Stat him, Veeky Forums

Flowey pls go

STR 16
DEX 10
CON 3
INT 3
WIS 1
CHA 1
FAG 100

>less love and more LovE
the fuck is LovE

Level ov execution.

It's a really stupid acronym for a stat that basically represents your corruption in the game. It does absolutely nothing unless you spend hours grinding to max it out, and then a demonic entity takes control of the player and then tries to put you on a guilt trip. The game then PERMANENTLY becomes altered unless you alter some files and mess with steam.

In other words, it's a pretentious load of shit.

Level of Violence

Level of Violence, basically a person's capacity to hurt others.

Well, fuck it, I may as well "stat him" in my system, because why not.

>Asgore Dreemurr
>Suicide (100 Tenacity)
1-2 Swipe - Target Hero. Target Number 16 Defensive Action or Wound.
3-4 Fireballs - All Heroes. Target Number 12 x 2 Defensive Action or Wound.
5-6 What Must Be Done - Raises Target Numbers' by +4 for the round.
7-8 Execution - Target Number 8 Defensive Action or Triple Wound

This game is despicable and pernicious propaganda intended to sell pacifist ideals to children.

It presents peace and rehabilitation.as the ideal of justice rather than punishment and reparation. It depicts a world where just war is impossible. It demonises the player for protecting their own safety.

It sells poisonous leftist ideals, that nobody is evil except the player. It is actively treasonous and seditious.

> It's simultaneously a message of zero accountability and white guilt.
Jack pls

youtube.com/watch?v=rNKIjLLZMWs

Your mixing up

execution points

And level of violence

>It presents peace and rehabilitation.as the ideal of justice rather than punishment and reparation
It is

Can't tell if ironic or not at this point

>confusing mercy with justice
I can tell that guy is taking the piss, but this particular part has a point. Justice was always about retaliation and reparation.

Spoken like someone who has never actually been wronged and worries more about the feelings.of rapists, thugs and murderers than their victims.

I am sure, were you to be a victim yourself, you would willingly give your attacker all you own because he is "troubled" and you are so evil you deserve to be the victim.

No mercy. Mercy is not just. The evil must pay.

Also anons really seem to hate this game for its message of

If you can magically reload your life at death or when you feel like it you have no reason to kill a person

You can literary just keep trying until everyone live and your only excuse not to is you don't want to or your bored

>If somebody tries to kill you
Dying is not a big deal in Undertale

>Justice was always about retaliation and reparation.
And the countries whose Justice system is moved by those principles are third world shitholes.

1. nothing wrong with me
2. nothing wrong with me
3. nothing wrong with me
4. nothing wrong with me

> And the countries whose Justice system is moved by those principles are third world shitholes.
I disagree strongly. America became a strong country because it was based on the principle of strength, not acceptance. So did many other countries and empires.
I'm not inclined to commit to this argument right now, though, so consider the topic closed.

...

Then you can considered your argument dismissed

Please have a nice day

No, America became a strong country by watching everyone else kill each other with weapons they bought from America.

>So did many other countries and empires
Such as Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Egypt, Indonesia, Chad...

It's not even like it's particularly accurate to say that the game judges you for "defending yourself," as there's only one character who reacts to how many people you've killed during your run and his primary assessment is that it's important you're honest with yourself about why you did what you did, although he will opine that you're kind of a shithead if your EXP starts to reach a point that indicates you were seeking out fights instead of reacting to random encounters.

Part of undertale's thing is that you and the character you control are not the same person and some of the characters are aware of that. You're not being honest with yourself about why you killed the encounters if you say it's because that's what the player character would do. You're not the player character, and you know perfectly well dying doesn't do anything more than mildly inconvenience you and that it's completely possible to end every encounter in the game except two nonviolently.

You chose not to, and that's the long and the short of it. No point buying an RPG that is sold as "an RPG where no one has to die" and then getting huffy the guy who knows what you're up to isn't impressed when you kill people.

Killing Toriel was the perfect set up for a redemption arc anyways.

either bait or someone who doesn't understand why the prison population is growing

It's in a comic so it's true. Ironically the comic is also black and white

>someone who doesn't understand why the prison population is growing
explain then

>white is good and black is evil
Really makes you think

>It's not even like it's particularly accurate to say that the game judges you for "defending yourself,"

The toriel fight immediately punishes you for understanding the basics of RPGs. Games are like cinematography. They can tell the player things without saying them outright the same way a movie can say can say something with a camera angle. Toriel is a friendly character who obviously holds back in your fight, and this tells the player that she's not really trying to hurt you. The mercy option for toriel also works completely differently from the previous and only time you were told how to solve conflicts non-violently. The scenario is dishonestly presented to get a cheap emotional hook in your mouth.

> You're not the player character, and you know perfectly well dying doesn't do anything more than mildly inconvenience you and that it's completely possible to end every encounter in the game except two nonviolently.

Undertale fans don't understand that the fundamental problem with their defense of the game is that it doesn't work unless you are spoiled on the story. Of course if you hang out on tumblr and everybody tells you the right way to play the game, you are going to have a different experience from a player judging the game on its own merits.

It's bait. It's actually a twist on traditional RPG tropes and nothing more.

The Toriel fight is a test to see if you've been paying attention

The game hints many times in the first chapter that it's going to not play by the standard RPG rules, and there's a dude you can talk to who straight up tells you to try selecting "mercy" sometimes even when it isn't yellow, hinting at how to beat her.

Wasn't spoiled, and managed to work out what was going on with Toriel. One of the basics of RPGs is talk to every NPC you come across, and one of them flat out tells you a situation might come up where you have to try and spare someone that isn't ready to be spared. Which obviously means that it will come up, and lo and behold maybe five minutes later the Toriel fight happens.

It's not even like the NPC that tells you how to resolve the fight is hard to find.

>Undertale fans don't understand that the fundamental problem with their defense of the game is that it doesn't work unless you are spoiled on the story.

The game's frigging tagline includes the phrase "nobody has to die." It's a pretty reasonable assumption to go into the game blind with the expectation that you can find a nonviolent solution with any monster you come across. Frankly I'm honestly surprised that Toriel is where people trip up, because again, you're given a hint before you fight her and the way to spare her is a lot more intuitive than how you spare Undyne.

>A fictional character proves my philosophy correct

I'm not that user, but I don't think justice works if its spiteful and self-destructive.

If we just lock up every person that jaywalks, that places an enormous burden on society. We end up with millions of people producing nothing of value in an industry that has a vested interest in increasing crime. This burden on society reduces our ability to raise upstanding citizens and creates an enormous conflict of interest. A punitive approach also creates repeat offenders, which creates more victims, which creates more criminals. There is also the issue of lumping in crimes against humanity offenses with statist bullshit offenses if we have a system that focuses on punishment.

I'm not going to get into the philosophy of redemption and what that has to do with paying a debt to society, but a system that doesn't have a focus on rehabilitation fucks over innocents and criminals alike.

Certainly overhyped, put still really good game/fanboys and contrarians

Doesn't matter. Didn't you hear me when I said
>It is actively treasonous and seditious.
Take your dumb libshit logic out of here!

The game would have been better if there was more options than just "be friends with everyone or kill them"
What would be the moral of the story if you could run from every encounter you faced? Or if you could beat every monster into submission and then spare them?

You are aware you can still get the happy ending if you do exactly that, right?

Only because you can respawn. Literally nobody knows you have this ability except Sans, and the humans that came and were killed before you clearly didn't have that ability. While the gameplay style is actually kind of interesting the monsters are assholes and a logical person would be reasonably justified in killing every person they encounter.
>Monsters randomly begin attacking you for no reason
>Psycho bitch tries to force you to live with her and be her kid
>Dangerous retard tries to imprison you so you can be killed and your soul harvested
>Essentially secret police tries to track you down and kill you
>A lunatic robot who tries to kill you so he can escape the underground and become famous
>A guy who wants to kill you so his people can escape the underground (which honestly isn't that bad a place)
The only reasonable person is Sans since he doesn't actually try to kill you until you are possessed by an evil child intending to destroy the world.

Of course losing to Papyrus several times for example shows you that he isn't actually dangerous but until you actually lose to him you can be forgiven for thinking that he is evil but just incompetent.

There are neutral endings depending on how high your LV is. The game does acknowledge if you just play it as any other RPG and kill every encounter/boss, but don't go out of you way to kill anymore than that.

The monsters would actually have a pretty good reason to attack you, what with their view being that humans are a race of ultrapowerful psychopaths that can hate you to death. Humans wouldn't exactly be making nice with cthulu-spawn that routinely fall into our cities and wander around killing things.

That's not an owlbear.

I'm amazed by how many morons think Undertale is morally complex

It's a good game, and has a lot of clever elements, but it has the moral depth of a birdbath

>The game's frigging tagline includes the phrase "nobody has to die." It's a pretty reasonable assumption to go into the game blind with the expectation that you can find a nonviolent solution with any monster you come across.

From a narrative perspective, that's basically cheating.
Let's say there is a game with the tagline "You will never get struck by lightning!" and then to get the good ending, you have to go to a thunderstorm and hold up a lightning rod while wiggling your bare feet in the mud.
As a player, it makes sense what you are supposed to do. However, it results in a nonsense narrative and it defeats the message.

I must admit that this is really not an easy problem to solve, and any game that has a highly experimental type of story structure is not going to 100% make sense. Conventional games have nonsense plot devices as well, but we are just more acquainted with them.

You are clearly told again and again that the monsters have been trapped underground for generations by the humans after a bloody war. You can argue that the monsters are a bit too bloodthirsty, but it isn't for "no reason." And once you learn about their only means of escaping their personal hell, it becomes a bit easier to feel sorry for them if you are at all emphatic.

Likewise only some monsters attack you. Many are just NPCs out for a chat and a few actively help you (though usually for some gold). You are also purposely ignoring the tone of the game. If the game presented itself seriously at all times you might have a point, but from the very beginning it is made clear this is a game that is mostly humorous with occasional sad parts.

Undertale expects you to metagame like that, it's written around you metagaming like that

I do think part of it is that Undertale expects you to play through multiple times regardless of what your experiences are the first time, so part of the idea is that you can groundhog day that shit and figure out what a better way is if you don't like the outcome of doing it the first time. Toriel is probably set up to be a bit of a twist on the usual "Now you must boss fight the tutorial person to show them you can survive, where they will be injured but OK afterwards" by showing fighting someone down to 0 HP will basically always kill them in this game and that it's very easy to kill someone by accident when you're fighting in this world.

The villain does make fun of you if you are caught by surprise by that and put things right with a reset, but his perspective isn't exactly an objective one.

>You are clearly told again and again that the monsters have been trapped underground for generations by the humans after a bloody war. You can argue that the monsters are a bit too bloodthirsty, but it isn't for "no reason." And once you learn about their only means of escaping their personal hell, it becomes a bit easier to feel sorry for them if you are at all emphatic.

Frisk is a child. If we have to ignore that in order for the monsters to be defensible, then they are no better than animals and shouldn't be humanized.

Considering that the primary thing most monsters know about humans are

>1. They murdered the prince, who was also a child, for going to the surface to bury his sibling
>2. They can make monsters die simply by wanting it to happen
>3. As far as monsters can tell don't have the capacity to feel mercy or compassion

Frisk being a smallish human means precisely jack shit to how dangerous they are.

It's a great twist on a common trope, actually

What a shit analogy. gg

Also, you're ignoring that most of the monsters aren't attacking him. Aside from the royal guard, Muffet, and mettatons mercenaries, they're trying to be your friends. Snowdrake is telling you lame jokes, the volcano monster just wants to hug you, etc. They're not malicious, and the things they're doing wouldn't be dangerous to other monsters, so they don't understand they're threatening you. And once they do realize, they stop.

None of that has anything to do with frisk being a child. You could make a list of atrocities committed by and it still wouldn't justify acting like a perverted fiend to a lost child.

A child carrying a weapon and indoctrinated with a violent ideology is dangerous, and should be treated as such. However, treating something like its dangerous is not what undyne does. She is a monster, and I'm not using the sesame street definition.

>The star-spawn of cthulu has landed in the city again.
>Right, I'm gonna go kill it.
>I don't know that that's right. It's just a LITTLE shoggoth.
>It's already capable of disintegrating a grown man with a light touch. I'm not waiting for it to get bigger.

In the pacifist run, Undyne's attack is unprovoked, although she also sees no other way for her people to escape the underground.

In every other run, Frisk is a killer considerably more powerful than Undyne and she knows it when she goes to take you on.

Your analogy is both clunky, and looking at it backwards. "No one has to die" isn't "you will never get struck by lightning," it's "no one has to get struck my lightning."

But trying to make it make sense: The game does take place in a thunderstorm. Various people are going to try to hand you a lightning rod. You, also, can hand them a lightning rod. You can also convince everyone to throw away their lightning rods.

The basic idea behind undertale is that you can choose to never fight anyone. While people might attack you (even then, it's not explicitly clear they're knowingly attacking you, see the books in the library where they mention bullet-filled birthday cards), you have the option of defusing the situation.

Also that bit with the Original Child being a sociopath makes the whole thing unnecessarily unfair, adding to the retardation.
Also, as has been noted before, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than the game is basically just humping Earthbound's leg for 20 hours.

Basically undertale would make a lot more sense if the fandom was able to admit that undyne and sans are pieces of shit and are the real villains of the story.

The other monsters might just not understand humans at first. Asgore knows what he is doing, but he is clearly under enormous pressure to do something he doesn't want to. The undyne ending makes it clear that Asgore doesn't really have a choice in the matter. The true ending even reveals that no bloodshed was necessary for the monsters to escape.

Having played both I will say that these are the things I consider EB and UT to have in common

>The coloring style
>The random lines at the start of a turn

>Undertale fans don't understand that the fundamental problem with their defense of the game is that it doesn't work unless you are spoiled on the story

I went into the game knowing literally nothing about it other than what two of the songs sounded like. I figured out how to spare everyone just fine. NPCs teach you Mercy is an option even when it doesn't look like it is. It's really just a test to see how committed you are to your decisions and makes your choices more meaningful and hard won. Surprise and delight is the essence of good game design.

Justice without compassion is merely vengeance

>The basic idea behind undertale is that you can choose to never fight anyone. While people might attack you (even then, it's not explicitly clear they're knowingly attacking you, see the books in the library where they mention bullet-filled birthday cards), you have the option of defusing the situation.

You make a salient point. The only exception is undyne. She tries to murder you with a spear without any discourse. Diffusing that situation is unrealistic and only works because of the quirks of how turn-based RPGs work and how undyne is inept. Undyne is the part of the game where the lightning rod analogy is true. Without the tagline, frisk vs undyne not being a fight to the death IS bullshit.

Fuck undyne. She is the loose thread that pulls apart every justification of undertale.

>Asgore knows what he is doing, but he is clearly under enormous pressure to do something he doesn't want to.
So how is her following his orders, any more monstrous? It's not like she's a random serial killer. She's one of his soldiers, and is after you on his orders.

Come on, at the very end the game itself makes it clear its idealized message of non-violence does not translate entirely to the real world.

IMO there's a second, more realistic message hidden under the "never hit anyone ever" bullshit, and if I were to GM an Undertale or Undertale-inspired game, it'd be the central theme. Consider: the violence is a metaphor for difference, distance, unease, disagreement. Those don't make for very cool confrontation mechanics, as opposed to dodging knives and fireballs. So the metaphor is here to make the game more fun.

Ultimately it's not the nonviolence itself that makes Undertale, it's the hilarious dialogue and interactions. It's not about being a saint, it's about talking to people so different from you, the idea of having a conversation with them is just fucking bizarre. Make friends with the freaks and weirdos! They might turn out to be real bros with stories to tell.

How is running away not a realistic and valid option?

You have it backwards.

In the endings where toriel takes over the underground and decrees peace with humans, undyne overthrows her and is bloodthirsty as hell. According to papyrus, asgore is "a big softy" and would let Frisk escape the underground should they meet.

The royal guard is obviously a threat to the royal family.

If somebody wants to kill you and they are on the loose, running away just means you die in your sleep. The underground is undyne's domain afterall.

As far as Undyne knows humans are not only insanely dangerous (even a child can wipe out their entire race), they're responsible for their imprisonment underground AND the only way to change that is to kill 7 humans. She's far from without justification.

I can't even think what Sans conceivably did wrong. He only fights you if you are literally committing genocide.

As someone who doesn't really care about Undertale lore or message it tries to convey, but still played through it purely on the gameplay merit: Undertale falls for the same pitfall as Spec Ops: The Line - it judges you for trying to explore the entirety of its content, which is counterintuitive for what is clearly a game.

Unintelligent digital puppets that exist purely for your entertainment do not deserve to be treated like actual people.
You can immerse yourself in the digital make-believe world or play nice with its inhabitants all you want, but in the end it's all purely for your entertainment, and said characters are nothing more than scripted lines of dialogue and pixels on the screen.

I don't think the idea that Undyne would harry you for the entire game is a fair assumption. The moment you try the running away option it's pretty clear that's the intended means of progression. It's not like you have to go very far before you see a sign for "HOT TOWN" and then it becomes very obvious what's about to happen.

>In the endings where toriel takes over the underground and decrees peace with humans, undyne overthrows her and is bloodthirsty as hell.
That's because Asgore was like a father to Undyne. (Or maybe she's into bara goatdaddies, we will never know.) As far as she knows, a human killed him, he was right about killing humans, and she wants revenge.

>Undertale falls for the same pitfall as Spec Ops: The Line - it judges you for trying to explore the entirety of its content

I think that's the game's strongest aspect. That games need not be tedious checklists of achievement hunting and completionism; that they can be about making meaningful interactions and genuine moments.

It's integral to the game's morality system - one of the few systems that lives by virtue of encouraging the player to assign their own sense of value to the characters and their actions, rather than implementing arbitrary and 'gamey' rewards like Infamous. Genocide playthroughs SHOULD feel kinda empty and boring, because killing for it's own sake really is pretty soulless. It makes your friendly interactions with the cast feel all the more authentic and dynamic by contrast.

>I can't even think what Sans conceivably did wrong. He only fights you if you are literally committing genocide.
If toriel didn't ask him not to, he would have killed you on a true pacifist route anyway.

>I don't think the idea that Undyne would harry you for the entire game is a fair assumption.

It isn't a fair assumption from a metagaming perspective. It IS a fair assumption if we step in frisk's shoes and think about the story. People without mental illnesses don't just try to hunt a specific person down to kill them with sadistic glee, and then just get chummy afterward.

I disagree strongly. When I decide to to go Genocide route, there is no reason to natter on into my ear like an annoying nanny about how bad of a person I am.
I am a grown-up and I am aware of what is considered right and wrong. I already realize that my actions would be unacceptable if they occured in real life. That's why games exist - to allow us to do what is impossible to do in real life. Like, yes, genociding everyone in the Undertale world.

>If toriel didn't ask him not to, he would have killed you on a true pacifist route anyway.
This is because he knows you can Save/Reload and senses disturbances in time. Therefore, he's extremely wary about you, because he's dealt with Flowey in the past. (There's dialogue mentioning Sans in the Omega Flowey fight that implies Flowey's gone through the Sans fight before.)

To be fair, when there is one other entity in the world that can save/reload and it wants to destroy everything, you have a pretty good reason to want to kill things that can save/reload, especially since you know they're not actually dead unless they decide they want to be.

>Metagaming

Welcome to their entire premise of Undertale. The entire character of Flowey is there purely to contextualize metagaming within the narrative.

Also, it's not even metagaming in this instance. There's nothing meta about watching a horror movie and expecting a scare. You know full well it's a horror movie and it'd be ridiculous to insist viewers avoid knowing basic genre expectations before watching. Likewise, Undertale is advertised as a social game where you don't have to fight. That's not metagaming, it's literally the premise of the game and it constantly incentivises trying different options out.

PS, as far as Sans knows the only hope for Monster-kind is to kill humans. Something humans have shown themselves willing to do to monsters.

Eh, the game was good, the sudden explosion in popularity, not so much.

I'm one of the posters here that's being critical of undertale, but I still disagree with you. The characters are bothering you about your actions in-universe. Its an expected reaction to what you are doing. The shitty grind of genocide is something I would criticize, but I wouldn't expect the game's characters to jerk you off for actively pursuing the villain ending.

I suppose you could argue that him not stopping you until the very end of a genocide run is his worst crime, but that's because he's certain that you'll just reset.

It's the Outline effect. The game paints a faint picture of a few interesting characters, which artists and authors fill in with their own ideals and interests, making the game seem a lot more interesting than it is.

That and the soundtrack was decent enough to make a good game better.

It's important to know that Sans himself admits that he can't sense the resets and doesn't carry any memories from them. He just knows that they can happen at any moment.

I am fine with being criticized in-universe. I am not fine, however, with said critique being dragged out. You made your point, fine, I'm a bad person, can we get it over with it already?
Using boredom as punishment for your players for breaking your arbitrary moral standards is not something that should ever happen in game design.
Consider a game like, I dunno, Dishonored. You can a complete fuckwit and murder your way through it, but the game doesn't punish you for it by intentionally turning less fun.

The intention isn't to nanny, but to present a meaningful alternative. It's not so much a moral lesson as it is a reflection on player agency and criticising the idea that 'you have to do it because it's there'. The fact the story becomes permanently corrupted if you do genocide means not doing genocide actually becomes a meaningful choice and fosters a sense of attachment to the characters. It's a rare instance where leaving things as they are is more rewarding then slogging through padded content. Going from the misery of MGS5 and pushing myself through it's blatant padding and empty world for the sake of getting my money's worth, Undertale telling me to fucking go outside was a breath of fresh air.

>The fact the story becomes permanently corrupted if you do genocide means not doing genocide actually becomes a meaningful choice
A meaningful choice of not exploring half the content of the game you paid for? Souns suspiciously like "you could've turned off the game anytime" line Spec Ops tried to pull.

I disagree. I feel like making the Genocide route fun would defeat the purpose. Now the message is "hey, murder is awesome except when we say it isn't," like every single other RPG out there.

Spec Ops gave you the meaningful choice of not exploring ALL the content of the game you paid for. Undertale gives you the option of not exploring the content of the game that you don't want to explore, and that it knows you don't want to explore, because even if you don't like the characters it's not fun, and both you and the game know you're only exploring it because you want to 100% the game for some reason.

The genocide route is pretty much the equivalent of stabbing random NPCs in an RPG because you can, even if the GM punishes you for it and the system itself actively tries to stop you.

100% agreed. There are certain boundaries you do not cross in game design and your cartridge self-destructing or self-corrupting is one of them.

There are certain things you just don't do, not because of tradition, but out of some basic respect for both the artistic medium and the consumer. Permanently corrupting the game isn't a meaningful choice, its toby fox telling the player "fuck you."

That said, the way post-genocide runs end is somewhat interesting. The notion that when you sold your soul, you really did something terrible is well done. This would have been a good thing for the game if "true reset" was an actual option and not a complete lie.

Sidenote, how many chara-type characters are there? I'm talking about a quasi-demonic entity that gains the ability to exist based on the sins of others.

It's not necessarily unprovoked: Her only point of contact with you before she attacks is Papyrus, who is a truly terrible judge of character.

She's treating you as dangerous because until half way through her section, all she has to go on is "We need his soul" and "Humans can kill monsters effortlessly"

Yes, a meaningful choice. Is it meaningful to do every last tedious side mission in MGS5? What does it matter? Does it affect anything in story? No. Is there any benefit to completing them? No. Yet, I felt compelled to do it, because fuck it, it's there. I'm not having any fun, but I might as well waste my time since I forked over the cash.

That game had the audacity to ask me to be sad for a bunch of no named soldier npcs when it forced me to kill them. I wasn't given any choice or even any kind of interaction between the soldiers that might have made me give a shit about them. It felt soulless and heavy handed.

Undertale made me like its characters by giving me lots of fun ways of interacting with them. I felt bad when I killed Toriel and I was surprised when the game called me out for trying to savescum. It made my actions feel meaningful. Like they had consequence. So when given the choice between killing them for the sake of it or letting them live happily ever after I felt super good about letting them live. It was comfy. It felt like the game had a soul of it's own and that was more memorable to me than anything that happened in Kojima's bloated sack of open world nothing.

Also, the game cost as much as a fancy coffee. I hardly felt like I was throwing cash away by not doing every last thing.

>It's important to know that Sans himself admits that he can't sense the resets and doesn't carry any memories from them. He just knows that they can happen at any moment.

I don't remember him ever outright saying this, just making frustrating hints about being reset-aware. The dude is a massive troll and takes every opportunity he has to fuck with you

To say he doesn't remember them is also just factually wrong. Most major characters get a sense of Deja-Vu . Torial says that, as a mother, she always gets a sense that she's known the children for longer then they've been with her, Papyrus feeling like he's already done his intro speil, Undyne feeling like you're a friend before dismissing it as human mind control, and Asgore straight up nodding when you say he's killed you before.

And this is all ignoring the fact that he counts how many times he's killed you. You can be good at reading emotions all you want, you can't tell me he can tell the difference between someone whose died nine times and ten times

>out of some basic respect for both the artistic medium and the consumer.

I'd say the best way to respect the medium and consumer is to make an artistic statement and provide an actual choice. I find it more insulting when devs throw in monotonous bullshit in the form of reused assets disguised as extra content for the sake of having more content. That's wasting my time and treating me like an idiot.

No Skyrim, you do not have "infinite quests" and fuck you for pretending you do.

The problem with Undyne is that she really needed just a nudge to help the player understand the context.

I really think a bit more dialogue and a "skip turn" like "Undyne stops to catch her breath." would help players understand that there's no reason to sit there and take it. It could have also been reinforced by an stationary enemy in the caves that can't be spared, but has a special "run" dialogue to indicate that you don't have to positively spare all enemies.

She's really the only point in the game that doesn't follow well.