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

[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 was just on a plot conveyor belt after all.

There would be other ways of making that point -- introduce critical hits in earlier battles, so its arrival in Toriel's fight isn't so implausible; have it related to your choice to bring a knife to her fight rather than sticking with the safer stick; have fights in this game simply NOT have an HP bar (not an unusual conceit!), so that you never know, going in, whether or not it's safe to hit her....

The other thing is the issue of Toriel's house, which I do want to touch on again..... The argument could be made that "well you're free to stay there and have nothing happen".... but that just spells out the artificiality of it again; games like this always acknowledge your actions with some dialogue, some story, maybe a cutscene.... being able to stand perfectly still in a room isn't a satisfying thing to do with your character, because no text comes along to smooth over the awkwardness of a sprite on a map the way it does when you do something that the game acknowledges.

But even with any of those changes implemented, there's a more fundamental problem... I might have shrugged it all off as the game just being poorly-made, if I hadn't seen the creator's twitter:

https://twitter.com/FwugRadiation/status/343113499658051585
https://twitter.com/aedavis/status/343128518319800320
https://twitter.com/FwugRadiation/status/343129492627267584

This isn't just "he started writing a cheque his talent couldn't cash". I might have suffered through that out of curiosity. This is "he deliberately started setting up what would seem like a game that people could invest in, specifically to prank them". And I don't know how it seems like so many people got through the scripted Toriel fight while still retaining any emotional connection to the gameplay, but I can't, DOUBLY so knowing that the experience was deliberate, not just incompetence. The ENTIRE DEMO is just a macro-scale equivalent of that first pull-the-rug-out-ha-ha encounter with Flowey.

So yeah! I mean I can see why someone like Kjorteo would still get off on a story like this, but Hatoful is ALREADY slightly past what I'm able to be comfortable with, and this is leagues worse, with the only un-nullified redeeming factor being the soundtrack (which I can enjoy comfortably context-free in iTunes) and Toriel's character design which I can enjoy comfortably context-free on furaffinity. This just isn't for me. It initially gave me the impression that it might be, but the more I learn, the clearer it is that I was just mistaken professing interest in the first place.

[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.

There was an interview I read a while ago with the makers of You Don't Know Jack, well before it was a Facebook game, where they said that one of the most important things in making the player believe they were interacting with an "intelligent" host was to respond to inaction as well as action... something which not a lot of games do at all. In The Granstream Saga, it does exactly what Undertale does to you twice in a row at the start of the game - you're told "I'm going down to the basement, don't follow me under any circumstances" and just by a game saying that, you know that you're going to have to do exactly the opposite of what it tells you. So in a game built so much to subvert the expectations of a normal RPG, a reaction to staying in the long corridor and an option to stay with Toriel forever would have been... nice.

Now, this is the most difficult thing that I'm going to try to convince you of, but... I don't believe that Radiation intended any personal malice towards the player in performing that switch, nor tried to suddenly take away a game that they could emotionally invest in - while I do see exactly why it happened, the break in emotional investment during the Toriel fight is your own reaction. I reacted differently to it, specifically because I had reluctantly gone down a path that I hadn't intended to complete, giving me (and Xaq, too, by the sound of it) a massive feeling of guilt - exactly the ride of emotion that the author had intended the player to experience.

But I do understand the want to stay away from being made to feel like that - even though for me, being able to experience it in a group like this is a way to... heighten that experience and share it together.

[ravenworks]

The difference in our playthroughs was that I was just giving her taps (deliberately getting the thinnest edge of the 'focus' meter) alternating with 'spare', like "how about now, how about now, come on, how about now" -- in accordance with the very rules that the game EXPLICITLY laid out for players to learn. Then, randomly, one of my meek swats did 300 damage and the game told me I'd killed her. It's like swatting someone's arm with the newspaper for telling a bad pun, and having someone say "are you proud of yourself???" after it turns out to have accidentally blown their torso clean off their legs.

And, this is the problem with an argument on different levels.... even IF he had properly sold the immersion in the Toriel fight (which as I said, could *absolutely* have been done well, it's not a conceptually flawed idea in itself), the fact remains that it's still a stacked deck; it's still a game designed to, as frequently as possible, make you love a character and then break your heart. That doesn't make it a bad game. It absolutely makes it not a game for me, though. I feel the same way about Quentin Tarantino movies. He's unquestionably an amazing director; I just don't enjoy experiencing the things that he's so expertly directing me into feeling. It's not worth going through all that suffering just to be impressed with how deftly he does it.

So...... MAYBE Radiation didn't deliberately intend to make the player feel uninvested.... but even if he didn't, he DID intend to make the player feel horrible, and...... well, that's ultimately the thing I never know how to put my finger on about sadism. The question I always ask myself about an apparent sadist is, "is this an actual sadist, or just a generous massochist?" Did Radiation intend to fuck with people as a power trip, or did he intend to let people have an experience he thought they would be glad to have despite how miserable it is? I think Moa is definitely in the latter camp.... from the sound of his twitter, Radiation is almost certainly a little of both.....

But the distinction is purely a matter of curiosity at this point anyway, because either way I have a hard time picturing this game bringing me more enjoyment than stress, if this is the tone he's putting so much effort into setting. The fact that you would describe this as something that you're seeking a way to *heighten* rather than mitigate pretty much confirms that we're having wildly unrelated responses to this game. (It also makes me envious of how much more you must have enjoyed Hatoful, if the miserable parts weren't just something you were willing to bear long enough to hopefully reach another scene with lasers and maid outfits!)

[crassadon]

How many games are there, where, in a situation like at Toriel's house, the player is allowed to just live happily ever after? Especially when the scenario has the protagonist in a place that's cut off from their standard reality, I can not think of one example where the player is allowed to remain in that reality. with the exception of death, or preventing the plot from progressing as you've mentioned here. It's something developers don't do in games, so why expect it of any game? Though I do think he should add additional ending for it, because killing Torriel and then going and living in her house, would be hilariously creepy.

I find it a little odd that you had so much disconnect from emotional involvement in the ending to this story. In my playthrough, I expected there was a way to evade the battle, but had difficulty finding it, and then surviving long enough to engage it, such that I ended up fighting her instead. In a game about how fighting is an easy answer to see, and overcoming battle in any other way is often difficult--even to tell if it's successful--I feel the ending to the game is a good test of the features put forward throughout the game.

[ravenworks]

"why expect it of any game? Though I do think he should add additional ending for it"

:P

And, I expected it of *this* game, because this game went out of its way to (seemingly) sell the idea that it's not like other RPGs, that it's about having feelings and having alternate choices. Up until Toriel's house, anyway.

What was unsatisfying about the Toriel fight to me was that it operated on different rules from the rules the game taught you to use. Maybe that was deliberate, but it still takes me right out of the immersion when I'm trying to roleplay within the rules I've been taught, and then the game pulls a fast one by having the rules be different -- suddenly I'm thinking about the ruleset I'm using, rather than pretending to be a character.

[crassadon]

Yeah, well, I do look for these sorts of ending whenever I play games that could feature them. . .

Your experience against Toriel, is similar to my ghost battle. I thought I needed to weaken the ghost to enable an alternative route to open. It surprised me to see how to save the ghost in the video.