that sort of makes sense(and has a source), but it ignores how powerful determination makes humans in undertale (e.g. no human died in the war with the monsters); with enough determination, you get the power to SAVE which is, frankly, a degree of power that nobody in the real world has, but is baked into every video game ever, and makes you, the player, significantly more powerful as the plucky underdog than the evil empire you're fighting. this undertale prime treats you as an underdog even though you hold the cards.
As an aside, OP's examples of Bucky Barnes and Organization XIII remind me of how [REDACTED] in Arkham Knight gets a free pass from Batman after nearly blowing up [REDACTED], compared to how a very sympathetic villain from another storyline gets sent to jail regardless
Oh yeah, that's the other thing, it's not like supa deadly serious games don't have sitcom silliness. E.g. FF7's Turks. They try to kill you but you sort of reconcile a bit. Video games have sometimes odd morality. Gee.
To draw out a tired cliche, PaciFrisk works pretty well as a Jesus parallel. He comes in from above the world into a world that is perpetually dealing with a problem. In the Bible, it's sin. In Undertale, it's the wall. And because of that chronic problem, literally everyone stands in their way, and yet they keep to what they believe in: kindness and forgiveness. Even against the one entity who stands in their way for the sake of standing in their way, Flowey/Satan. And just as God allowed Jesus to die faster than the other two criminals on the cross, Toriel spares Frisk the pain of fighting Asgore again after the initial Good Route sacrifice.
And just as Judaism eventually recognized Jesus as good (if not divine), Frisk eventually got through to Asriel, if only temporarily
Actually now that I think about it that's my problem with the moral lesson: it's about video games, or stories. It's hard to read as being about actual non violence. The little speech of the evillest character in the game is about raising numerical values, which is not usually a real motivation for murder. You could read an ethnic motivation, the majority monsters attacking the minority human, except that the targeted ethnicity has super powers. When you show some kindness in response to violence, there's an immediate flip in mood, not a drawn out reconciliation (I'm thinking of Undyne here). The one character in the game who would actually never stop killing you in response to your being nice, Flowey, is defeated either by physically attacking him (there goes that moral) or a miracle.
But it's simple to read as being about video games. "Hey, video games have you kill a lot of monsters... but what if the monsters could think and feel?" Well, they can't, they're shapes on the screen for me to destroy. In a game like Undertale I empathize with the presented personalities of those shapes and don't kill them, in a game like Nuclear Throne they are presented as mindless and I kill them. It's not a very interesting analysis.
You could go deeper, like, "why is it okay to kill them if there's so many and they're repetitive", which Flowey sort of does if you kill a lot of regular enemies but not Toriel, or whatever, but only briefly. Or you could talk about video game violence translating into real violence, but that doesn't really happen, and Chara was apparently horrible before ever seeing free EXP.
So the only moral I see is "if you were in a video game except the characters were people it would be pretty fucked up to kill them".
Sure. Works for video game morality. Does it well, even. But I personally don't much care, and I think any extension to real life is shallow at best. That's all I meant.
the save/restore stuff and like the whole thing with me blathering in my thread about finding asriel relatable, but ive already done that spiel a thousand times so im not gonna subject yall to it again
and ive been thinking about chara a lot lately as well
i think it would kinda spoil it if they gave away how the SAVE mechanic works on the Steam page.
And, i dunno. i don't think the commentary on violence was necessarily the best or most interesting thing about Undertale, but it was one of the aspects that hit me the hardest and has stuck in my thoughts the longest. Because it is a metafictional commentary, and i think the point is an interesting one. Like you can say, "video games don't cause violence". Well, maybe not, certainly there's no clear link between video game violence and actual violence. But then, like, why are they about violence, exactly? Why are so many games, the most popular games, violent ones? Why do even many children's games include violence, if only in a very abstracted form?
Like, idk, the reason seems to be that video games are mainly associated with a very particular kind of wish-fulfillment, a sort of power-dominance fantasy. Even just from a narrative standpoint, and an emotional standpoint, that seems pretty limiting, to me, and Undertale was a much more interesting game for not binding itself to that framework.
Undertale doesn't really ask those questions though. You can like, sort of read it in, but hardly. Flowey only got weird after being science'd into being a psychopath and even then he's dealing with people that are real to him, and Chara was apparently a bad person before he met any monsters.
Having games based on things other than committing violence is nice, though, yes.
I think killing in Undertale is more of a metaphoric for creating emotional walls, hence why LV is stated to be a ranking of /emotional/ distance. The statistics aren't indicative of growing ability, they're indicative of emotions.
I think killing in Undertale is more of a metaphoric for creating emotional walls, hence why LV is stated to be a ranking of /emotional/ distance. The statistics aren't indicative of growing ability, they're indicative of emotions.
Definitely, Sans says so outright when explaining what the stats mean (and i think it gets brought up elsewhere, not sure).
Undertale doesn't really ask those questions though. You can like, sort of read it in, but hardly. Flowey only got weird after being science'd into being a psychopath and even then he's dealing with people that are real to him, and Chara was apparently a bad person before he met any monsters.
Having games based on things other than committing violence is nice, though, yes.
It doesn't ask those questions, but i think by leaving the violent option there and presenting you with (and rather pointedly steering you towards) an alternative, it definitely encourages you to think about those kinds of questions.
Also idk if Chara was a bad person, or if the player taught them that.
Lately i'm inclining more towards Lin's view on this.
We know that Chara hated humanity, and also that they *may* have been amused by Asgore getting sick. It's not a lot to go off. We don't know why they felt the way they did about humanity, after all. The game kinda presents humanity as the bad guys most of the way through.
I dunno. Like, what's Sans say in the killemall route? Something like "do you think someone with great power has great responsibility", or the like? That sort of thing seems to me to explicitly take it back from real morality to you-are-a-video-gamer morality. We don't have that kind of power in real life.
It's not the killemall route when he says that, it's the neutral route if you've killed his brother
and no, i don't think that's any kind of meta-commentary, the guy just wants his brother back
anyway i definitely think the emphasis is on games (i said metafictional, but really i meant metatextual). but i think games can be interrogated, why not? let's think about games and what happens in them and why they are the way they are, it's interesting, i think
It's probably that I usually think of violence-in-video-games -> violence-in-reality as primarily being an FPS thing. There are plenty of big name FPSs where you shoot at Arabs or "ultranationalist" Russians or whatever and I feel that's a lot more likely to color real world politics and violence than an RPG. So I, personally, would rather talk about that (and there's some decent FPS commentary on that, like). An RPG is like... almost a red herring? The only people who think fantasy RPGs (like Undertale is obviously based on) cause violence on account of existing are, like, Jack Chick.
There are other things you could talk about wrt RPGs, of course. Number one for me would be the metaphorical racism inherent in the Tolkienesque treatment of elves, orcs, dwarves, etc. Obviously that's not in Undertale, humans and monsters seem to have pretty much the same psyches.
Even on the side of pure game internals stuff, I'd rather have games that don't have violence as the primary mode of interaction. Undertale has you act non-violent but the primary part of the game is still dodging attacks, and the non-violent parts, while interesting, are dialogue trees. It's not innovative technically.
So, uh. I guess I'm saying I don't think Undertale itself is a very interesting commentator on the subject of real world consequences. It might bring a few things up by virtue of being popular but it's so focused on game morality that I don't even know about that.
I think you're kind of expecting something that the game isn't really about, though.
It's not really about violence in any significant way. That's why the killemall route becomes so strange and surreal, because it's deliberately engaging with the unreality of the situation.
Really that route is sort of just punishing the player for outright rejecting the game's themes. It makes the fact that it ruins the pacifist ending all the more poignant.
That's what I said. It's not meaningfully about real world violence. Nonetheless that is how I've seen a lot of people talk about it, including Tachyon just now, so it comes to mind.
Yeah see i'm not talking about real world violence, i'm saying it's a commentary on violence in video games
and that i think that's interesting, even if the RPG is maybe an odd genre to do it in
mechanically, i've always liked RPG games with action elements, like Paper Mario TTYD and the Mario & Luigi games, they have just the right mix of story and action to keep me interested
And it sorta becomes a commentary on game mechanics, that a lot of stuff that is mechanically interesting doesn't have to be couched in the player acting destructively.
because it is, and when you think about it, the basic assumptions of RPGs, the grinding and levelling system, they're hugely messed up and don't make any kind of real life sense
though i do feel Undertale was clever for framing them from an emotional standpoint, that's easier to believe and also packs more punch
Games are pretty bizarre, yeah. That sort of thing happens all the way back to pen and paper. Or to quote 4chan, "The average commoner has a 1 in 4 chance of selling Asmodeus his own dick", if you follow the mechanical rules for negotiation in fifth edition D&D.
Mechanically, I dunno. Touhou boss fights are also about dodging and your death laser thing doesn't really change how the match goes except to convince you to stay in front of the boss and to sometimes shorten particular attacks.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
The argument makes sense, but at the same time, this person undermines their position by talking about tropes and fictional conventions. At least, to me.
And yeah, I feel like the ultimate moral of the game at large is about player culpability. Feel good because you were kind. Feel bad because you were cruel and needed to see everything. Either way, you did it.
like i said, it's really the balance of action and narrative that appeals to me, the dodging mechanics in themselves are clearly things you can find elsewhere (in Touhou, yes, but there's also bits of platformer in there and other stuff too)
Urtale argument was sorta interesting but i feel OP isn't giving the game's story much credit, the game's morality does make sense in the context of the fictional world the game presents, i think
this is where I state that while I think Undertale is a great game, I feel people give Toby Fox almost too much credit.
how so?
i am seriously, seriously impressed by Toby Fox's writing
Me too, but that's not really what I mean.
Death of the author is a thing and I feel people are free to interpret the game how they want, but people say things like "Undertale is intended to be blah blah blah", and it bothers me.
I see a lot of dialog to the effect of Undertale somehow making other games invalid as opposed to being a reaction to them. Art that seeks to subvert the status quo rarely works (see: almost any other game that tries to pull the "the player is an awful person" card) and I think Fox deserves plenty of credit for that alone. I don't like it when people go DID YOU KNOW THAT UNDYNE AND ALPHYS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PARODIES OF TYPICAL FAN REACTIONS TO THESE JRPG TROPES because that's fucking boring and also would require Toby Fox to, I don't know, plant several different messages in the game at once, which these people often like to imply are definitely there by authorial intent, not merely by interpretation.
Comments
In the good ending you kill ASGORE and go home. In the bad ending you die.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
But it's simple to read as being about video games. "Hey, video games have you kill a lot of monsters... but what if the monsters could think and feel?" Well, they can't, they're shapes on the screen for me to destroy. In a game like Undertale I empathize with the presented personalities of those shapes and don't kill them, in a game like Nuclear Throne they are presented as mindless and I kill them. It's not a very interesting analysis.
You could go deeper, like, "why is it okay to kill them if there's so many and they're repetitive", which Flowey sort of does if you kill a lot of regular enemies but not Toriel, or whatever, but only briefly. Or you could talk about video game violence translating into real violence, but that doesn't really happen, and Chara was apparently horrible before ever seeing free EXP.
So the only moral I see is "if you were in a video game except the characters were people it would be pretty fucked up to kill them".
Like the end of Super Metroid, where the whole planet explodes. Great ending, guys. Just kill the whole place, that solves everything.
At least Undertale makes some attempt at addressing this.
Morals is what I think of since that's what people talk about, and the first sentence of the Steam blurb is about not killing people.
But you can't sell the game on that, it would give too much away. And your average player would probably just be WTF
And, i dunno. i don't think the commentary on violence was necessarily the best or most interesting thing about Undertale, but it was one of the aspects that hit me the hardest and has stuck in my thoughts the longest. Because it is a metafictional commentary, and i think the point is an interesting one. Like you can say, "video games don't cause violence". Well, maybe not, certainly there's no clear link between video game violence and actual violence. But then, like, why are they about violence, exactly? Why are so many games, the most popular games, violent ones? Why do even many children's games include violence, if only in a very abstracted form?
Like, idk, the reason seems to be that video games are mainly associated with a very particular kind of wish-fulfillment, a sort of power-dominance fantasy. Even just from a narrative standpoint, and an emotional standpoint, that seems pretty limiting, to me, and Undertale was a much more interesting game for not binding itself to that framework.
Having games based on things other than committing violence is nice, though, yes.
Lately i'm inclining more towards Lin's view on this.
We know that Chara hated humanity, and also that they *may* have been amused by Asgore getting sick. It's not a lot to go off. We don't know why they felt the way they did about humanity, after all. The game kinda presents humanity as the bad guys most of the way through.
and no, i don't think that's any kind of meta-commentary, the guy just wants his brother back
anyway i definitely think the emphasis is on games (i said metafictional, but really i meant metatextual). but i think games can be interrogated, why not? let's think about games and what happens in them and why they are the way they are, it's interesting, i think
There are other things you could talk about wrt RPGs, of course. Number one for me would be the metaphorical racism inherent in the Tolkienesque treatment of elves, orcs, dwarves, etc. Obviously that's not in Undertale, humans and monsters seem to have pretty much the same psyches.
Even on the side of pure game internals stuff, I'd rather have games that don't have violence as the primary mode of interaction. Undertale has you act non-violent but the primary part of the game is still dodging attacks, and the non-violent parts, while interesting, are dialogue trees. It's not innovative technically.
So, uh. I guess I'm saying I don't think Undertale itself is a very interesting commentator on the subject of real world consequences. It might bring a few things up by virtue of being popular but it's so focused on game morality that I don't even know about that.
and that i think that's interesting, even if the RPG is maybe an odd genre to do it in
mechanically, i've always liked RPG games with action elements, like Paper Mario TTYD and the Mario & Luigi games, they have just the right mix of story and action to keep me interested
because it is, and when you think about it, the basic assumptions of RPGs, the grinding and levelling system, they're hugely messed up and don't make any kind of real life sense
though i do feel Undertale was clever for framing them from an emotional standpoint, that's easier to believe and also packs more punch
Mechanically, I dunno. Touhou boss fights are also about dodging and your death laser thing doesn't really change how the match goes except to convince you to stay in front of the boss and to sometimes shorten particular attacks.
like i said, it's really the balance of action and narrative that appeals to me, the dodging mechanics in themselves are clearly things you can find elsewhere (in Touhou, yes, but there's also bits of platformer in there and other stuff too)
i am seriously, seriously impressed by Toby Fox's writing