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[Vgray]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Undyne does condemn you a bit however.

[Aedel]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Undyne does condemn you a bit however.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Undyne is an at the time extreme humanphobe who has trained for years with the sole goal of killing a human. I don't think their judgement carries weight unless you killed something like a froggit or Shyren.

Then again she's also the police chief for all intents and purposes.

[Cthulhu]

I like hwo it encourages you to be pacifist by presenting you with interesting characters you care about. 

Spops failed at making you care because it forced you to kill them and they were all square-jawed call of duty mans.

That game's doing something different though, by adhering so closely to the standard tropes it exposes how heinous a lot of the shit you do in those games is.  Far Cry 2 is similar but not as in your face; the inherent difficulty of the game and the sandbox nature of it lets you do a lot of things that would be war crimes in real life, and it never rubs it in your face.

It lets you stick with the Dragunov instead of buying the Barrett because the Barrett kills in one shot and that means you can't shoot people trying to help their friends.  It doesn't comment on what you're doing.  If you don't realize that you've become a war criminal and a worse influence on the country than any of the game's "villains" then that's your thing.

It doesn't force you to shoot people and then say you're bad when you do it.

[Aleksanderus]

The first thing I did in this game was basically murdering everyone (and by that I began my genocide route) and it turned out that undertale is a very sad game but mainly in genocide route.

[AlleeCat]

Undertale is an emotional game, period. Even the True Pacifist route gets pretty heartbreaking.

[Leafsnail]

Special Ops is different, largely because it's a linear game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The game hinges on a scene where, in the heat of the moment, your group misidentifies a group of hiding civilians and fires at them with white phosphorus.  It probably works a lot less well if you notice what happens and don't fire until you realize you have to, but I think most people fire anyway because you've been doing that constantly anyway.

It's less about morally condemning you and more about using linear game objectives as a metaphor for the way the main character feels compelled to kill everyone

[Sonlirain]

The first thing I did in this game was basically murdering everyone (and by that I began my genocide route) and it turned out that undertale is a very sad game but mainly in genocide route.

If you ask me killing Undyne on normal is sadder.
Genocide kinda lets you distance yourself (in and out of universe) so it does not hurt as much. Normal is where the feels are at.

[Cthulhu]

I headcanonned it to be different.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I backed up my true pacifist save, then genocided and deleted the game from my hard drive, along with all the saves except the backup.  Now all that's left is a world where everything worked out nicely, in a rar with a password I don't know. 

No Flowey, no Asriel, no Chara.  No anomaly.

[TheBiggerFish]

Huh?

[Cthulhu]

I saved the day

[Leafsnail]

It's interesting how strongly people react to the genocide route.  I've never really seen anything else like it.

[Fniff]

I certainly had a reaction just from reading a let's play of it.

Spoiler: Rambling about Undertale (click to show/hide)

I didn't expect Undertale. Bullethell and JRPG? Aggressive recommendations making my hipster senses tingle? Appealing to fans of a genre I never really liked? I understand this could be good, but I'm not the right customer. The Something Awful Let's Play Archive has an LP of it, I'll just read it so people stop bothering me.

So I got to the fight. You know the one. I stopped.

The feeling I got, staring at my computer screen, was like the time a character begged for me to help him before he went insane.

The game was called Knock-Knock. It was a horror game. Your character, the Lodger, starts out mad and doesn't get much better from there. By the end, if you don't do the right things, you get stuck. The level starts with you in his house, and you have to leave the house to get to the next. But I did the wrong things. When he left, I got a game over. The game over is that he goes completely mad; catatonically so.

Around the second time of doing this, he began speaking to me. Not unusual, he often rambles to you throughout the game. But the things he was saying...

"You! You, outside! Who are you?"
"What do you want from me?"
"Help me."

And I knew. Even though he was just a collection of code and art assets and letters forming sentences... It made the perfect image of a man both wracked by extreme paranoia and tortured by the knowledge that he was about to die, knowing the only one who could save him... Simply can't. And the feeling washed over me; that feeling that has no name yet.

So I started a new game. Got the good ending. He got out of his house, out into the daylight. And I was both impressed and frightened by that feeling and hoped I would never get it again.

I did, in the most unlikely of places. Undertale... It's not the first time I've been changed by a Let's Play. Hell no. For some reason, the Let's Play of Cry of Fear on the LParchive still induces a melancholy mood to this day. But Undertale made me want to stop reading an LP simply because it was too horrible to continue.

Maybe this is all bullshit. Maybe it caught me in a bad mood: I have been feeling down recently. But... I know there's going to be more games like Undertale. I hope there are.

I'm sad, yes. Sad and guilty for the lives of fictional characters, how ridiculous. But isn't it amazing that the human race can make you feel emotions like that, really true emotions, just with illusions?

[Cthulhu]

I hipstered pretty hard about the game for a long time.  So many maymays.

There's obviously a reason it got memed so hard though, it's great.

All I mean by what I posted was that I saved a copy of my true pacifist save before I did genocide, so I can pretend they're all safe and happy.  The sense of responsibility towards those pixels is really intense, there really is nothing like it.  I found myself making bets with the bosses, like "If you can beat me this time, I'll reset and do a true pacifist run"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Of course, Sans skewers that idea.  The whole Chara thing doesn't really make much sense to me, even in-universe.  None of that made sense.  I think a more direct reference to the person behind the screen would've made more sense, that you're a being from an external reality fucking with their lives for fun.

[Fniff]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Of course, Sans skewers that idea.  The whole Chara thing doesn't really make much sense to me, even in-universe.  None of that made sense.  I think a more direct reference to the person behind the screen would've made more sense, that you're a being from an external reality fucking with their lives for fun.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think it works better with Chara, actually. Players usually aren't murderers in reality, so why are they in games? Well, because it's just a game. The player character and the player are two separate things. Chara is what happens when you take the player out of the equation.

I'm really not sure if I could play Undertale. Even I hadn't read the LP... I think it would have seriously messed with my head.

On a lighter (somewhat?) note, anyone notice the similarities between Frisk in a No Mercy run and a Dwarf Fortress adventurer?

About the headcanon...

Spoiler: Headcanon (click to show/hide)

Great idea for a story. A God has two universes: in one, they've created a paradise. In the other, an utter dystopia. What happens when one of their worshippers/tortured souls finds out about the other universe?

[Cthulhu]

My headcanon which I sort of gleaned from

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sans's dialog, is that everybody's been fucking with the timeline forever, before me it was Flowey.  Flowey killed them all a thousand times over, I figured he was the real anomaly.  By destroying the game completely and deleting it, I cleaned up the mess.  I saved a save file out of sentimentality but deleting it too probably would've made more sense.  Nonexistence is not a negative state, it's the most neutral state possible. 

If they're all dead, that's that.  The save I preserved Chara never woke up, and Flowey's lost his ability to SAVE.  Sans got his wish, there's one timeline left and not even I can fuck with it cause I put it in a rar with a random password.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I liked the subtle dig at people who watch LPs from Flowey, talking about people who don't have the balls to do it, and just want to watch it.  Which reminds me...

For a long time I've wanted to write a horror story that...  I dunno how to really put it.  I want to write a story that acknowledges the "transactional nature" of reading, as your freshman critical theory professor might put it.  That reminds the reader that he has a part in the story too.  Talking to the reader directly and encouraging him to do what readers usually do: filling in blanks, creating the details of the scenery, etc.

Create one of those agonizing dramatic irony moments and telling the reader to insert himself into the story and warn the character.

And through all of that, gently reminding the reader that by reading it he's actualizing what happens, that all the bad things that happen to the characters are happening because he's reading it.  If he just put the book down it'd all go away, but he won't of course.

But it'd take a lot of work to do that in a way that wasn't overbearing or gimmicky.  Still mulling it over.