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Well, you've already inspired one person to buy the game! "Favorite RPG of all time" is especially high praise from someone with a Mother 3 avatar, and that opening with the flower convinced me I have to play along with this rather than just watch it. It's already really good. That first encounter with the flower is just so goddamn menacing. And knowing this isn't your ordinary RPG too, that in itself casts a whole lot of doubt over what I'm supposed to be doing. I named my character 'Luna' cause Toriel's insistent niceness and wondering if we can really trust her reminds me of Virtue's Last Reward.
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Sep 20, 2015 21:52
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Tengames posted:Advice for anyone who plays undertale's demo as a result of the lets play: make sure to read the instruction manual both before you start playing and after you finish it. Instruction Manual? I only saw the one brief screen explaining the controls, not any kind of manual. How do you access it? (A quick Google convinced me I better avert my eyes before I get spoiled on something cool)
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Sep 21, 2015 03:31
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Valgaav posted:So based on this LP and the hype of the rest of the internet, I decided to pick up this game. I won't go that far yet, but I do really enjoy having new encounters with different enemies. I wouldn't mind a higher rate at all if it also came with a few more enemy types to make sure you don't see the same one too many times in a row. It's like taking the concept of an Earthbound final boss story battle and extending it to every single encounter, it's great. Even though I already bought the game, I went and downloaded the demo to check out that thing with the instruction manual. That was a nice touch, but what impressed me a LOT more was replaying the demo a couple times to quickly test different beginnings before I carried on with the main game.
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Sep 22, 2015 01:25
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RickVoid posted:Holy poo poo. Oh man, I really want to talk about the demo thing, but OP says no spoiling "past events", right? So we should wait till at least your second playthrough before mentioning different choices or endings?
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Sep 22, 2015 06:12
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Lilli posted:This is the sequence that just sold me on the game. The Toriel fight was just absolutely heart wrenching for me. I didn't kill her; I spared her from the start, but I loaded my game multiple times to try and find out if there was a way to stay with her or something because I was so taken in by her grief. I tried something like that too. I went through the defensive phase at first of wondering what if she's evil... (why is she looking for fallen people every day? Does she need a human sacrifice or something?) But the house with all its little details made me start to think differently. I felt bad even asking about how to get home, waking up to that slice of pie felt like she was so lonely and trying so hard. By the time she went to destroy the exit, seeing her emotion over the previous humans dying made me want to see if I could stay. I went back upstairs to my room to sleep and be good. But of course, our character is really more determined to move on. I spared her and if I wanted to stay before, that was nothing compared to how I felt when she broke down and gave me that goodbye hug. I was crying like crazy, I could just picture her crying all night regretting her decision and thinking how could she be so weak to not put her foot down, she was just sending me off to die. 
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Sep 22, 2015 21:25
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Samael posted:I found out this game because of Slowbeef and his undertale stream. He got to this point and he killed Toriel without a hint of remorse or hesitation. I actually shouted swear words at the screen as he did that and that showed me that this is a loving good game to get me so invested into it. How could someone be so horrible  It's funny though how in any other RPG, even when it's a plot battle where you wouldn't want to kill your opponent, you still just fight fight fight, assuming that the plot will take care of whatever the proper story option is, cause that's the only mechanic you have.
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Sep 23, 2015 00:59
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I picked the opposite options during cooking lesson just cause "how do you want to pound? (wimpy)" sounded hilarious. I never called Papyrus at the mountain, so I never realised that the real reason Undyne skipped the traditional backstory was probably cause she forgot it.  One of the consistently great techniques Toby uses in this game is that stuff still sounds fun or quirky at first even if you don't know whatever it's referencing, or haven't found the extra dialogue that explains things further. Picturing Undyne up there practicing the speech and then forgetting it is a great mental image. But it was already a funny moment when it just looked like she couldn't be bothered and wanted to get to the destroying-you part.
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Oct 7, 2015 18:33
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Tenebrais posted:Wait, didn't that monster in Grillby's say monster food doesn't actually come out the other end? Monsters don't need bathrooms. Well obviously that's why he had to jump out the window and leave, cause why would Undyne have a bathroom in her house? 
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Oct 7, 2015 23:45
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I also didn't notice Alphys' help at first, since I was able to answer the first few questions on my own. Then when Mettaton started throwing curveballs, I was just boggling at it and still didn't notice Alphys making the signals. I think the first time I looked more closely at her was when her expression noticeably changed... cause it was the ghost question that you couldn't get wrong. 
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Oct 9, 2015 23:28
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I was so busy looking at the tile puzzle, I never noticed Mettaton was continuing the love song with more lyrics! That's great.
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Oct 13, 2015 19:31
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I'm also very sympathetic to Asgore. His plan is no good and its trapping him into a very bad position, but it's easy to see how he ended up this way. And even with his bad planning, cowardice and hypocrisy,he still seems to actually do better than most human leaders. Just look at how much pain and collateral damage and atrocities human leaders cause against their fellow humans, with far less excuse. You don't even need to bring up the worst examples like Hitler or anything. Right here in modern day Australia we have an environmental minister who keeps approving the biggest coal mine instead of having any vision for transitioning to the future of renewables. Our prime minister was once a communications minister who destroyed our plan to get a good national internet infrastructure. And our immigration ministers waste so much taxpayer money keeping vulnerable refugees imprisoned in horribly unsafe and unhealthy conditions instead of hosted in the community, destroying their mental health just so their racist voters don't feel like we aren't looking at "Australians first!!!!" They treat caring about the lives of children, or the threat of suicide, or taking care of preventable diseases, to be "emotional blackmail". In any other game it'd feel a bit unfair to bring up real-world issues like this. But Undertale really prides itself on making you look at the consequences of your video game actions in a new light. Leaders of people live in a different sort of world where they make choices average people will never have to make, and people take for granted that this is normal for them and understandable behavior, hardly ever questioning whether they have the right. It feels very similar to how players act in a game, actually. We might have been pacifist in this run, but how many players have committed murder just cause that's what they thought they "had to" do in this world? So yeah, sorry for rambling so much but I think Asgore's actually quite rare and wonderful as a leader, by real world standards.
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Oct 17, 2015 21:15
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I also hesitated a long time before trying to fight Asgore. But even though I'd been going full pacifist, I didn't mind the idea so much that I was forced to fight him. Flowey's "what will you do if you meet a relentless killer" speech did fake me out a bit. But it felt like this was a chance for the game to test me on whether my pacifist conduct was worthwhile. If it would just get me killed once I was in a situation where I could no longer flee or talk/act my way out of things. When I was finally forced to fight in self defense, did I even have the power to defend myself?
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Oct 19, 2015 02:07
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My first playthrough was also as a pacifist. I figured iit would come down to this, having to choose whether or not to spare even Flowey. But I wasn't expecting to end up hating him so much. By the time I got through the fight with Asgore, I was so caught up in it, I forgot to worry about Flowey for a bit. (even though all the golden flowers around had got me suspicious) I was just so unguardedly happy to have made peace with Asgore after all. And then- BAM. When Flowey crashed the game, I was filled with seething hate. So when the choice came up to spare him, like I'd been expecting, I really paused for a while. I moved over towards the fight button a few times during those multiple choices,, seriously tempted to push it, but stopped and went back to mercy only out of spite. And more anger, that he was trying to the very end to gently caress up my pacifist ways and win at least an argument with me. I've started watching other people play on YouTube to see more vicarious reactions, and the first one I've got all the way through had a similar reaction. He ended up choosing fight instead, but he also paused, moving over that way and thinking for a while before making the final choice. I love that moment, getting to actually see the indecision. In any other game it's an obvious "choose X for good and Y for bad" kind of choice, but here you can get genuinely emotionally invested and weigh your gut reaction against the opposite choice.
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Oct 19, 2015 14:16
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The golden flowers can't be the same as buttercups. Cause the first kid said their dying wish was to see the flowers of their hometown, and there was nothing they could do to make that happen while the kid was still alive.
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Oct 23, 2015 11:43
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The only result in the real world is what happens inside your head. So if making these choices makes you feel really bad and sad, and you reflect on how people should be more empathetic and kind, perhaps even in how they play video games, then playing the genocide route is an awesome thing to do, morally. Moral quandry over.
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Oct 28, 2015 23:23
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I just started watching a blind playthrough of the genocide run, and while it is great to see fresh reactions, I can't muster up nearly as much emotion about it as I felt when actually playing through the genocide run myself. It's not a matter of it being my first time through, either. I recently replayed genocide to show it off to my husband (since he sucks way too hard at bullet hell to make it past Undyne even if he did want to play it himself) and even though I knew everything that was going to happen and that I would be bailing just before the end again, (I have no motivation to git gud enough to beat Sans) I still felt this guilt and dread just from walking through the ruins with Toriel. Some people get all "uh guys, you DO know it's a video game and it's not real, right" when they see how others react so strongly to the genocide run, but getting to experience that feeling of you doing something horrible is the whole point. It really does feel different and more emotionally powerful when the story is only progressing because you're actively making the choices to do these violent things. And then Undertale makes you think hard about what this feeling means, by having a meta narrative that forces you to consider: what if these things you write off as mere "experiments" in the game were still a part of the timeline of the story? What if it was doing something something terrible to these characters you love, even if you reset? Yeah, yeah, it's still just a game, but why do we engage with any art, if not to feel for a moment as if it were real, and let it move us somehow? Undertale willfully makes the best use of gaming as a medium, to suspend your disbelief harder than ever before. It provokes the strongest emotional reaction by relying on your agency as a player.
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Nov 6, 2015 21:02
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I also had a real hard time on the first stage of Omega Flowey. The first time I could hardly even move, I was just boggling at it. Second time I think I started laughing when the giant cartoon bombs showed up. And being really tired cause I'd stayed up till 1 am wanting to beat the game didn't help either, so it took me a lot of reloads till I got to the first checkpoint. When I saw the fight command doing just 1 damage, I seriously wondered for a while if the fight was so ridiculous to make it totally unwinnable, and all you could do was that 1 damage at a time, so to kill Flowey would be a battle of pure determination reloading over and over again countless times. I was mad enough at Flowey at that point that I thought I'd be willing to do it, too. Though not all in one sitting.
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Nov 14, 2015 21:27
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Sentient Data posted:Refusing is also useful for less experienced players - the fight has attacks that look REALLY intimidating compared to the rest of the game, and I bet a lot of people would simply give up if they got the regular game over screen a couple times. Refusing is a way to keep them in the action and directly remind them to bit give up when they're so close to the end Less experienced players may also be very concerned once they come out of the true lab, thinking they're stuck and can't go back for healing items and that saving at the end could put them in an unwinnable state.
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Nov 15, 2015 19:39
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senae posted:Not the helicopters. I know absolutely nothing about this game so I'm just imagining a bunch of helicopters flying in until the narrator clarifies, at which point they vanish and are abruptly replaced by people. I'm thinking now that unreliable narration games could make for some very fun level design.
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Nov 15, 2015 23:41
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Rawkking posted:Mettaton is actually a robot with a ghost soul inside of it, so technically she was dealing with soul business in all of these activities, so that could be her specialty. Ghosts possessing objects is an ordinary occurrence for them, though. She didn't have to discover anything or have any knowledge of how souls work. She just made a way fancier dummy for Mettaton to inhabit.
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Dec 6, 2015 06:01
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Thanks so much for this LP, Prof! Thanks to your passion for the game I was inspired to buy and play it myself real early on, avoid spoilers, and watch this whole crazy thing unfold.  And then infect others, too! I'm sure a lot of buzz around this game is your direct or indirect doing.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:38
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