Undertale full version live reactions: day 9

[kjorteo]

The End. For now.

• Hotland down, new area! Swanky hotel looking thing of some sort?
  
• "Go up the creepy alleyway on the right for some great deals!" To be fair, that is usually a good way to attract Kjorteo to something.
  
• But first, Sans! Last time I had a food break with him, it ended up being insightful and shocking. Will the trend continue?
  
• Oh.
  
• OH.
  
• Awww, Toriel ;_;
  
• OH, SANS HAS A SCARY MODE. OKAY GOOD TO KNOW.
  
• "You haven't died a single time. Hey, what's with that look? Am I wrong...?" Well, kind of, yeah. But shh.
  
• AAAA THE SNOWDRAKE SAGA GOT EVEN SADDEDR. The longer this game goes, the sillier I feel for guessing that was just an isolated random encounter we'd never see again.
  
• Anyway back to the Teo-bait alley!
  
• AAAAAA IT'S THEEEEMMMMMMM
  
• Oh, so their names are Bratty and Catty! I saw one single piece of fanart of them tagged as that back when the trailer was first out, and assumed it was a fan nickname that particular artist had come up with, since I don't think their actual names were given in the trailer. I wonder how the artist knew..? And God knows now that the secret is out, I'll never find that one particular picture in the tags again.
  
• Catty's paw pads!
  
• Oh my gosh, they are everything I ever dreamed.
  
• A mysterious key! This seems important, even if I can't afford it right now. I'll spare some enemies in the next area and then come back, I guess.
  
• Ooh, more awesome music.
  
• Alphys is suddenly leading me astray into every dead end and trap in this area, after having been so infallible before. Something is very wrong here. I suspect either (more innocently) someone caught onto her schemes and is changing and locking her out of things or (less innocently) imminent betrayal.
  
• Whimsalot and Final Froggit! I can't tell if this is another RPG trope deconstruction (palette swapped enemy upgrades) or some deep callback to the character growth since the ruins, or both. Would they be here in a genocide run, I wonder?
  
• Oh... dear. Whimsalot and Final Froggit are hard.
  
• Yeah that's going to be a few more deaths.
  
• I think I've cleared out the core, but rather than proceeding, I'm going to go back and buy the Mystery Key.
  
• And now I'm going to see where it goes.
  
• "You use the Mystery Key. The door's lock clicks... as you fail to fit the key into it. Nothing happened." TOBY YOU BASTARD
  
• And it doesn't work on the other Ruins door, either! Um... hmm. Did this game just take my money? It honestly wouldn't be the first time it's subverted my expectations like that. Well, now I'm way back at the beginning of Snowdin and would have to walk all the way back to Hotland... or since I last saved there, I could just quit the game right now. Next time!

...

• (Does a bunch of con stuff, sleeps on it, comes back next session) I KNOW WHERE THAT KEY GOES.
  
• It worked! AW YEAH TEO LEGIT FIGURED SOMETHING OUT WITHOUT A WAKLTHROUGH THIS TIME.
  
• Wait, whose...
  
• "Blooky?"
  
• Is this... whose... Mettaton??
  
• Since when does Mettaton get a heartwrenching backstory? METTATON.
  
• And Blooky ;_;
  
• And... that's it. I can't even say I was ripped off (even though I'm super broke and battles are getting hard and I really could have used those extra healing items) because this is really good information that I'm glad to have, but this just... this is not what I was expecting. Then again, when is anything in this game what I expected?
  
• I went back to the core ready to do a bunch of backtracking when davidn informed me that the elevator in the front room should be working now. It... should?
  
• It does, and I do not recognize that door where it took me. When did that happen? I must have quit out of the core the exact second I unlocked it, without actually going one room further to see the far end door that visually reminded me that that passage is open now. Oops.
  
• Mettaton!
  
• Oh, it is a betrayal... well, maybe. At the risk of being the naive gullible idiot that Flowey accuses me of being, I'm going to believe that Mettaton is lying and Alphys is true even if this passage will come back to haunt me later.
  
• Every interference from Alphys is going exactly how Mettaton said it would... NO. I STILL BELIEVE. AT THE RISK OF SAYING SOMETHING PARTICULARLY HILARIOUSLY WRONG AND FOOLISH IN HINDSIGHT, ALPHYS WOULDN'T DO THIS.
  
• "Ohh yes!" ... what?
  
• What??
  
• Mettaton EX. O... okay.
  
• Oh God it's Touhou and I have no healing items. This is going to be a scouting run.
  
• Ow. Yeah, I'll get him next time.
  
• The system for getting the ratings up is really cool. I love that it even accounts for the healing items (product placement versus junk food, etc.)
  
• There we go.
  
• AAAAA NAPSTABLOOK ;_;
  
• So that's why Mettaton has a tragic Napstablookstory.
  
• Oh God and it's even making a sad mix of the fucking Undertale: The Musical FF6 Opera parody song and making it legitimately sad. Toby's music direction is nothing short of genius.
  
• Alphys!
  
• ... Fuck. Well, now, don't I feel silly.
  
• For someone who's been flailing around like AAAA at basically every moment up to this point, the New Home segment and royal family's backstory left me legitimately speechless. I... I don't even know what to say. I've got nothing. I'm just... overwhelmed. This game.
  
• Final showdown with... Sans? Well, I'm perfect pacifist so it wasn't much of a showdown, he judged me and I earned his approval, but....
  
• Execution Points and Level of Violence. This game is really out to turn the very concept of an RPG on itself on its head, isn't it.
  
• Aw, Asgore is adorable.
  
• Ha, saving the Butterscotch Cinnamon Pie all the way throughout the game and employing it in this fight does do something!
  
• Um... I'm out of options again. Talking won't work anymore, I have no Mercy button, the battle doesn't appear to be on a timer... I can't be meant to weaken him first. The game already tried that trick with Toriel.
  
• Further things that don't work: Dying a lot, calling Toriel, taking a long time before confronting him (the "back so soon?" wasn't a clue like I was hoping it would be,) quitting the game mid-fight.
  
• I have made it through the entire game including Undyne literally never once even using the Fight command at all, let alone killing someone. That can't be solution. Not on the one person who specifically doesn't want to fight before the battle even started, and Undyne and even Asgore himself admitted that.
  
• Oh God it actually is the solution.
  
• "Asgore has low HP." Okay now can I do anything except fight?
  
• The damage keeps creeping up with every hit. I know it's going to do the Toriel thing again...
  
• FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
  
• oh he's okay.
  
• OH HE'S NOT OKAY. H-hi, Flowey.
  
• Did the game just close itself??
  
• Glitchy opening. Floweytale. WE ARE OFFICIALLY ON THE CREEPYPASTA TRAIN NOW.
  
• Oh my dear sweet fuck I love this game. It's pulling out all the stops on what a "video game" even is and it's terrifying and AWESOME.
  
• Oh, I recognized the cyan heart right before I died that time! I'm guessing the key is to just die six times since it's going through the other human souls.
  
• Oh, or just get better at the game and not die until each soul can help out. That's a thing too.
  
• This is like Giygas but even better.
  
• And yet, all I can think is "will fighting here break a pacifist run?" even here of all places. Even though NO JURY IN THE WORLD WOULD SAY THIS ISN'T JUSTIFIABLE SELF-DEFENSE.
  
• Got him...?
  
• This is seriously the best game ever made.
  
• Oh fuck. This is the choice I was worried would happen ever since the demo came out. I... uh...
  
• I have seriously stared at this window for like two solid minutes. I've never been less sure of anything in my life.
  
• Fuck it. MERCY. FINAL ANSWER QUICKLY BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND.
  
• God damn it don't make me keep Mercying over and over and over to prove I'm really really sure when I'm NOT.
  
• AGH.
  
• And it's done.
  
• Epilogue!
  
• This is a bittersweet epilogue.
  
• Flowey's "Why? I don't understand" speech makes me firmly believe I made the right choice.
  
• OH FUCK, ALPHYS. birdlooke told me he got a "weird ending" because he forgot to get a scene with Undyne, which I got. I think I just got the same ending because of fucking course I forgot about Alphys, oh God I'm an idiot.
  
• The end, for now...? Next is to secure Alphys (and possibly anyone else I'm missing--Mettaton? Napstablook?) and get the better ending.

Thank you for being with me on this wild and crazy ride so far! The next update is probably going to be a while because my laptop is now in complete and utter disrepair and I likely won't be able to play this game again until I get back from the convention (and even then, I may need to email Toby himself and ask for a new undertale.ini file, as mine seems to have disappeared. According to a Reddit thread he can help with that?) But I'm not just going to leave it hanging when I'm this close to a good pacifist ending, so... yeah. At some point!

Comments

[birdlooke.livejournal.com]

You just need to go to Alphys to get the ending you need, Mettaton and Napstablook don't change anything. Plus, you get a breathing chance after the final battle to go back and talk to everyone and the NPCs, from there you can see them.

Dude though, since I kept seeing interesting art about the battle between the player and Sans I looked it up, you have to see it when you get the chance, it's friggen insane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr4IYjeplJA thankfully the player can't kill him because he'll always dodge so don't fret about seeing him die.

[davidn]

As you're now well aware, Undertale is an astonishing game that continues to surprise at every turn, even beyond where the end should be - it was a privilege to see you working your way through the later stages! Even though your reactions in real life to the more horrifying parts were disappointingly internalized compared to my usual approach of yelling, screaming and crying.

I wondered if I had done something wrong in the last fight as well and restarted the game in the hope I would be back before the final fight and - regrettably - be railroaded into making the kill choice on Asgore. However... I got a massive shock when the game performed its artificial glitch, madly cycling the title bar and eventually resolving to FLOWEYTALE. This only got worse when Flowey did his terrifying Toriel face, melted face and followed it up with a new hideous fanged face, culminating in the boss that I think is generally referred to as Omega Flowey but that I prefer to call Nightmare Flowey. Its whole appearance is just so... wrong, the eyes, insane mouth, and everything, all rendered in an art style so jarringly different from the rest of the game. And that terrifying eyeless shifting black and white face at the top... at this point I seriously thought that I didn't want to play this game any more, that it had scared me to the point where I wouldn't be able to open it again.

But... something brought me back, and even though the game does an excellent job making it appear that you're up against overwhelming impossible opposition, you eventually see ways around it - I'm not sure if the game gradually gets a tiny bit more lenient on multiple reboots. And you slowly fight your way through this insurmountable nightmare and it just feels so... incredibly good when you overcome it and take the game back from the antagonist that had stolen it from you. Nothing I've ever seen uses the save file and the game itself in such a frighteningly self-aware way - when we looked back at the videos we'd made of the demo, there were so many things that we say are amazing about it that the full game completely upstages. I had never expected it to out-Giygas Giygas and out-Ecco Ecco at the same time.

The inability to do anything but fight Asgore is a... bit of a flaw, I think. I spent ages trying to find a way around - my approach was to let him kill me multiple times, as the message keeps changing as you're defeated over and over, but it had no effect. I'm very glad that you went with fighting him and that I wasn't on the edge of my seat waiting for you to give up for six hours :) But your attempt at getting around it by quitting the game during the fight was truly inspired, and I really would love for Toby Fox to have built in that possibility. At this stage, I'd assume that many people have been burned by the Toriel fight before and will think they know the game, making the solution completely against what you've learned up to that point even though he visibly stays with that sliver of health left.

This is... so wonderful. And you still have so much to discover - I'm looking forward to you continuing even past the end :)

[kjorteo]

Having to weaken Asgore is something that feels like a flaw on the surface, and I let this notification sit here for a while while I digested it, but I think it does make sense in retrospect. As with anything in this game, it's all about subverting expectations.

First, Toby had to know people were traumatized from the Toriel thing and were expecting that again, and because he is a bastard, he took the opportunity to punish us all for having expected or predicted anything in this game.

Storyline-wise, it makes sense... I wasn't expecting it to because the game thus far has been all about encountering people who genuinely do want to kill you and somehow talking them down (Undyne), so surely someone who never wanted to harm anyone in the first place before the battle even begins has to have a peaceful resolution, right? Yes, but--and here's the brilliant part--Asgore didn't want to be spared. Wracked with guilt for not only what he's done but what he knows he's about to do again, he destroyed your Mercy button specifically so that you couldn't use it on him. He keeps his head down and refuses to make eye contact until the fight is over, because it's... easier this way, probably. I'm not sure he was even expecting to win; his only reaction to hearing how many times he's already killed you is to nod sadly, and (as revealed in the Pacifist route) his entire plan in the first place was always just a stalling tactic so he could hide in the throne room and meekly hope no more humans fall down and make him have to deal with them. He doesn't want to win, but nor does he want you to end this peacefully. He is committing suicide.

And in retrospect, further developments in the game have almost made me feel greedy for having expected anything less. Asriel warns you that for all the despair at being imprisoned and excitement over the barrier finally having been destroyed, the overworld is actually not that nice a place, since there are cruel people out there who can't magically be swayed just by being nice, the way you can do underground. Much like the monster food versus human food comment in Grillby's, it took something I had taken as just a gameplay element and made me think about it... honestly, the player character's success rate with turning everyone they encounter through Determination and being unflappably kind is somewhat unrealistic compared to real life, and you know, maybe this was just a decision Asgore made. He is the king, after all. Maybe, for once in the entire string of multiple alternate timelines across this entire game, this isn't about you.

That and everything ends up being okay in the True Pacifist route anyway, so, you know, just by engaging in combat with Asgore at all the timeline is kind of already off. So there's that.