Undertale: Finished a super pacifism playthrough.
I think most people here would really enjoy this game. As for me, while I have to salute the game's innovation / early parts / few reveals (also, Gourry was right about the Papyrus fight not being the best part), I really disliked the last two hours or so (especially in retrospect) so much that I don't want to go back to it. This involves huge spoilers. Also Gourry will now think that I'm a huge emotionless jerk, but seriously I'm not guys.
- The weak points of the game earlygame were for me a lack of control given to the player, a strong reliance on plot fights, and a tendency to go overboard with the saccharine elements.
Well this is amplified tenfold in the last stretch, with like three power of friendship moments, and every attack being gravity based so that you can almost never die. You need a hell of a lot of emotional resonance to get me to go non-relunctantly through something like that, and this game didn't have enough; while Alphys is the only one of the core six friends I disliked, Papyrus was the only one I really cared strongly about. (Because I kept calling him the entire game) Ok, Toriel was cool too.
- Ultimately, while the savestate / loadstate thing was rad as fuck (as was this entire fight) here we have a game that sends a message that there is something wrong with you if you do not care vicariously about your videogame characters.
The flower basically is a videogame player who's bored and just goes kill everything in its videogame, and it's the antagonist of the story. He abuses savestats mid battle to get advantages, he plays with saves and toys with the idea of restarting the game, etc. The reason it's being so evil here is that it is bored. You convince it that it is not very nice and it turns good after a while.
If you restart the game after getting the good ending, the flower-turned-good tells the player of Undertale, directly, that all the characters are happy now and playing the game again would make them unhappy again.
This whole thing is at the core of the storyline.
Two problems with this.
1) Jesus Christ, that infantilizating guilt trip! Stop attaching such emotional baggage to fake things. Toy Story has the same problem (Always keep all your toys your entire life or they will be super sad), Undertale might be even more dumb about it because we are not even talking about physical things. (It might actually be better because carrying your toys around your entire life must be a real burden)
2) This is a terribly judgemental and conservative way of thinking. I like going Renegade in Mass Effect and punching journalists. I like being a huge jerk in games because I'd never act like that in real life and want to test the game's boundaries. This does not mean that there is something wrong with me. Surely this is an argument we're all tired of by now. I took the whole thing pretty personally (like I was supposed to) and I'm not even one of those guys who kills bystanders in GTA
