Killing the Narrative: No Mercy Revisited | Undertale Analysis
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- čas přidán 10. 05. 2024
- The No Mercy Run in Undertale is a run where you kill the narrative, a deep exploration of meta and the ways we relate to video games, and a thoughtful deconstruction of RPGs at their most basic level. In this video, I'll analyze what makes this route so impactful from beginning to end both as a metanarrative experience and as a piece of Undertale as a complete package. If you like what I do, consider supporting me on Patreon: / dorked
My Undertale/Deltarune Analyses: • Undertale & Deltarune ...
My Undertale webcomic: invertedfate.com/chapters
Kingdom Hearts Analyses: • Kingdom Hearts Charact...
SatAM Sonic Analysis: • SatAM's Sonic Deserves...
Paper Mario Intro Analysis: • That Time Bowser Won (...
Undertale Alarm Clock: undertale.com/alarmclock/
Andrew Cunningham's Undertale Retrospective: • What was so good about...
RG01 and 02 flavor text clip 'cause the credit was missing: • Undertale - Royal Guar...
Undertoad: Mission Luigi - gamejolt.com/games/UT_Mission...
Inverted Fate: Soul-Splitting Fury - gamejolt.com/games/soulsplitt...
Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
1:05 - The Beginning
04:41 - So Cold
10:36 - True Hero
15:04 - A Hellish Slog
19:19 - You are Flowey
23:34 - Final Judgment
31:43 - A Hollow Victory
37:53 - Conclusion
#undertale #genociderun #nomercy #nomercyrun #undertaleanalysis #videoessay - Hry
It's finally here! This is the longest video I've made in a while, so I hope you enjoyed! If you like what I do, consider supporting me on Patreon: patreon.com/dorked. I have an Undertale webcomic at invertedfate.com/chapters, and I also recently put out a video on the True Lab Entries: czcams.com/video/LLkO3RIBaL4/video.html as well as Gerson: czcams.com/video/XPqxqRxFrfU/video.html For more UT/DR analyses, here is a playlist: czcams.com/play/PLVzdARAAbX5EbeSqLALxWuHAwby8CYzEC.html I have some non-UTDR analyses, too, like my recent SatAM Sonic analysis: czcams.com/video/HmZ2-yA1aEA/video.html and my breakdown of Paper Mario 64's intro: czcams.com/video/79py_BE502o/video.html
Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction
1:05 - The Beginning
04:41 - So Cold
10:36 - True Hero
15:04 - A Hellish Slog
19:19 - You are Flowey
23:34 - Final Judgment
31:43 - A Hollow Victory
37:53 - Conclusion
Who here has never done the No Mercy Route? Its only been Neutral or True Pacifist for me!
About people knowing that there's a Sans battle in the game, I had to lie to a streamer by telling him that it must've been a fangame, but when he got to Sans in the Genocide Route... they were happy. We didn't talk about that lie tho.
Ooh, that's a really sneaky way of trying to preserve the surprise. c: Nice of you to try and keep the spirit of the twist.
Wow, this is the most clever way to preserve a spoiler.
@@DoughB101You think it was THAT clever? I thought it had its flaws if you stop and think about it, but I managed to avoid making the streamer think about it.
@@TaskMaster369 Well, yes even if it was flawed.
@@TaskMaster369I mean.. you’re technically right about the fangame thing
This route has become so popular that people forget that it was made to be a secret route.
The thing you have to do to trigger the route is so obscure. The whole route is basically "Undertale creepasta". Empty locations, creepy music, the script entirely forgotten and an ending that "destroys" the game.
The route is commonly complained about with things such as, "This route is too grindy, the game is punishing me with boredom for playing it!" when that's the whole point.
It's a secret, obscure and grindy route that has become so popular that people judge it as a normal route.
Yeah, it's definitely designed as a secret that just became insanely popular and widespread, so it's no longer a secret or surprise. I think there was also the demo as a factor, as the route did exist there, and that demo dropped in 2013, but all the same, I actually think it's cool how both Undertale and Deltarune have secret routes with very obscure means of activating them.
DR's snowgrave route hits the same themes even more explicitly, though. Interesting to see how that unfolds.
Maybe the valentine's newsletter is a prelude to some even more fucked up ARG elements? Locked online until it's completed is one of the only ways to properly hold secrets nowadays.
@@KhanShotFirst
And is actually fun in a gameplay sense, at least for me.
@@aldiascholarofthefirstsin1051 ?
@@aldiascholarofthefirstsin1051 Undertale Genocide is supposed to be boring yo discourage you from continuing the route
Imagine being so soulless that a DEMON tells you to touch grass
Thats when you know you have hit a new low.
They don't have a true completionist's spirit. Chara just wants to get Any%
Chara aint the one doing the genocide route, the player is bro 💀@AlphaPizzadog
@@gnlpsmff0808stfu
i'm tired of it.
we all get it.
bla bla bla, player's doing it.
DID YOU EVEN READ WHAT YOU WERE TRYING TO REPLY TO??
plus. who here said THEY did it
like, at all?
tell me. tell me please.
I am curious.
More curious than a genocider.
@@mishagaming1075 do you know what any% is?
its a category of speedrunning bro
the player is controlling frisk, not chara.
and since they brought up chara i assume they meant the genocide route, and that chara was trying to speedrun it
it aint that deep bro no need to go all caps
💀
I want to mention my favorite piece of dialogue that is imo not talked about enough:
""Mom! Dad! Somebody help me!" I called out.
But nobody came."
Now, the reason I like it is not only because it makes Flowey even more tragic, but it also gives more meaning to the PTS fight:
"* Call for help.
* I dare you.
* Cry into the darkness!
"Mommy! Daddy!"
"Somebody help!"
* See what good it does you!"
And then, when the text "(But nobody came)" appears, his face goes from '_' to '‿' (I do not know how to show it better lmao). No mercy succeeds in making Flowey a really great character. It further makes PTS Flowey seem less like "Flowey's mad with power" and more like "Flowey makes sure you understand how you played the game "wrong"".
Also, I really like that the way the game says "You are like Flowey" is not by just insulting you, but by letting you know Flowey's journey. The game doesn't insult you, it states a fact. It'd be one thing to get compared to a killer, but getting compared to someone who just wants more content is the better compression 90% of the time
YEAH, it absolutely has an interesting callback because of the dialogue he taunts you with in the Photoshop Flowey fight. I think if I ever do a proper Flowey analysis, I will absolutely have to highlight that because it's really cool.
@@DorkedOmg I would love to see your Flowey analysis!
Sorry hold on do you abbreviate photoshop as PTS
It completly escaped my mind that it's PS, not PTS lol @@Dankboi68
i always felt like floweytale is more like game saying "Flowey is like you", like, that he got to that point by using his save/load powers like any other completionist player (i wonder if he tried no hit running) more than the other way around
Now you’ve got me thinking. Post soulless pacifist, Monsters on the surface, Frisk living peacefully. But they get…nightmares. The world has remembered something. The world knows, even if Frisk pretends that they don’t, the world knows what they did. Even if it’s been long forgotten by everyone else. An ache, sharp and embedded in their chest, something no one else can see.
Imagine living like that. Simple shadows on the sidewalk become horrors of your own making. Sometimes you look at others and see bruises that aren’t there - bruises where you slashed and maimed them timelines ago - but nobody knows what you’re talking about when you point them out. When you look into your reflection, your eyes gleam red.
There is no real ‘danger.’ No one’s going to come out and force Frisk to kill everyone. But, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, with shaking hands, they realize that they could do it anyway.
Ooh, that's a really fascinating take on soulless Paci. :O Much more interesting to me, too, because it really plays into the guilt.
Not until Toby Releases UNDERTALE 2 (JK)
Ooo I really like this headcanon/interpretation!
For some reason that reminds me of SCP, like in this ending Frisk literally "has" a SOUL which now belongs to another entity. And that entity doesn't forget what you did to the monsters, including the royal family.
Definitely Frisk won't be the same after that. Some people in-universe might say that while the previous 6 humans died, Frisk survived but "came back wrong", as if somehow altered by going into the underground or freeing the monsters. Frisk might even go insane after living through that for several years.
...is there already an AU about Frisk going insane after soulless pacifist?
Or rather an alternate timeline or possible "sequel" instead of AU
No mercy route is always a particular case and funny to me because of my partner who genuinely stumbled into it on complete accident as their first run. They didn’t see any trailers or any images of undertale before then, just a game that one of their friends put on their PC during school.
They treated it like every other rpg, grinding like usual in every area. They thought all the creepy & character stuff affected by this run was basically a part of the normal playthrough. It was only till after they beat Mettaton and scrolling on YT that they caught the whole “genocide run” title with the Sans boss fight. By then they realized what kind of game UT was, but at that point my partner still basically finished the run itself since they already got so far in.
So every time I hear the “no one can get into route by accident”, yes, you genuinely can if you were already approaching this game with the usual grind mentality for other games.
YEAH! I made sure to mention that briefly because it's *unlikely* to stumble into it on accident, but certainly not impossible, especially if you're focused on the grind because of typical RPG conventions. Stories like this are so fascinating, tbh.
Heard another one who aborted it at papyrus after realizing that hey he isn't attacking me, maybe i could spare him?
YEAH, papyrus is basically a run killer for some cuz you really cannot come up with an excuse of what you’re doing when this guy is seriously just standing there, not harming you at all
@@DorkedHonestly I've always had the thought that it'd be funny if the dialogue from Chara actually changed a bit if you legit stumbled onto No Mercy by accident. Like they're so baffled by it they just go silent, or something like that
That's exactly how I played, too. I've played all of the Dragon Quest games and a few other RPGs, so I just grinded on the random encounters. I thought it was really bizarre when "But nobody came" started appearing. When Flowey taunted me, it clicked, and I started over.
I saw someone else say this in another place, but I would like to point out how much cruel irony is in Sans' fight.
Sans wanted to make the player stop playing the game, with his annoying mechanics and tough patterns. He's cheating the system just to annoy you into going away.
But by going all out, Sans' battle drew a ton of attention to itself, and arguably became the most popular part of the game. And the Undertale Fandom became very centered around Sans, with most AU's basically being centered around him and the battle against him.
Basically Sans had the complete opposite of what he wanted to do happen. He wanted the player to go away, so he went all out to annoy them into leaving. But by going all out, he ended up drawing attention to himself, and by extension Undertale itself. This led to *more* people playing the game, and more people doing the No Mercy Run.
Now Sans is popular for more reasons than *just* his boss fight, his connections to Gaster and mysterious past, plus his comedic side are very much also reasons. However I wonder, what if Sans was a no-effort boss like Toriel and Papyrus, would he have the same popularity? Say he pulled out his "Special Attack" at the very start of the fight, and made it into a very boring waiting game. It would've still been memorable, but would it have the same impact? If Sans didn't have any insane boss battle, would Undertale even be as popular as it is today? Would there be as many No Mercy routes wouldn't have happened since people don't know about the game? How many AU's simply wouldn't exist since the fight was different?
This obviously wasn't the intended idea of the Sans fight from Toby Fox, as he couldn't have known the Sans battle would explode in popularity. But the irony of how the one time Sans genuinely tried, ended up having the opposite effect of what he hoped... its kinda funny.
TL;DR: Sans fought the player because he wanted them to quit the game. Sans' fight ended up drawing more players to Undertale, which led to more No Mercy runs. Epic fail.
Imagine how fucked up that actually is from Sans' POV, though? Like, learning your attempt to repel people from killing all the monsters actually backfired, and now people are killing everybody SOLELY bc they wanted to fight *you.*
Wow that is cruel irony, he might even crack his emotional facade if he realized the unintended effect when he went all out.
@@F1areonSans might actually just give up entirely once he realized that fact, and just doubles down the "Hollow victory" tactic the game throws at you.
Like there's gotta be a one Sans timeline that managed to beat its player but the year is 2024. He then reflects that him going all out is the reason more no mercy runs happens from his sudden popularity. Dude would be even more depressed once he views HOW MANY no mercy run timelines occur from his original tactic at 2015 to go all out and his one thing he didn't want to happened is becoming common more frequently.
Sans would regret his biggest mistake of going all out for his entire lifetime and timelines, and would _hate_ his popularity that it caused monsterkind so many deaths from different "humans" to just fight and burned monsterkind along their journey SOLELY for _him._
@@Blackandwhitecat-to5llThat's not even getting into the other horrible bit of how Papyrus being described as "Forgettable"... actually was pretty on the nose, meta-wise. Papyrus very commonly gets infantilized, dismissed, or even killed off just for the sake of Sans Angst (tm). At the biggest extreme there's AUs where the main character is JUST some variant of Sans and any siblings they have are, you guessed it, ALSO variants of Sans. Papyrus? Who's THAT?? /s
@@F1areon Is like Toby knew some players with the RPG mindset would view Papyrus forgettable and are constantly annoyed with the dialogue.
Which exactly happened to a user's friend in this comment section lol.
One of the most interesting aspects of the No Mercy route to me, which you sort of touched on, is how every stage of the route, every new area, feels like the game is testing your willingness to keep going through with it. I like to think of it as the game world itself desperately trying to defend its own existence, knowing that the route ends with Chara destroying it.
First, the game tries to hide that the route even exists. There's no real indication that it exists, aside from inference; and even then, I think a lot of fully blind players would assume that you would only need to kill everyone you encounter, the way a pacifist run requires sparing everyone you encounter, rather than actively hunting down every single encounter you can. This probably *would* be one of the game world's most effective methods of self-preservation, if not for the impossibility of keeping secrets in the internet age that Toby bemoaned in the game's files. These days, even people who have never played Undertale know about No Mercy.
Once the player has realized that No Mercy exists, that killing the game is something they can (and thus, "have to") do, the game world pleads for its life, in the form of Papyrus. It shows you glimpses of all the fun, wacky japes that the game normally gives you by default, and clearly shows how continuing down this path will lead to you losing access to all that fun. It shows how empty and eerie places like Snowdin Town become when you've stopped caring about the characters who make it what it is. Sans directly spells it out for you towards the end - if you keep going then you're going to have a bad time. And to cap it off, Papyrus gives you one last chance to demonstrate that you care even a little about the story and characters. Just in case the player somehow stumbled on No Mercy by accident, not realizing that you can win battles nonviolently, Papyrus spares you right away, leaving no excuse to kill him by accident. To continue, you must be fully committed to reaching the end of the route at the expense of the game's story and its fun. You must ignore the world's desperate pleas to stop killing it.
And if you do so, the world finally begins to fight back in self-defense, in the form of Undyne. If you can't be *talked* into stopping, maybe you can be *forced* to. So the world empowers its strongest, most heroic champion to throw a skill ceiling at you. No matter how much you want to know what happens, you simply can't unless you're good enough at the game. Undyne, before she transforms, recognizes that the threat the player poses goes beyond the story of humans and monsters; it's a threat to the very foundations of the paradigm in which that story matters. Battle Against a True Hero is, of course, incredible, and its title reveals a lot about the direction the player has dragged the story in. But even more interesting to me is the name of the track before it - "But the Earth Refused to Die." This is why I like to frame the escalation of No Mercy the way I do - because, if that track name is anything to go by, the world itself is refusing to simply let you kill it just to see what happens.
If you overcome the skill ceiling imposed on you by Undyne, the world pivots tactics again, and tries to deter you through sheer boredom. You actually drew my attention to an aspect of No Mercy Hotland that I hadn't considered - that it's actually easier to just go straight through without fighting all 40 enemies. This would filter out anyone who had been doing No Mercy solely to progress through the game in the most mechanically efficient way (if Undyne didn't already, as it's easier to just spare MK and do the normal Undyne fight). And similarly, Mettaton Neo is there to filter out anyone who sees brutal fights like Undying as a selling point. In order to finish No Mercy, you have to stop caring about literally everything except reaching the end, knowing that you've already exhausted all the fun and interesting parts of the game. All that's left is boring mechanical completion. The world has realized that you're probably skilled enough to reach the end if you really want to, so it tries to make you stop wanting to, not through empathy like in Snowdin, but through tedium. It does everything in its power to telegraph that there is no satisfying ending waiting for you.
Finally, New Home represents the apex of both the emotional and mechanical strategies the game has been trying to throw at you thus far, empowering them by making them meta and thus more directly relevant to the player. It first uses Flowey to confront you with the reality of your motivations, showing you a mirror of what you've become and putting your actions in terms that would matter to you in the real world. Someone who's come this far doesn't think Papyrus's life has intrinsic value, or they wouldn't have killed him, but maybe they still at least think their own enjoyment of the game has intrinsic value. It's trying to show you how hollow the kind of completionism you're attempting is, how continuing has no benefit whatsoever to anyone, not even you. And then, in one final last-ditch attempt at self-defense, the game throws Sans at you, a boss who is not just hard, but actively unfair, breaking all the normal rules of the combat system in order to make it as annoying as possible to win. Since it's clear at this point that you're skilled enough to get through any challenge with enough patience, Sans, like you said in the video, isn't trying to win; he's trying to get you to change your mind, to realize that your determination is working against you and leading you somewhere that you won't actually find satisfying. And what does he say just after you land the killing blow, just before the world uses Flowey to beg for its life one last time, just before Chara ends it all and you're left with nothing but a howling black void and the question of what you did any of that for? "don't say i didn't warn you."
Toby Fox created in Undertale a world of compelling characters, wonderful humor, and powerful emotions. And he knew that going in. A lot of the game's metanarrative, and especially the metanarrative aspects of No Mercy, fall flat unless you actually liked the characters that the route forces you to kill. When I say that No Mercy's challenges are the game world defending itself, perhaps a more accurate way to frame it is that it's Toby doing everything in his power to remind you that you care about the game, that it has value to you, that it's not worth destroying just because you wanted to 100% it.
I'm loving all the in-depth comments I'm seeing here! c: It's so cool to see everyone share their own thoughts and analysis. Happy to have generated the discussion.
Okay, This may be weird to say this, but I somehow see the five stages of grief in your analyses (Disclaimer: The original study by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross both has a lot of misinformation caused by cultural osmis and ever since it release it been strongelly criticized by new studies and discrated as a ecurate model for the greving process. Even Kübler-Ross herself regret some of the interpretation of her work, because she never intented to suggest that the stages were either in tha exact order and as preditable. In my own analyses of your interpretation I even am switcingh the order they are usually portrait as. I'm also not trying to suggest that the paralles are intentional to either you or Toby Fox. This is just something I noticed that I want to talk about. I'm not trying to do a Majora's Mask theory here)
*The Ruins is denial* : The game dosen't tell you that the route exist or is possible. It's very unlikelly to get it by accident since you have to insist in killing evey possible monster encounter and the game is program to make those take longer and longer to get with each one.
*Snowin is Bargain* : The game is constantly trying to remember you of the narrative, puzzles and all the funny and fun moments and things you can experience if you abort the route only for you to keep skipping and desingadge to it to the dismai of the characters. Communating to a final a plea by Papyrus in trying to do better.
*Waterfalls is Anger* : The game sundelly throw a curved ball as a spike in difficulty with Undyne the Undying and making you have to put all your skills to the test as a barrior to continue, however by the nature of this being a game you eventually can retry and retry until you can finally succeed.
*Hotland is Depression* : The game is trying to bore you by having the least amount of story or events and make you grind more enemies than any of the other areas so you just get to keep doing the same monotamous fights over and over again and the game does not even give you an unique harder fight this time, everything just goes by slowly and bland.
*New Home with Sans is than Acceptance* : As one final attempt to stop you from compleeting the route, the game throw everything it did back at you all at once. It keeps you in the dark how hard and unfair it is, Is annoying by being repetitive, long and hard, It try to appeal one last time to your feelings by trying to remember about a time when you were having fun or when you were friends, trying to sympathize with how you end up here, calling out exactly what type of mentality bring you to this point, argue that what you are doing will not bring anything good to anyone, even at the very end, as Sans's final attack, he tries to get you stuck in one place as to bore you in to giving up and going back. However as the game and Sans knows, despise all there efforts, it can't stop you. You hold more power than them ever could so they are fourced to just accept that if it is your will than it will happen. Warning you one last time for you to accept the consequences as well.
This is a great analysis. Part of the reason I love Another Medium is that instead of creeping you out, it's slowed down much less, so it's a lament for the fate of the world, since you have proven to be unstoppable by all means the game has, except boredom. Out of a sample size of 400 comments from No Mercy quitters, 200 plus minus 20 quit at papyrus. In comparison, only 80 quit at Undyne, and 56 at Sans. He really is one of the best characters there.
I love your interpretation of Undyne the Undying. And yeah, it makes total sense given the track is named what it is, instead of "But She refused to Die". Undyne represents the world of Undertale, almost as if she is its harbinger, the final attempt at stopping you, in which the world pours all it has.
And to think of it, the timing is also perfect. You already proved that you are ignorant of a peaceful solution when you killed Papyrus, but raising arms against a literal child, who has heard bad stuff about you and is STILL trusting you, that's the very moment the world realises you are beyond saving. You just pulled the final straw, and the game knows this. So what follows is a skill+perseverence test, boredom, direct accusation, and an unfair one-sided fight, with the game dialing all of this to 11 and making Undyne harder(with long attacks some of which are not pattern-based), hotland having an insane 40 kill count requirement, and Sans getting the Karma damage mechanic.
I ain’t readin alat chief
One thing I’d like to add that I think is a neat detail about the genocide route is that the fallen human/chara refers to themselves as a “demon”. Demons serve the devil and Chara is essentially serving you in the genocide route with the kill count and so on. This also perfectly aligns with the ominous “demon text” in the files which read as:
“Greetings.
You have made yourself completely clear.
Understood.
I, your humble servant, will follow you to the utmost…”
If you read this from the perspective that Chara is saying this (which is likely considering the signature “Greetings”) it highlights how YOU the player is responsible in this route.
Oh yeah, the unused demon strings really do lean into that. That's a really good observation! O: Somehow, it slipped my mind to bring up here, but I think a part of it was just because the video had just gotten so heckin' large at that point.
Yeah the genocide route is such a goldmine with story telling that small details can get swept up :,) Either way I love this video to death as a person with chronic UT brain rot
so where does a certain mystery man speaking in hands fall into all this? gaster IS associated with the devil as well, y’know?
@@masonasaro2118he doesn't I suppose since Gaster’s links to the devil only go so far as the number 666 and a comparison of both their falls
Kinda ironic for a "demon" to serve under an "angel" in undertale.
( don't know what i'm talking about, i'm talking about the player is the angel theory from deltarune).
I think we're entering a time in which we as a fandom get reminded why we loved Undertale.
I think one thing that is interesting is the factor of time. The game's been out for so long that many people have turned solely to fanworks to continue to experience new Undertale things, but as a result, the original creative vision is lost in a fog of distant memories. That's one reason I really like to make these videos.
@@DorkedI just hope these videos don’t have consequences, people harassing fan artists and fan writers for writing characters in a noncanon way when we don’t care about canon and haven’t cared for *6 GOD DAMN YEARS*
Yellow I think was the catalyst for this, and also TS!Underswap but that’s my take on this
@@resumethyvideo7631 Some people will walk the path of harrassment. The video doesn't even do much in that regard. They would simply find someone else to hate for doing something else.
@@resumethyvideo7631Oh, don't be silly...
That started long before this video came out.
Most fangames and AUs are on Sans, but thank goodness this person made something different, alongside some other people.
Yeah, it's not that every fangame is Sans or Sans-like, but the Sans fight's brilliance really is dependent on everything else the game has to offer.
I feel like one reason why TS!Underswaps Ruthless Route Crossbones fight hits so hard is because as someone else said, Sans doesn't really take the persona too seriously, he jokes around, and he messes around with the 'villians', which you could compare with someone like Spider Man. Until an actual threat appears, and he actually has to do something about it. When he actually has to take his job seriously.
Ooh. I really gotta look into ruthless and evacuation at some point.
@@Dorked Yeah! I won't spoil anything, but it does stuff better then Undertale in my opinion, try to get around to it sometime.
I love the evacuation route, because it's like yeah you aborted your genocide but, you still killed a lot of people and the fall out is still thier.
As much as i love Sans and his fight being genuinely iconic, I cant lie that it kinda seems like the ONLY take away people had from Undertale (the fact that more than half of Undertale AUs have him as some typa MC show me that lol)
And it bums me out because that game, geno route aside, has ALOT of stand out moments that i feel like dont get talked about enough (like to this DAY I still tweak over Omega Flowey's introduction that thing jumpscared me dude)
I'm really grateful to have your channel because it talks about these aspects of Undertale's writing and characters that i love
Yeah, the thing with Sans is that it's very much an iconic moment. It's popular for a reason... but as time goes on, it's become so divorced from its original context, both in the run and in the greater scope of Undertale as a complete package. UT is one of those games with so many unique aspects and facets that often get overshadowed by a few key hype moments, and I love to highlight that there's a lot more than what people see at a glance, especially when the game's almost a decade old.
Media literacy is dying day by day, it’s not surprising. I don’t think toby made undertale with the intention to make everyone who plays it understand its message. It’s literally commentary about the state of video games and their players in the form of a video game. It has messages for people who like to think critically, but is also enjoyable at surface level for a wider audience. It’s there for the people who enjoy it and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that toby definitely did not expect it to become so massive or how blown out and distorted the pop culture around the game would become. There’s no possible way he could have predicted that so it’s better to analyze undertale with the understanding it was made to be played blind by niche gaming enthusiasts.
It's almost passé at this point, but I'll still stand by the opinion that the No Mercy route (as well as Chara and their role in the narrative) is a hell of a media literacy check.
If you felt personally offended by the route, or thought you were being punished for just "playing the game", then you've already missed the point.
Like, a complaint I hear exhaustingly often is "If Toby didn't want you to do the No Mercy route, then why did he put the best boss fight at the end of it?"
Even ignoring the fact that you got spoiled, the fact that you only view killing everyone in the game as a means to an end only further reinforces the narrative. The harder you try to outsmart the game, the deeper the hole you dig yourself.
Like Andrew Cunningham said, the way it's impossible to act outside of Undertale's narrative no matter how you play or what actions you choose both in-game and irl is profound and what sets Undertale apart from other "meta" video game stories for me.
@@NRobbi42Also, that sort or argument only works if you see sans' boss as the best, which I don't.
Very well said! There's so much nuance and depth to the route that goes overlooked in favor of more shallow readings, and I think working on this video gave me a deeper appreciation.
@Dorked Sans literally tells you that you're not doing the route out of a sense "good or evil", but because you can. And because you "can" you "have to". How some people still come away with the thought that the route solely exists to morally scold the player is absurd.
@@NRobbi42I feel like part of that is people forgetting details and talking about stuff years later.
The Eradication Route is simultaneously underappreciated and overblown at the same time, and the way the fandom has treated it has definitely dampened its themes. As always, great work!
Yeah, it's a fascinating paradox between hype and overlooked moments of brilliance for sure.
@@Dorked True, and as you said in you FAQ of Inverted Fate, the fandom tends to focus on "edgy corridor battles".
@@DoughB101That's why Monster Mix is the greatest AU. Instead of the final battle being yet another Sans with 500 phases and blatantly overtuned attacks, it's just Grillby and a bunch of angry drunks beating you to death in the Judgment Hall
@@dataexpunged4784erm... actually...the final fight is a battle with undyne and papyrus at the surface....
@@dataexpunged4784 Where is it? Where is the Monster Mix.
On the topic of overlooked parts of undertale’s narrative, I still think that flowey/Asriel is the most underrated character in the game. He is Single handedly the most interesting part of each route. His horrifying narrative presence in neutral, his heartbreaking story in pacifist, and the fact he acts as reflection of the player in genocide. In Genocide you get to feel what flowey felt when he was board of the world, the desire to see everything taking over morals. The way players keep going just to see what happens is just the same as when flowey was describing his first murder run. It’s criminal how much flowey (the character who whole game is centered around) is overshadowed in the fandom in favor of sans. sans is cool in all but he is no where near as emotional and deep as Asriel.
See, I think Asriel is easily one of the most popular. The problem, I think, is that a lot of Asriel fans try to completely divorce him from Flowey, but you need both Flowey and Asriel to truly understand who he is. To just focus on cute goat boy robs him of so much depth and tragedy.
@@Dorkedtrue, I really like your videos by the way. They really bring attention to undertale’s more under appreciated characters (Alphys and Papyrus deserve the world).
Good job your comic explores it in full!@@Dorked
@@Dorked YES For real, REAL Asriel fans are FLOWEY fans first and foremost. You are right about that problematic tendency, BUT the thing I find really funny tho is that when people tried to separate the “cute precious fluffy boy” part from Flowey into its own separate fandom character, they did that because their mind couldn’t handle THAT EVIL FLOWER being the same person as him??? Meaning they completely failed to see the fact that FLOWEY IS really cute and precious as he is????? And that fact is honestly hilarious and amazing I have no idea how did Toby make a character so fascinating, but “The evil murderous demon flower TM” is EXTREMELY CUTE on his own and people need to stop pretending he is not. (only ppl like us who look deep into him know that tho). AND UM THIS TURNED INTO A WHOLE ESSAY, BUT YOU OF ALL PEOPLE WOULD UNDERSTAND ME CHARA-UH I MEAN DORKED (I LOVE YOU) SO I AM GOING TO POST IT ANYWAY
ASRIEL IS ADORABLE NOT BECAUSE HE HAS A CUTE FACE AND A TIMID DISPOSITION…BUT BECAUSE HE IS FLOWEY. AND WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT FLOWEY???
His mannerisms are childish, innocent even, his word choice…calling MERCY as “being nice”???REALLY??YOU ARE BABY I AM CRYING…I AM NOT EVEN OPENING UP A CAN OF (GUMMY) WORMS THAT IS JAPANESE TRANSLATION MY GOD. ADORABLE. He tends to act “cutesy” as a sort of fake-out or lure, but when he “reveals his true colours” he just…unironically somehow becomes cuter? tenfold?? not the “uwu can do no wrong ever” cute, but the glorious“ wet cat, troll, mischievous, bullyable, spunky, sour loser, copycatting people who he thinks are cool, making creepy faces because he thinks it is cool, thinking the name “FLOWEY” is cool, little asshole Prince that thinks of everyone as idiots so once they are out of the time-loop and he isn’t playing with their lives anymore he just HAS to STICK AROUND and take responsibility, checking on whether they are leaving his mother on a cold garage floor or not” cute. The “ I’m too grown up and cool so I don’t need presents and big kids don’t cry…then proving it all wrong by his actions a few seconds later” type of cute. The “edgelord with a dark soul but actually an emoboy tryhard supreme who’s full of remorse and guilt and NO I CAN’T BE YOUR FRIEND STUPID I CAN’T CARE ABOUT YOU PROPERLY AND THAT’S NOT HOW FRIENDS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE! DO YOU NOT GET IT???” type of cute. This nature of his just cannot be contained or hidden it SHOWS.
Secondly, His one and only motivation in every route is as pure as it possibly can be for a soulless “serial murderer”: keep us from leaving him alone and play with him forever…That is the most sinister he canonically gets.. He doesn’t even want to be a God if he’s got no one to PLAY GOD with! His perception of violence and killing is warped by both Time travelling and horrible trauma. HAS ANYONE NOTICED HOW “IT’S KILLED OR BE KILLED” and “I’LL KILL YOU 100000 TIMES I’LL TEAR YOU APART OVER AND OVER” FREAKING CONTRADICTS ITSELF?? It sounds so gruesome as a standalone pieces of his philosophy but TOGETHER? It implies he never really intends to hurt anyone permanently, checks out since the thought of any choice having a lasting consequence is HORRIFYING for him as he is TORTURED by a single decision that ruined his life Every Single Day! Killing people a lot is bad undeniably, but his situation can make you pretty desensitised to it, viewing it as just another action that can get you a desirable result, be it a new “route”, an outlet, or something else… It will be erased no one will get hurt anyway r-right?…so even his SADISM can be technically excused, but when you look at it (and the verbal taunts/projections) as signs of PTSD and as coping mechanisms it just gets heartbreaking man…AND Lastly, while he is stuck in his comfortable delusions and refuses to let go of them, causing his (mostly SELF-)destructive behavioural patterns… he literally HAS to GASLIGHT HIMSELF CONSTANTLY or else it’ll all crumble… because (i’ll admit it’s my personal read on his character, however…) he honestly seems very reflective and conscientious(DELTARUNE YOSHI INCIDENT GUYS), and he seems to be LONGING for some kind of change, so this “heart” contradicts his “mind”, as he’s consciously refusing this mental struggle, clinging to his delusions. That’s why he is questioning his actions and beliefs a lot at several points in the game as well as why he goes so back and forth etc etc
(When he THINKS he feels some type of way he is ALWAYS upfront about it, he is just confused most of the time)
His worldview of “ you just CAN’T get a happy ending by doing what I did, you have to either succumb to the unfair world where it’s “kill or be killed” or keep playing!” IS malleable it depends on whether we: decide to confront and defy it, (which will make him struggle and unsure of himself “Why are you being so nice to me??” “I’ve been thinking…is killing things really necessary? I honestly don’t know anymore…..Prove to me you are strong enough to survive”.) or give him The “No Mercy” - his sweet relief and reassurance - in which his Best Friend is here, they are still like him, they still would understand him no matter how horrible he is and it’ll be ok and they can keep playing together! He will double down on being MWAHAHA evil in Pacifist tho, because he can’t let that chance of HIS happy ending slip AND I AM GLAD Undertale gives us an opportunity to answer his unanswered long overdue call for help and SAVE him….Which uh, makes him instantly remorseful??? MEANING HE ALWAYS FELT REMORSE BUT JUST PUSHED IT AWAY RAMPING UP THAT EDGELORD ACT, DISSOCIATING HARD, GOING “I DON’T NEED THESE GUYS I DON’T NEED ANYONE”??? FREAKING. CUTE. So yes, ASRIEL IS STILL THE MOST ADORABLE GUY, you really can’t separate Asriel from Flowey, huh, at the end of the day, Flowey just can’t help but BE CUTE BWAHAHA
He's my third favourite character in the game, with Chara being the first. And not even out of being similar to him. Thanks for the comment
We talk about content creators liking every comments, but Dorked is here answering almost every comments already even though the video was 30 minutes ago, respect
Yeah, I usually reply to comments for the first few hours because after that it just gets really hard to keep up.
I feel like the best part about the post-Genocide route stuff is that while you can delete the flags and continue as if nothing happened, Chara is still right. You _do_ think you are above consequences, because you've proven that you actually are.
Loved this analysis, it's a real shame that most of the route gets overshadowed by the Sans fight
YEAH! Deleting the flags ironically feeds into the idea that you're above consequences, so it still is very much in line with the message.
In a sense, Chara is the embodiment of "You can escape the consequences. But you will never escape yourself."
@@itap8880 hey socrates it's a fucking video game
@@Glaster6 Did you even watch the video, or are you just trolling?
@@astralnekomimi Neither. I genuinely cannot stand this channel and everyone who watches it
Initially I had only known about the sans fight and gotten the impression that there not much else to the genocide route at all, till I decided to look at a playthrough. And Undyne's fight + Flowey's dialogue in New Home is truly the most impactful part of this route. When I think back on the true pacifist route I think about Asriel a lot, and with no mercy likewise I think about Undyne. There's something unhinged and nihilistic about the sans battle, but that's not Undyne's perspective on it, she is standing strong and holding you off long enough to give the others a chance, and the grimly determined grin on her face through it all really drives home the tragedy of it. Especially knowing from pacifist playthroughs exactly what future of hers she is sacrificing for this, and she doesn't even know it only you do from being familiar with a different route.
And with Flowey, he has always been at the very center of the narrative of this whole game. Through pacifist maybe you get the view that he's a corrupted version of Asriel, and Asriel come off as the real tragic and lonely figure in it. But genocide flowey gives you a view into his own desperation. It's like now that everyone else is gone, now that your determination to just be good is gone, it's just you and him, he finally has you alone, away from all other noise and distractions, and that's the only way he gets to tell his own story.
I get why sans is hyped for the gameplay, and he's a really great character and reveals so much about the world. But from a purely story perspective? The interactions with undyne and flowey are so much more meaningful to me, and they really stick with me and make my heart hurt when I think about them. Thinking of Flowey especially, and knowing his fate as Asriel in other timelines, I keep coming back to this thought: 'no matter what you do there is no timeline where HE gets a happy ending'. He's doomed from the beginning, from actions that aren't even his own (the stuff with Chara and then being brought back by Alphys' experiments and not finding love with his own parents). Maybe we don't get to connect and joke around with Flowey and Asriel as much. But he's the most tragic figure in this world to me, and that's what gave the no mercy route a new depth to me beyond just the sans fight.
Great video as always! Loved your analysis ❤
I'm so happy my analysis could in turn inspire such thoughtful comments! I definitely agree that Flowey's section of the route is probably the most poignant on both a character and meta level. Flowey really is just... Undertale. The first character you meet. The character who has his roots in every route, and you need to experience them all to understand him.
Personally, I feel that THE worst route you can do is one where you kill everyone except for Glad Dummy. You get the Leaderless ending, and Mew Mew's stuck in a body she'll eventually come to despise.
YEAH, that's actually a really good (and sad) point. ;w; Dang.
nice pfp
@@RichConnerGMN Thanks! :)
I always wondered why only six monsters could replace Asgore. You would think there would be plenty of others willing to take the throne when one else will, right? Or maybe, the ones that do are ones where having absolute power is a bad thing.
@@Brydav_Massbear 6, actually. There's Toriel, Undyne, Mettaton, Papyrus, Alphys, and the Annoying Dog.
In all honesty, nowadays it seems like the fandom treats Sans as a character who no longer has any relevance or importance since he had so much popularity in the past. He's my favorite character but it was annoying to see people hyperfixate on him in the past, and now just simply hate on him and MEGALOVANIA just because they think its "overrated" or "too common of a pick".
Sans is a great character who I feel like has been kinda boiled down to epic Megalovania guy when there's so much more to him than that. I had a lot to say on the fight! I just wanted to highlight the bigger picture, since Sans works best when taken as a whole and not just the battle.
I've noticed that too. It's a weird case of over correction
Yeah, the problem is that people treat him like a tragic superhero. He's not. He's Lou Costello after you gunned down Bud Abbott in cold blood, and then set out to destroy everything else
This moment is powerful not because sans is physically strong, but because he, by his own words, cannot afford not to care anymore. He's just a regular guy forced to attempt extraordinary things just for a CHANCE at seeing tomorrow, not even for a happy ending. You got rid of all the happy endings, after all.
...honestly, I think it would be kinda nice if there was a line of dialogue for meeting sans in a Pacifist run after you got dunked on, and took his advice not to come back. A line where he alludes to you looking like you feel REALLY bad about something, then brushing it off by saying he's sure you "made the right choice in the end"
@@spindash64 that would be really cool
I agree. I really value him and don't hate seeing him at all but people really miss the incrwdible slice of life potential he has, or his casual and just plausible enough space trickery that I loved about him (like the joke book and quantum physics book recursion). That's why I prefer to read about Chara. But properly written he's still very solid. Especially with casino canon
Babe wake up, a new lengthy analysis of a specific part of Undertale from Dorked just dropped
Hehe. x) I love how specifically this comment was worded.
A semi-headcanon I have is that sans never meant to beat the player. He knew abt the saves and so knew he had to die at point. The point of the fight was to make us quit temporarily. But i feel like fangames dont understand that when stuff like last breath exist. they make it seem like sans means to end the player even though he obv knows he cant.
PS.: Didnt watch the vid yet so will edit after
Yeah, that's a great point that I absolutely agree with. I feel like the problem with a lot of these really hard Sans/Sans-like fangames is that when removed from the original context (e.g. Undertale as a whole), they're really more of a spectacle than serving the same metanarrative purpose the original fight served, which was such a hugely impactful reveal about Sans as a character.
I kinda wish sans had a reaction in snowdin alluding to that, if you reset your run after getting dunked on, then play pacifist. Nothing that would raise red flags if he's wrong and this human has never met him before, but would mean all the world to a human that tried to kill him before, and genuinely regretted what they did
This isn’t even a headcanon, this is real. At the end of the boss during his “special attack “ he says “The most determined thing you can do is give up” He knows about saves and loads, and the way he uses the word Determination implies he means it that way.
you guys just wait for the Undertale fangame where Sans actually finally kills you by deleting the whole game folder
He also could have simply heard/seen that you managed to defeat determination-infused Undyne - which would've made him understand that there's no one in the Undeground you can't defeat.
Toby is a f***ing GENIUS writer to make a game with this much depth about consequence, seeing the end, and player narrative. And you are an even smarter genius for being able to recognize these facts. In your previous video regarding the True Lab entries and the Gaster Mandela effect, I was surprised to learn people ignored Alphys just to insert an unimportant character into the lore, that most of what was being explained was info I already knew. But I was surprised by how much this video revealed narratives I completely missed. You’re an amazingly smart person, Dorked. Thanks for blowing my mind out the Earth once again!
Thanks so much for the kind words! I really love to share my passion for this game and the cleverness in its writing and concepts. There's just a lot to unpack.
This IS why I love Chara's character on this route.
They help you with the kill count, tell you if you miss some monsters (example if you go after Undyne without killing all the monsters in waterfall, Chara will tell you how many you hsve to kill)
They are the one who gave sans the last slash, almost killed Asgore, the one who made Frisk move alone without the players input and Chara is the one that ends Flowey's life (Which I find it kind of poetic)
Then it's Chara's speech (especially when you keep repeting the route ove and over, you can tell that even Chara doesn't want you to repeat this over and over) and how they permanently ruin your pacifist ending.
It's like they are punishing you in a way for what you done despite them helping you.
I think what makes the discussion here interesting is they say that you taught them that this is the way, so they're following what you taught them, internalizing it, and to back out of it at the last minute may seem as a betrayal. What do you MEAN you don't want to see this through to the end? You're the one who took everything to this absolute. You molded them.
@@Dorked If anything, it's the second time they've been betrayed like that. Asriel agreed with their plan ("our plan") and was willing to do it before he backed out at the last second
@@elizabeth_x51 Asriel betrayed Chara more than that time.
The first time was when they plan failed and then Undertale's PLOT happened.
The Second time was when Flowey said that begins like them Will tear each other. Chara would probably think that Flowey would betray them.
And the third time was when Flowey warns Asgore but It backfired
I actually saw some places on TvTropes point out that killing Flowey isn’t automatic, since you actively need to press the “confirm” button in order to proceed with it. Way I see it, it’s showing that even having been basically corrupted by the player into wanton slaughter, Chara still hesitates killing Flowey, to the point where you effectively become the Emperor and have to rasp “do it” to them in order to get them to finish the job.
I will say this though, there is one other instance of Frisk moving without input, specifically in the intro to Photoshop Flowey
Not sure if this is related in the slightest to Chara at all, but it's a neat detail
This is a very good way of breaking the whole run down, I had a friend who only wanted to do no mercy as their first run because its all they knew and it really sucked watching them play the game effectively backwards having lesser connections with the characters in the end of pacifist.
This video shows how well written the run is and yet how its overshadowed by 'haha funni skeleton.
Yeah, my one thing I wanted to convey is that it's not that the Sans fight is bad or even undeserving of its popularity, but rather that it's just one piece of a much bigger piece of Undertale and the themes and concepts it seeks to explore. The Sans fight is at its best when you have already consumed the other routes, because then it hits the hardest.
@@Dorked I completely agree, what makes the Sans fight so good is the fact it pulls on the aspects of the previos areas, ruins with its curiocity for what could happen, snowdin with the emotional spare check, waterfall for the hard fight (linking to how the game died with Undyne's death) and lastly Hotland/Core ending with the desire to get it over with.
Most fangames dont make this link and focus too hard on the 'hard fight go brrr'
Yeah, I guess the weakness of Undertale is that it doesn't account for people who chose the Genocide route out habit.
Genocide's narrative and metanarrative only make sense if you're doing the route as second, if not last. The later you do it, the stronger the narrative gets. But if someone does blind Genocide first, then the majority of its points make no sense and are straight up not correct.
Another problem I have with all these AUs that focus on the genocide route is that they completely take away from the suprise of the Sans fight.
The reason the Sans fight is works is that throughout the game, Sans is built up as this lazy skeleton dude who occasionally does or says weird things.
But on the Sans fight, he forgoes all of that in order to stop you from erasing the timeline.
Every fanon and AU Sans interpretation kinda has him acting edgy from the getgo, though, and it takes away from that suprise and makes the Sans fight feel less unique compared to the other fights in the game.
YES, these are all exactly my gripes with the way fangames tend to hype up their AU last corridor fights. Though I will say, it's not that there are no good AU Sanses. I put a lot of care into writing him in Inverted Fate, and off the top of my head, TS Underswap and Rupturedtale are two really cool AU Sanses that still feel true to the character. I think it's more... the wider fandom perception of Sans and the stuff that gets really popular tends to be pretty far removed from the base character, for better or worse.
@Dorked Another thing I always see is that these fangames tend to give Sans way too much emotion during his fight.
Like when you're fighting Sans, the dude is clearly angry at you for what you've done but he doesn't make that visible, he wants to make it seem like he's above it all like he usually is, he doesn't wanna give you that satisfaction of seeing him finally crack emotionally.
But all these fangames have Sans outright expressing and showing anger during his fight (like there is no way Sans would make the expression shown at 27:05), it just makes him look like a teen throwing a temper tantrum.
Just in general, a lot of Undertale fan projects tend to ignore the finer details.
Like one thing that bugs me with a lot of fangames is how overdesigned everything looks, people never seemed to notice that Undertale gets it's charm from how simplistic everything looks, it's to the point where even Toby himself told Temmie to make some sprites look shittier.
Even good fangames like Undertale Yellow kinda suffer from this in a way, like sometimes I'll see images of Undertale Yellow characters next to regular Undertale characters and they just seem out of place to me a lot of the time.
Although this is by no means to say that the sprite work for the these games are bad, my issue is that it moreso doesn't really fit with the aesthetic of Undertale imo.
@@peronafanmanI agree that Sans isn’t nearly as emotionally as the fandom portrays him to be but I think that people that criticize the fandom for making him more emotional forget that Sans is put in dark and traumatic scenarios, some even worse then the genocide run or these Sanses they’re criticizing isn’t meant to have the same characterization as canon Sans.
Sans is still human emotionally, he’s capable of having moments of weakness and dropping the “I don’t care anymore mask” he wears. For example, in Dusttale, Sans suddenly remembered 500+ genocide runs. Something like that like that could make anyone lose their cool. Sans is good at keep his emotions in check but he’s not perfect at it.
@animemaster4412 My point was that Sans doesn't really show these emotions very often, yeah he goes through dark and tramatic stuff during the Genocide route and yeah there are moments where he slips up but he doesn't try and let that be shown, even when you're actively trying to kill him or make an angry expression at him, the dude is still making jokes about how many times you died and what not.
Also that Dusttale thing kinda just sounds like more of the overly edgy stuff in famgames I was criticizing to begin to with
@@Dorkedthe AU monster mix has a cool take on this with the corridor fight with grillby being a sudo-fakeout for the final genocide boss, and the true final fight being undyne + papyrus on the surface. Monster Mix in general feels really inspired for a roleswap au, and I'd recommend checking the ost out.
I feel like Chara's actual role here is being a bit underplayed.
They say that "with your guidance, I realized the purpose of my reincarnation"
They join you the moment you trigger the route, and help you all the way through. If any other route is chosen, they do not make their presence known.
The Winter Alarm Clock dialogue gives us insight. It shows that Chara used to fill their water glasses to the brim regardless of how thirsty they were, as it was the "most efficient way to do so".
With this in mind, I think it's likely Chara themself was already inclined towards routes of completionism, and once you trigger that route, they finally find a purpose for their reincarnation that aligns with their own morals/ideals.
They do tell you to pursue another route, yet if you actually follow their advice, the Soulless Epilogue is triggered, which makes it more of a ploy than anything.
Good point.
i didn't really play RPGs growing up, so undertale's critiques have left a lasting effect on how i play them now. i still play them as intended, but it gets me to reflect on why the game is the way it is, and asking myself if i'm making any assumptions about what i'm "supposed" to do. i like analyzing the things i enjoy and the meta aspects of it. 700 hours into baldur's gate 3 made this refresher on undertale's no-mercy run feel like quite the callout, i gotta say. after killing a bunch of innocent tieflings in my second playthrough (an evil one), my first thought was "hmm, think i feel my sins crawling on my back right about now"
Part of me pities the fool who played it for the first time blind and grinded like a normal RPG. I watched someone play the geno run a few months ago mostly blind. His reaction to Toriel was... notable.
The wrong number song kinda killed the mood though.
kjhkjh OH NO, wrong number song coming in during such a dark and somber route. That sounds comical, actually.
"notable"?
Were they a streamer/yter I wanna see the playthrough
I'm not going to deny that the No-Mercy Run is quite fun for the Undyne the Undying and Sans battles, but I think that many people ignore of what you have to do in order to fight them, and its the agonizing grinding (especially in Hotland).
- You must mindlessly walking for extended two-digit minutes, in the worst cases
- you must kill a certain amount of Enemies, you will know you did it when the "but nobody came" encounter happens, (Hotland has 40)
- with each zone, it gets progressively harder to encounter. You can kill every monster you encounter and still get the Neutral Ending
- the battles are very hard (each in their own way, Undyne as a fair battle and Sans by breaking the game's rules)
- And if you knew of the consequences of the Route beforehand, you know that the Pacifist Ending will be ruined by completing the No-Mercy Route
The game is trying to stop you by reducing your determination as much as it can, and once you manage to kill Sans, the game stops trying, since there is no No-Mercy-Asgore-Boss-Battle, No-Mercy-Omega-Flowey-Rematch or some Chara-Boss-Battle, but instead nothing
Toby seems to make the more violent routes as both dissapointing in terms of reward
Yeah, these are all great observations! It really makes me curious to see how Deltarune will differ in its approach, since we only have one chapter to go off of so far. There's a lot of potential to take it in interesting directions.
Hotland and the cores kill counts are Merged together.
I agree with you on the points and would add that I personally believe the game and characters should have treated you like monsters of a RPG (besides a few like Torriel, Sans and such), where the puzzles should be deadly ones trying to kill you or trap you.
Because then the pacifist option which Torriel speaks of would be hard to achieve, because the underground people (monsters) have gotten used to fighting humans and want their souls to exit the underground.
But then after you are able to achieve pacifist results in Papryus and Undyne fights and get to the Core, word has spread about you not being a normal human and less monsters are out to fight.
I just feel like that while Undertale has a great story, it did not properly subvert the RPG trend because it didn't properly respect it in the first place. In the "traditional RPG" route it gave us 2 good boss fights, 3 developed characters and a big basket of grind.
Maybe I am alone in this feeling though.
@@Dorked There are two chapters right?
One thing I despise about the fandom is how they assume a genocide Papyrus fight would unfold. Yes, Disbelief sounds cool (emphasis on “sounds”; it’s practically carried by the soundtrack), but it’s dependent on throwing Papyrus’s character out the window for the first 3/4ths. The reason why Papyrus doesn’t have a fight in the base no mercy run is because he wants to believe there’s a shred of good in you- and he’s willing to die if it means stopping your rampage with the mercy he knows you’re capable of. And for many players… it works. They stop their killing spree because of his kindness. They just can’t bring themselves to do it. And Sans voices his pride in us for turning over a new leaf.
Papyrus is effectively the first point of no return of the run, and many players choose to end it there because they just can’t resist his kindness.
I think there's room for an AU Papyrus fight that's in-character, but he wouldn't be ANGRY. I think it'd be a more... stern, but with a drive to get you to understand, trying to talk you down the entire time. If you abort the run, he suggests he was willing to fight if his plan failed, so it seems like he just wasn't expecting to be oneshot. The big thing is compassion. Even if Papyrus did put up a fight, he wouldn't stop believing.
@@Dorkedif anything to me, this gives me that it would be an indirect parallel to the ACT option give when fighting Asgore in neutral, where Frisk tells him that they don't want to fight, them pleading him to stop, them Firmly telling him to STOP fighting, where with the king, it wears on him as his guilt seeps trough but is still determined that there will only be 2 outcomes in the fight.
whereas with an actual no mercy papyrus, it ends up to the player if him believing on them fall to deaf ears.
And you can imagine the thought process and dialogue of the skele-bro if the latter is true.
Papyrus would fight us if his plan failed he just underestimated how strong the player character can actually get mid point.
Papyrus would still fight trying to steer you into the good path eventually running out of patience like he did when you ignored his attempts at making friends.
A good Papyrus fight would have him fight you, but not with the intent to kill. And he tries to change your mind the whole time
@@matti.8465 YES
Something I like about the No Mercy Run is how it affects the True Pacifist Route and its ties to the meta narrative
You’ve completed the game, seen everything there is to see because you wanted to feel like you earned something at the end of it. Going through the Genocide Run again yields no satisfaction, Chara’s words this time around make you wonder about doing another route, maybe some neutral runs, or perhaps you want to end your Undertale experience on the high note that was the Pacifist Ending.
Except when you do complete it….that feeling you got from it the first time around….is gone. It doesn’t ring the same anymore, you feel hollow on the inside, you’ve sucked out so much of what Undertale had to offer, what made it special to you, that now the experience has lost its appeal.
And don’t even try to absolve yourself of your guilt this way, because the game already has that covered for you, you don’t get the chance to feel like you’ve evaded the consequences of your actions by doing this.
In the end I guess the ending to all this is that trying to get the most content out of games you enjoy by playing them over and over will leave you feeling like this.
True.
The one thing I like about the no mercy/genocide/dark side route is that you fall into the same path of flowey. Like flowey, he did save and befriend everyone, but got bored with it and kill many people over. Also if you tried to delete internal files of the game to get rid of the genocide stuff, you still in a way not wanting to take responsibility of your actions, which proves flowey and the game point.
Also cannot wait for what deltarune's weird route and dark side would be like
YEAH. That's the thing! You are following in Flowey's footsteps if you play the game at the "intended" time. Obviously, the Flowey parallels don't work as well if you make it your first route, but I suppose in a way it still kind of works in that you are still doing it just to see what happens, even if it's due to outside hype.
As someone who played a Sans fight simulator to learn about Undertale by accident, yeah, I definitely didn't find the removal of surprise very fun.
Oh yeah, I can imagine it's kind of a letdown to have the biggest twist of the route spoiled that way. :c
This route never fails to make me restart and do Pacifist instead
Tbh, I think that's very much by design, which is what makes it so interesting!
26:27 "until there's nothing but bones left"
fighting the skeleton boss
Finally a video that describes the true meaning of undertale's genocide run! Not following the narrative, killing everything that you can find, pushing the world and all the characters to their limit, awakening forces you shouldn't have in the form of chara, permenantely destroying the world and altering the true pacifist ending for the sake of just seeing through the genocide route, even the genocide route itself is permenantey altered and chara calls your sentimentality perverted for doing the genocide run yet again.
TS!Underswap and Undertale Yellow's genocide runs as just as memorable for the same reason, if not more so than undertale's. Undertale Yellow's genocide run is not that much different from undertale until you get to the last 7 encounters in the dark ruins, which is when enemy retreating kick in, slowing down with every encounter exhausted until nobody is left and Flowey comments on you commiting mass murder, Followed by Dalv and Decibat. Decibat doesn't even fight you if you've exhausted the counter before him, and Dalv's dialogue is very different, and should you strike him down he dies realising you are not a haunting of (presumably) the integrity soul and actually real. Honestly Martlet deserves a full video on her character in genocide, but the way she constatly fights with herself between wanting to give you chances for redemption and stopping you, even realising she shouldn't have let you go and you should have killer her back in Snowdin should you see the genocide run through to the point of no return. El Bailador not even fighting you if you exhaust the counter mirrors Decibat, and even puts you at a disatvantage against Ceroba later on unlike Decibat who you don't need to have it easy against Dalv, and then Starlo and Ceroba......Starlo, even if he was wasted potential, stays true to his values of wanting to protect everyone he cares for, and his death is what pushes Ceroba to seek vengeance, setting up a parallel between Clover and Ceroba, as both seek vengeance against the other. and then the Steamworks, the robots are not even providing exp, but at justice is indiscriminate, and you too must gun down the robots for this reason, otherwise the run is aborted. Axis also realises the threat you pose and actively runs away from Clover the entire time, even preventing the Guardener from engaging in battle. And when you DO kill Martlet, Clover's determination overpowers Flowey's and he just gives up, at which point you can either keep walking around the wasteland that you made of the underground or go to Asgore and finish the game, leaving you afterwards with the option of either reseting or leaving the game as is, not able to do anything else as Clover's goal has been fulfilled. Even though there are no overarching consequences in Undertale Yellow the entire genocide run still puts you in the moral dilemma of wether this is all truly worth it because on one hand you're killing hundreds for the actions of one, but if you spare everyone Clover ends up sacrificing themselves.
Meanwhile TS!Underswap seems to have a sentience of its own, fully taking advantage of the swapped roles and sets a narrative that goes strongly against the player. Asgore not only fights you but he also warns Sans and Papyrus outside, and the Starlight Isles take a very dark turn, culminating to a fight with Sans at LV8, a fight he escapes from and then the Navy ambushes Chara, presumable making Crystal Springs much darker than it'd be in pacifist.
All three games have the narrative either dying out, forcing you into a dilemma OR actively fighting your will of destruction, making the genocide route the most impactful route on all three games.
It's really interesting to see how fangames tackle their equivalent routes, but I think UTY and TS are both good examples of giving their own spin rather than just repeating what UT did wholesale, and I think that because it'd be so hard to replicate the initial formula and that initial formula isn't as fun to play/replay, it makes sense that these games would go for more in-depth gameplay with more battles rather than just having most fights oneshots. It's iterative rather than duplicating the same ideas with a different coat of paint.
I think the difference between Yellow and base game also comes down to who we guide:
Clover, at his absolute worst, is angry at monsters for their crimes and demands they pay in dust. Once they kill Asgore, the "debt" is paid, and we have no further influence. They have their 39:26 own aspirations separate from ours, and while we can manipulate them into being horribly cruel, we do not have the ability to force them into something they refuse to do, we must make them think they wanted it all along
Chara, meanwhile, is so utterly shattered both physically and mentally by their failure that they are willing to reevaluate EVERYTHING about their ideals. Frisk, we have less immediate information on, but there is similarly little resistance to what WE want. Frisk is only treated separately from the player if we choose to give everyone a chance for freedom, including the character we command, while Chara only diverges from the player when we choose to eradicate everything, then change our minds after everyone is already dead, because up until that point, they form their ideals around what they are given. When you reject destruction of the world, suddenly you admit you DONT have a particular reason for this, and they can't keep cooperating with you, because what THEY are is no longer what YOU are
Well, I think so anyway: the meta narrative around the Player,Frisk, and Chara is incredibly fuzzy
I love seeing that other people are still looking at Undertale. The game's a goddam classic already, and it's only nine years old.
It's so crazy to think that this game is almost a decade old...
burgerpants and gerson in the thumbnail, automatically peak their genocide lines are so raw
I had to at least mention them both a little bit! Gerson I had a whole dedicated video for, so his mention was brief but still Mandatory, haha.
I also really love how even Undyne and Sans' cool new boss fights in Genocide ties into Sans' explanation of LV/LOVE.
"The more you kill, the easier it is to distance yourself. The more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt. The more easily you can bring yourself to hurt others."
When you get to Undyne the Undying or Sans and start losing to them constantly, players who see it through will at first think it's really cool, but as you die over and over, a boss fight like theirs starts to grate on your nerves slowly but surely over time, and you begin to distance yourself as it frustrates you, but once you beat the incredibly difficult challenge placed in front of you, what do you do?
_You cheer at the death of someone who on other routes you would potentially consider a friend. Not a shred of remorse or heartache, but the celebration of an execution._
I had to catch myself after I finished fighting Undyne in Genocide post-True Pacifist like "Oh my god, what am I cheering for?"
Also, this is one more thing, but it's a connection I've just now made.
The consequences of the route also maifest in your experience with the game. If you do soulless pacifist, you're likely not doing it to invest in the game again, You're doing it to see the changes. You maintain your level of emotional detachment, even as in universe your LV is set back to 1.
Its the consequences of your actions.
The game to those souless players:
"Hey! It's your fault you're not invested. MAYBE! You shouldn't have done the no mercy route first, hmm?"
@@Blackandwhitecat-to5llWhat if you weren't doing No Mercy but STILL weren't invested?
@@F1areon That's why I specified said players.
I was just making a minor joke, I don't know for the players who aren't invested at all. Not their cup of tea, I guess?
@@Blackandwhitecat-to5llNah I was talking more someone who was playing fully Pacifist, but feels no attachment to the game and is only completing it bc they feel obligated to, a la why people do No Mercy despite any dislike of it.
You said it bud
The funy boneman route isn't some epic dramatic route where you *TRUIMPH OVER THE HARDEST OF MONSTERS AND LSUT FOR POWER*
It's just
"You did it,, you won, was it worth it though"
"Like tell me"
"Why"
"What reason is there to go do this..."
"Why go through all murder and challenge"
"Just to burn monsterkind to the ground"
"Wait"
"I thought you did it for the power but now it's so clear"
"Screw the power you did it for fun"
"You get off on it"
26:50-27:33
I feel like the only reason why there are "super edgy and depressed stories where sans and/or papyrus f*cking dies after condoning mass murder" is just an excuse to make extremely hard fights that try to one-up undertale with music and mechanics without actually having the buildup to make it worth it
And that the fights at this point is just a contest to see whose b0n3r gets longer when playing these fangames
Still enjoy them
14:10
I got no patience
I got no resolve
I will slaughter
Screw the dialogue
Yeah, this is a route that actively fights against you by testing your patience and how far you're willing to go just to see what happens, and I think that's really interesting, more so than the angsty and edgy stuff the route often spawns.
This is a lovely way to put some appreciation towards the masterful way the rest of this route was done outside the two iconic fights
Eyy, thanks! That was definitely the goal. Not to take away the impact of the Sans fight but to elevate it by discussing the other aspects of the run and how they fit together.
gonna be real i love putting on your analyses while doing other things
like your voice is *really* relaxing to listen to
Eyy, thanks. :> That's very flattering to hear!
The Genocide run was a unique experience for me. I was able to grind out the Ruins, murder Toriel, kill all of Snowdin, ignore Papyrus, empty Waterfall, attempt Undyne the Undying enough times to succeed against her, defeat all 40 of the encounters in Hotland and then Mettaton NEO, listen to Flowey's speech, reach Sans... and then die to him 25 times while barely making it past his first 2 attacks.
I already knew that there was no reward for beating Sans, and even if I didn't I would've been okay to never know. As a result, I decided that attempting the Sans fight 100 more times just to have Pacifist ruined wasn't worth it, so I deleted my Genocide file and replayed Pacifist. In the end, Sans was able to achieve his goal.
Stories like these are so fun to see! I feel like everyone's first experiences with Undertale are really special, which is why I take issue with the types of fans who try to railroad streamers/LPers into one specific path. Part of what makes Undertale such a unique experience the first time around is how flexible and in-depth it gets with its branching.
@@Dorked Yeah, Undertale is best experienced in the way that you choose to experience it. If you get railroaded into Genocide, it might end like it did for me, but it feels worse because you didn't choose Genocide.
Glad to see more insights on the no Mercy Routes.
Something you metion in the conclusions about most fanworks not engaging in a metanarritve got me thinking on why that happens.
It because its kind of hard to put it together without the metanarrative or Regular narrative taking the spotlight. Its why most fanworks and fanfiction dont introduced the Player unless its specifically about that. I write and read fanfiction and let me tell you works that have a Player entinty and thoses that dont are completely different and it changes the story into something else and i think most people aren't capable of doing it and so choose to play in straight.
For example Your AU inverted fate how different would it be if the Player was still in it. I think this happens because people mostly want to write the characters and there stories without being bogged down with a meta narrative that might make it confusing.
I think this is why Chara most likely gets portrayed as a bad guy because if the Player not there then they play Chara straight.
There also deltarune fanfiction that sometimes have the Player as a real person or a mysterious entity that gaster created or some mysterious force.
Not saying this good or bad. I read many stories with different approaches that work. But i think people just want write the characters on want they think they're will act without some 4th wall nonsense.
I think even without the player, Chara's "with your guidance" still holds some weight, of course. Because in that context, it'd be *Frisk* who taught them that this was the way. By their own admission, they were confused at the start, which I think is lost on a lot of playerless no mercy-related fanworks. Obviously, a lot of UT's stuff when translated to other mediums does work best w/o the player, but how you tweak things to reflect that can be tricky!
It's minor, but I love how the weird route denies the player the mechanical satisfaction of a fully levelled character with the strongest equipment.
You finally get the True Knife (the thing you've been desiring since the Ruins), and the only enemy left, Sans, has 1 HP.
Sans only 'deals' 1 DMG too, so the ultimate Heart Locket is worthless too.
You don't even get to play after LV 20, the game's on autopilot after that.
And of course, even at max level, your HP is just 1 point shy of the much more aesthetically pleasing 100.
the part where you talk about papyrus's belief and in most fan works hes just there for sadness reminds me of how most of the fandom for snowgrave berdly is like "hes dead and noelles So PoWeRfUl OmG" and they dont talk about how the MOMENT he saw something was wrong with one of his best friends he drops the nerd persona to help her and even though his BEST FRIEND is telling him to run away he refuses because he wants to make sure shes ok and if kris DOES go down he urges her (noelle) to run away (even though she doesnt due to the player) but anyways, yeah
I love that Undyne the Undying embodies one really cool trope in fiction, where the hero dies with a smile, and the villain dies screaming. Now, of course when you finish this route, you don't die, but I'd imagine that most players probably raged at least once when fighting Undyne or Sans.
i know chara ain’t exactly the villain (moreso the embodiment of the phrase “if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”), but their jumpscare definitely looks like they’re screaming.
Waterfall's theme has to be the most eerie. Every other theme (maybe excluding Bonetroustle) can easily recognized. But with Waterfall, its basically nothing like it was before. Like funeral bells or something
YEAH. I noticed when I was downloading the no mercy bgm last night that Waterfall's is REALLY slowed down. Like significantly more than the other areas.
15 minute long track
It's an attempt to be terrifying, which did make one person out of 400 quit. But I much prefer the sad wail of the game through Another Medium
In UnderTale, you're not accountable. You can delete those files that Chara's encounter creates, so you don't have to get through the Soulless ending. UnderTale is not telling you that your actions have consequences, it's telling you that if the consequences for you didn't exist, then, for the sake of everyone, don't do wrong.
This is such a good video about the No Mercy run of the game! It's a very good deconstruction of the narrative of the game being picked apart and destroyed as you go through the run.
Thanks a bunch! c: It's kind of a realization I came to in the scripting process. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that you're not only killing monsters, but the story as well.
I always thought toby hated we romanticized the genocide run for the final skele fight
I feel like Toby views it with a level of irony/humor, given things like the trailer for the Sans costume in smash.
Seeing some comments
I remind y'all that "genocide route' is not an official term and that localization book refers the route as the "No mercy route", so I don't think Dorked is wrong for referring that route with that name
Yeah, I get that there's a neutral run that has used the same name, but No Mercy has been used enough for this run that it feels rather nitpicky, when it's all down to preference.
You were on point about the multitude of Sans fangames. How there's sooo many of them that they are devoided of their original meaning and have been boiled to to just "beat the difficult video game boss!!". There's so many Sans battle fangames that it just grows so tired seeing yet another one of them that I just get disgusted seeing them and I think that really sucks cause the Sans battle in UT had a purpose and wasn't just there to be a generic final boss. I also hate how Sans is just the leading image of the UT fandom and how Toby leaned into it. Trust me, I like Sans as a character and the thematic concept of his boss, but the way the fandom stripped it of all its meaning and purpose and made it the only thing to look for in Undertale just kinda rubs me the wrong way. Cool for those that like Sans battle I guess I ain't gonna stop you, but it's still disappointing. Makes me happy Sans or Papyrus don't have big roles in Deltarune, at least not yet anyway (tho people are gonna try and find ways to shoehorn them in with their fan works somehow to make them a lot more important than they actually are)
It's interesting because I think if I was to consider a character the "face" of Undertale, Flowey is the best candidate. He's the encapsulation of everything the game represents, whose story and character depth are spread across every avenue of the game, right down to the most obscure decisions. He probably has the most unique lines for player interactions out of any character by far.
@@DorkedExactlyyy yesss, the literal reflection of a player who let's you in about this game you're playing and who keeps track of your every move, and yet he's overshadowed by a mysterious skeleton with bad puns and a cool battle theme because I guess the fight was cool. Flowey as a whole needs to be studied properly and extensively. So much potential with that silly lil guy and yet, little interest for him. Such a sad fate
@@DorkedIIRC the demo and a lot of the early UT stuff tried to push Flowey as the designated mascot character/face of the game/what have you... and yet...
@@Dorked Papyrus is a very close second though
how do you think toby has leaned into his popularity? (just curious)
It's so weird to realize now that what I felt and acted exactly like Flowey. When I played Undertale the first time I was pretty much a kid, I loved the story with my whole heart but had a very hard time grasping the meta narrative (I'm not sure I was even aware of it past the constant breaking of the fourth wall). It's not that I didn't understand the parallels between the player and Flowey, I just didn't apply them to myself. It didn't even seem that important. For me it was pretty much a "Flowey is a soulless killer and you're just as bad as him". Like what, are you trying to make me feel remorse for my actions or something? Sorry, at this point I've come too far to care. It took me several years to finally understand what Undertale tried to tell me. Without even thinking about it I was doing it. I interacted with every object (several times just to make sure), talked to every monster, befriended every monster, killed every monster. And when I couldn't achieve the endingI wanted I watched countless playthroughs to get everything out of the game. And after a while I emotionally detached myself from it. The characters stopped making me feel the same way they did, now it's just a bunch of pixels Now that I've seen everything they can say they don't even seem to have a personality, a soul. They lost their charm, their meaning. Now I saw everything and can move on to another game. And I did. But after a few years, after leaving the fandom, it finally hit me. And god did it hit hard.
Sorry, I feel like it's something so very obvious, but I felt like I needed to share my feelings. It's just that for me it was a very sudden realization, years after I stopped interacting with Undertale's fandom. It's literally the reason I'm back here now. I hope it's not very off topic, I'm just really passionate about it lol. And sorry if I phrased some things poorly, english isn't my first language
No need to apologize! I'm enjoying seeing everyone's various experiences and how they relate to the messages of this route.
I'm glad you looked at Sans' dialogue during his fight in depth. I've always seen it glossed over
Flowey's dialogue at the end of the route / him being a mirror to the player is what ultimately made him become my favourite character. When he talked about needing to see everything that the game had to offer, that really hit home with me
On a sidenote, I always found it interesting that there are people out there who seemingly completely fail to see that Flowey is a mirror of the player. I wonder how big the overlap between those people and the ones who blame all their actions on the first fallen human are
This is really well put, thank you for making the video
I think it was genius to include it in the game, there's so much there and I feel like this is the only video I've seen which scratches that surface about it
I really like the detail for sans’s fight, where *he* was the one who struck first. *he* was the one who dodged your attack, and most likely, he is going to hit you. The tables have fully turned, and you finally come to the realization: you’ve killed so many monsters, that you *are* the monster. Treated like one, where you don’t get the first turn, you’re the one dealing with the dodging enemy instead of the other way around, ect. And a personal theory I have, is that sans waits to attack you until the last moment, the last corridor, because he spent the entire rest of the route watching you, seeing how you attack, how you dodge, and using this information, he knows how to perfectly dodge your attack, which is why the only way to win the fight, is to cheat. Sans decided to never fight during his turn, and make you wait until you give up, and you end up cheating, and fighting. He dodges it again, but you hit him a second time and land the blow, which is so interesting to me, since you litterally *took* sans’s turn. It was his turn still, and since it was his turn that you attacked on, his turn ended, and it became *your* turn, something that’s never happened before, something unpredictable, and something sans could *never* expect. All in all, the sans fight is just so jam-packed with interesting lore, even from just the battle mechanics in the fight, and I feel like it’s so glossed over, and im glad you covered it in the video!
A Dusttale AU regarding Flowey would be a sick idea, I've had thought up some ideas of it myself, such as Flowey using Papyrus as a hostage to kill Undyne the Undying.
Tbh, more AUs involving Flowey in general would be fire. I'm surprised more AUs don't do stuff w/ him.
@@Dorkedthat's honestly what I appreciate about your AU, inverted fate, it makes Flowey just as relevant as other characters. Flowey is my favourite character, so it's very nice for me to see you guys do that.
Another thing to note is that in OFF, Bad Batter's fight is foreshadowed by Sugar/Sucre's fight.
"Like a beautiful day, for example. With a huge ducky. A frightening one."
Great video, it had some interesting and amazing points of view that I haven't considered before
Alr so just giving my opinion on the whole Mettaton Neo dying in one hit thing. So Mettaton NEO is built as a "HUMAN eradication robot" and Sans and Undyne describe you as "NOT HUMAN" so Mettaton NEO isn't programed to deal with someone like the human in the no mercy route. you've become so dehumanized through all the killing that you've done that nobody, not even a ROBOT sees you as a human.
Nice video, was looking forward to it ever since you announced it on twitter.
Eyy, thanks! It took a lot longer than I expected, but I am at least happy with the end result. Hopefully it'll perform well, since my last few vids have been hit or mess in terms of analytics. Either way, I can at least say I am happy with the end result here.
I quit at undyne. She was more determined than me. In any other rout I can stay determined. But killing everyone… I’m a sentimental guy.
I've recently rediscovered Undertale content have been binging your content. I don't know how to give a compliment but your content is enjoyable
Sans being so prominent in the fandom/au scene is honestly so weird to me, when asriel/flowey is right there (which is what i chose, though it's complicated)?
14:15
THIS POINT IS SOOO GOOD TO MAKE!!! BECAUSE YOU CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT!!!
The one with the most Determination is practially the one that determines fate in a way.
I was barely able to beat undyne after a day of grinding the fight out. and then... sans, well... There's a reason I never beat him legitamatly. He just had too much determination, more than I did. (same with No Mercy Ceroba and Martlet's if you count them...)
One could say that characters in universe has their determination too. So it LITERALLY IS a battle of determination. And such can be said even for non UT games. Me lacking the determination is the reason it took me 3 YEARS to finish Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon and Explorers of Darkness (both games all of yall should play, btw) The characters and the world were just... So much more determined than me, and they won out.
When Sans said in snowdin,that we are pretending to be a human... *i felt that.*
YEAH, it's so interesting? I love what it says about the kind of person you'd have to be to start that kind of route in the first place. That by going this far, you aren't even human.
By doing the genocide route, you effectively dehumanize Frisk.
my absolute favorite detail the no mercy route is that even if you abandon it, the signs of your massacre are still there for the rest of that run. i abandoned my first (and probably only) no mercy run after losing to undyne the undying on turn 2 a good 10 times in a row. the true hero did her job and stopped me in my tracks, allowing the underground to live on. after killing undyne normally instead i went back to the temmie village just to see what would happen. maybe the surviving npcs would return? maybe i could make amends by helping the shopkeeper temmie pay for colleg? maybe i could see that one neutral mushroom dance clip that blew up on tik tok a while back firsthand? but nope... NOTHING. the village was still empty. "but nobody came" still played in the background. shopkeeper temmie still only sold "premiem" temmie flakes. just because i let monster kid go didn't mean i could just magically bring back all the people whose friends and family i laid waste to. i still had to face the consequences of my decision to even TRY the route. *the game remembers.*
Your content is consistently excellent, and I've added you to my 'All' notifications. Keep up the amazing analysis!
The boss encounters in this route are so creepy, it’s like a prototype of horror tale
It’s not the fallen human they are talking about, they are talking about you
We all do things just to see what happens, what happens if we push that guy into an oncoming car levels of curiosity
The game is trying and trying, and in the end when you finally kill sans, he and the game basically mimic one sentence
“You wanted this, you went this far and I tried really really hard to convince you not to continue on this route, but so be it, just don’t come crying to me when it ends poorly for you”
An amazing analysis as usual. I’d expect nothing less from you. I really like the parallels drawn to the ending of OFF, and I think you’re spot on about the No Mercy route of Undertale being at least partially inspired by OFF.
The final battle between the human and Sans, who serves as a sort of judge (since he judges you in the Judgment hall and he represents the Judge tarot card) mirrors the fight between the Batter and Pablo, the Judge, with the player in both of these cases being a sort of puppeteer controlling their puppet to destroy and erase the world. Like you said in the video, this is why the characters refer to you as not being human in Undertale: it’s not merely calling you evil, it’s acknowledging that your character, to do the things that they do in-universe, cannot be a human but a soulless puppet forced to act by an otherwordly being. And that’s exactly what Frisk is in the No Mercy route, that’s why they don’t emote at all, ignore Papyrus’ puzzles etc.
Although the Batter has his own reasons for doing what he does, he and the player are connected through a common goal. At the very beginning of the game, the player is “assigned” to the Batter, who is tasked with a holy mission, and the player must make sure that this mission is fulfilled. The creator of OFF has acknowledged that the Batter’s “Bad Batter” form that you see if you side with the Judge in the final encounter is not the Batter’s “true form”, but merely a change in perspective. This proves that the Batter wasn’t the true mastermind all along, but that he just fully believed in the mission, while the player ditched it at the last moment. And in doing so, the player now sees the Batter as a monster that has to be stopped.
This is quite similar to how Asriel gave up on his and Chara’s plan at the last moment. Or how you can “betray” Chara by choosing not to erase the world at the end of the No Mercy run.
Great video!
Great work!
Thank ye! c:
Another comment (but from my pov this time), but
I’ll always appreciate the other routes much more for their narrative than the no mercy run, but what I actually did like the most from the genocide run was like seeing how much it all affects Frisk as a character tbh. Frisk is a lot more open and self insert-y than Kris is, but Undertale still brings up how Frisk *is* their own person in the pacifist route, and with some of the flavor text you can really see that. So to see this goofball kid turning into a monster themselves is a sight, and a bit creepy. I don’t really believe in the Chara possession making Frisk do things (like walk when told not to) because it’s not like Chara themselves is literally forcing our & Frisk’s hand to do this, we always have the option to back out, until the very end anyway. It’s literally just the effects of us and how LOVE is brought up in the game that changes Frisk.
However, I think my favorite moment of it is when you abort the run in Hotland. You brought it up about how much the speech changes if we fail the kill count, and I think it’s really interesting too. Even if us, the players, strike at Mettaton will precise aim and such, Mettaton will still say they noticed Frisk was hesitating, even if we players weren’t. While we simply rushed before completing the count, Frisk themself is not willing to go all the way because you basically didn’t give them that last push.
And of course after getting dunked Sans pointing out how genuinely furious Frisk looks after the spare betrayal is another stand out moment.
Tbh I like silent Mc character study basically
Ooh, these are some fun observations! But one thing I find so interesting is how any time you abort the run, it kinda snaps back into place. Mettaton NEO has his unique dialogue if you fail/abort the run, but everything after is par the course. The monsters still tell you the story. Sans still gives his neutral judgment. Asgore's fight and Flowey's battle are as you would expect, though I believe Flowey's dialogue does change, at least.
Yeah, and while realistically you’d think there still be a big change considering if you kept going all the way till hotland, Monsters shouldn’t & wouldn’t come out to greet you, it does make the encounter with Asgore being the same more emotional & bitter in a way. With him asking you if you have anything else you want to go back to before the fight, but at this point us and frisk is hated by generally everyone left alive, what is there to go back to in this run? And how Chara says “but there was nothing to say” showing how Frisk cannot or will not talk to Asgore at this point after everything that happened really drives the depressing end this feels. i love neutral runs
Actually I think you showed this pretty well with what Gerson said in Inverted Fate about how “LV is one hell of a drug” or something like that! It really interesting how Frisk and Chara with their narration seem to basically snap out of it once you go off the route, even if you kept on killing it doesn’t revert back to something sinister beside maybe a few details
Theres another secret ingredient to this narrative, imo: stats DONT make you stronger in Undertale. At least, not enough to offset the potential you could obtain without increasing your LV:
1: "just dont get hit, bruh"
In most rpgs, you cant beat bosses at all if you're too weak, because you die before you can finish the fight. But in Undertale, you can just evade attacks, so even if more hp and defense can give you a buffer. Therefore, you dont have a good moral excuse to NEED more power to simply avoid dying
2: "Who needs knives?! Ive got friends!": Attack Power is usually incredibly valuable for ending battles, but you can ignore fighting in 99% of undertale battles to instead use your charisma to woo enemies to your side.
3: "What is a god to a nonbeliever?"
Finally, one thing UT shares with other rpgs is that abilities are often more powerful than better stats. even in the greediest way possible, your combat reward for being a saint far outweighs any flat damage bonus:
IMMORTALITY.
The holy grail of any video game ability, being able to simply deny having been hurt and continue like nothing ever happened. In most games, you need to jump thru massive hopes to get even conditional invulnerability. But here?
No matter how many hitpoints or defense points you gain, you will never reach infinity. If you want to be truly the most unbreakable, unstoppable entity in this world, you cant get that by butchering. You can only obtain such immense power by having something worth protecting with that power.
Only thr meekest and humblest of all humans can become something to make gods kneel.
Thanks for the new video
Awesome Video
I love geno because it "tortures" you. The eerie music and difficult bosses just scream "give up. Its not worth doing". It hurts even more after doing pacifist and seeing monsters you befriended being dead because you were bored.
Also it plays differently because you just have to do one thing-use attack. In pacifist you will experiment different ACTs
Interestingly, being forced to sell your soul to Chara was not actually what Toby intended for completion of the Genocide Route. Toby intended for the game to DELETE itself if you were to complete a genocide route which falls in line with Chara destroying the world. Unfortunately Toby couldn’t figure out how to code that in which is why we got being forced to sell our souls instead.
actually that's a myth, the real reason why undertale doesn't delete itself is because toby tought it would be too virus-like
@@StarFried part of me wish he did, wonder how discussion around it would have changed if you knew that the game would be gone if you tried.
deletes it from your library and you have to buy it again 😈
Whats your opinion on the Vengeance route of Undertale Yellow? I think its an interesting equivilant of No Mercy. Like how No Mercy is a corrupted form Determination, the feeling of going through with something to see the end. The Vengance route is a corruption of Justice. You become the judge ,jury ,and executioner.
Yeah, it's a really interesting alternative approach to the route, focused more on a narrative rather than being quite as meta. Not to say there isn't any meta to it, but it's decidedly more "in the world" than UT's version.
So i literally posted this before you actually mentioned UTY in the video! Thats what I get for not watching it all the way through.
@@Dorkedre in-universe to say.
Honestly, I've come to see the reward of undertale to be seeing how the game can change. How much my choices matter. How little things will impact a run. It's actually how neutral runs have become my favourite of all (the true pacifist and genocide are very interesting as well, but they're very specific, while neutral truly allows you free decision making and has a variety of consequences. I always like to see _which_ neutral someone has gotten first honestly).
I found that neutral undyne kill is the saddest fight in the game
26:37 the editing is such a cool way to combine both scenes.
Thanks! I did a bit more ambitious editing for some parts of this than I usually do 'cause I thought it'd look cool.
One thing I always find fascinating about the Genocide route is how many opportunities it gives you to abort the route without doing a Reset, and yet still changes the nature of the story and characters in the end. Even if, say, you decide to spare Papyrus or Mad/Glad Dummy or Monster Kid, or abort the route in Hotland, the consequences of the Genocide route up to those points might still partly carry over even when you go over to Neutral.
23:32 As soon as the *VERY FIRST NOTE* of Megalovania started playing, like, HALF of it got to play and an ad popped up
That was hilarious timing lol
Great analysis! Love getting more light on the whole concept of the route instead of just Sans
Very good video! I think you covered the route and what it’s about excellently!
Y’know, this reminds me of the Pokémon CreepyBlack version hack; you cursed (killed) every Pokémon and every trainer just because you’re curious, and while filling your curiosity can feel fun, in the end, it just makes you feel bad. And your own ghost turns on you, to curse you. It’s all your fault, so you suffer the consequences.
I never thought of it before, but I guess Chara is similar to that ghost. They work with you, but you’re who’s guiding them. In the end, they won’t let you forget what you’ve done.
I’ve played the No Mercy run before due to this curiosity, and mainly due to wanting to play the Sans fight. After reaching Flowey, I reset, because I didn’t want to lock myself out of a good Pacifist ending despite already playing Pacifist xD It also made me feel bad, as it does in Deltarune and fangames like TS!Underswap and Undertale Yellow. I love these characters, and yet I’m killing them. Despite them making me feel terrible, though, my curiosity strangely adds enough fun to the sad routes to carry me through them.
I always reset and do Pacifist again to leave the game’s world in a nice state, though, and I guess I never play No Mercy more than once.
With sans being the priority of the genocide route I thought you just fought him no matter what.
It was my first time playing the game, I just got into core, and I was excited. I knew sans what up ahead. I beat mettaton and looked at my love, I was lv 15. I thought to myself “wait… that’s not right. I’m not high enough level, aren’t I supposed to be level 19?” I got to the judgement hall and sure enough, I didn’t fight him. I was so excited when I saw the yellow of the hall too. I was disappointed when I didn’t fight him. I hot to the Asgore fight and it went as normal, although I still was confused on what I did wrong. I did neutral about 15 - 20 more times after that. And then I finally did a genocide. “It’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would” I said to myself. I got to waterfall and I knew I was halfway. When I got to the bridge with monster kid, I noticed that his dialog was different, and I was a little confused. When Undyne showed up, I was surprised and I thought it was gonna be a one hit kill like Toriel and Papyrus were. Boy was I wrong. I “killed” her and she went on with her monologue. When the screen went white, I thought she dusted like all the others, and then battle against a true hero started playing. I was surprised when I saw undyne the undying. I wasn’t prepared at all since I never saw this before. I ended up dying at least 100-140 times and it took me what felt like 2 months to beat. I finally beat her and I was very happy, when I got to Mettaton, I noticed that their dialogue was different too. I thought it was gonna be another long and challenging battle with them so I was prepared and had my hopes up. I wasn’t excepting a one shot, and when it landed I was dissatisfied and felt like it was a joke like with Undyne. And sure enough, they exploded. I moved on, I was remembered the story that the monsters told about Asriel and Chara at new home on a neutral route, and I was wondering what would happen, since they were all dead. Then Flowey appeared, I was confused about it. I wasn’t expecting him of all people to show. I went through the new home to Sans, and I couldn’t have been more excited. With all the videos I watched of people beating him, I thought I was prepared for his battle… I couldn’t have been more wrong. “I got this, this’ll be an easy fight” sure enough, I died on the first attack. When I got past it, I checked his stats. “1 ATK 1 DF. The easiest enemy, can only deal one damage” with “the easiest enemy” part I knew it was a joke and I though to myself “he doesn’t have 1 ATK, he has several different attacks” (at this point I didn’t know attack as a stat meant damage, I thought it meant how many different attacks they used) after dying at least 120 times, I made it to his break attack. Unknowingly, I spared him. I didn’t know what was about to come. He killed me, I thought it was a joke, it wasn’t. When I got back there, without hesitation, I pressed fight. I was furious with him. When I got to his last attack, I knew this was the end, I ended up dying at least 20 times to that. When I got past it, I killed him and I was glad that it was finally over. “I died at least 260-300 times” I thought, but I’m glad it’s over now.
i love it when people mention off when talking about undertale, especially how you mentioned how that game’s ending could be a big inspiration to the no mercy run. the more you look at it, that game has a lot more impact than ppl might think.
looking at you, old fedora papyrus who is definitely not dedan
This video is truly terryfiyng for me
At first, I was excited about getting to know THE route from one of the most influential indie games of our time, but then, near the end
I've met a mirror.
I'm prone to hyperfixating on games, watching endless videos, playthroughs, essays, listenning to OSTs until there is nothing left or the subject becomes too familiar to me for it to be interesting. I'm that completionist, who will skin the game, tear away all flesh, grind every single bone in a fine powder, who will not stop until the end
I've looked into that mirror and was stunned, because I've seen myself too clearly.
But unlike others, I will not do all of that myself. I always complete the game I'm in love with once, making my choices, and leave it alone. But after that my morbid curiousity will sway me to learn about every single ending, every single choice, every outcome, every single bit and byte of content, and yet my hands are clean in the end
I hate mirrors.
I thought my Undertale phase was over but then i watched this entire 40-minute video, haha!
Great stuff, I honestly miss the days when content like this was more widespread about Undertale itself! It's all fangames and AUs these days, which don't get me wrong, are amazing! But you just can't beat the OG, at least for me!
There are definitely some fantastic fangames and AUs out there! It's just the ones that are more in-depth are often buried in the sea of AU Sans battles and Sans AUs. Not to say people are wrong to enjoy those, of course! But I do think there's some overlooked gems. Maybe at some point I'll do a video talking about them.
Thanks for the kind words!
00:56 then the shuckle makes small detail juice
the use of Umineko music works pretty well, I have to say. reminds me of a certain intellectual… also fun to see just how much deltarune’s weird route is deepening what was already in the no mercy route. pretty good video!
Oh, the Umineko music was absolutely a conscious choice. That VN has so much to say about the relationship with stories and the tendency to want to tear out the guts of a narrative.
Gosh, Undertale has literally altered my way of gaming forever, I love undertale, it’s such a comfort game for me, I’ve played it 11 times already and yet I still come back for more, but the one thing that always puzzled me was the fact I could never do a genocide route, I would always feel guilty, like I was betraying there trust. Anyways I was kinda rambling, I’ve always liked the little details of the genocide route, even though I could never do it, it always kinda been my favorite, probably because of Chara but shhh, so finding a ACTUAL genocide route video that doesn’t talk about sans 24/7 is so refreshing, thank you! Also do you have any in-depth videos about Chara? I really enjoy your videos and would love it you had a Chara vid! 😋
I was reading the comments and got into the one about how the fandom is re-descovering why undertale is so good and I couldn’t agree more. The last week i re played both undertale and deltarune and god how much things i forgot along the way of fanon media. Don’t get me wrong, fanon media is a good thing for every fandom, and I think undertale has a special meaning that others don’t, as the fact that technically AU’s are part of the main game because of timeline changes, and I get extremely happy that even after almost 9 years of a game and 3 years of another the fandom is just growing and it is still standing strong, but i found myself forgetting the basic things like flowey being Asriel and getting shocked with this just like I did on the first time. Keep doing this type of videos they are awesome
You know, I think Papyrus knows that he could never hurt anyone and probably wouldn't make a good royal guard in most situations. He just wants friends and admiration so he probably knows that Undyne is lying to him but is cool with it because she still spends time with him.
Funnily, I did a whole video on the Undyne lie. It's possible Papyrus is onto her. I just wish we'd seen a conversation between the two about it, haha.
@@Dorked Fair enough. (I did see that video ).
So much dialogue I didn't know. The Muffet and Mettaton ones surprised me 0_0. I swear Chara had a reaction to you trying to quit the game or something... weird, but nice video.
The Muffet one is REALLY well hidden because you have to deliberately draw out the fight in order to see it. The MTT one is also super situational, since you only get it if you don't exhaust the counter.
@@Dorked I just watched your Muffet video, and I can't believe Muffet doomed THE WHOLE Underground due to her being self-centered and only looking out for herself and the spiders. I really thought she was a caring/nice monster at first, but it turns out it's THE OPPOSITE. I hope for more content from you!