to trigger it. This is Toby writing the SOUL and Kris' relationship to be this way from the very beginning.
I have faith in Toby's writing. It's just a little thing in the back of my mind that I'm worried about.
Made an edit to correct Kris' pronouns.
Edited by GNinja on Mar 21st 2022 at 8:57:55 AM
Kaze ni Nare!We're guessing Kris won't be happy with us no matter what we do, but considering that this whole possession situation is a fait accompli that we have no control over in-universe as much as out, it doesn't seem like "you are a bad person for doing this" is the target of that arc.
Suddenly I'm... still rotating Fallen London in my mind even though I've stopped actively playing it.Kris is enby and goes by they/them.
But to the point of your post, I'm pretty sure 1( Toby's a better writer than that and 2) it's already been set up in story that the player had no choice in this either. The entire tutorial gives us choices, gives us a hollow person to shape to our will. And then some third party rips it away. That's not a detail to include if the game instends to do Blamed for Being Railroaded.
Edited by RhymeBeat on Mar 21st 2022 at 4:55:38 AM
The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.From the looks of it, it's more likely that the Weird Route will be where all the criticisms of the player come into play, given that it requires active malice on the player's part. Beyond that, I agree with the aforementioned remarks that the game will do more to examine the existential implications of railroading; IIRC Toby even made Toriel spareable back in Undertale specifically because of his distaste for the Blamed for Being Railroaded trope.
Edited by bowserbros on Mar 22nd 2022 at 3:55:24 AM
Be kind.
I always suspect Kris having their own reasons.
As for Toby Fox and blaming the player for being railroaded.
Well a consistent theme I noticed in Toby Fox's works is the relationship between the player and the character, most likely inspired by Earthbound, and You Bastard!.
Now while Toby Fox regrets a LOT in the Halloween hack, particularly it's use of slurs, I think he really did believe in a lot of it's themes and refined it in his later works. For example, he wanted to write a non-stereotypical homosexual, Dr. Andonuts there, is certainly an example of that. Yeah it hasn't aged well but Toby learned from this and went on to portray homosexuality and gender in a more mature way such as Undertale and the royal guards and Kris being non-binary and it being normalized in Deltarune.
One thing that stood out to me in Halloween hack, was his attempt at creating moral ambiguity with Varik, he's called a bastard and monster by both Andonuts and the narrative, despite not particularly doing anything evil but the story seems to be agreeing with the sentiment of Varik and thus the player being morally bad for trying to stop Andonut's rampage.
Toby seems to feel that this entire fall from grace narrative for Andonuts how his repressed homosexuality, distance from his son, and thinking he accidentally killed the Chosen four makes him somewhat justified in portraying him as a victim of Varik despite what Andonuts is doing, and that the player is a bastard for fighting him, even killing Andonuts early is portrayed as the bad ending instead of trying to help his issues by diving into his mind.
I feel like Radiation liked what he was trying to go for in this, and I swear back in the forums in Starman.net he was really proud of this bit, but I was a kid back then so my memory may be hazy.
So you can see a bit of this in the No Mercy route of Undertale, where the player is the biggest villain through Chara, and even Flowey is reduced to begging for mercy, and dying pathetically.
So with this in mind, I'm very curious to see how he handles Kris and the soul, as well as what the bad routes will lead to.
Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 25th 2022 at 7:05:30 AM
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"I've always felt a sort of narrative dissonance with Undertale, honestly, as much as I like it.
No one is given as much shit for murder as the player is. Other than Papyrus, almost every enemy in the game tries to kill you. And aside from Asgore, I don't really remember any of them being criticized for it. In-universe, these monsters are attempting to murder a child. A child who, if you're playing pacifist, hasn't done anything to any of them.
I guess the game takes the stance that, since the player has the power of Determination, then attempted murder against you doesn't really count since you can just undo it?
Edited by GNinja on Mar 25th 2022 at 7:25:53 PM
Kaze ni Nare!With the exceptions of Undyne and Asgore, they're explicitly not trying to kill you. There's a book early on in the Librarby that points out the monsters' magic bullets are a means of communicating with each other. In most cases monster encounters boil down to them assuming Frisk is just a funny-looking monster and are trying to say hello.
There really can't be any consequences for murders that no one but Flowey and Frisk know about. The game equally doesn't judge Frisk for ALMOST killing people via Fight sparing. IIRC the neutral Pacifist ending doesn't change regardless of whether Frisk killed Asgore or Flowey. AKA the game isn't so much judging you as the monsters are, and the monsters don't know about Frisk's various deaths.
Edited by RhymeBeat on Mar 25th 2022 at 3:45:37 PM
The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.
I feel like Sans still reads you the riot act near the end of the game, even if you haven't killed anyone.
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I didn't know about that book passage, though that feels like kind of a major thing that a player could easily miss, but I think Undyne is who I'm mostly thinking about actually.
Edited by GNinja on Mar 25th 2022 at 7:52:46 PM
Kaze ni Nare!No he doesn't? He's pretty warm to you. He's worried about the Asgore thing, but that's a Sadistic Choice situation.
The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.Alright, fine. I was wrong.
I'm always wrong about undertale.
I think I'm just bitter that I've never really loved Undertale as much as other people, but I can't seem to make any criticism of it that's actually true. I'm always misremembering something or there's one bit of text that I missed
Edited by GNinja on Mar 25th 2022 at 8:29:45 AM
Kaze ni Nare!I think Muffet tries to kill Frisk but for the noblest of all causes
Cash money.
Forever liveblogging the Avengers

That, and the fact that the video released right around the time when Undertale was starting to experience some serious Hype Backlash, so his attitude kinda ended up playing into the stereotype of Undertale fans overinflating the game's stature (ironically, analysts now seem to widely agree that Undertale was indeed massively important and influential, at least if Wikipedia is any indication, but that's besides the point).
Be kind.