furry_irl

Okay, I'm about to completely go off on Undertale in this random comment section and I don't really expect sympathy about this but I have to talk about it.

Undertale is a great game. I respect it as a work of art and I respect how popular it is, and I think the story is genuinely interesting underneath the three layers of meta knowledge that hides the actual story from the player.

But dear God does it have some trash game design in some places.

I didn't personally get too far in to Undertale because I managed to make a "bad" decision right off the bat without even knowing about it. I was at the beginning of the game where Toriel tries to stop you from leaving. I knew going in that this was a game that was going to judge you on your choices, and that you don't want to kill unnecessarily. So I really didn't want to fight her.

Tried to just leave, this does nothing, she just jumps you again when you talk to her again.

Tried to talk to her, over and over again. She just kept repeating her dialogue. Clearly this wasn't getting anywhere after like the 8th time I tried it.

Had no items to use with the Item command.

So, I knifed her. Seemed like that's clearly what she wanted, nothing else was doing anything, and she kept egging me to prove I could fight.

This was, apparently, the wrong move. The correct answer, in case you're wondering, was to continue to talk to her and have her repeat her dialogue 11 times in a row, and then she'll finally give up and let you pass without violence. You're expected to know this, or figure this out, with exactly zero player guidance. Even something so simple as having unique dialogue for each of those 11 times would have signposted the intended result. But no, you're just expected to bang your head against an option that is showing no signs of productivity whatsoever, until it eventually works.

Remember this is the very first combat in the game. I could forgive this later in the game once the player is more familiar with what they're actually able to accomplish in "combat". But this first encounter is designed specifically to prey on a new player's expectations coming from other RPGs and will make you "ruin" your entire first playthrough before you even have the opportunity to know that you're doing so.

Or maybe I'm just the idiot, because when I complained to my friends that I had to give Toriel a lil stabby to progress, they all looked at me like I had just curb stomped a puppy.

What? How is she mean?