Undertale - Pet dogs and date a skeleton!

@swirlingflight Not that it'll help you now, but I've read somewhere that you can actually ditch Jerry on a No Mercy run without it affecting your run; the wiki page seems to agree. I seem to remember there being a funny comic about even Chara being disgusted by Jerry, but I can't seem to find it.

 

*shakes my fist at the sky*

Spoiler: also i backed up my files

just before killing papyrus, so that way i could play out a game where i do spare him and end the murder spree with his friendship. i'm curious how characters would respond to that.

 

Spoiler

i wonder how chara will respond to that, honestly.

 

I don't blame Alex for being disgusted to the point of ditching him. I mean really. It's JERRY,

 

I kinda regret ending almost every fight the moment I was able. I feel like I missed out on a lot. For example, I never learned what the hell's up with Jerry. And Shyren, missed a lot of her stuff. I kinda rushed through a lot of stuff, but now I'm stuck, cause I was told not to reset the world and ruin everything, and apparently I'll do anything that fucking flower tells me to do. unless he quirks his face a bit before talking bout "friendliness pellets", then I'll get squirmy and sidestep everything. I'm such an unobservant motherfucker, I'm still so amazed I caught that.

 

probably worth mentioning for anybody going to go for a genocide run, apparently if you don't just immediately kill mettaton in his fight it will actually cause you to fuck up the genocide run. he has no extra dialogue at all anyway so it's not worth it to go through the extra options but just as a heads up.

 

There is an insane amount of text in the game to read. I just got through another pacifist run where I went around using the phone in every room. I have learned many things this way. Much of it entirely useless and dumb, but other things are very important. Such as how Undyne thinks that the little bird is entirely fucking rad because that shit is dependable. It might take him two hours to get you where you need but by god he will get you there one way or another. You go little bird. You go.

 

Spoiler: No Mercy continued: Snowdin to Waterfall.

Sure she is, kid. Sure she is.


Well fuck you too Santa.





. . .


Anyway.


I take a short break to appreciate the familiar music.


The fucking turtle laughs at me because I can't attack him in a shop room. He plans to hide in there forever.


Who needs flavor text. This is all I need to know.


Yep. This is the power of determination.


. . .

. . ?



. . ? !



Determination . . ?

Well, shit.

Spoiler: And outside my pseudo in-character summaries, I just want to point out

Isn't it interesting that the two challenging bosses of this run, Undyne and Sans, both have a strange light emanating from their left eye socket.

 

The kid's flavor text is great. The royal guards have awesome flavor text too in geno.

 

Spoiler: Plot shit

I looked up the symptoms of buttercup poisoning. It turns out that you need to eat a LOT of them to really effect you, and that the effects are far from pleasant. Chara's last days would have been slow, agonizing, and filled with disgusting gastrointestinal problems.

On the one hand I'm thrilled because it's a suitable end for 3edgy5me crap, on the other, they probably picked such a horrible way to off themselves in order to traumatize their adoptive family as much as possible.

 

Spoiler: No Mercy continued: Waterfall to Core.

. . .

An enemy with determination is enough to give me a hard time. 9 deaths worth of hard time.

(I don't know what it is, I just suck at dodging a few of Undyne's upgraded attacks. Especially the slower spear circles. Weirdly, I have no trouble with the fast one; there's some spiraling to it that comes instinctively.)

(So in the spirit of being the fallen human, I fucked with the save files until I started with 111/99 health.)





Nope.




Funny. I remember a human child who expressed the same sentiment, as they fought a flower, then a god. They didn't just buff themselves to have special attacks and a lot of health. They simply refused to die. While you...



You're willing to let someone else do your fighting for you.

Not so determined, are you.

...



As a completionist, I was obligated to empty this thing.



The boat person didn't mind giving me a lift to Snowdin to go get some free food.



It's me, Angel.



Nope.



. . .

What a sentimental spider.



Another coward hiding in their shop. But he sells useful food items, so whatever.



Not long until I have a b a d t i m e.

 

I am now even sadder for the Fallen Human than I already was knowing that. Especially if they did it to traumatize and enrage family. They needed help. So much.

AND I CAN'T GIVE IT TO THEM.

*curls up sadly*

 

Spoiler: Brief interruption to focus on the No Mercy conversation with Flowey.

When you reach New Home and gather the keys, you don't get random monsters telling you about the fallen human and the prince. They've all run away, and you already know that story.

Instead, Flowey shows up to chat with you about the old times.

An Imgur album, it should be in order. I missed a single screenshot during the curiosity part, but nothing essential.

Nasty amusement factor includes:









Also... remember back in the labs, those audio-only tapes that Alphys found by snooping around in the castle?




Well, after Flowey was rambling about how creatures like them would gladly kill one another...




Well. Chara (Angel, in this playthrough) makes the same face at him.





Flowey isn't as amused when it's genuine and directed at him.

 

Spoiler: No Mercy continued: Core to New Home.

accidentally became more Flowey analysis, sorry.




Yep, I remember.



Those functions look removed to me.

. . .

I continue to New Home. Flowey shows up; greets me, reminisces about the good old days when we were kids playing together, and smirks at the idea of what we're going to do today.

He gives me some sad backstory on his existence as a flower. However long ago it was that he died? He's experienced a lot more time than the rest of the world has.

He awoke as a flower, confused and frightened. He cried out for help, and eventually the king found him.

The king, very emotional, held him and blathered platitudes meant to reassure. He didn't succeed. Flowey didn't feel any love or care for the emotional man blubbering over him, and he was confused and disoriented by this.






He spent weeks in denial, hoping that just staying there long enough would spark something to change. It didn't. Flowey gave up and fled from there, wound up in the ruins, and chanced upon his mother. He dared to hope again that, if anyone, his mom would rekindle his soul.



And for both of these, Flowey doesn't make his nasty (creepy) smile. He makes a sad smile, a resigned smile, a what an idiot I was to hope for anything smile.

Flowey eventually attempted to imitate Chara and kill himself, but discovered he was too determined to stop living --- and discovered he had the power to load his save file from when he first woke as a flower.

He spent an uncounted number of reloads, befriending everyone in the underworld, making them all happy, solving all their problems, and became bored. He began to experiment with hurting people, with killing people.

(He breaks the fourth wall for a bit, rationalizing it as something he had to explore, before making fun of people who watch let's plays instead of playing out the gruesome parts for themselves).

And eventually he encountered a human in the ruins. Scared them to steal their soul, failed, and went to reload his save. And failed.

In the genocide run at least, the moment the fallen human wakes up in the ruins, they now have the power of saving and reloading---and Flowey no longer does. I think it's very likely the case in any run.

He knows all the characters of the underworld. He's "read every book and burned every book." (It's unclear whether he's ever explored the lab and read the reports of how he became a flower). He knows them well enough that, even when he no longer has the save file, he knows which characters to nudge into your path to create the true pacifist ending.





He smirks and cackles to himself for a bit, and says that after that, he had been entertaining a few ways to use that power... but with Chara here, now he doesn't need to.




He goes on to explain that he tried many ways to get the king to reveal the souls to him (so he could steal them) and none of them worked. But he's sure that the king would reveal them to a human.

Flowey says, "why am I telling you all this," as though he's echoing Chara's question. He answers, because they're the only one that understands him. That creatures like them wouldn't hesitate to kill each other.

And then he realizes that this means Chara would be willing to kill him, and he no longer has the safety of his save. He begins trembling, and wonders why, and yells at Chara to stop making that creepy face and approaching him, it's not funny.

I then saved in the Final Hall.

It's time for me to have a bad time.

 

Have fun. I know I did.

 

The first lesson of having a bad time: you can't take screenshots. Jesus christ.

I think I lasted 4 seconds.

 

I was playing it with a friend watching the first time I went through it. We just kind of burst into laughter when the first attack came and I died like fucking instantly. Really that characterized a lot of that hour.

 

@swirlingflight I'm loving your playthrough+commentary :D

Having gotten to (and gotten stuck on) the bad-time portion of my own genocide playthrough, I think one of my favorite things about that route is that there's no difficulty ramp-up to speak of. Most monsters you meet you can kill in one or two turns, and unless you're really messing up somehow they can't do more than a little damage to you. The average difficulty of dodging their attacks doesn't even increase. And then suddenly Undyne. And then suddenly sans. It really highlights the fact that most of the people you're encountering(/murdering) are civilians.

 

Spoiler: 8 times...

4 of my last 5 deaths were on that attack where he's got the huge long bones going along the top and tiny bones along the bottom, so there's no vertical space between them. I run out of food by that point. T_T

 

Reading peoples reactions to getting dunked is

Spoiler: spoiler

SANSational