#is toby fox being fair? has he analyzed a meaningful problem in the way people engage with games? is there a 'wrong' way to engage

[txttletale]

In what ways does undertale's themes drop the ball? I feel like they do as well, but I only really see the criticisms you mentioned in your post by the online fandom at large.

the sans fight is cool and fun and has a sick music track. it should have fucking sucked it should have been literally on the same level as the stanley parable baby game. it should have been impossible without an autoclicker and been super fucking tedious with one. it should have been desert bus.

like i don't think that what undertale is every trying to say is 'killing video game characters is morally wrong in real life'. i think it's clearly, in chara and flowey--who are obviously positioned as Players of video games--is trying to explore what (at least to toby fox) is an unhealthy and unsatisfying way of playing games. the need to maximize the amount of 'content', the need to experience everything in a game even when it's not fun anymore. i think the way that flowey talks makes this very clear:

like obviously diegetically this kind of stuff is meant to go towards making a point of how detached flowey is from his moral reality but i think non-diegetically this is pretty clearly speaking to a way of engaging with games that toby fox thinks sucks the fun out of them. flowey isn't connected to the contents of undertale because he didn't play it for fun, he played it to extract the maximum amount of Content, to see every possible combination of events, to get all the endings, etc.

the rest of no mercy route isn't fun. killing enemies once you've levelled up at all is boring and barely interactive, walking around in circles to spawn every single random encounter is boring, you miss out on substantial amounts of content--the humour and dialogue, etc. and that's the point! i don't think the intended emotional effect of the empty misery of the no mercy route is to make you think 'i'm a bad person for killing video game characters' it's to make you think 'is this even fun? what am i even getting out of this?' or in short--

unfortunatley i think the sans fight being very cool and becoming iconic of the game kind of fumbles that very very hard becaues it does make the murder everybody route ultimately rewarding--it gives players the Content that i feel like the entire writing and metanarrative of the game is setting up to not exist, and so i think it absolutely fails to stick the landing.

#ask #undertale #undertale spoilers #if thats a thing anyone cares about in the year two thousand and twenty three #now i think there's a lot of interesting and compelling discussions to be had about like #is toby fox being fair? has he analyzed a meaningful problem in the way people engage with games? is there a 'wrong' way to engage #with any art at all? #etc #but i think 'undertale thinks its irl morally wrong to kill NPCs' really undersells what the game is at least swinging for