Discover Top Posts Tagged with #save analysis

Mew Mew Parallels In Undertale

It’s been forever and a day before I did a pure meta post, but Toby’s latest tweet planted a thought I wanted to articulate.

Recently, Toby shared with us a picture, an image visible for barely a second in the special edition trailer. It appears to be a blurred ad for Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2, which brought back an old idea I had, about how Mew Mew and Undertale seem to almost mirror each others’ stories.

And since Mew Mew Kissy Cutie is a rough sketch of Undertale’s journey from several angles, this take on Mew Mew 2 interested me. Now, before we go into depth on that, the question I need to answer is: why does Mew Mew Kissy Cutie match up with Undertale? Well, I have an answer, but I wanted to go full hog on screenshots this time, so I think I’m going to put the rest of this argument under a cut.

#undertale #meta #save analysis

You're one of the only theorist I've seen who treats the genocide route as part of the game's full arc and story, specifically the last chapter of that story, instead of as an alternate "what if" or a forbidden thing that exists *not* to be played. At the same time, you seem to treat the Pacifist route's themes of hope and forgiveness as being more relevant than genocide's themes of some actions being genuinely unforgivable and irredeemable. How do you resolve that dissonance?

That’s definitively a contradiction! In the end, it boils down to a couple things.

From a purely analytical perspective, I don’t consider what Frisk and Chara can do to be any worse, necessarily, than what Asriel tries with all of his heart and power to do. The only difference between the Worst route and Pacifist/Neutral routes, is that there’s someone standing in Asriel’s way that can stop them.

The only difference is that someone was there at the absolute to keep Asriel from leaping over the edge. So I have a hard time consodering Chara/Frisk/Us as inherently less forgivable than Asriel, when it feels like in the Worst run, we’re just playing through Asriel’s side of the story.

The second reason is that I consider the Undertale universe as explicitly a work in progress, rather than complete. The promised ‘Shrouded in Darkness’ game looms on the horizon, and the dog in the dog dev room still claims to have patches to make, even if they will 'take a while.’

Now, I’m way more mellow about it than I once was. It’s hard to keep my blood up aboit a game for actual years, and I think I would just burn out if I tried. But low key, I think there’s more going on, more coming, even if it’s not a full blown new ending.

So while I take the Worst run as canon, I don’t quite accept it as the be-all-end-all final message we’re to take away from it. Even if this particular loop is closed, there’s more this world has to show us.

#save asks #save analysis

So, I think sans gets waaaay more credit than he deserves in the fandom, and that people who see him as a sort of hero figure drastically misunderstand him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as sore about it as anybody. But I think it’s a little weird to come down on him too hard for it, because, for the most part, he’s not trying to be a hero.

Like, put aside his desperation and his depression and the way he waits until the last minute of the worst run to confront you with violence. I hear the ‘he never does anything in any other run’ issue and raise a different take: he absolutely does something, in every single run, good or bad. Those just don’t involve stopping you with force.

sans doesn’t drop his comedy routine for much, so, I’m gonna be honest with you, when I hear him talking about how if he hadn’t made that promise, you’d be ‘dead where you stand?’ I take it as a sign that sans had a favorite way of stopping potential anomalies. And that was killing them immediately, whenever he caught a whim of any weird time shit.

So, he makes that deal, and he doesn’t fight you. Doesn’t kill you. Just watches you waltz through. And if you don’t kill PAPYRUS, he’ll joke with you, mess with you, have fun little jokes and escapades with you. ’Good friends, bad jokes.’ And then he comes at you in the judgment, every time, looking over what you did. Calling you out with this isn’t the first time you’ve done a neutral and counting your kills, laying it thick, telling you to do better, only dropping the veil when you kill PAPYRUS out of what I assume to be pure brotherly rage.

He ain’t a hero. And in any case, it’s not what he’s trying to be, most of the time. sans’ knowledge of the timeline is incomplete, but he appears to know that resets are possible. In fact, in many neutral judgments, sans will allude to how you must have heard this many times before, or how you should try not killing anyone ‘next time.’

See, sans’ first instinct on seeing the human go all murdery doesn’t seem to be to stop them now. Naaah, he seems more concerned with setting things up so that he can try to advise them, guide them. He takes it as a matter of course that this is but one iteration of the world, and that his end goal isn’t to stop the human in this iteration, but try to inspire mercy in the the next one.

He’s never trying to be the hero of the story. He’s trying to be Frisk’s Iroh. Knowing his tactics, in a messed up way it make sense that he waits until the last minute.

Waits for the human to change. Waits for the timeline to veer into a course where there isn’t a reset, where there’s still room for the human to reconsider next time. It’s the foundation of his strategy; looking at this shitty timeline and thinking ‘well, it’s gonna get reset anyway, might as well try to get them to like me and the other monsters so the next one might be better, even if I don’t remember it.’

It’s only at the end that sans steps in. Not because everyone is dead but because if the human keeps going, there will be no further iterations and plan A is now a wash.

In spite of looking at time linearly, he thinks on the same plane as the human does. Viewing the world in terms of timelines; in terms if ‘this time’ and ‘next time.’ In a manner of speaking, it’s a very cold way to view the world. But you could also argue that it’s one of the most effective ways, considering how many players just refuse to do the worst run and never meet sans in his serious mode.

And it’s like . . . Yes, sans is a shitty hero. But he’s not trying to be a hero at all most of the time. So let’s not get so wrapped up in the sans obsession that we start to believe that that was at all his goal. For that reason, I think it’s real interesting how we consider sans attempting to push us onto the right path or befriend us in bad routes ‘doing nothing.’ And I also don’t that that’s entirely fair.

#undertale #sans #save analysis

Do you know what gets me about UNDERTALE after all this time?

I’m one of those people who played it over and over again. Hunting out every little bit of dialogue I could find. Every detail. Turned over every rock. And then, I did the Worst.

I don’t remember what my first run was like. It’s like . . . A memory of a memory. A weird, wistful feeling, which may be defined more by what I know must have happened than anything that actually happened.

Did I find Temmie village? What dialogue options did I pick? Did I get the quiche? It’s like grabbing at shapes in the mist.

I love how Undertale takes that feeling, that familiarity that makes you forget a time when you ever did not know and builds it into the game. You can play Undertale today, and everything will be the same, but the game expects you to play again.

It does. It thinks you’ll come back. And that fuzziness, that familiarity . . . It knows that will happen to you. It’s why the Worst run exists. And because it exists, while everything is the same, it will never be the same. Because you’ve changed, and you will never be the same.

#undertale #save analysis

Undertale’s Creepy Smiles

There are a few reoccuring images in Undertale that you simply cannot get away from. Flowers. ‘Hearts.’ Especially common is the ‘creepy smile.’

It’s not a good thing. Quickly, the player associates the smile, ‘= )’, with death, terror and pain. Our introduction to the game is Flowey, who himself constantly bears a =) face as his resting expression, and it serves as an essential part of his image when he seizes the six souls and tries to torture Frisk as Omega Flowey

In the time before the final pacifist encounter, we go on a trek through the true lab. Each amalgamate we meet there is a horrifying, unsettling, invincible frankenstein of different monsters, spun together into grotesque shapes. And before we fight them, their bodies take the shape of a ‘=).’

(You may be thinking right now that the amalgamates don’t seem to be actually cruel or evil even if they are terrifying. I’ll get to that later.)

When we begin the worst run, the way combat begins changes. You see, normally, when we start, a small dialogue box appears over Frisk’s head, containing an exclamation mark. However, in the worst run, this is replaced by . . You guessed it . . . Our creepy smile.

Whatever your thoughts on Chara’s true nature, the expression that they show us at the end of the Worst run is a mimicry of that face. There’s some argument to be made about whether that’s their REAL face or simply an expression they now bear after being corrupted. But regardless, here we are, the same face, donned by a child who has decided that the world’s purpose is to die . . . and that it is their purpose to destroy it.

Some might even argue that the ‘mysteryman’ you have a 10% chance of finding at ‘fun’ 66 has a very similar expression . . .

From what we’ve seen so far, the creepy smile appears to be a deeply unsettling, threatening expression. For Flowey, Chara and Frisk, we see it lined up with deliberate, malicious intent to harm others. That doesn’t seem to line up with the amalgamates, though, unless you accept that Alphys was VERY wrong about why they attacked you.

The only apparently benign and non-creepy version of this smile is found in Snowdin, marking the expression of one of the monsters who are standing in the snow. In the files, their sprite is called, I believe, ‘red demon.’

They talk at length about their smile, and why they DO smile. They smile because they’re miserable and everything is doomed. But they can’t do anything about it, so why be glum?

If we look at the smile through the lens of the red demon, it’s a display of terrible hopelessness, of ultimate surrender to an uncaring world. It’s a mask, designed to hide the true self, who is always in pain, who would rather smile than allow themselves to cry, because they’ve given up on the healing power of sorrow.

This . . . kind of fits the sort of being that Asriel became, who sought love, but ultimately could not find it. And that, in a desperate attempt to feel anything, turned himself into the sort of being that we meet at the beginning of the game. And while we know little of the amalgamates I can only imagine their existence, locked in a basement from their loved ones as they entangled with the bodies and spirits of other monsters.

It could not have been pleasant.

Some would argue that Chara and Frisk’s use of the smile contradicts this take. I myself am not convinced that these children are not distressed in other ways that are not immediately obvious while the Worst run is in progress.

Perhaps the smile if a function of an excess of determination that the person doesn’t know what to do with? This definition fits everyone pretty well. Except for the red demon, of course, but there exists such things as coincidences.

Some people also connect this face, this smile, to Chara’s creepy face. It’s not a bad link. We see Chara make it at the end of the run, and we keep hearing references to a creepy expression on Frisks’ face, from monster kid and eventually even Flowey, who calls it a ‘creepy face’ again.

And there’s Gaster, too . . . Or perhaps that’s just coincidence?

There’s no right answer yet, not from what I can see. Just a lot of maybes, a lot of mights. Could bes, could nots. I think, personally, that the creepy smile is just a hopeless face.

A scary face, sure! But I think it’s the expression of someone who’s given up hope of a happy ending. I think it’s the face of someone who loathes themselves so much that they’ll become anything just to escape the pain of their true feelings.

Maybe you disagree? I’d be interested to hear what you think.

#undertale #theories #long post #save analysis

Asriel/Chara SOULless Headcanon

There’s a lot of questions about the exact nature of how a SOULless being changes in Undertale. There are some important underlying questions that we have to ask ourselves about them, as people. Are they the same person that they were, before their death and resurrection? Does their consciousness remain intact? Are they still responsible for the choices they make, as a result of their SOULless nature?

Like, there is a lot of continuity between Flowey and Asriel and back again, as he turns from one to the other. We can’t accept that being SOULless makes one a terrible person by default. It doesn't work . . . Or else, why would Flowey try to appeal to Chara and ask them not to do it all again, when the game is restarted after a pacifist playthrough . . . ?

It implies that SOULless is not a transfiguration of the self, but a lack which, over extended periods of time, can distort the self. Perhaps there is more of Asriel in Flowey than we think; the heart of everything that Asriel does as Flowey is play.

Without empathy, he perceives the people of the Underground as his toys, and the fallen Frisk as his playmate. What would he have looked like, had he had a soul? Would he be the innocent muffin that we see depicted in th fandom, or would we see a harmless trickster kid, moving along from one game, one prank to the next? Without empathy to give him guardrails, the lives and pains of others are rendered meaningless.

On the other hand you have Chara. If you accept that they partake, at least passively, in all runs, then you need to also need to accept that being SOULless doesn’t necessarily make them evil. But in the Worst run, through the narration we see in a Chara that becomes more active, a profoundly literal mind, deeply focused on a singular purpose.

The Chara who we speak with at the end of the Worst run doesn’t use the same kind of language that Asriel does. They don’t refer to to the world as a ‘game’ or to having ‘fun.’ They’re very existential, and instead refer to a mission, and seem most happy with discovering a purpose for themselves.

I think that, too might be a corruption of the person Chara once was. Is it not impossible that in life they might have had this same practical outlook, devotion to a mission which was then guided by their compassion? A compassion which, once gone, rendered them rudderless until they found an alternative solution?

Just a few thoughts I wanted to throw out there.

#long post #save analysis #undertale #chara #asriel #the floof prince #weird hairless goat

what do you find most intriguing about each of the following characters: frisk, chara, gaster.

Funnily enough, the broad strokes answer to all three is - the mystery.

With Frisk - We have the only character out of three main kids whose story is left untold. We know the broad strokes of Chara and Asriel’s stories, even if some details are left is shadow (I’ll get to that) but with Frisk, we have nothing. Their individual agency and personhood has been masked from us, to make it easier for us to not realize they exist.

The revelation that Frisk has a name of their own is what convinced me that Frisk is more than a cipher. What convinced me that their silence is about a story left deliberately untold rather than an empty space for us to project our imagination. I’m convinced there’s a right answer to the question of who Frisk is, which is a magnet for my attention.

With Chara - I mean, Chara’s true nature has been a hot topic in the Undertale community for years, so I won’t get into that, cause you know what’s in that can of worms. Instead, I’ll ask, who was the first human to be able to time travel?

It wasn’t Frisk. Toriel talks about how other humans gave her the same sense of ‘meeting an old friend’ after all. So, when it comes to SAVING and LOADING, Frisk wasn’t special. The six kids who fell after Asriel and Chara’s death could as well.

Is there any reason why Chara shouldn’t be able to? I mean, until we know more about what causes SAVING and LOADING . . . No. So, what was Chara’s time in the Underground like? Did they go through many ‘runs’ before settling on this one? What exactly was the state of monsters when they fell? How did it change as Chara lived there, and how much of that change was Chara personally responsible for?

There are so many questions about the world that Chara is in a good position to answer. Even if the answer to everything I speculate here is ‘nothing’ or ‘no,’ we’d learn a lot.

With Gaster - It’s simple. We know next to nothing of Gaster, but we do know that Gaster is linked to the keywords ‘Shrouded In Darkness.’ Therefore, Gaster is linked to the next game, whatever that game’s gonna be. I’m interested in what comes next. So, therefore, I’m interested in Gaster.

#Anonymous #undertale #gaster #chara #frisk #save analysis #weird hairless goat #looking for *flirt

You know the problem with Undertale theories in the modern day?

We know everything.

I don’t mean that as in ‘we have solved every problem,’ or that ‘there are no mysteries unsolved,’ or that ‘every question has an answer that is definitive.’

There are reasons that theories rise and fall from prominence. Arguments get refuted. Little details that haven’t been looked over get a second pass and bright things into sharper contrast. Things get proven. Things get disproven.

But, part of the reason I’m less taken with theorycraft is that everything is redundant now. I mean it. Every question that someone asks has been asked before. Every little nuance of dialogue has been read into.

If two people have been in the theory community for long enough, you can just show them anything. Any piece of dialogue, and nuance of the hidden strings. And they’ll go ‘yup, I’ve seen that before, and I have built a framework for my opinion around it.’

There’s a certain point of absurdity, in which a thing can be proven definitively wrong. But aside from that, the issue is that it’s all about subjective perspectives. Someone says; ‘Chara’s laughter as the narrator here, it reflects their true nature as a cruel and unusual person.;

Another person says, ‘Chara’s laughter as the narrator here, it reflects their nervousness and terror.’

I know my perspective of this problem and so, I imagine, do you, but that’s not the point. The point is why I’ve leaned away from, when I DO talk about theory, making solid points.

You can’t ‘refute’ me, especially on the things I’ve spent years trying to understand. There’s literally nothing I haven’t incorporated into my understanding. There’s nothing you can tell me that’s new to me.

Same for the other side of the argument. They’ve been around as long. It’s conceited to think that they haven’t seen everything I’ve seen. That they don’t have the tools at my disposal.

At this point, with broadly debated issues, like whether Chara is ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ there’s nothing to talk about. Not because I’m ‘right,’ but because the other side is as sick of my arguments as I am sick of theirs. We’ve been around too long. Our understanding of the theory of Undertale has settled and become solid, like concrete.

Come to introduce something to refute me? I’ve had it built into my theories for years. And so has the other side. So no one will change.

Honestly, it makes it hard to talk about things. At this point, my presence as a theorist here isn’t even about making new theories. It’s to look back over the things I’ve already said and clarify what I think to someone who comes up and sends me an ask.

Everyone has their framework, and everyone thinks everyone else’s framework is built on false assumptions and misunderstandings. The only thing that can REALLY unsettle the theories we have? Is new information.

Only updates which may or may not even come, or the next game, coming in who knows how long, can progress the meta. We’re stuck. And the only thing we can say for sure, is that someone who claims they know the absolute truth all the time is full of nonsense.

#save analysis