Discussion VideoGame / Undertale

"Bad Time" is injokey, spoilery, and obtuse. Worse than both, imo.

"No Mercy" can imply "never used the Mercy button" as well as "killed literally everything", but the fact that only one of those choices is actually acknowledged by the game somewhat obviates that issue.

If you want something that accurately describes the path without spoiling anything, you could call it "Max LV" or just "the worst path". Current consensus is on "No Mercy", but discussions are a thing that we have here on this internet web site, so it could well change.

I don't really see a consensus, just one person who gets really upset about the word "genocide" being used.

That's not saying I'm for using Genocide exclusively (although it's definitively superior to No Mercy). I'm just find the whole edit war... John, you tell them◊.

Genocide is infinitely better than No Mercy, but no one thinking that is willing to make big enough of a ruckus about it to actually challenge the "consensus". The only one legitimately upset is that one guy who disagrees.

Does anyone know who that one guy is? Does anyone know if he's still watching this page?

If not, just Ctrl+F the "No Mercy" parts and replace them with Genocide on all the pages!

"That one guy" is, in fact, several people. If you think there's only one guy, you're not paying attention.

Please don't try to start edit wars. The path doesn't have an official name, and none of the unofficial names need to be reserved for something else, so there's no point trying to enforce one of them over the rest.

I personally don't see how "Genocide Route" would be spoilery, since it's exactly what's being done on that route. It's about as spoilery as the name "Pacifist Route"/"True Pacifist Route" in my opinion.

Additionally, "No Mercy" is, in my opinion, just an inaccurate descriptor. It implies that you "kill anyone who stumbles into your way", rather than "actively hunt down every monster (essentially committing a genocide)".

It's a Broken Base, that's why the note for editing says both are valid and to put the label you prefer. (Heck, today I added the Broken Base about this on the YMMV).

Doing anything to provoke the broken base is going to result in this page getting an Edit War and it being locked like the Final Fantasy VII page.

@KEEP_IN That is the difference between the two. "No Mercy" Ending is when you kill anyone you come across but "Genocide" is when you actively hunt monsters down until you have exhausted the population to the point where all characters that aren't peaceful npc are dead.

No, "No Mercy" and "Genocide" refer to the same route, which has no official name.

It is useless to try and argue about this; the usage is well-established and people will continue to use both to refer to the route regardless of how anyone feels about it, so we should acknowledge that fact to reduce confusion rather than insist on something that simply isn't true.

We had this discussion a few times and we've basically decided No Mercy is an alternative name for Genocide.

It's a Broken Base which is the better name for the Kill Em All route, so it's better to let people call it what they want. Otherwise this page will be plagued by edit wars!

It's called that because it's the ending you will get if you play the game like a regular RPG without touching the Mercy button, and then everyone confused "if you do X, Y will happen" with "you must do X for Y to happen".

I would support calling that ending "No Mercy" if never touching the Mercy button was actually required to get it, but it's not.

For the Genocide Route, you actually CAN do mercy (fleeing, in particular. not sure about sparing) and stay on the route, so I feel that "No Mercy" is just vague and very inaccurate. It really is a pet peeve of mine.

For those who don't like the word "genocide" for some reason I'd say call the route "Max LV", or really anything that isn't "no mercy"... but then again, I can't expect people to just pick up new terminology on the spot, lol. Ahhh.

This kind of debate is so heated, even caused a commented out note to be edited to support their own claims.

To stop edit wars, the note, itself was eventually changed into this:

"Note: The route for the worst ending, aka the "No Mercy" route, aka the "Genocide" Route, does NOT have an official name. Therefore, call it whatever you want. To avoid edit wars, please don't make edits that do nothing but change one term to the other. The wiki isn't the official source of information for the game."

It's true. The route doesn't really have an official name.

Besides, the wiki contradicts itself in that it calls the Genocide route the "No Mercy" route as well.

http://undertale.wikia.com/wiki/Genocide_Route

It's true that although "Genocide Route" is the most popular name, the route doesn't have an official name. Regardless, I just have a nitpick with the last sentence.

The wiki doesn't contradict itself on the name. The wiki calls it the Genocide Route, but says that that route is SOMETIMES called the "No Mercy Route". One of the rules on the wiki even says not to change the terminology agreed upon by the wikia's community, giving "Genocide Route" and "Photoshop Flowey" as examples of agreed-upon terminology. Also, any attempts to change "genocide route" to "no mercy route" on the wiki are usually quickly reverted back to "genocide route".

Bumping this to call to attention that someone just went through and changed every mention of No Mercy to Genocide, including editing out the "Call it what you wish" note. Normally I'd be whatever, but it doesn't look like they asked anyone or started a conversation, so I'm unsure if this is something we should let sit

Only on two pages. I undid it for now. It's bad to revert-war over it, so we should probably discuss it some more if it keeps happening; but for now, we should stick to the status quo, and their changes created serious inconsistencies, since most subpages and the like still use No Mercy (and they'd entirely removed it from just a few pages.)

Anyway, at the bare minimum, I'll say this: No Mercy and Genocide refer to the same thing. Nobody actually uses No Mercy to refer to any of the neutral routes.

(My impression is that a small number of people started trying to use No Mercy to refer to one of the neutral routes after a dispute over it on one of the Undertale fan-wikis, since they wanted to stop people from using No Mercy at all. But it's a forced-meme sort of thing; a glance at eg. Youtube videos under that title shows that people use No Mercy to refer to the same thing as the Genocide route, and that we should therefore support both terms to an extent in order to avoid confusion.)

Actually, they don't. For the Genocide Route, you have to kill a certain amount of monsters before fighting a certain character. No mercy would be just killing any you come across without actively depleting all of the monsters in the area.

Again, nobody uses it that way. A quick search shows that "No Mercy" is used to refer to the route where you fight Sans at the end. A small number of people on the wikia and in various forums have tried to basically force-meme an alternate definition because they hoped that introducing an alternate definition would stop people, but there's no organic usage of it - in actual usage "No Mercy" and "Genocide" are alternate terms for the same route.

Just cut them all.

None that I've heard. I just see people switching them around without consulting anyone else.

Personally I'm voting for genocide, because a) it's what everyone else is using, and b) it really pretty much is literally what you're doing on that route. It's not even very spoilerrific, contrary to what they claim - I mean, it's something you choose to do from the very start, so how can that be a spoiler?

The own game names this path?

If the game names the path somewhere in its files, we should use that. (unless it's like obviously a developer name like "route3bad") Otherwise, I don't really care what the consensus is, as long as there is a consensus.

Word on the street is that Toby doesn't like it being called "Genocide". I haven't seen a citation for this yet, nor an officially suggested alternative.

Honestly, from what I've seen, Genocide means "KILL EVERYTHING" while No Mercy is linked to killing all the bosses and a few random encounters but not going far enough to reach the Genocide route.

I mean, that's what the wiki went for. http://undertale.wikia.com/wiki/Neutral_Route

Almost literally everybody outside of TV Tropes calls it "Genocide". We should really ditch the "No Mercy" stuff, since "Genocide" is what most people will be familiar with.

The only reason we use No Mercy is because some people think the label Genocide is too much of a Spoiler (heck, that's what it says on the Trivia page). But really, It Was His Sled at this point, so we might as well just use it.

Can we not take the route of overriding an existing consensus without discussion because we think it's too PC?

There's no need to reserve the name "No Mercy" for the path of not using the Mercy button. The game doesn't acknowledge that choice in any way; it's more like a Self-Imposed Challenge than an actual path.

How is genocide too much of a spoiler? Any player that can put 2 and 2 together will realize that the game changes a decent bit between the no-kill and some-kill endings, so how will it change on an all-kill? Plus considering you are literally committing genocide by hand, I think it's an apt enough term.

In my experience, both terms are used equally, but it's clear No Mercy is used more frequently on T Vtropes, so please don't go through replacing it (or removing the warnings not to do so!) Earlier someone seems to have switched every one with the edit summary of "fixing some inconsistencies", which clearly isn't accurate (and it made things more inconsistent, because 'no mercy' is more frequently used here on other pages — and they were clumsy about it, leaving behind some bizarre things like "the Genocide route, aka. the Genocide route.")

With the prevalence of "No Mercy" as a description for the Kill Em All route, I assume that tropers held onto No Mercy first, and now they feel more inclined to go with that because it was used first, regardless of policy...

Add it back to the trivia page, and just make it known that it's an official tag for fanart. It's still trivia.

Well, if it is official, the name change would make sense but maybe we need more of a consensus (unless nobody responds)

"Photoshop Flowey Battle Co-design" appears in the Neutral credits, except due to its formatting, it might actually be crediting the person with "Photoshop" and "Flowey Battle Co-design" separately. (NOTE: this was originally misquoted from memory as "Flowey Design", probably causing some confusion")

e: Screenshot for clarity.

And if I recall correctly, Toby used the first name on twitter at some point, and that's where it came from. It's not like the worst route, where the fanbase had to pull something out of our ass because it was never given any remotely official name.

(Of course I can't find the tweet in question, because I don't know how to operate that dang web site.)

I believe it's safe to say that he's not being credited simply for "Photoshop", and that he's not being credited simply for "Flowey design" (as that would imply he designed Flowey's normal form as well).

The name "Photoshop Flowey" comes from the the fact that interpreting the credit as being a single credit of "Photoshop Flowey Design" makes more sense in context.

@Karjam P you may want to look at the screenshot because it is formatted as

Photoshop
Flowey Battle Co-design

and thinking about that for a moment makes me think it's probably meant to be read the other way, since there's no good reason to put a line break in the middle of a name if the full name would fit just fine on one line (and it would fit on one line, if that's what toby had wanted to do)

After some testing, Folder A-F opens in Firefox but not chrome. I thought a commented-out trope in the folder was what "broke" it for chrome. After giving the trope context and un-commenting it out, Folder A-F STILL won't open in chrome. When I used Chrome's dev tools to inspect the folder, the console reported:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'display' of main.js?rev=100:557
undefined

It isn't empty for me.

I wasn't involved in these edits, but I'd say the second asterisk's descriptor is the only part that's clearly a lie. Everything else is accurate or technically true.

The first asterisk is a lie too. Sans is technically weak, but he is not easy in any sense. Meanwhile Whimsun does not even hit you if you don't move and it can't hit you multiple times.

edit: I confused asterisks. The troper above is right.

Yeah, we should. First we may need to figure out the best way to divide them all.

I can see how the Annoying Dog (the little white one that seems to be Toby's avatar) might qualify as a Running Gag. It goes further than a Recurring Extra because it's actually acknowledged by other characters multiple times. I can't really think of any common threads in other dog-related events besides, well, dogs.

It absolutely does not.

Why should it apply? Honest question

She's portrayed as kindly and nonthreatening up until the end, where she's revealed to be the most powerful combatant in the demo. She's not a minor or comic relief character, though, and she does act threatening in a few isolated instanced beforehand. That could be considered Foreshadowing, or it could disqualify her.

There is another trope for that I think - might want to ask on Lost And Found.