The Player's Forgotten Agency | A Rejection of Self in Undertale
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.พ. 2020
- In video games the player as an entity in the story itself is rarely touched upon. The interactive medium have on the other hand proven to be the perfect playground for creators to express this curious relationship. Perhaps the most noteable is Undertale.
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#Undertale #Deltarune #Lore - เกม
It is a crime that this video has less than a thousand views. Seriously, this was amazing, and your work deserves more recognition. I agree with pretty much everything you said on Undertale, but I wanted to leave a comment explaining what I think might be a rare perspective to Deltarune, and why I think Deltarune is a worse experience than Undertale because its marketing directly undercut its message.
When Deltarune was first released, it was announced as a demo, specifically with the disclaimer that playing it would be a spoiler of the full game. Being a fan of Undertale and one not to take spoilers lightly, I stayed away. I never played Deltarune. It has been two years with nearly nonexistent information on the full game, so I have still not played it. I began to feel that it was I who was being played.
I do not believe Deltarune is a demo. I believe that the devs (Toby Fox and co.) lied when they claimed it to be. Suspecting this, while watching this video, you came to the part of discussing Deltarune. I could've avoided it like I have with all Deltarune spoilers, but I decided that enough was enough. I wanted to know if it truly was a demo or not, and your analysis was so amazingly thorough specifically on player interaction. Surely, continuing watching your video would give me the answers I crave, even if that means discarding any hope of genuinely playing the full experience.
I got the answer I was looking for. There is no full experience, and that is the point. Or rather, the demo is the full experience, while simultaneously being incomplete. Now, I could be wrong, but after watching your video, it seems clear to me that Deltarune is designed not just to be linear, where Undertale was not, but also truncated. You spoke of how the Genocide Route of Undertale begs you to turn off the game, and how Deltarune's message is dependent on knowledge of Undertale. I kept expecting you to say that Deltarune makes you do something bad, expecting the only right way to play Deltarune was to turn it off, like the Genocide Route.
I think I was right, but the game doesn't expect you to turn it off or something bad will happen. Instead, the game turns itself off, ends prematurely, without even letting you have that control yourself. In the finale scene you showed, where the character tears out your heart, the game doesn't end because that's where the demo just stops. The game ends because it goes on without you, the player. The player will never see how the game ends, nor the character's true motives, because the game has discarded the player, just like it said it would do in the select screen.
That is why the game is not a demo. It was deliberately made to halt abruptly. I suspect that, short before publishing the game, the devs realized the backlash they could receive from fans who felt they bought an unfinished game; they feared they would anger their audience with their message. But instead of saying "the game ends abruptly" or "is anticlimatic" or "is unfinished", they said "it's a demo". With this knowledge, literally everyone who played Deltarune went into it expecting an abrupt end of some sort, cushioning the blow.
However, that also ensured that the people most likely to be invested in Deltarune were those were NOT invested in Undertale, undercutting its own message. This is due to spoilers. I find spoilers to be very important, and your video makes what may be the best argument for the necessity of taking spoilers seriously. You explain how the first time a game with choices is played is inherently valuable in a way separate from any attempt to replay the game. You can always play it again, but there is only one first experience. This experienced can be diminished or even erased with spoilers.
Undertale shows this in play amazingly. It's genuinely sad to see so many people attempt to play Undertale's Pacifist Route on the first go. It's technically impossible, but misses that the game expects the player to approach it with an incorrect expectation of the game as portrayed by most monster-slaying RPGs in the market. I introduced a friend to Undertale, making sure they were blissfully ignorant of it, and they slayed half the monsters before realizing they didn't have to slay any at all. That's just not something you see anymore these days in 2020, where the Pacifist/Genocide Routes are well-known.
As such, anyone who valued such experiences in Undertale as much as I did would be reticent to play Deltarune when explicitly told not to for sake of spoilage. I was told to remain ignorant, and out of trust, I did. Yeah, I'm bitter about it, but I can't help but notice that the marketing inherently put players into a situation where they were to disobey a warning about spoilers. It's almost like they didn't even want you to play the game.
So, if you were among those who played anyway, good for you. Perhaps that added to the experience for you. But if you were conditioned by your experiences of Undertale and not aware that the next game's message would its antithesis, then you might be in my shoes, having missed the experience entirely. I can still go play Deltarune and learn the nuances and granular details, but that first time experience that Undertale prized has been robbed from me in regards to Deltarune's relation to the player's experience. Not because of your video; it's great. But because of the demo framing.
Deltarune is meant to be a single chapter, one without a sequel, because its sequel has left without us. I'm certain the devs are working on a sequel to Deltarune in much the same way that it was a sequel to Undertale. Which is to say, it'll reference the previous entry, have a vastly separate plot, but build on top of the theme of its dynamic player relationship. Perhaps that is a semantic difference from a demo, or a Chapter 1, but it is one the game chose to make, one that I believe undercuts its theme from what I've seen in this video.
I feel it would've been better handled as a stand-alone game that simply was marketed as a game you shouldn't play, to spur people to play it anyway, to more go for the player hostility for which they aimed. If you read this, thank you. Please don't mistake my criticism of the game for your video. Your video, again, was very well-made and thought-provoking. Sorry this was so long. I had a lot of complicated stuff in my mind I wanted to work out.
Thanks for your input, this is enough to cover a video in itself, haha, but we hear you! The entire framing of Deltarune and its relationship with Undertale is ripe for lots of takes and interpretations, we could probably go on for hours about it. We quite like the idea of people waiting for years, decades even, for a follow-up that never happens, without starting to recontextualize the game from the perspective of abandonment. Guess we'll just have to wait and see how things work out in the end.
Also, pinned your comment so more people can see it, because it was a really good read.
Aw thank you, that's so kind! Best of luck to you all and your future endeavors!
So you get off on messaging comments from a year ago and going "HA HA" like a Simpsons character? Cool. Cool. Very insightful. Much analysis.
I think this is a super interesting interpretation! Deltarune turned out to actually legit be a demo though, and it's just that the full game is coming out more slowly than expected. But this idea is such a cool meta concept that now I wish there was a game that really did do this!
Undertale (2015): We can fix all our problems without violence, guys.
Deltasone (2018): Sometimes, you got no choice but to fight.
I wonder what happened between those two times? Hmm.
WHOOOOO KNOOOOWS!
As someone who played Undertale for the first time January 2017, hmmm what could it beeeeee
Was it the US 2016 election? I'm dumb, I actually don't know.
"but no matter how evil your game avatar may be"
*GOOSE SHOWS UP*
We are Goose, and we just have to admit we are bad.
My mom's inexperienced gamer mind was blown when the whole family had to explain to her how The Stanley Parable's plot throughline goes differently if she the player had done different things. Those were fun times.
I always think about that line that Asriel says at the end of the pacifist route in Undertale. Something about "There are a lot of Floweys out there, and not everything can be solved by being nice." That really stuck out to me when playing through Deltarune, as it truly is a continuation of that idea. Deltarune even ends the Pacifist route with a literal anti-monarchist uprising, as if to give an example of a Flowey who cannot be defeated by being nice.
The connection to choice also strikes me as interesting in relation to the characters of Asriel and Susie. The Flowey/Asriel duality is an interesting exploration of choice, as Flowey, being incapable of empathy, decides to use SAVE to make all these branching choices. Asriel, at the end of the Pacifist, has no choice between being Flowey or not. Asriel's inability to choose his morality works excellently as a contrast to the player's totally unhindered ability to choose their morality.
Susie's entire arc is literally about teaching her that she has the ability to choose between good and evil. In some way, she contrasts the player in Deltarune in the opposite way that Asriel does in Undertale. The game is about how Susie can choose her morality, and how the player cannot. This time, both Kris and the Player are the ones bound by fate, and Susie is the one who can choose. It's a sort of deconstruction of a deconstruction. Undertale is about how players really do have the ability to choose their morality in games, even if executing on that choice implies not playing. Deltarune is experiencing that idea from the perspective of someone who actually can't choose, and what it's like to deal with someone who can choose and chooses evil. In a weird way, it's like experiencing Undertale on a violent route, but as an NPC and not the player.
This is a very good take and we like it!
"It's like experiencing Undertale on a violent route, but as an NPC and not the player." Wow! That's such a brilliant way of explaining Deltarune!
As someone who experienced Undertale through lets plays, this is a fantastic essay on how the act of playing completely changes the context of the narrative. It's one of the reasons I bought the game for a friend for Christmas and told him to not look up anything, I wanted him to have a true experience by himself unlike myself. Great work girls 😁
Glad you liked it, as we enjoyed making it! Hope your friend also had a great experience with the game, for some it doesn't click after all for different reasons :)
"Spicy" is "pain" flavored.
But that might be a spicy take
You might be correct. If that is the case then we love the flavor of pain.
Wow, you are a channel that deserves 1000 times the subs and recognition you have. Excellent work, as always
Thank you, glad you enjoy what we are doing! We are hopefully going places anyway, haha. At least we are trying our best and things are moving forward both on here and Patreon. With a little luck maybe more people will find something here too!
The big difficulty here, I've found, academically, is that the very basis of interpretive discourse and art theory, or talking/thinking about what a thing means, has mostly always presumed (or been institutionalized as presuming, at least) that the art object is a static message, to which we the audience bring our mushy, changeable brains and choices. People already rarely talk about stuff like film, music, or books as interactive art installations, wherein for example a projector, screen, and audience interact differently each time. Better to just assume every music performance or book reading works the same way on a pragmatic level, or that all divergent experiences can be accounted for each time.
So we've still barely the popular vocabulary to even consider each game as its own distinct structure of meaningful agency, affordances, constraints, and uncertainties. Mostly what's happened in pop discourse is the same as what happened to the interactivity of dance, architecture, or tool/tech-design; we dismiss the interactivity in overly pragmatic or overly floaty terms and then just go on to talk about the ornamentation or the dressing strung up among the interactive bits.
I’m glad my brother showed me this game without telling me anything, i usually just watch games for narratives so having him make me make the decisions without me knowing a ton about it, it was a really unique experience for sure.
Deltarune is Susie's story so far. I hope we get an update soon.
We can't wait to see more of it, and we are certain that whatever Toby has in store for us next is going to surprise us as always. Gonna be a wild ride, hopefully sooner than later!
I now understand why everyone was raving about Undertale when it came out. Very interesting!
It is quite something, that is for sure. Also it is very funny.
if i wasn't a bit harder to make cry i fully believe this video would have made me cry. it filled me with such nostalgia over the first time i played undertale, over how it felt so deep and dear to me, over how its symbolism and themes felt so endless to explore and learn on, and its secrets so new. i discovered your channel very recently and i am hooked. thank you for this video.
And thank you for sharing and joining us on this wonderful youtube adventure!
What a fantastic analysis!! I had never seen such a wonderful exploration of Deltarune before, it makes me appreciate the game even more!
Well I guess now I finally kow what actually happens after killing everybody. Sadly I didn't go into Undertale blind. I knew not killing people was an option, so I knew to immediately stick with that. Maybe this is why Deltarune just confused the hell out of me when I played it. It didn't seem to me like it was significantly more restrictive in player agency to me, because I had denied myself any meaningful choice in Undertale to begin with.
Thanks a lot for this very thorough exploration of these topics. Gives me a lot to think about!
Also, loved the narration and the jokes and the editing. All very cool stuff!!!
Glad to hear you got something out of it! To be clear we still think there is value in experiencing Undertale in other ways, but blind is probably ideal. But it is interesting getting your perspective on Deltarune then too, very interesting indeed.
And thanks! We worked really hard on this one, haha.
@@Transparencyboo It shows!
But yeah, Undertale was still really great. Love it to death. I could honestly go a for a replay sometime...
Absolutely essential viewing. I'm forlorn that not more people have seen this analysis.
This stuff used to be common knowledge, but the literalists (the lore absolutists) have dogmatically rejected any meta-analysis
Have yall ever heard of or played a DS game called "Contact"? it also plays with these themes in a neat way, where a scientist has you (the player) control Terry (the protag) without his knowledge. He even tries to actively hide this fact from Terry.
I won't give away too much, but yes that fact does get brought up at a few key moments at the end :)
OH MY GOD, Contact! I have not thought about that game for like forever, and usually I am the only one who even remembers that was a thing at all. Need to play it again, it is certainly not fresh in my memory at least. Thanks for mentioning it. Funny thing too, it is another one of those Earthbound inspired games.
I was going to make a comment about my distaste for the part where you emphasize the importance of convincing people of the core themes of Undertale until I saw someone generally voiced similar feelings and your subsequent response.
So rather than that, I'll just say that it's refreshing to find a video that actively challenges my beliefs without intentionally being inflammatory (which is moreso a diss against the content I consume than anything, but your videos are still standout in my eyes). I initially - and rather embarrassingly, to be honest - reacted to this section by just sort of saying "ew no" and stopped watching. But I couldn't stop thinking about the points you made and how you supported them, ultimately leading me to introspect on my reaction and my understanding of your call to action. I'm glad I did, because I really like your content and don't want to arbitrarily dismiss or run away when I feel my opinions challenged! Thanks for this video :)
There are a lot of things we would probably have done differently with this video today, our way of writing and presenting ourselves has evolved a bit since then after all. We're glad that our points could come across anyway though (even if with a bit of extra explanation of our thoughts behind it). Creating things is weird, especially as you get some distance from it, lets just say that, haha.
Having watched this video, I'm glad I didn't end up playing Deltarune. I did play through Undertale (only eventually, and mostly spoiler-free), and it ended up ringing hollow for me... probably mainly because I already didn't play video games that require killing. (Even in stuff like farming sims, I avoid fishing!) So for me, there already was basically no option. And now, knowing that playing Deltarune kinda means stealing a character's autonomy... y'know, I'd rather not do that if I can avoid it!
Anyhoo, I appreciate all these videos of yours being so thought-provoking, entertaining, and well-subtitled! Seriously, the captions have been consistently superb. Props to whoever does those.
I'm so happy that i played Undertale early on and blind. It's an experience I can't have again, which makes the game even better.
We are glad you did too!
Lovely video, lots of really good points! One of my favorite things about Undertale and Deltarune, is the separation it makes between Frisk, Chara, and Kris- and you the player. Kris especially, I find very interesting and would love to learn more about them.
Also, I don't know if you'd have enough to say to make a whole video on it- but man, I'd LOVE to see what your thoughts on Chapter 2 were in relation to this subject. Or any other subjects you'd like to talk about, actually.
We've been thinking about doing some short follow-up relating to chapter 2, but haven't really had the time yet.
i really love this video essay!!! it made me think about undertale in a way differently than i had before (although as someone who has only played true pacifist, i never really thought much about genocide route). like when you talked about how they game is trying to talk you out of the genocide route.. i had always thought of "you're going to have a bad time" as foreshadowing for the ridiculously hard sans fight. but now that i think about it, sans is literally warning the player that the genocide route is the least fun way and most tedious way to play the game.... you really will have a bad time lol
Thank you, glad you liked it! Always fun to hear someone get some new perspectives from our videos - that is like the most rewarding thing we could ever wish to read. Especially glad that this old one can still find some use out there, haha. This is just such a cool game, right?
Great video as usual, this exploration of agency in games has still a lot of potential and I wonder what kind of nuanced takes on it the future has. Maybe they will delve into the idea of the general agency we have over our lives as well, how agency can sometimes be wishful thinking. I guess that might be what deltarune will explore in the future.
A bit off-topic but uuuuhhh Kiki... I wanted to thank you for that beautiful piece you did for my cat? I'll put a framed print on his grave
We are super glad you liked the commission!
Once again I find that ideas on games criticism that have been floating vaguely in my head have actually already been written clearly and precisely by you! There is so much depth to critical analysis of video games, and the dimension of interactivity is the key to that complexity. I can't wait to keep developing my own voice as a critic, which undoubtedly will be heavily influenced by this channel :)
(Now I really need to get around to deltarune chapter 2 so I can see whether your reading is supported or complicated by it. very curious)
Unrelated but the song at 11:00 has been my alarm for the longest time, and made it so hard to focus on what was being said! Other than that, this is such an excellent video - I'm glad to have found your channel through That Jess.
These types of analyses are the ones we need more of on this platform. Great stuff!
There is a lot we think we could have done better today, but I think this one still holds up pretty well. I hope we can return to the topic someday, whenever Deltarune is finished I guess, haha.
@@Transparencyboo yeah lol it was interesting to watch this and put myself back into the shoes of someone who hadn't played chapter 2 yet. And in general even if it doesn't hold up to your current rigorous quality standards, it's still definitely a literary analysis that holds weight and views art as art and not as some objective set of facts that we can only hope to glean the meaning of through intense theorizing and speculation *cough* game theory *cough*
Also no offense to you for comparing you to that channel and I'm not implying anyone can't enjoy speculation about art, just that it's not a substitute for literary analysis and is, in many respects, actively antithetical to the goal of increasing media literacy among the general populace as well as unfortunately reinforcing a lot of rigid lenses of viewing art as "correct". Anyway, rant over, tl;dr: I like art in general and undertale/deltarune specifically and would love to see more stuff from y'all in general and about these wonderful games in particular
I waited to watch this video until I accepted I'm not going to get around to playing undertale. It's great to put a finger on what bothers me with so many game narratives. As always, another amazing video!
Thank you, friend! Glad you enjoyed it!
I played a really interesting game called Save The Date a while back - I don't wanna spoil it, but I think it has some interesting stuff to do with player agency and the choice to stop playing the game. It's available for free online, is pretty short, + I really recommend it!!
Great video, very insightful and thought provoking!
Oooh! We will for sure look it up! Thanks for the recommendation and the kind words, friend! 💕
Wonderful analysis!!
Quite an interesting video. Much more interesting than merely reading a lore wiki indeed :D
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it, friend! :)
this isn't at all connected to the point of the video, but i think it wonderful that asgore gets a flower shop. i feel like he's living his best life & i'm happy for him
He is just a flower dad.
I love your analysis!
Thank you, love you too!
Transparency aww 🥰
Great video! The only question I have with Chara/Player Character, isn't there some lore that says they were edgy and did stuff before the game started? I just ask, because does that change the reading that they are just the player's bad vibes in all contexts? Or does this add to the concept of knowing the player probably was chaotic in other games?
The genocide route in undertale sadly has two of the best songs in the game... Battle against a true hero and megalovania are my go to ”I need determination right now” music. I guess you could just listen to them from the soundtrack and still love them though.
Also I have 8 HOURS recorded footage of me and my sister trying to beat the Sans fight. But when we did and came to the end we both realized that it was a HUGE waste of time, and yet somehow it still felt satisfying. Now we had the bragging rights to say we beat Sans. We have now played the game AT LEAST 4 times together in many different routes. So we can say we have seen (probably) 99.99% of the dialogue in Undertale. 8 hours though.... I think what makes the genocide route so good in a way is how it turned the game into pure horror nightmare fuel, yet we couldnt stop playing! Scary stuff... I wonder if there is something psychological at play here.
But thats just a comment, a really really long comment lol
@@Zyfiels Taking 8 hours to kill one of your friends, something to think about ;)
@@Transparencyboo Yeah.........
The genocide version of Snowy is legit super cozy.
Fröken Keke Genocide n chill
jk lol
(LONG COMMENT WARNING)
I was really getting into this video at the start, but the direction it went in the middle is something I’d like to critique. Maybe this was me reading too much into things, but I got the feeling that your perspective on the UnderTale fandom’s obsession with lore and looking at the narrative on a non-meta level is that it takes away from the *actual, main* point about Player agency. And my instinctual reaction is… why can’t we have both? Why can’t we dig into lore, while also acknowledging the role of the Player as an active entity in the game and the lessons the game wants to teach you in that context?
My main example here is your perspective on Chara. I think it’s very possible to argue both that they are a reflection of the player’s sins in the Genocide run, and that they are as much a unique character within the story as the monsters. I don’t want to write a whole essay in the comments, but to simplify:
Chara says that it was “with your guidance” that they “realized the purpose of [their] reincarnation”. If they were meant to represent the player’s mindset, and we agree that the Genocide run is something a player chooses to do going in, it seems weird to imply that the desire for power is something Chara “learned”.
On top of that, it’s possible for your actions to *confuse* Chara. Doing a Genocide run a second or further time leads them to literally say, “You and I are not the same, are we?” and “I cannot understand these feelings anymore.” To me, the only way to reconcile this is that Chara is also a victim of your actions, taught through your choices that there was nothing worth saving in this world after all. They reflect your evils in how you’ve corrupted them, but it is also clear that they became this way, because of you.
I also feel like there is enough subtext to suggest Frisk is more than just a “blank slate” “player avatar”, but it is more subtle than it is with Chara and Kris for sure, and they definitely don’t seem to show signs of personally feeling compromised by the player the way Kris does. If you’re interested in seeing more of my thoughts on that, I made a video about it a few months back. It’s technically just one part of a video building to a point irrelevant to this discussion, but it’s possible to ignore that and just look at the analysis of Frisk and Chara as their own characters, from 1:06 to 6:55 for Frisk and 7:20 to 10:44 for Chara: th-cam.com/video/mddZojvJH68/w-d-xo.html (I apologize in advance for the awful mic quality; there's a link to the script doc in the description if you'd rather just read my full thoughts, starting right at the top of page 11.)
I did really love your analysis of the Stanley Parable at the start and the ending of DeltaRune at the end. But I think that, where Stanley Parable clearly has no consistent lore and is all about meta discussions, there really IS lore to dissect and build on in UnderTale. And I think it’s possible to do that without denying the angle that yes, this is a game about Player agency. Still, even despite this gripe of mine, I immensely enjoyed this video like all the others you guys have made!
EDIT: I don't mean to imply that you NEED to get into the lore to really GET UnderTale. I just don't like the implication that everyone who enjoys digging into the lore is forgetting the point. Really, the insinuation that UnderTale has 1 main message kinda rubs me the wrong way when it has stuff to say on so many levels.
This is fair, and of course both can co-exist for sure. We found though that it seems like a lot of players have lost sight of their own actions in games and then attributing them to other characters rather than themselves. We were trying to get at how sometimes the diagetic world presented in games can obscure things if you go too deep into lore and things like that. In a game like Undertale you are inevitably missing a lot of things if you don't see yourself as part of the story so to speak. But of course people are free to enjoy and explore these aspects of Undertale, at some point we just got a few too many "why is Chara so evil" I suppose, haha. But by all means, we do not have the one true interpretation or reading of course.
Transparency Thank you for the response! I totally agree that players pushing their guilt onto Chara and focusing on why *they’re* so evil is missing the point, I think it was just seeing videos that argued Chara isn’t that amongst the screen caps gave me the wrong impression. I think if I had gone back and rewatched the video before commenting I would have realized what you meant. I tend to get pretty passionate about this game 😅 To reiterate, great work as always!
@@AgentRaven Gosh darn, don't we all get passionate about this game about dating skeletons, haha. It is all good. Come to think of it Kiki did switch out some of the background slides of youtube videos at one point of the video, because like you said, someone might interpret it as something else. Turns out she was right, haha. But yeah, anyway, nice having a dialouge about it. Will keep in mind for the future :)
But is anime real?
Yes!
@@Transparencyboo If I'm gonna be serious though, and this is probably just because I've been playing it so much recently, but the parts about the genodice run and Shadow of the Colossus got me thinking about Pathologic. Kinda like how Wander is actively causing the return of the elder god, you playing Pathologic is basically the cause of the whole epidemic. They're kinda facinating examples of games that maybe shouldn't be played. Or maybe turning the game of at the point where it doesn't feel comfortable or right to play anymore is actually a part of the intended game experience.
Either way, what I'm saying is you should totally play Pathologic.
Once Pahthologic 2 is out for PS4 we will probably play it!
It's weird to look backward and realize; undertale being the best game ever made
Am I missing something or did you genuinely mean to say that no game before Undertale has examined the morality of continuing to play the game? And that it wasn't a topic of discussion before the game came out in 2015?
Because I'm no expert but uh, random example...Spec Ops: The Line? It even tells you to stop in game, right to the camera, and on loading screens.
No, we did not mean to say that no game had done it. There were games before it for sure, and Spec Ops was one of them. However with Undertale reaching the popularity it did the discussion was pushed forward to a greater extent.
algorithm and love
Video games man. They complicated
Deltarune 2 has come out. It seems to be pretty close to what y'all have said. Although you have a lot more choice in this chapter, Kris's will/choice was immensely curtailed, and Kris knows it. At the end of the spamton neo fight, he mentions that they could "cut their own strings," and kris is angry from that, because they know of their own. I know you probably know this but I feel like y'all actually were spot on everywhere else!
Haha, we think it is quite fun to be vindicated like that. Really felt like we hit the nail on the head about what the games are fundamentally about. We have actually been thinking about making a new video now that we have played chapter 2, just to re-state some points and flesh out some of the arguments. Also this video is a bit old at this point, so it could use some touch ups!
Kris’ set idea of their life was getting up in the middle of the night to eat an entire pie, and I respect them for that
It's funny having made this video before more Deltarune stuff came out.
18:09 yo what
What do you mean?
@@Transparencyboo you were about to stab toriel and it cut off
pretty funny
@@AhmedAhmed-fc8gh 😌 she got away this time!
So are you saying i won undertale by not playing it all the way through
If you felt content by that, sure.
(I know it's an old video but I wanted to give my two cents) This is a great analysis, but it does kinda feel like you're policing the way people interpret Undertale, like there's only one "correct" way of reading it.
While it's true that Undertale is first and foremost a commentary on the way we play games, you should also be able to read it from a purely narrative, in-universe point of view (case in point, Chara being an actual character and not JUST the player). Undertale encourages this, why else would gameplay mechanics (such as saving/loading) be contextualized within the story? In the video you kinda talk down to those that care about theories or lore in Undertale, like they're "missing the point", when both readings of the story can and SHOULD co-exist
It's been a while, for sure, lol. I'd say though that we're not really intending to say that there is only one correct way of reading a video game. That's not really what we believe, anyway. It's art after all. Although a lot of it comes from a belief that much of video game discourse and analysis is often about interpreting things a bit too literally and that a lot of the theorizing and lore deep dives makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. That's just our opinion though.
I'm glad to see this comment, as this was my exact reaction to the part about trying to convince others to see the proposed meaning. I was a bit put off, but to give the benefit of the doubt I think it was intended more as "we want people to place more value on this interpretation" and less as "we want people to place value on this interpretation *and none others*". I do think that someone can value the core moral questions posed by Undertale and still want to know what W. D. Gaster's canonical favorite flavor of ice-cream is, but I think Transparency takes issue with those that only value the latter.