![]() ![]() I can’t tell if this is an oversight (!), the lack of a better word, or intentional obtuseness/irony.Īnyway, I approached the game with determination, and I probably would’ve kept sparing Toriel even if she’d said the same nothing ten times in a row. If you don’t take the Froggit’s advice to heart, it may not even occur to you to try “sparing” someone who’s still keen on fighting. On the other hand, the game pretty well obfuscates its key pacifism feature - “spare” really means standing your ground while refusing to fight, but it sounds like nonsense in many cases where sparing is useful. Even if it’s only the difference between “…” and “… …”. And when you do spare Toriel, the game tries to stall a bit, but she still has to give you different dialog each time, just to let you know that something’s happening. Of course we know that “someday”, in video game parlance, means “the next boss fight”. So we have the Froggit NPC a few screens before the Toriel encounter, who tells you that someday you may need to spare someone whose name isn’t yellow. But at the same time, it’s still a game, so it has to rely on some existing game vocabulary in order to be understandable at all. It wants to throw this pillar out the window, to redefine what it even means to be this kind of game. The game knows that the biggest trope in its genre is to defeat everything the player encounters. What kind of a medium is video games, when the only way we know how to approach a problem is to destroy everything that’s even mildly inconvenient?īy taking this stand, the game traps itself in an awkward place, and the resulting balance is really interesting to me. I suppose right there, in the very first hour, is the biggest point Undertale is trying to make. So when you do kill that person, it’s the game’s fault. In other words: the game doesn’t clearly tell you not to kill a person who has been preposterously nice to you the entire time you’ve been playing. Since then, I’ve watched a handful of people kill Toriel and later be annoyed that the game didn’t tell them not to do it. That takes a certain amount of, ah, determination. I went in willing to die rather than fight. The game was supposed to be playable without fighting, so I decided upfront that I wouldn’t fight. I never saw the combat UI at all until I got to Asgore. The very first sentence on Undertale’s Steam page is “ UNDERTALE! The RPG game where you don’t have to destroy anyone.” Not having to kill to progress is, seemingly, the primary selling point of the entire game. Half of that isn’t even right - Toriel is a nice goat mom lady. ![]() There’s a nice cow mom lady in the first area.Here is an exhaustive list of things I knew about Undertale going in: A game where you don't have to kill anyone Dissecting the plot without playing it will not entertain you and may ruin your enjoyment of the game later. I’m reflecting on it, so I’m not gonna bother explaining stuff you would know if you’d seen the ending(s). Don’t read this if you haven’t played the game. So you should play it, because I am about to spoil the hell out of it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |