Was playing Undertale and decided to take a break with my other favorite 2D game with amazing music. Here be spoilers, probably. Also ethical dilemmas because those are fun.
YEP. OFF is Undertale's meatier, sugar-high cousin. Approximately equal representation of transportation ducks, though, which was pleasant.
Spoiler: So yeah. OFF. I got a couple of spoilers here and there, and enough fan art crossed my dash to get me intrigued, but I didn't get all the spoilers. And I was playing late into the night. So when the music and colors changed, it was. Uh. Nightmare-inspiring. The static, the off-tone hints of the old music, the way everything was as colorless as the Batter now... It really made it clear what he thought purifying the world meant. And I did not enjoy how small the choice at the end of the game was. Spoiler: Thinking back to OFF as I play Undertale... The Batter and NoMercy!Chara have so fucking much in common, man. Reduce everything to zeroes. Turn the game off. Murder everyone. Destroy everything. Purify this imperfect, unsatisfying world.
Gods, the sound effects. I'm a serious lover of soundtracks and this one is what made the game for me, honestly. Spoiler Especially The Meaning of His Tears, the song that plays during the fight with the Queen. It stuck with me the first time I played through it and never left.
Spoiler just when i finally had gotten used to hearing pepper steak in combat, the combat bgm changes. literally that exact point in the game. i played the sound cue maze in lecture so sound off ofc. it was kinda hilarious playing it again later with sound, realising the cues i didnt get were fucking sound and that you dont have to bruteforce the damn thing. and i mapped out the looping maze with the whales to get all the items. -filthy completionist- also i cant fucking believe i missed the hidden switch in the mines for the locked door. its so obvious. and i. missed. it.
I don't fault the game for lack of choice at the end, but I think because its a horror rpg it felt fitting. Tumblr was not good at getting across it was Horror, and the first translation patch grom French most of us played apparently had some big issues. I'm also not sure how much building in choices and branching path the version of rpg maker the guy used allowed.
Yeah, I don't fault it either. It's very, very fitting for the tone of the game. It's more that I was going "oh noooooooo" at the end, there, and that I can't bring myself to replay the game.
nods nods. I don't think the game maker meant for people to get more than two plays through it - if that. Given a few of the interview's I saw the maker seemed to be pretty shocked and thrilled people wanted to translate a free game.
So because @IvyLB and I are playing OFF characters in the multifandom RP, and you can't find a french transcription on the internet for love nor money, I'm currently playing the game on french and screenshotting like every single fucking line. I have just arrived in La Chambre and have over a thousand screenshots. Spoiler: (And of course the line I needed on Sunday is the VERY LAST FUCKING LINE the Judge says in the Pro-Judge Ending. ARGH. So Ives and I have been bouncing theories off each other (heh), business as usual, and then something hit me like a Home-Run Magique and Spoiler: Buckle up, I think I just solved OFF and. Or at least I have an interpretation that I haven't seen around before, but the english OFF fandom is kinda sorely lacking in meta. So! Remember how Mortis Ghost said something about Zacharie being the actual Hero/Protagonist (one of the two I forgot which)? And how Zacharie, Sugar, and Hugo are the only humans in the game (aside from the Elsen but tbh the way those burn I'm not sold on that), and how the Queen and the Batter aren't? And how the actual translation of that one thing the Queen says isn't "the son we brought into the world", but "the son who brought us into the world"? And how one of the calender sheets in The Room say "Zacharie is the bad guy", alongside the note that "Papa" is absent? Yeah. There's also the theory that Zacharie and Sugar are Hugo's actual parents. I didn't come up with that one, but it's the basis for the one I have. So the whole story is actually about Zacharie, or, Zacharie losing everything he has. The Batter is a metaphor for the sacrifices Zacharie makes, and how it's destroying him. But let's start at the beginning. So. Zacharie and Sugar have a kid, Hugo. Hugo is very sick, and needs to take medication. Hugo's parents are... absent. Because his mother, Sugar, has a pretty damn fucking huge substance abuse problem, and Zacharie is struggling to support the three of them. But Sugar isn't getting better, and she's being kept away from Hugo (whether she ever writes back, never even gets his letters, or hers don't reach Hugo, Hugo never receives a response from her), metaphorically shown, in that basement surrounded by her drugs, where she dies if the Batter is led to fight her. The destruction of the first zone is already the beginning of the end, because everything the zones are made of is produced there - smoke, metal, plastic, meat - once the first zone is gone we're past the point of no return. It might also be a symbol for Zacharie's grip on reality slipping. The destruction of the second zone is the point where Zacharie loses the means to support the three of them - Bismark, which was supposed to be safe, and the amusement park Zacharie ran at some point (amusement parks are supposed to be fun and show a perfect world), and it's implied Zacharie hasn't been there since quite some time - he was neglecting his job, and now it's gone, along with the facade of a perfect world - and family. It's also when Zacharie's item prices skyrocket - of course, now he is forced to gain all necessary funds from his item merchant (*cough* backalley dealing *cough*) stints. The third zone is where we are shown what sugar is made of, burnt corpses, which, in this theory, shows that Zacharie would go over corpses to fuel Sugar's addiction. The destruction of this zone means that he also has no further source of sugar for her. Sugar, now, is an optional boss, and as damage sponge she's not easy to defeat, and after she's dead, Zacharie, who in canon is implied to be at least friends with her, utters a resigned "I suppose it's better this way", not distraught, not angry, resigned, as if he'd seen it coming. The room is where we get to the bottom of all of this. Hugo, left alone by his parents, creates the Queen (and the Batter), but as the Queen is not truly real, the world he constructs to flee in is not sustainable, and the Queen, too, can't or won't give Hugo the affection he craves - something the Queen and the Batter are accusing each other of quite a bit. The Batter is, based on the line that he returned to the cradle of his father, as much an expy of Zacharie as the Queen is one of Sugar - he is the damage Zacharie is doing to himself and his family. After Hugo is dead, the Judge accosts the Batter and goes like "wtf are you doing", like a friend who tries to stop you from doing something monumentally stupid, and he tries to shake Zacharie back awake and look at what he's done - What he's done not only didn't save his son, but led to his death. At this point you have two choices: 1) Side with the Judge. The Batter falls to brain/spinal trauma injuries and the Judge wanders off into an empty world - Whatever he was about to do, he was stopped. 2) Side with the Batter. The Batter succeeds, the world ends. Spoiler: Aries card aka secret ending aka oh gods why The space apes and you are basically trying to drive Zacharie into ruin so you can get at the world itself. The Batter might be a metaphor, but they didn't create it, it comes from Zacharie and his deeds, and you were assigned to it and systematically guided him to destruction. Congratulations, asshole. The spectres are regrets. They're threatening to consume everything, and, instead of inspecting where they come from and remove the source, you destroy them, and never get to said source. Also, Zacharie always wears a mask, and Mortis Ghost stated that the thing shown below it is his actual neck, and not a turtleneck or Zacharie is an actual turtle i dont even know anymore - and that the Batter's monster duck form was not an actual transformation, but a change of perspective, what kind of monster he had become. Zacharie can't face himself - and from the form of his neck, I would suspect that it's not only plainly visible what kind of monster he had become, but that it's so obvious that Zacharie needs to hide himself behind that mask - we never see what he really looks like, he's deluding himself that much. And after all that, it's obvious why the only way to win this game is by not playing it: It's going off the deep and, and the only way to not lose when you go there, is to not go there at all.
i did not want to have this much sympathy with zacharie who i am still convinced is the anti-christ (pls don't mind my absolutely ridiculous problem with zacharie)
*poing!* The "first" translation patch? Have there been more? yes please give me an excuse to play this game again, please do And God, Pepper Steak. The only RPG random battle music I never, ever got tired of. The whole soundtrack is amazing. ACC is amazing.
ooh i didn't know we had a thread for this fandom, i love OFF i've been recently playing a lot of the HOME fangame, and would be playing it a lot more if i weren't stuck on this one puzzle
! I was going bring up HOME, eventually. I'd offer help but I haven't played in ages, or finished it. It's the only OFF fangame I've enjoyed, since some I've played were really flashy and headache-inducing and my computer freaks out when I try to play other ones. Def would rec HOME, though, you get to play as a variety of cats, which is an obvious plus. more triggery than OFF though
@Lambda see, i've been playing home on hardmode, with hard puzzles on as well and the hard puzzles are significantly harder than on the normal puzzle difficulty and there are no walkthroughs or guides for hard puzzle difficulty puzzles for when you get stuck Spoiler in purified zone 2, there is a note in zacharie's office in the amusememt park describing a safe in a bookcase with a combination based off of the chairs in the area to the left and i am completely stumped
@Ipuntya yeah, I can't even remember what happened in zone 2, let alone hardmode? (there's a hardmode??) it's been so long that I probably should erase my save and replay the whole thing I'm sorry, I have no idea
