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Undertale
Dec 21, 2015 8:45:49 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by Neo Rasa on Dec 21, 2015 8:45:49 GMT -5
Something it has in common with Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden is that unlike most RPGs the writing is actually good.
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Post by Brand on Dec 21, 2015 11:41:48 GMT -5
The forum link in the article is broken.
I enjoyed the article but yeah maybe someday, something in depth would be cool. But this game is still very, very new so I can see avoiding it for now. But I did share it with a friend because I suck at explaining things and she wanted to know more about it.
I actually randomly backed this game. Sounded neat, didn't think it would blow up like it did. I liked it, but yeah the hype this game has gotten is kind of off the hook, didn't really expect that.
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Post by Bobinator on Dec 21, 2015 13:48:55 GMT -5
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Post by Neo Rasa on Dec 21, 2015 14:36:01 GMT -5
That's awesome.
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Lord Dalek
Full Member
WHY DOES HE HAVE A SECOND/THIRD/FORTH/ETC. FORM?!?!
Posts: 249
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Post by Lord Dalek on Dec 24, 2015 15:48:54 GMT -5
Is Undertale the "Greatest Game of All Time"? Hell no!
Is it "yet another flavor of the year indie title that everybody overhypes before immediately forgetting in place of the next shiny thing"? You bet your ass!
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Post by Ike on Dec 24, 2015 16:36:31 GMT -5
I think (read: hope) that Undertale's success will send a message about what makes a game good and worth playing - if Undertale can achieve this degree of success with a relatively small team and budget and a whole lot of care put into it, the same should hold true for games generally. Games don't need super complex stories or top notch graphics, they need good design, and this game is all about its design. It works with what it's got and doesn't try to be more than it is, which is not something you can say about a lot of other Kickstarter projects. I was pretty dismissive of it when I first saw it because it did look like just another cash-in low-effort JRPG knockoff, but I was pretty impressed with the final result. It's nice to see something that feels like the creators were really invested in making a game good and fun without being super invested in a pretentious story.
That said, I wish there were more critical analysis of the game (not in this article necessarily but in general.) Even in this thread, criticism seems to extend as far as "It's not the greatest game ever, and it has flaws," but nobody enunciates those flaws to any appreciable degree. The biggest criticism I can think to levy against it is that its gimmick can only really work once, because every subsequent knockoff of this game that will come about in the next 3 years or so is going to be measured against this standard and I think the genre will be worse for it. Although it's hard to place that at Undertale's feet specifically rather than just a consequence of being relatively innovative with the way the game's morality system works. There's also no really "organic" way to experience the game - I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the people playing the game for the first time already know about the good-evil paths and the fact that the game remembers your actions, so having that foreknowledge becomes kind of a self-fulfilling thing. You still play for the ending you want rather than the one you deserve, unless you're playing the game completely blind.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 24, 2015 18:34:30 GMT -5
I'm actually reading through Homestuck so I can do a big article on the game an its influences and ideas.
This guy here is trying to do a video series on the symbolism in the game, so that's neat (spoilers obviously).
Guy does great work, he really helped me see the bigger themes at play in the No More Heroes series and helped me form my own readings on it during a replay session.
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ult
Junior Member
Posts: 78
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Post by ult on Dec 25, 2015 11:53:51 GMT -5
I clicked on the forum link in the Grinch article and somehow got here.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 25, 2015 12:32:05 GMT -5
One problem I have with Undertale is that there is no way to fully save Asriel. As it is, we get a golden ending but not a "platinum" ending.
I've heard the Hard Mode is incomplete so maybe the "finished" version of that, if it ever happens, will solve the problem.
I get Toby may have been aiming for a bittersweet ending but considering OTHER equally-luckless characters can get happy-enough endings this seems odd.
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Post by Ike on Dec 25, 2015 15:15:36 GMT -5
edit: should probably be careful about spoilers. Sometimes stories just don't have a good outcome. Asriel's already dead long before the game even starts, so saving him would be too deus ex machina convenient.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 25, 2015 15:32:54 GMT -5
edit: should probably be careful about spoilers. Sometimes stories just don't have a good outcome. Asriel's already dead long before the game even starts, so saving him would be too deus ex machina convenient. There's a theory that hard mode is a way to undo the bad endings that come about from a genocide run, since you're calling Frisk's name, except that mode ends too fast due to that annoying fucking dog.
So now fans are theorizing that Toby Fox didn't finish hard mode just to fuck with them and that's probably exactly what the plan was.
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Post by Ike on Dec 25, 2015 15:36:15 GMT -5
It's amazing how deeply people overanalyze the story of this game. It's really not that complicated.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 25, 2015 15:48:45 GMT -5
It's amazing how deeply people overanalyze the story of this game. It's really not that complicated. Yeah, I noticed people overthinking things a lot. Except I do think the annoying dog theory might be on the nose, since the annoying dog is Toby's insert in the game, and it always appears to fuck around with the player in some way. So hard mode is his way just to fuck with anyone expecting to find some way to undo their actions in the genocide route.
Which would be hilarious if true.
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Post by Woody Alien on Dec 28, 2015 7:01:20 GMT -5
The only other indie game I saw receive such a huge load of emotional response and warm tributes from gamers was Katawa Shoujo three years ago. There are two pretty big differences though: outside of its great writing and unusual choice of subject matter, KS didn't actually play with the medium or defy the conventions of its genre, it was mostly helped by the fact that for many players (myself included) it was their first entry in the visual novel world. also, while the KS developers were and are (by their choice) faceless nobodies, Toby Fox had already a pretty big fanbase for his work on Homestuck, so he didn't have to build interest to his game from scratch.
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Post by JDarkside on Dec 28, 2015 7:54:00 GMT -5
Not really. Toby Fox had diehard Homestuck fans interested in his composition work, not necessarily anything he developed. The budget of this game was pretty tiny and hiss crowdfunding campaign wasn't a rousing event many people cared about. I'd argue the reason the game got so big was because of how he marketed to those first few diehard fans and ingrained the story so well with so many meta elements.
We don't see many games today that are a mystery when you first play them. That's what made Undertale so unique and why people gravitated towards it. Word of mouth got people's attention because nothing about what people heard about it early on made it sound like any other sort of game out there. Homestuck worked sort of similarly, and now we're at the point where people are being scared off because the game has gotten a bit too popular with a rabid fanbase that does nothing but make contextless injokes.
Kind of wish that didn't happen to Homestuck because I started reading it and it is basically a series of shitposts with an overarching plot. It's amazing.
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