Undertale
Dec 17, 2017 11:48:21 GMT -8
Post by Zarnium on Dec 17, 2017 11:48:21 GMT -8
"Say, I've been thinking. Seems like you're gonna fight my brother pretty soon. Here's some friendly advice. If you keep going the way you are now...
...You're gonna have a bad time."
SPOILER WARNING: Only read this if you've played the game already, you never intend to play, or you don't care about seeing spoilers.
I'm late to the Undertale party. This game came out in 2015 and became extremely popular very quickly, but I didn't pay much attention to it at the time. Mostly, I just knew that it was a very short Earthbound-esque psuedo-RPG that had multiple endings, and its primary gimmick was that it remembers what you did on past play-throughs. At the time, I thought that this didn't amount to much more than that little flower guy getting up in your face if you save-scum a bunch. It was not until I finally played it over the last couple weeks that I realized just how insanely deep this mechanic goes, and how effectively the game uses it to involve the player in its narrative.
For the uninitiated, here's how the game basically works: When you encounter an enemy, you can choose to either kill it, or resolve the battle peacefully and spare it. Naturally, this has an effect on the story, as killing or choosing to spare a major character will greatly effect the sort of plot progression and ending you get, and even the amount of regular enemies that you kill has an effect on the story as well. The game is short, and you can play through it multiple times. If you killed someone on your first play-through, you can see what happens if you spare them on your next instead, or do the opposite and kill characters you once spared. You can see what happens as you play more violently, or you can see what happens as you play more peacefully. You can also reset the game without saving and play the same scene multiple times in a row, picking the one you like best, or do something you know you don't want to progress with just to see what happens and then undo it right after. It's just like any other video game with branching story paths, or at least seems to be at first.
There are three basic paths you can take. Most paths involve a mixture of both sparing and killing, and will result in one of many "neutral" endings. You can also choose to spare everyone you meet and go out of your way to be nice to them them, not killing anyone at all, which results in the "pacifist" ending where you befriend all the characters and they all end up happy. The third option is to hunt down and kill every fightable NPC in the game, resulting in a "genocide" ending, the worst possible outcome.
Most people will play the game multiple times to see more than one story path, which requires resetting the game after finishing in order to start again, and may require some resetting during the game in order to figure out what it is you need to do to accomplish what you want to accomplish. At first, it may seem like you can get away with this just as easily as any other game, because you can undo your actions whenever you want and no one will remember what just happened.
No one, that is, except for Flowey, a sadistic little talking flower who has the ability to remember what you've done whenever you reset the game. If you've reset the game at all during the first area, he'll show up and call you out on it, especially if you killed someone and then brought them back to life. You can continue resetting unabated if that's your desire, but Flowey will always be watching. Furthermore, resetting will not always erase everyone else's memories entirely. Dialogue can differ very slightly the second time you go through a scene, reflecting the choices that you've made before. None of this stops you from resetting and rewriting the narrative to suit your whims, but it does become clear very quickly that the game knows what you're doing and doesn't completely let it go.
You eventually discover how Flowey is able to remember your actions after resetting if you play the game enough, though the exact time and place varies depending on what you do. It turns out that Flowey used to have the ability to "SAVE" and "LOAD" and "RESET" just like the player, and he was using this ability to go through the same time loops over and over again and do whatever he wanted without consequences. Over time, he exhausted the "friendly" options for interacting with the other people in his world, and when he became bored with this, he started tormenting them instead just to see what would happen. He came to view the other inhabitants of his world as nothing more than scripted actors who do the same things over and over again.
Once you discover this, it creates a rather disturbing parallel. This creepy villain character that you've been fighting against behaves the way he does because he's used to acting in the same way the player has been up to this point, by re-writing reality to suit his interests at the expense of erasing accomplishments that others have made, and visiting suffering on them under the auspices that it doesn't matter because it can all be reset. To make matters worse, if you start the game up again after you complete the happy "pacifist" ending, Flowey appears and begs you not to reset the game again; everyone's happy, and if you destroy their accomplishments, you're no better than he used to be, and you'd be doing exactly what it is you just fought so hard to stop.
The thing is, though, anyone who knows anything about this game knows that they haven't seen everything yet. There's still the genocide path, the one where you murder everyone. And you've probably gotten everything you wanted out of the pacifistic options at this point, so the only way to see everything the game has to offer is to reset, undo the happy ending, and start killing your friends.
Before I started playing the game, I was initially planning to go through all three story paths provided I didn't simply get bored of the game altogether first. However, while playing through the pacifist path, I began to have second thoughts. This game is very charming, and the characters are remarkably well-drawn for how short the game is. They're cute, they're funny, they're lovable, and even if they start out as your enemy, they'll always give you compassion and offer friendship if you give them the chance. Killing them just for fun seemed not only very unpleasant, but morally wrong, somehow, as though they were real people living in my computer.
I wouldn't normally have any issue with playing a game in whatever manner I needed to to see everything in it, but Undertale has a sort of chronological persistance that most other games don't have. It remembers what you did, and will remind you of this in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Resetting doesn't really reset everything, which ultimately results in one, continuous sequence of events that begins when you boot up the game for the first time and ends when you stop playing it forever, and there's no way to truly avoid this. This results in it feeling surprisingly real and vivid in a way I've never experienced before.
I eventually decided that my hesitance was irrational, and I'd just go ahead and complete the game on genocide mode because I just had to see everything that was in this game, and I wouldn't feel like I completed it without doing so. My experience with the game up to this point had been that playing nice got you the best rewards, but it doesn't give you everything, and I wanted everything. So, I ignored Flowey's pleas, reset the game, and started slaughtering everyone I met.
I knew in broad strokes what the genocide path is supposed to be like, but actually playing it turned out to be way worse than I thought. Everything that's normally fun about the game is absent. First of all, in order to actually kill everyone in the game, you have to wander around in circles for hours in order to run into enough random encounters to hit your kill quota. This is very boring and monotonous, and leaves you with nothing to think about other than the unpleasantness of what you're doing. Furthermore, even when you're not fighting, the game's ambience gets extremely depressing and creepy very fast.
Entire towns that were previously filled with happy citizens are deserted, having fled to safety after hearing that a bloodthirsty maniac is coming for them. The few who stay are either terrified of you or treat you like the devil incarnate. There are way fewer cutscenes, and none of them are funny or charming like they used to be, being designed to make you feel guilty or saddened instead. At several points in the game, people describe you as appearing like some sort of hideous demon, "covered in dust" from monster corpses and "shambling from place to place." The music is also either slowed down and sounds depressing, or it's replaced entirely with an ominous, creepy droning noise.
The worst part, however, is that you have to murder all of the friends you've made. Every single one of them, one after the other, while they make heart-wrenching speeches about how they either want to give you a second chance or how much they despise you this time around, and your only option if you want to continue down this route is to be ridiculously cruel to them no matter what. Your interactions are usually fairly brief, however, and I was always relieved when I'd gotten past one of them and didn't have to think about it anymore. I kept doing this, until I was finally stopped near the end my run by one character, Sans.
Let's backtrack a bit. Sans is a cute little skeleton guy in a hoodie who you meet early in the game, and while he's never directly involved in progressing the plot the way the other major characters are, he appears more often than anyone else and acts as a kind of a moral guide to the player. He's always there to make a bad joke, offer up a wisecrack, or give a bit of moral support. He'll take the player out to a restaurant a couple times, where you have the lengthiest conversations in the game with him. Towards the end, he always shows up before the final boss and makes the player reflect on the choices they've made and whether they were the right ones or not, and during a neutral play-through's ending, he'll call the player on the phone to tell them what's been going on since they've left.
He's a likeable, friendly character, but something still seems a bit off about him at times. It's not quite explained why he keeps tabs on you to an extent that rivals even Flowey, or how and why he sees fit to provide you with cryptic judgement at the end of the game. While he's usually very affable, he can also be sort of creepy at times. If you act unusually violent on a neutral run, he'll pretend to be friendly before offering some very cutting remarks in the judgement scene, and even on a completely peaceful run there's one point where he says that you'd be "dead where you stand" if he hadn't made a promise to protect the humans who enter his realm. I initially took this to mean that if he hadn't been protecting me off-screen I'd have been killed by someone else by now, but looking back, it sounds very much like blatant threat, or a warning that you're messing with forces you don't truly understand.
When you get to the judgement scene in the genocide run, you find out the explanation for his odd behavior. And while he explains himself, you have to fight him, which you don't do in any other play-through.
Unlike the fights with most of the other characters on the genocide path, the encounter with Sans is not brief, and he doesn't die in one hit. Instead, his fight is the most absurdly difficult boss fight I've ever played in my life. You need to have pixel-perfect precision in order to dodge his attacks, and there is no margin for error. He cheats in ways that no other character does; he removes your post-hit invincibility so that even a minor brush with one of his projectiles does a huge amount of damage, and he also has the ability to cut his attacks out suddenly and replace them with an entirely different pattern in just a split-second, making them very difficult to predict. You have to really be determined to get past this fight, you have to really want it. The worst part is, he has an incredibly painful speech that he delivers, which paints him as a very tragic figure and will cast a shadow over everything you've done up to this point, in both this playthrough and all the others. You can watch the whole thing here (well, most of it, I couldn't find a good video with all of his pre-battle speech), but a section of it is quoted below, truncated for brevity:
Through means that are never entirely explained (albeit hinted at if you pay close enough attention), he knows that you've been resetting the world and altering reality, and he's known the whole time. He doesn't retain memories from the reset timelines, at least not in full, but he knows that you've done bad things and then reset them like it didn't matter, and he knows that you lead him and his people towards a happy ending and then ripped it away in order to wreak terror and destruction upon them. Even worse, it's clear that this has been going on for years due to Flowey's influence, and Sans has known about it all along, unable to do much of anything about it, or even be consciously aware of it when it happens, trapped in an uncertain nightmare that no one else would believe or understand even if he told them.
You could have stopped this when you wrested control of the reset power from Flowey, but instead, you continued the cycle, and this is the result. Sans tried to guide you down the right path, but you refused his help, and now that you're bent on pursuing the worse possible path, he has no choice but to directly confront you and convince you to stop in one last act of desperation. If the warnings that you've received up to this point weren't enough, you have it spelled out right here, in no uncertain terms; you've been doing bad things, and the game knows it, and it knows why you're doing them. This is the most blatant that any character ever gets that they think you're some horrible Lovecraftian monstrosity for wielding your power over time and space in an irresponsible manner for your own selfish ends.
Each time you die and restart his fight, you have to listen to his speech again, confronted by the implications of what you've been doing, by a beloved character that you used to be friends with who gave you multiple chances for redemption that you threw in his face. At one point, he even offers to forgive you if you'll stop, and be friends again. If you take up his offer, he kills you instantly with an unavoidable attack, and says "If we're really friends, you won't come back."
I spent multiple evenings and at least four hours on just this boss battle, and must have gone through it at least a hundred times. It's grueling. It's both emotionally and physically exhausting. After awhile, it becomes clear what his plan is. He knows he can't win, because you'll just reset and come back to fight him again.What he's trying to do... is make you so frustrated, bored, or depressed that you'll stop playing the game, and to make it clear that your actions have consequences. And that's exactly what I did, I stopped playing the game.
Going into this, I was sure that I was going to get through this part with no problem, but I simply can't continue anymore. I'd have to spend four more hours practicing it just so that I could "win," only to go on to commit further atrocities for no reason that I can't really take back. It would be a horrifying, depressing slog. I'd be able to press through if this was just an unusually difficult fight in any other game, but knowing that there's nothing but guilt and misery at the end has sapped all of my motivation.
This game just feels too real. It will outsmart everything you do, it will predict every possible way that you could play and then make a counterattack against it. It will remember everything that happens, and find some way to make you feel guilty. It will invite you to do terrible things, but in such a way that it's clearly your own fault if you give in. It transcends the normal limitations and expectations of video games in ways that are both fascinating and absurdly creepy. It can be a very pleasant and positive experience if you let it, but it will turn deeply into psychological horror if you go a different way.
Of course, after quitting, I looked up the rest of the ending on Youtube. If you kill Sans and continue on to the next room, you're presented with the choice of whether to destroy the world or not by a character who's implied to be the embodiment of all the violent actions you've taken. Even if you say no, this character destroys the world anyway, and the only way to reset again is to sell your soul. Then every pacifist ending you get on your copy of the game will end with this character taking control, and it's implied they do something nasty off-screen. Sans' speech even implies that he knows about this; it's only on a play-through where this is in danger of happening that he actively tries to stop you, since he knows his world can't be reset to a happier state afterwards the way it has been before.
In the end, your hubris in thinking that you were above the consequences results in you losing control and having to live with what you've done, no backsies. Even if you hack the game to remove this, you may still wonder if this is any better, since it represents the ultimate wielding of abusive power to mold the world to your own whims, and you'll always know what you did. Of course, it's still just a game, and what you do in it doesn't really matter... but it does matter within the context of the game, and if you want to hold on to any of the happy, enjoyable parts of it without them feeling tainted, there are certain lines you can't cross.
I didn't actually get all of that on my run-through of the game, but that's fine. I had what I'd consider a more valuable experience; I fully intended to play the game in one way, but was convinced to back out and play it differently, in a manner I did not plan on and that I never suspected was possible. Maybe since I genuinely stopped because of my own guilt rather than some pre-determined rationalization about why what I was doing is ok, it means that I'm not irredeemably evil by the game's logic, and I can make things right. Or maybe not; when I reset the game to begin another pacifist play-through, Flowey taunted me on my cowardice in backing down. We'll see what happens.
...You're gonna have a bad time."
SPOILER WARNING: Only read this if you've played the game already, you never intend to play, or you don't care about seeing spoilers.
I'm late to the Undertale party. This game came out in 2015 and became extremely popular very quickly, but I didn't pay much attention to it at the time. Mostly, I just knew that it was a very short Earthbound-esque psuedo-RPG that had multiple endings, and its primary gimmick was that it remembers what you did on past play-throughs. At the time, I thought that this didn't amount to much more than that little flower guy getting up in your face if you save-scum a bunch. It was not until I finally played it over the last couple weeks that I realized just how insanely deep this mechanic goes, and how effectively the game uses it to involve the player in its narrative.
For the uninitiated, here's how the game basically works: When you encounter an enemy, you can choose to either kill it, or resolve the battle peacefully and spare it. Naturally, this has an effect on the story, as killing or choosing to spare a major character will greatly effect the sort of plot progression and ending you get, and even the amount of regular enemies that you kill has an effect on the story as well. The game is short, and you can play through it multiple times. If you killed someone on your first play-through, you can see what happens if you spare them on your next instead, or do the opposite and kill characters you once spared. You can see what happens as you play more violently, or you can see what happens as you play more peacefully. You can also reset the game without saving and play the same scene multiple times in a row, picking the one you like best, or do something you know you don't want to progress with just to see what happens and then undo it right after. It's just like any other video game with branching story paths, or at least seems to be at first.
There are three basic paths you can take. Most paths involve a mixture of both sparing and killing, and will result in one of many "neutral" endings. You can also choose to spare everyone you meet and go out of your way to be nice to them them, not killing anyone at all, which results in the "pacifist" ending where you befriend all the characters and they all end up happy. The third option is to hunt down and kill every fightable NPC in the game, resulting in a "genocide" ending, the worst possible outcome.
Most people will play the game multiple times to see more than one story path, which requires resetting the game after finishing in order to start again, and may require some resetting during the game in order to figure out what it is you need to do to accomplish what you want to accomplish. At first, it may seem like you can get away with this just as easily as any other game, because you can undo your actions whenever you want and no one will remember what just happened.
No one, that is, except for Flowey, a sadistic little talking flower who has the ability to remember what you've done whenever you reset the game. If you've reset the game at all during the first area, he'll show up and call you out on it, especially if you killed someone and then brought them back to life. You can continue resetting unabated if that's your desire, but Flowey will always be watching. Furthermore, resetting will not always erase everyone else's memories entirely. Dialogue can differ very slightly the second time you go through a scene, reflecting the choices that you've made before. None of this stops you from resetting and rewriting the narrative to suit your whims, but it does become clear very quickly that the game knows what you're doing and doesn't completely let it go.
You eventually discover how Flowey is able to remember your actions after resetting if you play the game enough, though the exact time and place varies depending on what you do. It turns out that Flowey used to have the ability to "SAVE" and "LOAD" and "RESET" just like the player, and he was using this ability to go through the same time loops over and over again and do whatever he wanted without consequences. Over time, he exhausted the "friendly" options for interacting with the other people in his world, and when he became bored with this, he started tormenting them instead just to see what would happen. He came to view the other inhabitants of his world as nothing more than scripted actors who do the same things over and over again.
Once you discover this, it creates a rather disturbing parallel. This creepy villain character that you've been fighting against behaves the way he does because he's used to acting in the same way the player has been up to this point, by re-writing reality to suit his interests at the expense of erasing accomplishments that others have made, and visiting suffering on them under the auspices that it doesn't matter because it can all be reset. To make matters worse, if you start the game up again after you complete the happy "pacifist" ending, Flowey appears and begs you not to reset the game again; everyone's happy, and if you destroy their accomplishments, you're no better than he used to be, and you'd be doing exactly what it is you just fought so hard to stop.
The thing is, though, anyone who knows anything about this game knows that they haven't seen everything yet. There's still the genocide path, the one where you murder everyone. And you've probably gotten everything you wanted out of the pacifistic options at this point, so the only way to see everything the game has to offer is to reset, undo the happy ending, and start killing your friends.
Before I started playing the game, I was initially planning to go through all three story paths provided I didn't simply get bored of the game altogether first. However, while playing through the pacifist path, I began to have second thoughts. This game is very charming, and the characters are remarkably well-drawn for how short the game is. They're cute, they're funny, they're lovable, and even if they start out as your enemy, they'll always give you compassion and offer friendship if you give them the chance. Killing them just for fun seemed not only very unpleasant, but morally wrong, somehow, as though they were real people living in my computer.
I wouldn't normally have any issue with playing a game in whatever manner I needed to to see everything in it, but Undertale has a sort of chronological persistance that most other games don't have. It remembers what you did, and will remind you of this in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Resetting doesn't really reset everything, which ultimately results in one, continuous sequence of events that begins when you boot up the game for the first time and ends when you stop playing it forever, and there's no way to truly avoid this. This results in it feeling surprisingly real and vivid in a way I've never experienced before.
I eventually decided that my hesitance was irrational, and I'd just go ahead and complete the game on genocide mode because I just had to see everything that was in this game, and I wouldn't feel like I completed it without doing so. My experience with the game up to this point had been that playing nice got you the best rewards, but it doesn't give you everything, and I wanted everything. So, I ignored Flowey's pleas, reset the game, and started slaughtering everyone I met.
I knew in broad strokes what the genocide path is supposed to be like, but actually playing it turned out to be way worse than I thought. Everything that's normally fun about the game is absent. First of all, in order to actually kill everyone in the game, you have to wander around in circles for hours in order to run into enough random encounters to hit your kill quota. This is very boring and monotonous, and leaves you with nothing to think about other than the unpleasantness of what you're doing. Furthermore, even when you're not fighting, the game's ambience gets extremely depressing and creepy very fast.
Entire towns that were previously filled with happy citizens are deserted, having fled to safety after hearing that a bloodthirsty maniac is coming for them. The few who stay are either terrified of you or treat you like the devil incarnate. There are way fewer cutscenes, and none of them are funny or charming like they used to be, being designed to make you feel guilty or saddened instead. At several points in the game, people describe you as appearing like some sort of hideous demon, "covered in dust" from monster corpses and "shambling from place to place." The music is also either slowed down and sounds depressing, or it's replaced entirely with an ominous, creepy droning noise.
The worst part, however, is that you have to murder all of the friends you've made. Every single one of them, one after the other, while they make heart-wrenching speeches about how they either want to give you a second chance or how much they despise you this time around, and your only option if you want to continue down this route is to be ridiculously cruel to them no matter what. Your interactions are usually fairly brief, however, and I was always relieved when I'd gotten past one of them and didn't have to think about it anymore. I kept doing this, until I was finally stopped near the end my run by one character, Sans.
Let's backtrack a bit. Sans is a cute little skeleton guy in a hoodie who you meet early in the game, and while he's never directly involved in progressing the plot the way the other major characters are, he appears more often than anyone else and acts as a kind of a moral guide to the player. He's always there to make a bad joke, offer up a wisecrack, or give a bit of moral support. He'll take the player out to a restaurant a couple times, where you have the lengthiest conversations in the game with him. Towards the end, he always shows up before the final boss and makes the player reflect on the choices they've made and whether they were the right ones or not, and during a neutral play-through's ending, he'll call the player on the phone to tell them what's been going on since they've left.
He's a likeable, friendly character, but something still seems a bit off about him at times. It's not quite explained why he keeps tabs on you to an extent that rivals even Flowey, or how and why he sees fit to provide you with cryptic judgement at the end of the game. While he's usually very affable, he can also be sort of creepy at times. If you act unusually violent on a neutral run, he'll pretend to be friendly before offering some very cutting remarks in the judgement scene, and even on a completely peaceful run there's one point where he says that you'd be "dead where you stand" if he hadn't made a promise to protect the humans who enter his realm. I initially took this to mean that if he hadn't been protecting me off-screen I'd have been killed by someone else by now, but looking back, it sounds very much like blatant threat, or a warning that you're messing with forces you don't truly understand.
When you get to the judgement scene in the genocide run, you find out the explanation for his odd behavior. And while he explains himself, you have to fight him, which you don't do in any other play-through.
Unlike the fights with most of the other characters on the genocide path, the encounter with Sans is not brief, and he doesn't die in one hit. Instead, his fight is the most absurdly difficult boss fight I've ever played in my life. You need to have pixel-perfect precision in order to dodge his attacks, and there is no margin for error. He cheats in ways that no other character does; he removes your post-hit invincibility so that even a minor brush with one of his projectiles does a huge amount of damage, and he also has the ability to cut his attacks out suddenly and replace them with an entirely different pattern in just a split-second, making them very difficult to predict. You have to really be determined to get past this fight, you have to really want it. The worst part is, he has an incredibly painful speech that he delivers, which paints him as a very tragic figure and will cast a shadow over everything you've done up to this point, in both this playthrough and all the others. You can watch the whole thing here (well, most of it, I couldn't find a good video with all of his pre-battle speech), but a section of it is quoted below, truncated for brevity:
Our reports showed a massive anomaly in the timespace continuum. Timelines jumping left and right, stopping and starting... Until suddenly, everything ends. That's your fault, isn't it?
You can't understand how this feels. Knowing that one day, without any warning... It's all going to be reset. Look. I gave up trying to go back a long time ago. And getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore, either. Cause even if we do... We'll just end up right back here, without any memory of it, right?
Sounds strange, but before all this I was secretly hoping we could be friends. I always thought the anomaly was doing all this cause they were unhappy. And when they got what they wanted, they would stop all this. And maybe all they needed was... I dunno. Some good food, some bad laughs, some nice friends. But that's ridiculous, right?
Yeah, you're the type or person who won't EVER be happy. No matter what, you'll just keep going. Not out of any desire for good or evil... But just because you think you can. And because you "can..."
...You "have to."
You can't understand how this feels. Knowing that one day, without any warning... It's all going to be reset. Look. I gave up trying to go back a long time ago. And getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore, either. Cause even if we do... We'll just end up right back here, without any memory of it, right?
Sounds strange, but before all this I was secretly hoping we could be friends. I always thought the anomaly was doing all this cause they were unhappy. And when they got what they wanted, they would stop all this. And maybe all they needed was... I dunno. Some good food, some bad laughs, some nice friends. But that's ridiculous, right?
Yeah, you're the type or person who won't EVER be happy. No matter what, you'll just keep going. Not out of any desire for good or evil... But just because you think you can. And because you "can..."
...You "have to."
Through means that are never entirely explained (albeit hinted at if you pay close enough attention), he knows that you've been resetting the world and altering reality, and he's known the whole time. He doesn't retain memories from the reset timelines, at least not in full, but he knows that you've done bad things and then reset them like it didn't matter, and he knows that you lead him and his people towards a happy ending and then ripped it away in order to wreak terror and destruction upon them. Even worse, it's clear that this has been going on for years due to Flowey's influence, and Sans has known about it all along, unable to do much of anything about it, or even be consciously aware of it when it happens, trapped in an uncertain nightmare that no one else would believe or understand even if he told them.
You could have stopped this when you wrested control of the reset power from Flowey, but instead, you continued the cycle, and this is the result. Sans tried to guide you down the right path, but you refused his help, and now that you're bent on pursuing the worse possible path, he has no choice but to directly confront you and convince you to stop in one last act of desperation. If the warnings that you've received up to this point weren't enough, you have it spelled out right here, in no uncertain terms; you've been doing bad things, and the game knows it, and it knows why you're doing them. This is the most blatant that any character ever gets that they think you're some horrible Lovecraftian monstrosity for wielding your power over time and space in an irresponsible manner for your own selfish ends.
Each time you die and restart his fight, you have to listen to his speech again, confronted by the implications of what you've been doing, by a beloved character that you used to be friends with who gave you multiple chances for redemption that you threw in his face. At one point, he even offers to forgive you if you'll stop, and be friends again. If you take up his offer, he kills you instantly with an unavoidable attack, and says "If we're really friends, you won't come back."
I spent multiple evenings and at least four hours on just this boss battle, and must have gone through it at least a hundred times. It's grueling. It's both emotionally and physically exhausting. After awhile, it becomes clear what his plan is. He knows he can't win, because you'll just reset and come back to fight him again.What he's trying to do... is make you so frustrated, bored, or depressed that you'll stop playing the game, and to make it clear that your actions have consequences. And that's exactly what I did, I stopped playing the game.
Going into this, I was sure that I was going to get through this part with no problem, but I simply can't continue anymore. I'd have to spend four more hours practicing it just so that I could "win," only to go on to commit further atrocities for no reason that I can't really take back. It would be a horrifying, depressing slog. I'd be able to press through if this was just an unusually difficult fight in any other game, but knowing that there's nothing but guilt and misery at the end has sapped all of my motivation.
This game just feels too real. It will outsmart everything you do, it will predict every possible way that you could play and then make a counterattack against it. It will remember everything that happens, and find some way to make you feel guilty. It will invite you to do terrible things, but in such a way that it's clearly your own fault if you give in. It transcends the normal limitations and expectations of video games in ways that are both fascinating and absurdly creepy. It can be a very pleasant and positive experience if you let it, but it will turn deeply into psychological horror if you go a different way.
Of course, after quitting, I looked up the rest of the ending on Youtube. If you kill Sans and continue on to the next room, you're presented with the choice of whether to destroy the world or not by a character who's implied to be the embodiment of all the violent actions you've taken. Even if you say no, this character destroys the world anyway, and the only way to reset again is to sell your soul. Then every pacifist ending you get on your copy of the game will end with this character taking control, and it's implied they do something nasty off-screen. Sans' speech even implies that he knows about this; it's only on a play-through where this is in danger of happening that he actively tries to stop you, since he knows his world can't be reset to a happier state afterwards the way it has been before.
In the end, your hubris in thinking that you were above the consequences results in you losing control and having to live with what you've done, no backsies. Even if you hack the game to remove this, you may still wonder if this is any better, since it represents the ultimate wielding of abusive power to mold the world to your own whims, and you'll always know what you did. Of course, it's still just a game, and what you do in it doesn't really matter... but it does matter within the context of the game, and if you want to hold on to any of the happy, enjoyable parts of it without them feeling tainted, there are certain lines you can't cross.
I didn't actually get all of that on my run-through of the game, but that's fine. I had what I'd consider a more valuable experience; I fully intended to play the game in one way, but was convinced to back out and play it differently, in a manner I did not plan on and that I never suspected was possible. Maybe since I genuinely stopped because of my own guilt rather than some pre-determined rationalization about why what I was doing is ok, it means that I'm not irredeemably evil by the game's logic, and I can make things right. Or maybe not; when I reset the game to begin another pacifist play-through, Flowey taunted me on my cowardice in backing down. We'll see what happens.