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:
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.
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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.