~This is your fault, you chose this path
Okay, I mentioned Undertale in the last entry, right? As you can guess from the trailer/gimmick, you can spare every monster you see... or you can kill them. You can kill them all. This is what's known as Genocide run, or a Murder run as I call it since it rolls off the tongue better I think.
I beat the game 100% pacifist the first time because that's pretty much how I'd like to beat any game if I possibly could. AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW BY NOW, I GET OVERLY ATTACHED TO NPCS WITH LIKE BARELY ANY PROVOCATION
The curiousity about the Murder run ate at me though - there were so many grim warnings about it, and I heard certain parts of the game would be EVEN MORE HORRIFYING, and I wondered how the plot would change, and yada yada yada so in the end... I went for it. And it's seriously probably one of the worst things I've ever done in a video game.
I did two bits of art for it, one that's not super spoilery and one that is, but I'll tuck them under a cut and a spoiler tag (or for dreamwidth browsers, just the cut DO NOT SCROLL DOWN IF YOU DO NOT WANT SPOILERS). I'm not going to get too much into the specific plot elements of the Murder run, but i DO want to talk about it because it's absolutely fascinating in a horrible, horrible way, and unbelievably grueling.
The thing is, if you've played Undertale and gotten the good ending, I wouldn't recommend doing a Murder run unless you have the same morbid curiousity as I do, and the same desire to experience the changes yourself. I'm not joking, it's really, really brutal at points and incredibly upsetting, and there's no reward for doing it. You could actually say there's a penalty for doing it, because if you do a Murder run first and then try for a Pacifist run, the Pacifist run will be forever tainted. Doing a Murder run will forever taint your game. SO again you don't have to do this run yourself. You can just watch a playthrough of it on youtube or something and save yourself the personal anguish, although doing these things by your own hand and facing the consequences of your actions does make things so much heavier and so personal.
[Spoiler (click to open)]
I really wasn't sure what to expect going into the Murder run. Most games that give you the option to kill NPCs don't have very serious consequences or effects from it. Maybe you'll miss out on a quest or something. Maybe you'll lock yourself out of the ending of the game. Maybe you'll get weird fractal lighting effects around you and grow horns. Maybe you'll go down an evil plotline. Either way, most of the time it just feels like window dressing. I mean, I fell in love with the scientists in Half-Life, but did it change anything if I killed all of them for no reason? The game didn't even notice. Even killing them in Half-Life 2 just makes your team that much smaller. Killing NPCs in Metal Gear games doesn't really affect anything but your alert rating and your ranking at the end. Window dressing.
With Undertale I suspected there'd be more thought put into it, given how much was put into the main storyline, and I was right. Killing monsters affects way more than just the area, or your level, or your gold, or the plot. It gradually changes everything around you.
The thing about the Murder run is that to do a real complete Murder run, you can't just kill every monster you encounter. You have to kill EVERYONE. And the thing is, the encounter rate in Undertale is really low for the most part. So if you want to kill everyone... you have to stay in an area and look for monsters to kill. You have to want to do this. You have to make an active, conscious choice to seek out these monsters and kill them. I'm not sure what happens if you do a run just killing everyone you see without being completely thorough, but I'm sure there's a route for it.
But as I said in the last entry, the game is paying attention to what you're doing. And eventually, it will know the path you've decided to take. When all the enemies are gone, the area gets really creepy music, and you constantly spring empty battles with "but nobody came."
That's where most things would leave it, but the effect spreads outwards into the world. There are NPC monsters that would sit in the overworld and talk to you... and as you kill off more monsters in your area, those monsters disappear. Either dead or hiding, who knows, but soon rooms that used to have friendly monsters are empty. Dialogue is gone. Items are gone. Hints are gone. As you progress, towns evacuate before you. Shops are abandoned with notes begging you not to hurt their family, where you can steal items now that there's no one to stop you. There are very few monsters that stay to talk to you as your Murder run progresses - no one wants to die. Sidequests are gone. Entire cutscenes are gone. Puzzles are gone.
But it doesn't just affect the world, it affects you, the player. Without getting into the plot-stuff connected to this, your actions define who you are in Undertale in a very literal sense. As you begin killing things, the dialogue you get when you check objects begins to change. Originally quirky observations become flat and monotone. Your character stops seeing wonder in the world. They stop drawing strength from the things they see, and rely only on their own determination to see every living thing dead.
It affects things in battle too - your character's opinion when you "Check" a monster changes. While before they might have been charitable, the further along you go, the crueler and more practical your observations become. "Forgettable" you think about a friend of yours in the good run. "Free EXP." "What an idiot." "Not worth the challenge." Certain actions you can take in battle, like Talking, stop working - "Not worth talking to." your character decides.
Doing this, deliberately seeking out and killing monsters, changes your character as a person. To do something like this, just wholesale murdering these people for no reason, would make someone dead inside. And that's what happens to your character - your actions define them. You make them this way. NPCs comment that your character has creepy, dead eyes and shambles from place to place. Your character stops even tolerating puzzles and walks through them, refuses to listen to jokes or banter, stops laughing, stops interacting with others. This is the price you pay to kill without remorse.
Sparing monsters earns you no EXP. If you get the good ending, you'll be Level 1 at the end of it. You don't need to level with the way the battle system is set up. But killing monsters earns you EXP. And you will go up levels, and gain health. And even to start with, monsters don't provide much of a challenge, but as your levels go up, they can barely stand against you. You can oneshot most of them easily, and shrug off their attacks like nothing. They're not even a threat to you, but you seek them out and kill them anyway.
Your character begins methodical and cold, and the more you kill, the stronger you become... and the more your character begins to enjoy it. Your character gets crueller, their attacks more unnecessary. You begin fighting things that literally aren't even threatening you, or ones want to run away or want to let you go. You kill things for no reason whatsoever that give you no EXP. And now when you get into a new battle, your character is pleased, the little ! now a :) face. The Murder run is a process, a slow slide into complete evil.
And the game knows you're doing this, and it knows what you're trying to do. The save points give you a count of how many enemies are left before you've completely wiped out an area. At every point, you're given chances not to keep doing this. Characters keep asking you to stop, they believe you can get better, they remember you being kind (from my previous playthrough), but to do a complete Murder run, you can't stop. At each point, continuing the murder run is a choice. You choose to seek out the monsters in an area. You choose to kill everything you run into. This is your path. In a way, it's the inversion of the determination in the good path that led you to saving everyone - in the murder run, your determination is what lets you slaughter everyone instead.
There are points when characters make brave stands against you - characters you know well from the good timeline, characters who used to be your FRIENDS - and they do everything in their power to stop you. Dramatic speeches, transformations, belief from their friends... that classic speech about how everyone in the world must pool together to stop this great evil... that evil is you. You face off against this brave hero, transformed by the power of her determination to save the world and her friends, and you have to kill her. You have to win. She has everything good and right on her side and still, she will lose because you're the player, and she's still an NPC. This is the first time I think I've ever been on this side of the equation in a game and I felt truly awful about it.
And like I said... the game knows what you're doing. And why did I decide to do this? What possible reason could I have for wanting to slaughter everyone in my path? The game knows that too. The game knows why you're here, why you just HAD to see what would happen, and there's an absolutely AMAZING monologue about it that completely blew my mind, but without more detail about the plot itself I feel like the impact might be lost. But the game is very aware of why you're here and what you're doing, and it tells you this straight-out. At every turn there are so many consequences for what you are doing, and at every turn the game reminds you that you decided to do this, and asks you why. Why are you doing this? Is it worth it?
The good ending to the game is amazing too in a very meta way, don't get me wrong, but the Murder run is also insanely well thought out and unbelievably emotionally grueling. In particular for me, because as I mentioned before I never want to hurt anyone in games. I really don't. I want to help NPCs or save them or do anything I can to rescue them, or at least hurt enemies as little as possible. I didn't even have to really try to do a pacifist run, it's just what I would've normally done if given the chance. Doing this is against my nature, and it's hard. It's so hard because I care so much about all these characters, and there isn't even a good reason for doing it. I mean, there is more backstory in the Murder run you don't get in the good route, and more insight into some characters, and like I mentioned the meta awareness and the experience of doing this is like nothing else, but at the same time I really wouldn't recommend anyone doing it for fun. It's not fun. It's so, so awful.
On a purely technical level though, the Murder run at first isn't actually very hard - there are no puzzles, since everyone is too afraid of you to set any, or have run away in the later game. Most enemies can barely hurt you after a point, and you can one-shot most of them. The greatest challenge in earlier segments is making sure you track down every monster, but the save points help with that.
This lures you into a sense of complacency, because the Murder run has some insanely hard boss battles. I beat the first one, but right now I'm stuck against the second one and I know this is going to take a WHILE. I assume this is intentional, making you think things will be easy and then pulling the rug out from under you with sudden insanely hard battles that make you also feel extremely bad at the same time. Despite having to seek out monsters though, the Murder run has been considerably shorter, in no doubt due to how many of the NPCs are dead and therefore so many scenes have been cut.
The murder run is an awful awful experience and it's so heartbreaking, but everything about it is thought out in detail just like the other routes. It really amazes me just how much thought was put into this and how it affects things and how it makes things feel so real and heavy. Consequences never felt so severe. Decisions were never so hard. Victories don't even qualify as bittersweet... I only felt a brief second of joy after beating the first boss battle before I immediately regretted what I'd done. You don't get a star on your save file for beating it, or special items, or any kind of reward for doing a murder run... just the experience, and the extra knowledge from the new dialogue and scenarios. Is it worth it?
As mentioned I'm stuck against the second tough boss battle. And now I'll get more into game specifics, for those wary.
It's the battle against Sans, and it completely wrecked me. And here's a comic actually illustrating the precise moment it happened.
radic (of course i named them radic)'s face was pretty much my face as you can probably guess. SO MANY BOSSES SAY SO MANY AWFUL, AWFUL SAD THINGS IN THIS GAME BUT THIS
THIS WAS WHAT REALLY KILLED ME
"the memory of someone who once wanted to do the right thing" was me on my first run. and when he asked me if I remembered him I actually started crying for real because I was like yes sans, I remember you. I remember beating the game the right way, I remember being your friend, i remember being a good person. i don't want to hurt you. i don't want to hurt anyone. i don't want to kill anyone anymore. I'd done so many awful things by this point but this was what really shattered my resolve. I'd killed everyone else, but when Sans stepped back and asked me this and offered to spare me... I just couldn't do it. I couldn't be this monster anymore. I wanted to be a good person again. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE. WHY AM I DOING THIS? I WANT TO STOP.
My heart was screaming at me to stop doing this, stop hurting people, be nice, let him go. I just couldn't bear it anymore. So for the first time in the run, I spared someone. I let Sans go. And of course, after being relieved that we could be friends after all, he turned around and killed me because what else could he do at that point? I'm a genocidal maniac who's trying to destroy the world, he HAS to stop me. And I wasn't even mad at him for doing it, I even suspected he would. Just knowing that I spared him once, even if it didn't stick, made me feel a little better...
Until I had to come back to try and kill him for real, and he said that the fact I came back after he'd killed me the last time proved that we really weren't friends after all, and then I felt REALLY awful. Then I hit Sans' second phase and it seemed like ridiculously hard, and I was also really emotionally drained so I decided to call it a night. SO DON'T SPOIL ANYTHING PAST THIS POINT FOR ME OKAY. This path is awful but I'm going to see it through. I might as well, what else do I have to lose at this point? I've already sold my Undertale soul, there's no going back.
what really kills me in this run are all the reminders as a result from my first pacifist run that i could be nice, i COULD be a good person, i COULD save all these people and instead I'm doing THIS. I've never felt so guilty about anything. aaaaaagh
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!
I beat the game 100% pacifist the first time because that's pretty much how I'd like to beat any game if I possibly could. AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW BY NOW, I GET OVERLY ATTACHED TO NPCS WITH LIKE BARELY ANY PROVOCATION
The curiousity about the Murder run ate at me though - there were so many grim warnings about it, and I heard certain parts of the game would be EVEN MORE HORRIFYING, and I wondered how the plot would change, and yada yada yada so in the end... I went for it. And it's seriously probably one of the worst things I've ever done in a video game.
I did two bits of art for it, one that's not super spoilery and one that is, but I'll tuck them under a cut and a spoiler tag (or for dreamwidth browsers, just the cut DO NOT SCROLL DOWN IF YOU DO NOT WANT SPOILERS). I'm not going to get too much into the specific plot elements of the Murder run, but i DO want to talk about it because it's absolutely fascinating in a horrible, horrible way, and unbelievably grueling.
The thing is, if you've played Undertale and gotten the good ending, I wouldn't recommend doing a Murder run unless you have the same morbid curiousity as I do, and the same desire to experience the changes yourself. I'm not joking, it's really, really brutal at points and incredibly upsetting, and there's no reward for doing it. You could actually say there's a penalty for doing it, because if you do a Murder run first and then try for a Pacifist run, the Pacifist run will be forever tainted. Doing a Murder run will forever taint your game. SO again you don't have to do this run yourself. You can just watch a playthrough of it on youtube or something and save yourself the personal anguish, although doing these things by your own hand and facing the consequences of your actions does make things so much heavier and so personal.
[Spoiler (click to open)]
I really wasn't sure what to expect going into the Murder run. Most games that give you the option to kill NPCs don't have very serious consequences or effects from it. Maybe you'll miss out on a quest or something. Maybe you'll lock yourself out of the ending of the game. Maybe you'll get weird fractal lighting effects around you and grow horns. Maybe you'll go down an evil plotline. Either way, most of the time it just feels like window dressing. I mean, I fell in love with the scientists in Half-Life, but did it change anything if I killed all of them for no reason? The game didn't even notice. Even killing them in Half-Life 2 just makes your team that much smaller. Killing NPCs in Metal Gear games doesn't really affect anything but your alert rating and your ranking at the end. Window dressing.
With Undertale I suspected there'd be more thought put into it, given how much was put into the main storyline, and I was right. Killing monsters affects way more than just the area, or your level, or your gold, or the plot. It gradually changes everything around you.
The thing about the Murder run is that to do a real complete Murder run, you can't just kill every monster you encounter. You have to kill EVERYONE. And the thing is, the encounter rate in Undertale is really low for the most part. So if you want to kill everyone... you have to stay in an area and look for monsters to kill. You have to want to do this. You have to make an active, conscious choice to seek out these monsters and kill them. I'm not sure what happens if you do a run just killing everyone you see without being completely thorough, but I'm sure there's a route for it.
But as I said in the last entry, the game is paying attention to what you're doing. And eventually, it will know the path you've decided to take. When all the enemies are gone, the area gets really creepy music, and you constantly spring empty battles with "but nobody came."
That's where most things would leave it, but the effect spreads outwards into the world. There are NPC monsters that would sit in the overworld and talk to you... and as you kill off more monsters in your area, those monsters disappear. Either dead or hiding, who knows, but soon rooms that used to have friendly monsters are empty. Dialogue is gone. Items are gone. Hints are gone. As you progress, towns evacuate before you. Shops are abandoned with notes begging you not to hurt their family, where you can steal items now that there's no one to stop you. There are very few monsters that stay to talk to you as your Murder run progresses - no one wants to die. Sidequests are gone. Entire cutscenes are gone. Puzzles are gone.
But it doesn't just affect the world, it affects you, the player. Without getting into the plot-stuff connected to this, your actions define who you are in Undertale in a very literal sense. As you begin killing things, the dialogue you get when you check objects begins to change. Originally quirky observations become flat and monotone. Your character stops seeing wonder in the world. They stop drawing strength from the things they see, and rely only on their own determination to see every living thing dead.
It affects things in battle too - your character's opinion when you "Check" a monster changes. While before they might have been charitable, the further along you go, the crueler and more practical your observations become. "Forgettable" you think about a friend of yours in the good run. "Free EXP." "What an idiot." "Not worth the challenge." Certain actions you can take in battle, like Talking, stop working - "Not worth talking to." your character decides.
Doing this, deliberately seeking out and killing monsters, changes your character as a person. To do something like this, just wholesale murdering these people for no reason, would make someone dead inside. And that's what happens to your character - your actions define them. You make them this way. NPCs comment that your character has creepy, dead eyes and shambles from place to place. Your character stops even tolerating puzzles and walks through them, refuses to listen to jokes or banter, stops laughing, stops interacting with others. This is the price you pay to kill without remorse.
Sparing monsters earns you no EXP. If you get the good ending, you'll be Level 1 at the end of it. You don't need to level with the way the battle system is set up. But killing monsters earns you EXP. And you will go up levels, and gain health. And even to start with, monsters don't provide much of a challenge, but as your levels go up, they can barely stand against you. You can oneshot most of them easily, and shrug off their attacks like nothing. They're not even a threat to you, but you seek them out and kill them anyway.
Your character begins methodical and cold, and the more you kill, the stronger you become... and the more your character begins to enjoy it. Your character gets crueller, their attacks more unnecessary. You begin fighting things that literally aren't even threatening you, or ones want to run away or want to let you go. You kill things for no reason whatsoever that give you no EXP. And now when you get into a new battle, your character is pleased, the little ! now a :) face. The Murder run is a process, a slow slide into complete evil.
And the game knows you're doing this, and it knows what you're trying to do. The save points give you a count of how many enemies are left before you've completely wiped out an area. At every point, you're given chances not to keep doing this. Characters keep asking you to stop, they believe you can get better, they remember you being kind (from my previous playthrough), but to do a complete Murder run, you can't stop. At each point, continuing the murder run is a choice. You choose to seek out the monsters in an area. You choose to kill everything you run into. This is your path. In a way, it's the inversion of the determination in the good path that led you to saving everyone - in the murder run, your determination is what lets you slaughter everyone instead.
There are points when characters make brave stands against you - characters you know well from the good timeline, characters who used to be your FRIENDS - and they do everything in their power to stop you. Dramatic speeches, transformations, belief from their friends... that classic speech about how everyone in the world must pool together to stop this great evil... that evil is you. You face off against this brave hero, transformed by the power of her determination to save the world and her friends, and you have to kill her. You have to win. She has everything good and right on her side and still, she will lose because you're the player, and she's still an NPC. This is the first time I think I've ever been on this side of the equation in a game and I felt truly awful about it.
And like I said... the game knows what you're doing. And why did I decide to do this? What possible reason could I have for wanting to slaughter everyone in my path? The game knows that too. The game knows why you're here, why you just HAD to see what would happen, and there's an absolutely AMAZING monologue about it that completely blew my mind, but without more detail about the plot itself I feel like the impact might be lost. But the game is very aware of why you're here and what you're doing, and it tells you this straight-out. At every turn there are so many consequences for what you are doing, and at every turn the game reminds you that you decided to do this, and asks you why. Why are you doing this? Is it worth it?
The good ending to the game is amazing too in a very meta way, don't get me wrong, but the Murder run is also insanely well thought out and unbelievably emotionally grueling. In particular for me, because as I mentioned before I never want to hurt anyone in games. I really don't. I want to help NPCs or save them or do anything I can to rescue them, or at least hurt enemies as little as possible. I didn't even have to really try to do a pacifist run, it's just what I would've normally done if given the chance. Doing this is against my nature, and it's hard. It's so hard because I care so much about all these characters, and there isn't even a good reason for doing it. I mean, there is more backstory in the Murder run you don't get in the good route, and more insight into some characters, and like I mentioned the meta awareness and the experience of doing this is like nothing else, but at the same time I really wouldn't recommend anyone doing it for fun. It's not fun. It's so, so awful.
On a purely technical level though, the Murder run at first isn't actually very hard - there are no puzzles, since everyone is too afraid of you to set any, or have run away in the later game. Most enemies can barely hurt you after a point, and you can one-shot most of them. The greatest challenge in earlier segments is making sure you track down every monster, but the save points help with that.
This lures you into a sense of complacency, because the Murder run has some insanely hard boss battles. I beat the first one, but right now I'm stuck against the second one and I know this is going to take a WHILE. I assume this is intentional, making you think things will be easy and then pulling the rug out from under you with sudden insanely hard battles that make you also feel extremely bad at the same time. Despite having to seek out monsters though, the Murder run has been considerably shorter, in no doubt due to how many of the NPCs are dead and therefore so many scenes have been cut.
The murder run is an awful awful experience and it's so heartbreaking, but everything about it is thought out in detail just like the other routes. It really amazes me just how much thought was put into this and how it affects things and how it makes things feel so real and heavy. Consequences never felt so severe. Decisions were never so hard. Victories don't even qualify as bittersweet... I only felt a brief second of joy after beating the first boss battle before I immediately regretted what I'd done. You don't get a star on your save file for beating it, or special items, or any kind of reward for doing a murder run... just the experience, and the extra knowledge from the new dialogue and scenarios. Is it worth it?
As mentioned I'm stuck against the second tough boss battle. And now I'll get more into game specifics, for those wary.
It's the battle against Sans, and it completely wrecked me. And here's a comic actually illustrating the precise moment it happened.
radic (of course i named them radic)'s face was pretty much my face as you can probably guess. SO MANY BOSSES SAY SO MANY AWFUL, AWFUL SAD THINGS IN THIS GAME BUT THIS
THIS WAS WHAT REALLY KILLED ME
"the memory of someone who once wanted to do the right thing" was me on my first run. and when he asked me if I remembered him I actually started crying for real because I was like yes sans, I remember you. I remember beating the game the right way, I remember being your friend, i remember being a good person. i don't want to hurt you. i don't want to hurt anyone. i don't want to kill anyone anymore. I'd done so many awful things by this point but this was what really shattered my resolve. I'd killed everyone else, but when Sans stepped back and asked me this and offered to spare me... I just couldn't do it. I couldn't be this monster anymore. I wanted to be a good person again. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE. WHY AM I DOING THIS? I WANT TO STOP.
My heart was screaming at me to stop doing this, stop hurting people, be nice, let him go. I just couldn't bear it anymore. So for the first time in the run, I spared someone. I let Sans go. And of course, after being relieved that we could be friends after all, he turned around and killed me because what else could he do at that point? I'm a genocidal maniac who's trying to destroy the world, he HAS to stop me. And I wasn't even mad at him for doing it, I even suspected he would. Just knowing that I spared him once, even if it didn't stick, made me feel a little better...
Until I had to come back to try and kill him for real, and he said that the fact I came back after he'd killed me the last time proved that we really weren't friends after all, and then I felt REALLY awful. Then I hit Sans' second phase and it seemed like ridiculously hard, and I was also really emotionally drained so I decided to call it a night. SO DON'T SPOIL ANYTHING PAST THIS POINT FOR ME OKAY. This path is awful but I'm going to see it through. I might as well, what else do I have to lose at this point? I've already sold my Undertale soul, there's no going back.
what really kills me in this run are all the reminders as a result from my first pacifist run that i could be nice, i COULD be a good person, i COULD save all these people and instead I'm doing THIS. I've never felt so guilty about anything. aaaaaagh
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!