#No Mercy

[gummy-sweet]

Dile a tu silencio que no me grite tanto, ya entendí, ya me voy.

[thereifling]

When they ask him about the blood, he smiles “not all of it is mine”

More angsty No Mercy Percy

[krispdreemurr]

[crossposted from Bluesky]

a fun recurring theme in no mercy and the weird route is everyone around you trying so fucking hard to make sense of your motives and landing on a pov that suits their own needs/wants/hopes and then being very surprised when you don't act as that model predicted

the obvious ones like. Chara thinks you're getting stronger with them to bring the world to a clean end where they can't be hurt. Noelle thinks you're teaching her to be strong and to stand up for herself and make her needs known. Flowey thinks you're a coconspirator and Chara back to help him

but even the enemies - Berdly tries to play it into his whole weird dynamic with Noelle and turn it into a quasi-romantic rivalry, Undyne frames you as the enemy a heroine defeats in an anime with directly Evil motives who can be beaten by will and friendship

oh i forgot spamton who thinks you're after personal power and such and who is happy to ride along on your chaos to get his own personal power lmao

everyone sees in the relentless, unspeaking violence some sort of mirror of themself, the wants they may not admit to, the fears they hold, etc

i think sans is the only one who actually truly gets even a little bit of it, especially if you go for the fake spare and then come back. he understands - you probably were friends, once. you hold no true malice. you have no grand purpose.

but he has more dialogue to show you.

i'm really curious if anyone will similarly see what's actually going on with us in Deltarune. seam seems like an obvious shot, plus gaster ofc lmao. but it's way too early

in the meantime, i can't wait to see every character rationalize Kris Is Doing Random Murder lmao

[shimmershy]

[becabeale143]

[nintendroid]

WWF No Mercy for Nintendo 64.

[victoriadallonfan]

Wildbow characters who would love sparkling water versus those who hate it

[jungle-golf]

❤ with you in the dark

also on my twitter | patreon

[roxcs]

[batfambrainrotbeloved]

Honestly I think the league used to fucking CHUNK baby Dick like a football because a. they could and b. he loved it.

[joselyn565]

Not my angel.

[ofcrowsanddragons]

He'll never say a word, but it makes Lucanis breathless with worry. Rook is a force of nature in battle, wielding a mage knife as though born with it in hand. Lightning crackles across the killing field, and death stalks their enemies in the form of the slight mage. An unstoppable force.

The younger Crow wears light regalia barely sturdy enough to turn away a knife in the back. One straight hit from an axe or a sword means death. To Lucanis, every dodge or block feels like a grain of sand in an hourglass.

All he can do is push aside the feeling. All he can do is be fast enough, strong enough, good enough that the final blow will never land.

[patchwork-crow-writes]

How the Sans fight didn't accomplish its narrative purpose - and how a Ralsei fight can iterate and improve on it

Clickbait title - check ✅

A topic I sometimes see discussed on this here Webbed Site is "who or what is going to be the final boss of Deltarune's Weird Route?" I see people talk about it being Noelle or Susie, trying to wrest the tattered remnants of their world from our manipulative grasp, or perhaps Gaster, who has seen how badly we've failed the assignment and reluctantly interferes with his own experiment to try and salvage something out of it.

But I would like to put forward my pitch for Ralsei being the Weird Route's final boss - an encounter that would share some similarities to the Sans fight in Undertale's No Mercy route, but with crucial idiosyncratic differences that not only makes the concept his own, but also improves upon it in terms of its narrative goals.

First, let's look at Sans.

Sans is effectively trolling you throughout his fight, taking all the established rules of Undertale's combat system and breaking them over his knee. He dodges all your attacks, his own attacks deal continuous damage even after they're done hitting you, he starts attacking you while you're in the battle menu, he can vary his attack patterns according to the number of times you've fought him, he's not above tricking you into a false surrender by turning the game's mercy mechanic against you, and as his final resort can make his "turn" last forever so you never get the chance to proceed against him. For the uninitiated, fighting him is a uniquely frustrating experience - and that's exactly the point. Sans knows he can't beat something like you, so he opts for the next best thing - making his fight as frustratingly difficult and unfair as possible in the hopes that you'll get fed up and quit.

The question is - does Sans succeed in his stated goal? The answer, I'm sure you realise, is not really. Firstly, his reputation as a "superboss" makes him an alluring challenge for players wishing to test their skills and reflexes, and such players won't be deterred by falling at the first few hurdles. Secondly, Sans continually goads the player throughout his fight, even going so far as to dunk on them if they fall for his false mercy trick - this makes them more likely to want a runback against him so they can show that smug skeleton what-for. Thirdly, encounters against Sans tend to end very quickly, and retrying takes very little time and effort on the player's part.

Fourthly: M E G A L O V A N I A

To summarise the above points: the Sans fight's purpose in-universe is to deter players from completing the No Mercy route, but the problem is it's too engaging and too easy to retry, meaning most players will persevere and eventually overcome him and his tricks. Gameplay-wise the fight is phenomenal, but story-wise it simply doesn't succeed at what it's meant to do.

And so, we come to Deltarune, and to Ralsei.

And how, I hear you ask, can this harmless ball of cotton candy possibly one-up the great and mighty Sans? Well, firstly, I'm going to lay out a scenario for you.

Deltarune has been fully released, and you are at the final stretch of the Weird Route. No-one else is left to stand in your way, all the strongest and most intimidating fighters fallen to your will. But in your triumph, you've forgotten someone. Someone who still cleaves to the version of the story that should have happened, someone who will not hesitate to stand in your way and stop you from claiming your absolute victory over his world.

The fight begins, and you are confident in your abilities, certain that no matter what Ralsei throws at you - be it physical resistance or emotional guilt-tripping - you can overcome him quickly. After all, his HP and attack are so low. In terms of stats, he simply cannot match up to you, and you've already conquered far more powerful threats than he.

So, you do what this route has conditioned you to - you attack. Ralsei takes major damage, and predictably he uses his turn trying to reason with you, insisting that you're a good person at heart and you don't really want to do this. You scoff, and attack him again. Still he doesn't fight back. He's severely weakened, barely clinging to life - one or two more good hits will finish him off... except suddenly, he casts Heal Prayer on himself, restoring his HP to full.

No matter. You keep attacking, knowing it's only a matter of time until he realises he can't win, until you start to outpace his healing. But then, he does it again. And again. And again. And you begin to remember that taking damage fills a character's TP gauge, and Heal Prayer requires TP to cast... meaning that as long as you keep fighting him, Ralsei will always have the means to heal straight back to full.

Okay, you reason. That shouldn't be a problem, you can just use one of your ACTs to weaken him in some way, use the TP you've accumulated from grazing his attacks to...

But he hasn't been throwing attacks at you, has he? There's nothing to graze, nothing to farm TP from. He's just been talking at you while the battle box displaying your SOUL does nothing for a while then disappears.

But that's fine! Because you've been attacking this whole time, you should have some TP stored up from... hey, why does your TP bar drain whenever Ralsei starts talking? It's like his attempts at defusing any chance for aggression on your end are actually working or something. And oh, that's interesting... it appears that his dialogue is starting to loop back on itself...

And that's when it hits you: this was never about trying to convince you to stop, or try and redeem you. Like Sans before him, Ralsei KNOWS he can't stop us through conventional means - so instead, he has weaponised the battle mechanics of Deltarune to trap you in an unending fight where nothing happens, nothing CAN EVER happen. You can't kill him quicker than he can heal, you can't earn TP faster than he can drain it, there's no run command so you can't escape and regroup, and you can't take damage or die because he never attacks you. You thought him an easy mark and charged blindly in, but now he has you exactly where he wants you.

You scan your available ACTs again, desperate to try and find a way out of this stalemate. But it's no use - X-Slash costs 25% TP to use, and all your more powerful attacks are even more expensive. Your inventory is full of nothing but heals and revives, since you were expecting to take SOME form of damage. There's only one ACT that's available to you, that costs nothing to use, that only appears the moment Ralsei's dialogue starts looping:

"Give Up"

...

Now, is this hypothetical Ralsei encounter a perfect trap? Of course not - I expect some of you have thought of ways to circumvent the TP drain, or considered other potential loopholes. But the point of the exercise is to demonstrate the potential a Ralsei encounter could have in terms of forcing a violent player into a scenario where their normal tools are almost entirely useless to them, and in a way that makes complete and perfect sense for Ralsei as a character, AND doesn't rely on deviating from or outright breaking the established rules of the Deltarune battle system to achieve its aims... unlike Sans before him.

...filthy cheater...

Ah, but wouldn't such a ""fight"" be extremely uninteresting and boring to the player once the novelty wears off? Why yes it would be - and that's exactly the point! Ralsei here is not trying to engage or entertain you - he's not negotiating, he's not grandstanding. He's stonewalling you, stalling you out, whittling away your options one by one until you have no way out except the way he has offered you - and he does it all without lifting a single finger against you. And unless you're carrying some VERY specific items (or remember that the guard function exists I guess), you're completely stuck.

And THAT - is how Ralsei is better than Sans in every conceivable way shape and form and no I won't be taking any questions at this time byeeeeee *flees into the sunset while carrying my life-size Ralsei standee under my arm*

[krispdreemurr]

hey so i beat jevil with violence today on my deltarune replay and i was kinda surprised on how it got easier if i just. stopped healing kris for the most part.

like. their act ability isn't that useful for a violence route, they lack the healing abilities of ralsei, and their attack power is lower than susie so it's better to just keep the latter two alive rather than wasting a turn on reviving kris.

which considering later implications that's um. bad!

ooh yeah ... there's definitely. something, huh. like in snowgrave for most of it Kris literally just stays in defend mode sending tp to Noelle. and of course there's that really telling thing when they go down and Noelle can still perfectly hear our commands.

kris is the leader, the one who issues commands. but even for casual violence that's not really needed - everyone can handle themselves fine. and then with deeper more profound violence the truth becomes stark, the polite fiction drops. they're not needed to give commands because they never gave any. you need the intermediary force less and less.

i still think a lot about the thought of snowgrave kris paralleling no mercy frisk. both disappear, the idea that the silent protagonist could ever get a voice shut down as they leave the narrative as anything except for the vessel of your commands. the only difference is in Undertale Chara slips into the picture subtly to make up for the lack, while Noelle can't cover for the fact Kris has left a body to stumble blankly through it all.

[zabkkai]

some things never change