#asriel yelling stop it while frisks soul continues going 'technically!!!' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

unwiltingblossom · 4 years

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I’m back!

And now that it’s been years since it was a thing, can we talk a bit about how Undertale is absolutely written with just...thinly veiled contempt for the player? As if playing the game and having fun doing it is just a contemptible concept that should be mocked and undermined at every turn?

“Oh but if you have fun killing monste-”

ahahaHA that’s a nice try, except pacifist and neutral mode treat you with that same contempt, it just tacks on a vaguely happy ending depending on how well you follow the rules. Let me explain if it’s not been discussed!

First we’ll start with the obvious part people would immediately think of just to get it out of the way but be thorough: violent delights

The game will instantaneously punish you for playing it like a normal RPG and killing monsters to level up when you face bosses you can’t beat. Even if you take a hint from the frog and only kill the kinds of monsters who look unpleasant you’re still getting slammed.

You get leeway of about 5 monsters before the ending starts punishing you, and if you kill even one before Undyne you can’t befriend her, cutting off a whole portion of an already short game. If you kill 10 or more monsters (over the entirety of the game) the people you had friendly relationships with will start getting cold or harsh with you.

Meanwhile, of course, everything you encounter will relentlessly attempt to kill you, and anything that doesn’t is only not trying because it doesn’t realize you’re a human. Monsters gleefully talk about the genocide of humanity with you, while the game fingerwags at you for harming any of them.

Asgore has murdered 6 innocent children, is crushed by the guilt, and is planning to massacre all of humanity for lack of a better answer, but if you kill any monsters you have no position to speak to him/get him to weaken his attacks.

So we’ve established that for the neutral-violent players, the game treats you poorly, despite programming it to allow you to do so, and in fact making it considerably harder not to do it. What most games would treat as an achievement or bonus mode is treated as basic requirements by the game. But we’re not actually done with this section yet.

We can’t talk about this without discussing the open contempt and disdain the game has for you if you go full genocide. First, it’s 100% possible to accidentally start a genocide route. Lose to Toriel and then play it safe by grinding up levels until you accidentally run out of monsters and you’ve activated genocide mode. The game will assume you did it on purpose.

This means Toriel will insult you, Flowey will become a cheerleader, and then Sans and Papyrus will treat you terribly. You’ll act like a mindless robot from this point onward, with no way to change course or react differently until you’re done with the puzzle cutscenes. If you continue on with it, then the game gets belligerent, calling Undyne the ‘true heroine’ when you know full well that this woman is 100% okay with murdering an innocent child so that the monsters can be free to wage genocide on humanity. Weirdly enough, Undyne being willing to kill a person who wants to kill all of her people makes her a hero, but Frisk being willing to kill a monster who wants to kill all of humanity makes them a villain.

eventually the game gets to Sans, who is hilariously likely the most fun boss fight to play in the game. The ‘punishment’ for the route is the number one motivator for most people to play Genocide, just because it has the most challenging and entertaining gameplay (and best track). The game then spends the rest of its time preaching at you like it did the rest of the game, but this time you can’t just skip through the dialog, whatever.

More importantly, along the way of genocide, Flowey himself gets scared and runs away from Frisk, terrified of them, because they’ve become a monster ‘even worse than him’ - Flowey, someone who has admitted to tormenting and torturing every monster in every way he can think of, just to see how they react, until he got so bored from the repetition that he ran out of things to do. BUT IF YOU RESET (before you kill Asgore), all of a sudden he can’t remember any of that and instead gets angry at you for stopping. The game definitely considered you defeating Sans and reloading, as Sans has special dialog for that, so it’s not sequence breaking.

No, this is just the game continuing to act with its weird sort of disdain toward the player. It doesn’t want to let you have a different Flowey to interact with after you scare him witless - presumably because that would be potentially rewarding you for genocide route - so it just ignores all the rules it established for itself and pretends Flowey’s memories end before Frisk gets to New Home.

“Okay, okay, but none of this is a problem if you’re a pacifist! Just play the game RIGHT and it’s fine!”

Except it still isn’t.

Put aside that Undyne will still insult you for not killing any monsters, and that the game still has its preposterous concept that monsters should be allowed to be as violent and abusive toward Frisk as possible, but Frisk can’t lift a finger to stop them because they’re ‘more powerful’ (except the whole “not one human died” thing is a bunch of BS when they’ve collected the soul of every human who fell in so far, and Frisk will die if a machine so much as sprays disinfectant on them) - the determination doesn’t matter because it’s clearly a freak occurrence in Frisk’s case to have enough to bend time to their whim, not normal for humans.

Put that aside!

Let’s see what this game has to offer players who follow the rules:

There’s a mercy mechanic, wherein you either beat on a monster until it’s critically injured and then press the ‘spare’ button, or you use the unique option that appears for the monster first and then spare it if that doesn’t auto-spare it. Despite ostensibly being the primary method of how you’re supposed to handle combat, it’s extremely simplistic. It can’t be leveled up, and there’s no skill or complexity in it. The bullet hell and attack timings are more complex than it - and the former you use in both violent and pacifist forms.

Backtracking to Genocide a moment - that route also intentionally sabotages your gameplay, because ‘intent to kill’ just one-shots everything as long as you’re locked into ‘genocide’ route, so the only way to get the most out of the combat system is to play neutral route and be violent, but never cross the line into genocide. (hilariously, just sparing one single creature for any reason will save you from being a killer robot ever again even if you go on to massacre everything from then on and/or before then)

So anyway. The mercy mechanic is simplistic and boring, and the only complexity and interest in the fights come from the bosses, which are identical regardless of your body count - just easier/harder - unless you’re genociding. However, the two hardest boss fights, Flowey and Asriel, are designed to be impossible to lose to.

Another mechanic available to players who follow the rules is dating!

Except the gameplay is minuscule in those, too. Sans’ ‘dates’ are just him talking to you, while Alphys and Papyrus both have a date-fight mock up, wherein you don’t really do anything but have them talk to you for a bit and your choices don’t matter. Undyne has the most interactivity on the surface, with a ‘choose your own adventure’ sequence in her house and the an actual fight. Unfortunately, every choice is meaningless, and will either be rejected by Undyne if incorrect or lead to the same ending - the non-fight.

Mettaton doesn’t even have a date, but at least to his credit he’d been planned to have the most expansive one involving a marriage, it just got cut out and never re-added.

So the sparing mechanic is simplistic and the dates are glorified cutscenes where you don’t really ‘date’ the monster so much as hang out with them once and listen to them ramble on. But there’s more to the gameplay, right?

There’s puzzles!

Except not really. Despite the monsters repeating over and over about how big the puzzles are to monsters, most of them won’t even suggest playing any puzzles with you, and as for the ones gating your progress...99% of them are just literally not puzzles. They’re already solved by the time you get there, the monster with you solves it for you, or it’s literally impossible to lose.

.9% of them are puzzles that technically exist, but are so simplistic that they shouldn’t count, or are less ‘puzzles’ than they are tests of skill (the snowball into the hole, for instance)

.1% are puzzles that are impossible to win (or meant to be so) and the game just lets you skip.

imagine, if the game were really about its puzzles, Mettaton actually giving you puzzles that you could solve without Alphys or Mettaton cheating to let you win, not just time attack sequences that you can’t lose in anyway. Imagine if the tile puzzle were an actual puzzle you were meant to solve, Papyrus’ being a simplistic version and Mettaton’s being the full version. Like an actual puzzle game would have.

The pay off for the box slide shooter game can even be missed in the Core if you take the wrong path, while still maintaining your pacifist run.

Then, of course, the game will try to guilt you into no longer playing if you get the Ultra Happy Ending. That would indicate you should try to get it last, except if you do everything else first, the game will go out of its way to screw you - not even in an entertaining way, either, just ‘punishment’ for the genocide route. It’s basically just daring you to do the good end first and then go back for the others, but then will mock you for it in the genocide route if that’s what you do.

Also on the subject of resets, despite the game acknowledging the resets enough for Sans or Flowey to yell, lecture, or quip at you about it, there’s almost no opportunity for Frisk to respond differently to a situation because it’s on a repeat loop. Basically if a new response exists, it’s to let you skip some dialog/a cutscene. Which is a shame, because if canonical loading and saving is going to be a big part of a game, it should be used in more than one or two boss fights.

So in review, what is the gameplay offered by Undertale?

Puzzles you don’t really solve

Monsters who try to kill you no matter how good you are, because your reputation is entirely deductive, not additive

Dates that aren’t really dates with choices that don’t matter

Mercy mechanics that barely extend beyond mashing one button

Combat mechanics you can’t explore in pacifist modes and that are sabotaged in genocide mode

Reset loop mechanics that punish you regardless of whether you use them to explore every possibility or whether you save the best route for last

Characters who react to resets only so much as to either punish/lecture you for resetting or allow you to skip gameplay on repeats

Three gameplay styles, none of which are fully fleshed out, and two of which actively punish you for using.

Now admittedly, this is an indie game, about 10hrs long, for $10. It being a bit skimpy on content and not fully exploring its potential isn’t surprising, and it’s forgivable.

The trouble is that all through this, the game and characters in it are treating you, the player, with contempt. Anything shy of pacifist will get you lectured by the characters, and even when you do go full pacifist, you’ll still not get away without being talked down to. The puzzles from Mettaton are some of the worst ‘it’s cute that you expected a real puzzle’ moments, but of course things like the dates do it, too. And of course, even the naming mechanic is just designed to trick and essentially ‘call out’ the player.

All the detail and care that went into the game seems to just be dedicated to negatively subverting the player’s expectations or lecturing/scolding/disapproving of the player.

Thus.

I say that Undertale is written with this weird thinly veiled disdain and contempt for the player, and it’s weird no one talks about it.

#undertale #meta #long post #ooc

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