Team Hatoful presents the Undertale Demo - Part 4

[davidn]

It's the final part of the Undertale demo! In this, we realize what we now have to do, and head to the final confrontation, which I attempt to resolve in the most peaceful manner possible.

Please have a supply of buckets for tears on standby, and curb any temptations for extreme violence towards plants that this video might unexpectedly awaken in you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1bP0dUPdEA

Comments

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

18, 22, 20, 18, 331!? That's either the worst case of plot-scripted hax I've ever seen (I'm looking at you, Breath of Fire 3 plot-unwinnable battles that trick me into using all my healing items), or critical hits in this game are orders of magnitude stronger than they have any right to be. I know some things can fail so hard they loop round into being awesome again, but to be so awesome that it loops over into failure? Really?

Also, fuck you Flowey, you venomous little weed. I realise that getting rid of a goat with fire-based magic seems like a double-win from the point of view of a rotten dandelion, but seriously. Spellcasting: W - E - E - D - O - L...

Would it be possible for Team Hatoful to play something that isn't... I dunno, deeply emotionally traumatising next?

D.F.

[kjorteo]

Next we're getting the ending where we don't do that. :D

After that, I can't really speak for everyone else, but I personally am sort of thinking of going along with literally anything anyone else proposes to make it up to them that I put them through this.

[davidn]

Yes, it... tricks you - it makes you believe there's no other option, so you experiment with whittling down her health with the intention of sparing her later... and just when it looks like you're getting somewhere, there's that sudden huge critical hit that overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt that you even thought about hurting her to get through the battle. Games are the only medium that can so effectively kill a character and then tell you that you did it...

We do seem to be developing a trademark here, don't we :) I'm hoping to at least keep the rest of my videos light!

[kjorteo]

I'd just like to point out that, as sorry as I am for having done this to you, your Big No was absolutely perfect.

[raptorianone.livejournal.com]

I was more amused by the Big FU(beep)

[kjorteo]

Also, there are ways to do even more damage than that, but those involve being on the paths for the really bad endings, and we are absolutely not doing that.

I mean, if someone has the demo and is curious, I can tell you how to do it. You can take care of that on your own if you really want to (you don't.) But even I (and you know me and my insatiable lust for heartbreaking content!) flat-out refuse to do ... that.

[premchaia_pre4]

Oh, what this tempts me to say.

[kjorteo]

Also also, I see Flowey hate like your comment there and Xaq's at the end of the video absolutely everywhere and I can totally understand why, but ... mfmfmfmfm. I have such a complicated in-depth point I want to bring up on that note, but it involves spoilers from the good ending.

REMIND ME, BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT

[premchaia_pre4]

Mmhmm. Eheheheheh. AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Ahem.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

It's simply amazing to me, how in just an hour this game establishes itself as something so special.

I can probably count the number of games where I've felt real emotions towards the characters on one hand, and then this demo takes itself to that level so passionately, and so immediately.

The other games that have made me feel for the characters have always been me reacting to something that happens, PMD2's ending sequence, the reveals of various Phoenix Wright final cases, the various sacrifices in Cave Story.

But then, this is first where the the tragedy is your own conscious doing. I think everybody who plays through this finds themselves refusing to fight Toriel, and then in desperation whittling her down hoping she'll accept mercy at low health.

(In my first playthrough my final hit on her had the attack bar dead center and I thought that was some instant one hit KO for timing it right)

It's weird how games have been capable of this for a good 30+ years, but so few come remotely close to offering anything this game does. 30 years and it's extraordianrily unique to have a game where you have enemies and the solution to them isn't punching or shooting them until they stop moving is virtually nil.

I had heard a decent number of things about this game in bits and pieces beforehand. (And you totally missed out by not calling her Mom on the phone and then flirting with her afterwards.) I planned to just wait for the full release because why get excited for a game that's god knows how far off? Then another friend was upset he couldn't get somebody to play it and so I made sure to when he asked me to as well, and good lord. It's funny to think how it's all just a demo because it stands better on its own right now than most games ever do.

Since you haven't yet, be sure to plug the Kickstarter! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002143342/undertale

[davidn]

It really does grasp your heart very early on - I can't name a game that's had such a prominent... mother figure in it, who teaches you empathy instead of strength and literally holds your hand through the first puzzle, making you form a real attachment to her from the moment she appears... and then blaming you for her death! It seems like that cruel trap happens to everyone...

[kjorteo]

I totally meant to plug the Bandcamp page when we were recording this, but I forgot. See, this was recorded back before there was a Kickstarter and there was an FAQ on the official Tumblr more or less saying "yeah I don't have anything like that but if you want to throw money at the project buy the soundtrack, I guess."

and just like the Flowey thing I hinted at above, I have SO MUCH I want to say about Toriel in response to all that but I should probably wait for the good ending (well more making David get all the relevant-to-her-character dialogue we missed along the way on the first playthrough, but either way.)

One thing I can say now, though: the game brilliantly handles the player's sense of trust. It starts you out with Your Best Friend, Flowey, who turns out to be ... well. Then Toriel comes along, and the player isn't sure whether to trust her because the player is probably a bit rattled by the last trust exercise from, what, ten seconds ago. Toriel keeps the player tentative throughout the entire game--she is kind and loving, reassuring, sweet, and instantly empathetic, but if the player thinks about it hard enough there are some hints that something may not be 100% there with her.

She is really mothering. Really, really mothering. The first three puzzles in the game are almost insultingly easy to anyone who has ever played a video game before, but rather than even giving you the slightest chance, she automatically solves two of them for you and vandalizes the one in between them with big giant "PRESS THIS ONE" arrows and circles. She gets you all worked up that she's asking some horrifically scary test of independence, and then that turns out to be nothing more than "walk from one side of this long empty hallway to the other." (There aren't even any encounters there.) The player is clearly meant to be somewhere between "goatmom is the best <3" and "um, you know, I can probably handle this, you don't have to... sigh."

Then you get to her home and it's the warmest sweetest location in the game, but the suspicion that there's another shoe to be dropped intensifies; she won't let you into her mysterious creepy basement, and she won't let you leave. Clearly something isn't right ... right?

It's only in hindsight, after you can finally stop wondering "is Toriel going to turn evil" and look back on everything that happened now that you no the answer is "no," that she really was as genuinely compassionate as she appeared the entire time, and everything she did really was for you, and you were suspicious of a kindly old goatmom who was completely innocent the entire time. And then you killed her, maybe, if you didn't get the good ending anyway

We didn't do this, but when I played on my own, rather than immediately walk through the door and run into Flowey again, I first walked back into the house, and just ... took in everything. The bedroom she had prepared just for me. The bookshelves that were her only entertainment before I arrived. The pie. And I felt bad not only for killing her, but for ever having doubted her. :(

[davidn]

I don't think I adequately conveyed how much Flowey scared the life out of me when he transformed - I thought I was in a tutorial, I wasn't really paying much attention, and then suddenly... that evil face and the shaking text... my hand had reflexively gone to Alt+F4, which fortunately/unfortunately did nothing! Just after that, I was pretty uneasy about... not Toriel specifically, but really anything that this game was going to do - especially in that long walk with the appropriately-named scary music playing.

Toriel definitely isn't evil, but I wonder how innocent you could truly call her... she honestly believes that keeping the human in her home is the best for her, not even considering that she might want to go back to her real home, but she knows from the start that she's going to do that without telling the human and reacts to the request to leave by attempting to seal off the exit forever.

It's odd that she leaves the player alone suddenly after babying you through three puzzles, although I suppose she did say to wait for her rather than trying to go off on your own... still, it's a sudden change from her very protective attitude up until then for the sake of baking a surprise pie, and nobody who's ever played any game before is really going to spend even a moment sitting there.

[premchaia_pre4]

Hmhmhmhmhm. Suppose you were living isolated underground and had ample evidence that you were the most powerful thing around after spending so long adapting to it, and saw creatures whom you empathized with so strongly repeatedly falling in by accident. You have the resources to give them marginally acceptable lives there, but not the resources to get them out safely. Every last one of them so far has been ignorant or careless of the danger ahead and perished ignominiously after you allowed them their choice; they may well be perfectly knowledgeable about some other world, but as a result they get overconfident in this one, and they can't think of any reason to listen to you.

Would your emotions be fully stable after all that?

And do you allow it the next time?

(Perhaps keeping in mind that the question comes from someone whose predecessor, in the same physical form, seems to have had some form of posttraumatic augh whose trigger(-ish) was basically “foundational aspects of human civilization”, of course.)

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Naughty Teo. . . . How did you create this Flowey voice? It seems so impossible to emulate, yet so fitting for the character. .

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

(I guess this is mostly directed at Kjorteo, but for lack of a relevant post...)

I've been waiting for discussions of the the next Undertale recording session to come up before bringing this up, but really it's probably better said sooner rather than later -- I'm just going to bow out of this one. Hatoful managed to have enough great stuff to counteract most of how miserable it is -- Undertale just undermines everything it goes to the trouble of setting up. There are ways for these ideas to work, but this isn't it, and judging from Radiation's twitter he isn't even INTERESTED in finding them, just in making sure everyone gets the ending he wanted, to hell with the thesis of the other 90% of the demo... I nearly bowed out beforehand, but I agreed to see how it turned out, and it DID turn out better than I expected, but I like the actual game even less and less the more I think about it (and the more I learn about Radiation), and there aren't even enough roles to go around *anyway*, so it's not like I'm leaving you with holes to fill or something. Unless I find out that he's somehow learned a lot about storytelling before the full game comes out, I just don't think this holds anything for me.

[davidn]

I believe that if we start up Undertale again it's just going to be reloading the last save and then righting the wrongs I committed last time (unless there's a huge other section to the demo that I haven't seen as a result of going the right route - after Hatoful I'm suspicious of everything) - possibly combined with the Hatoful manga readings?

I was expecting more roles from a streamed game as well, this turned more into a shared commentary with little game speech here and there - you're welcome to sit out of the remainder of the demo if you want to, but just know that Napstablook would not have been the same without you :)

You're talking about the game's betrayal in rather general terms (I should mention to others that RavenWorks and I talked about this at some length after the last session) - is it just the moment at the end where it suddenly leads you against the expectations that you've built up, or is there more to it than that? There's no doubt that Radiation wanted the player to be led into the ending that I got here, but to do it in a way that made it seem like my own choice when nothing else seemed possible.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

It's basically all the ways that the game forced me to stop investing in it like a story I'm roleplaying, and start treating it like I'm playing a video game on a computer. It was bad enough when the game didn't provide any option to just stay at Toriel's house, but the real clincher was when the game just grabs the wheel away from you during the Toriel fight.... I know you said that you felt like you had killed her, David, but for me that was just the moment that I stopped feeling like *I* was doing ANYTHING in the game. The falseness of the whole thing just snapped into focus, and it stopped being my story, and started being Radiation's, and the idea of finding the sequence of inputs that would result in my character not doing that against my will just felt like hunting for a secret exit in Super Mario World. Until then I had been emotionally invested in the consequences of my own actions (what with the whole battle system built around that concept), but Toriel's awkwardly-scripted death just cemented the growing suspicion that I was just on a plot conveyor belt after all.

There would be other ways of making that point -- introduce critical hits in earlier battles, so its arrival in Toriel's fight isn't so implausible; have it related to your choice to bring a knife to her fight rather than sticking with the safer stick; have fights in this game simply NOT have an HP bar (not an unusual conceit!), so that you never know, going in, whether or not it's safe to hit her....

The other thing is the issue of Toriel's house, which I do want to touch on again..... The argument could be made that "well you're free to stay there and have nothing happen".... but that just spells out the artificiality of it again; games like this always acknowledge your actions with some dialogue, some story, maybe a cutscene.... being able to stand perfectly still in a room isn't a satisfying thing to do with your character, because no text comes along to smooth over the awkwardness of a sprite on a map the way it does when you do something that the game acknowledges.

But even with any of those changes implemented, there's a more fundamental problem... I might have shrugged it all off as the game just being poorly-made, if I hadn't seen the creator's twitter:

https://twitter.com/FwugRadiation/status/343113499658051585
https://twitter.com/aedavis/status/343128518319800320
https://twitter.com/FwugRadiation/status/343129492627267584

This isn't just "he started writing a cheque his talent couldn't cash". I might have suffered through that out of curiosity. This is "he deliberately started setting up what would seem like a game that people could invest in, specifically to prank them". And I don't know how it seems like so many people got through the scripted Toriel fight while still retaining any emotional connection to the gameplay, but I can't, DOUBLY so knowing that the experience was deliberate, not just incompetence. The ENTIRE DEMO is just a macro-scale equivalent of that first pull-the-rug-out-ha-ha encounter with Flowey.

So yeah! I mean I can see why someone like Kjorteo would still get off on a story like this, but Hatoful is ALREADY slightly past what I'm able to be comfortable with, and this is leagues worse, with the only un-nullified redeeming factor being the soundtrack (which I can enjoy comfortably context-free in iTunes) and Toriel's character design which I can enjoy comfortably context-free on furaffinity. This just isn't for me. It initially gave me the impression that it might be, but the more I learn, the clearer it is that I was just mistaken professing interest in the first place.

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

Raven, I respect your choice to bow out. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we would still appreciate your presence and some commentary, but if you feel that your experience with Undertale is not worth the time invested, don't do it for our sakes.

The thread above this comment makes me think that the team needs to just sit down and have a big talk about what direction we want to go in. If we want to continue playing games together, then we have to make a solid decision about the kinds of games we want to experience together. Genres, themes, so on and so forth. If it happens that we just have to lie dormant for a while, or do things in different groups, then I think we have to decide pretty soon.

I propose we sit down in IRC some evening this week or next and really figure out what our goals are as a team now that our main project is done. I feel a little pressured now that we have a surprisingly large number of fans. I feel as if we have to do something on a fairly regular basis for the people who enjoy our work. If I am responsible for our public face, and if I have taken on some leadership roles, I have to know what our boundaries are. I need to know that I am doing okay and not, in fact, dragging people into something they don't want to do.

There are a lot of games out there, and to have 5 different people agree on what to play is just like ordering toppings on pizza. It's even worse if it's a mostly blind experience. We also need to figure out what we are doing next week, which is our next clear Saturday - How are we running the good ending's play, how long might that take, and will we do one (or both?) of the manga readings? What will we do *next* after Undertale?

[premchaia_pre4]

>demand anchovy.

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

Anchovies were actually not carried at Undisclosed Pizza Restaurant, but we did have linguica, which is a favorite around here. ...The one a few cities over had chorizo, the spicier variant.

But no anchovy.

[davidn]

The last thing I'd want is for people to feel pressured about this whole thing - it's fantastic that the planned low-key Hatoful readthrough took off as much as it did and that we gained fans from it, but our focus should always be on enjoying ourselves and doing these things among friends, and I don't want this taking up more of people's weekends than it's worth for them (personally, I was very glad to get a break from video editing at the end of Holidaystar, even though what I then did with the time was to start three further video projects).

I think our mistake over the last month when we couldn't one hundred percent agree on anything was that we were actively looking for a game to voice, rather than what made the Hatoful experience stand out in the first place - voicing what we already knew was a very special game. So we may not know definitively what we want to do for a while, and I'm okay with that... the fans will wait, especially if it means that in the end we produce something more enjoyable :)

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

So you are more in favor of just waiting until something amazing comes along? The problem with Hatoful is that few games really match its level of writing. It's literally just like Matt Smith having to follow David Tennant's Doctor. It's hard for ANYONE to succeed after a star like him. If we wait for a game on equal par we may have to wait a *long* time, and we would also expect things out of games that shouldn't be expected.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

If we're doing Undertale mixed in with our next Hatoful (manga) recording, I'm certainly not going to up and leave when we get to that point -- I just don't think I'd be interested in bothering to attend a session put together for nothing but Undertale. (Which obviously isn't an issue at the moment since we're basically finished the demo, but I mean in the future when the full game comes out.)

I share your feeling about the pressure from the fans, but actually I have the opposite response -- rather than putting out regular content, I feel like we have a responsibility to put out quality content.... if I subscribed to someone, I would rather get a great video every few months than mediocre ones all the time....

I think the solution here is not to worry about the strict integrity of "team hatoful" per se..... not in the sense of "breaking up the band" but in terms of band members having side projects. I think David's got the right idea, he's doing videos alone, or with other people, as the project suits.... we've already established that five people doing Undertale was a bit of overkill anyway, so I think the way to have frequent content AND good content is to not be afraid to have smaller groups doing other things instead of feeling forced to find something that exactly all five of us always want to do. (Frankly I think applying the name 'team hatoful' to non-hatoful videos was a bit of a mistake in the first place, and just led to the current awkward situation.... I can certainly understand the desire to keep providing videos to an audience that's going to be starved for content until the next game once we're done the manga, but maybe it would make more sense to put videos like that on the tumblr as "here's some other things the Team Hatoful members are doing!" rather than "hello we're most of team hatoful even though this game isn't a hatoful game!")

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that we have to keep banging out videos. Quality work is definitely the priority, I think that we just don't know our voice yet. We're pretty much two games in - that's not a lot to go on.

I think the biggest issue is that we're all very new to this and are learning what works and what does not as it occurs. Now we know that forcing roles for each member doesn't work, and we're going to have to learn what does work naturally as we eventually cover more material.

Yes, we do need to think about our name - but, do we have a better name to call ourselves?