Team Hatoful presents the Undertale Demo - Part 4

[davidn]

It's the final part of the Undertale demo! In this, we realize what we now have to do, and head to the final confrontation, which I attempt to resolve in the most peaceful manner possible

Comments

[lupineangel]

18, 22, 20, 18, 331!? That's either the worst case of plot-scripted hax I've ever seen (I'm looking at you, Breath of Fire 3 plot-unwinnable battles that trick me into using all my healing items), or critical hits in this game are orders of magnitude stronger than they have any right to be. I know some things can fail so hard they loop round into being awesome again, but to be so awesome that it loops over into failure? Really?

Also, fuck you Flowey, you venomous little weed. I realise that getting rid of a goat with fire-based magic seems like a double-win from the point of view of a rotten dandelion, but seriously. Spellcasting: W - E - E - D - O - L...

Would it be possible for Team Hatoful to play something that isn't... I dunno, deeply emotionally traumatising next?

D.F.

[kjorteo]

Next we're getting the ending where we don't do that. :D

After that, I can't really speak for everyone else, but I personally am sort of thinking of going along with literally anything anyone else proposes to make it up to them that I put them through this.

[davidn]

Yes, it... tricks you - it makes you believe there's no other option, so you experiment with whittling down her health with the intention of sparing her later... and just when it looks like you're getting somewhere, there's that sudden huge critical hit that overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt that you even thought about hurting her to get through the battle. Games are the only medium that can so effectively kill a character and then tell you that you did it...

We do seem to be developing a trademark here, don't we :) I'm hoping to at least keep the rest of my videos light!

[kjorteo]

I'd just like to point out that, as sorry as I am for having done this to you, your Big No was absolutely perfect.

[dr_dos]

It's simply amazing to me, how in just an hour this game establishes itself as something so special

[davidn]

It really does grasp your heart very early on - I can't name a game that's had such a prominent... mother figure in it, who teaches you empathy instead of strength and literally holds your hand through the first puzzle, making you form a real attachment to her from the moment she appears... and then blaming you for her death! It seems like that cruel trap happens to everyone...

[kjorteo]

I totally meant to plug the Bandcamp page when we were recording this, but I forgot. See, this was recorded back before there was a Kickstarter and there was an FAQ on the official Tumblr more or less saying "yeah I don't have anything like that but if you want to throw money at the project buy the soundtrack, I guess."

and just like the Flowey thing I hinted at above, I have SO MUCH I want to say about Toriel in response to all that but I should probably wait for the good ending (well more making David get all the relevant-to-her-character dialogue we missed along the way on the first playthrough, but either way.)

One thing I can say now, though: the game brilliantly handles the player's sense of trust. It starts you out with Your Best Friend, Flowey, who turns out to be ... well. Then Toriel comes along, and the player isn't sure whether to trust her because the player is probably a bit rattled by the last trust exercise from, what, ten seconds ago. Toriel keeps the player tentative throughout the entire game--she is kind and

[davidn]

I don't think I adequately conveyed how much Flowey scared the life out of me when he transformed - I thought I was in a tutorial, I wasn't really paying much attention, and then suddenly... that evil face and the shaking text... my hand had reflexively gone to Alt+F4, which fortunately/unfortunately did nothing! Just after that, I was pretty uneasy about... not Toriel specifically, but really anything that this game was going to do - especially in that long walk with the appropriately-named scary music playing

[crassadon]

Naughty Teo. . . . How did you create this Flowey voice? It seems so impossible to emulate, yet so fitting for the character. .

[ravenworks]

(I guess this is mostly directed at Kjorteo, but for lack of a relevant post

[davidn]

I believe that if we start up Undertale again it's just going to be reloading the last save and then righting the wrongs I committed last time (unless there's a huge other section to the demo that I haven't seen as a result of going the right route - after Hatoful I'm suspicious of everything) - possibly combined with the Hatoful manga readings

[ravenworks]

It's basically all the ways that the game forced me to stop investing in it like a story I'm roleplaying, and start treating it like I'm playing a video game on a computer. It was bad enough when the game didn't provide any option to just stay at Toriel's house, but the real clincher was when the game just grabs the wheel away from you during the Toriel fight.... I know you said that you felt like you had killed her, David, but for me that was just the moment that I stopped feeling like *I* was doing ANYTHING in the game. The falseness of the whole thing just snapped into focus, and it stopped being my story, and started being Radiation's, and the idea of finding the sequence of inputs that would result in my character not doing that against my will just felt like hunting for a secret exit in Super Mario World. Until then I had been emotionally invested in the consequences of my own actions (what with the whole battle system built around that concept), but Toriel's awkwardly-scripted death just cemented the growing suspicion that I

[davidn]

I don't know about the game wresting control away from me - I always felt that the final decisions were... mine, just that I had tried multiple paths that had ended in dead ends and the option to "fight" was one that I was reluctantly going down because I couldn't think of anything else. I remember that when we talked about it there was some vital difference in how we played that fight the first time that made your experience very different from mine, but I can't remember what it was... nevertheless, all the ways that you volunteered there to set up the battle would have been good alternatives to how he handled it

[budgiebin]

Raven, I respect your choice to bow out. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we would still appreciate your presence and some commentary, but if you feel that your experience with Undertale is not worth the time invested, don't do it for our sakes

[xviith_et_seq]

>demand anchovy.

[budgiebin]

Anchovies were actually not carried at Undisclosed Pizza Restaurant, but we did have linguica, which is a favorite around here. ...The one a few cities over had chorizo, the spicier variant.

But no anchovy.

[xviith_et_seq]

Chorizo is even better. I'll take that instead.