Okay to everyone getting hung up on the title yes, the title IS pretentious and DOES give the vibe I am the lone hero giving criticism against a game nobody dares criticize. Genuinely sorry about that I just am quite bothered nobody ever at least points out this couple of issues. In the future I will withhold such titles and call it "Little ***** Hates On One Of Your Favorite Games."
As for some of the retorts to the nitpicks I'll just make a neat little concise list of reasons why I disagree with the arguments so far:
-difficulty is not subjective when a large majority of people cannot access a large portion of the game even when trying their best
-the story is not a good excuse for making the game unplayable for a large amount of people. if it's a good story, why are people being kept from personally experiencing said story. it would at least feel more justified if one of the two fights was not literally button mashing the arrow keys in the right order over and over but sadly that is how the game was designed
-i did not give a wrong wording PCMaster Pirate as I went on to explain in Nitpick #2 when I say 'punish' I am referring strictly to how the game treats the player and in no way am referencing difficulty like I did in Nitpick #1
-saying you never had to play part of the game is perhaps the best excuse one could ever conceive of to excuse any bad part of any game. i am going to review the WHOLE game and criticize ALL of it when discussing a game. it giving me the option to not play part of it does not mean that part of the game is thus not subject to any form of criticism, as that would be an unfair review completely ignoring part of the game people want to know about and should know about especially if there is a problem such as player treatment or game difficulty
-it is correct this is good story-telling as it does convey a realistic sense of what would happen if you started killing everyone. however my criticism is this is going so far with being personally cruel toward the player that this is also a bad thing. this is a grey area and like i said it is possible i am wrong in criticizing that. however, people were taking it personally including myself and even getting sickened by it and depressed, including myself. i can go look up some old forums for reference if anyone wants to challenge my notion because people really did have physical/psychological reactions beyond simply feeling sad or angry and i dont feel people should be rewarded with good content for playing games that hurt them on that level. as a first-time occurrence, you can mostly let it slide this time since this issue is a novelty interesting new concept but in the future i would not want everyone treating it like there aren't any flaws to making a mode like this where the player always feels bad and is coaxed by good game content into playing further to their personal detriment. some day I expect there will be Adults Only (Ao) games modeled on modes similar to Genocide Run's and I am left pondering if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
-the player should not feel a conflict of interests that forces them to not experience a large portion of the game containing the best content because they feel morally bad playing it. that is a game design improving the story-telling at the cost of gameplay and i dont believe good gameplay should be sacrificed for good story-telling.
-just because a game can make you feel awful does not mean it should and i would argue it is even unethical to cause players personal feelings of disgusted negativity causing them real-life awful feelings in name of the game's self-aware judgemental story-telling style.
-it's one thing to treat the player's character like a monster, but when the game starts talking to you the player personally and acting as if playing a game about killing is just as bad as literally killing real beings, it's overstepping its meta boundaries and i believe going too far.
-if you managed to have an only mildly difficult experience with undyne and a ridiculously hard one with sans, good for you for being a better game player than i am at undyne. i dont feel undyne was as fair a fight as sans though since again, one tests how fast you can mash specific buttons while the other tests various new ways of approaching the gameplay which at least is something you can learn (undyne not only felt impossible but the fight felt geared towards only people who are good at button-mashing). frankly i bet i could beat sans after a few hours since at least his moves and ordering can be learned while undyne is something you either can beat or you cannot and the couple hours i sank into her showed little improvement at all in how well i did against her.
-that point made by MHR about sociopaths not caring is an extremely interesting one and opens a perspective i had not considered. if you are a sociopath you can go ahead and completely ignore my nitpick about how the game treats the player. however, if this game was made so that the genocide mode was meant strictly for sociopaths, i feel it should have outright said so beforehand. really if you are a sociopath i imagine you would completely miss the point of that nitpick i made about player treatment since you need to actually have empathy and be affected by the emotional meaning behind certain strings of words. however, if that mode was truly meant for sociopaths, i am personally recommending the game get an R rating for that. if the graphics weren't pixelated id recommend an Ao rating.
-the difference between feeling scared and feeling emotionally hurt are vastly different and in no way should be treated as remotely the same. i can receive pleasure from a good scare but being hurt on a personal level is vastly different and does anything but give me a good feeling.
-a game should not be telling you you are a bad person for killing creatures that are not remotely real and are only as real as toby could pixelate their bodies and write their dialogue. i hope in the future games dont get on a high-horse and proceed to treat you like you the player are a horrible person for doing so.
- "You just made a bunch of friends and saved everyone. So now you're gonna go back and kill them all knowing this? Then you deserve to feel bad for it, cause you ARE a bit of a monster for doing so." This is one of the few things I read that I'm actually quoting because it bothered me so absolutely immensely i could not help but quote it. Nobody is a monster for pressing a button which says attack and causing an imaginary being composed of pixels and dialogue made by Toby to suddenly explode into a million pixels. The only monster would be someone who would actually judge you for wanting to play the whole game. Why would anyone be a monster for destroying pieces of art? They are still going to exist in other games by that same logic and if you are worried about the feelings of imaginary beings, they are still alive in your mind merrily watching you play if you want to step into the idealist route of thought that the feelings of imaginary beings matter #ImaginaryLivesMatter. Nothing personal of course to you the commentator, but such thinking would be very limiting in player freedom if I must ethically do everything on the right and narrow in games or risk being a bad person.
-just because i chose to play the whole genocide route does not justify unfair spikes in difficulty without proper beforehand buildup as any good game designer is normally expected to deliver so you can actually stand a change against the later challenges (i.e. undyne and sans ripping your dick off and playing hackysack with your soul).
-i do not believe a game should be making you feel bad in the process of trying to access all of its content. maybe have a sad or angry moving story or even include gorey horrible deaths but you should NEVER start outright speaking to the player as if they are a bad human being nonironically outside the game. on some level you could probably argue toby himself is calling you an asshole for playing the genocide route since he wrote all the dialogue for sans whom is depicted as this grand perfectly moral force (aside from the laziness).
-the player should not be expected to watch a let's play in order to enjoy all the content in an ethical manner. if you have to watch a video of the gameplay then you are not playing the game, which is the whole point of a game. if the only way to play it is to watch it, then the game itself is at fault.
-going haha it's just a game would've still been a better ending than chara to the genocide route and could have at least been mentioned in an ironic manner like "ha... ha... ... but it's just a game. get over it. ... at least to you it is." that in itself both would've provoked some more depth of thought and at least been better than the game taking itself seriously to the point where it treats itself like everyone is alive. again, great story-telling but it comes at the cost of making people personally feel like they're bad people for playing the game. but again, that's a new grey area of what's right and wrong in being creative with evil routes like genocide causing people to have to at least contemplate if this is okay or not to play and if games in the future should act like this towards players.
-the genocide route rewards you with its art-style, fantastic music, and extra character depth on top of new game mechanics introduced by Sans. it is completely rewarding but does that alongside acting like you as a person unironically outside of the game are bad which to me is going too far.
-the game doesn't need to approve of slaughtering characters and can fight you and characters can get mad and take it personally. but this goes so far that the game acts as if you the player are literally causing real deaths to real beings and you are a bad person. if the game is so self-aware then it should also be self-aware IT IS A GAME and not treat the player like they're an awful being. it's like the game is acting like it's aware of everything except that it is a game. like it's meta about everything else, but when it comes to being aware its a game, that's like the one fact that's never pointed out. it's almost like it wants to convince you it's an alternate reality but in doing so it treats all your actions like they're killing real beings when they aren't actually real.
-the game did good story-telling with genocide, and it does help the game gets its point across that killing is wrong. im not going to deny that that's inherently true about the game. my criticism lies in HOW that point was made and perhaps people should not so swiftly overlook how cruelly the game tries to make its point by making it so you can only enjoy all of the game by taking the good route and then the evil route of genocide. the game even says you're awful if you're watching a let's play of the content. the bottom line is the game is treating you like you're a monster when you're not and i find it underhanded and going too far and i hope other games don't start making it so you can only enjoy the best parts of the game when you do evil things.
-if you argue these are more glaring criticisms rather than simply nitpicks, you have a decent point and i see what you're saying. but, I'm calling them nitpicks because alongside ALL the other great stuff in the neutral and pacifist runs these otherwise massive criticisms add up to nitpicks in the grand scheme of the game's content.
-"Though I do believe the game pretending like you purposely wanted to be evil is sloppily done, but meh." Wouldn't say sloppy, just unjustified. Again, who the hell legitimately judges you to be a bad person for wanting to enjoy the whole game? That's one of the two main issues I had with Genocide and I feel more people should've been vocal about that issue instead of just grumbling about it quietly and praising the game as the perfect game all others should strive to be. So yeah I feel you on that one.
-the questions left unanswered by the story in genocide run eh... don't really bother me and i feel like I'm not missing out on much in not knowing. nothing particularly glaring in my view was left unanswered that needed to be answered in genocide mode (unlike the ending to Homestuck with the millions of unanswered questions for those of you who know what I'm talking about.)
-treating the imaginary deaths in the game like they're real is ridiculous and the game shouldn't have so forcefully treated them like they were really real beings really being killed and you the player in real life are now a murderer.
-making a player feel sad can be good. this game did not just make me feel sad though. it made me feel immensely disgusted with its treatment of the player and forcing you to only be able to choose seemingly bad things just to access all the game's content.
-just because the genocide run was intentionally designed to be way too hard and make you feel horrible does not mean it's any better of a game for having been intentionally designed that way. i get the point and why it was done, but i still disagree anyway.
-BX3 your points are sound and I don't disagree with what you've said.
-undyne is geared towards a type of speedy button-mashing i cannot no matter how many times i try get any further with and there should've been a better buildup and perhaps NOT have a boss built on those DDR mechanics which seemed CHEAP. sans looked ridiculously hard but i never thought his fight looked cheap like undyne's felt.
-"I will agree that the Morality of the genocide route kinda falls flat since it adds to the lore rather than being just a "kill everything" storyline, it's like a book that insults you for reading it's second half." That's precisely how I feel on the matter. But the thing is, Undertale did just that. And though I would be pissed off at a book for being so personally rude toward me just as I am at Undertale, that would still be an interesting book to read.
-it is not fair to treat the player as if they are a monster for trying to access the rest of the game's content by means of destroying pieces of pixel art on a screen that have dialogue below them. i get WHY the game does that since it helps convey the point that "if you murder you're gonna have a bad tem." i just don't believe it's a good enough reason to be a jerk to the player for playing your game.
-Shitty overused DETERMINATION reference.
EDIT: Apologies to the people who had the DETERMINATION to read this massive wall of text but it was the only way to counter every argument as thoroughly as possible.
