Recent reviews by Jonloo

Hoo boy, what a revisit.
The main reason that I wanted to give Undertale 1 another replay was for the sake of getting myself familiar with this game again before diving into that new fangled spin-off side story thing everybody's so excited about, that game called NUTDEALER if I remember correctly. I'm glad that I played it myself, since that way I got to meticulously dissect every bit of the game I wanted to at my own leisure and experience it rather than read about it off some wiki. There's some stuff I missed, particularly with some NPCs and some events that have a small chance of even happening, but that's okay. It's the type of thing that's more neat as trivia or things to mention while showing the game off to friends anyways. There's a few NPCs in particular that I wonder about, but that's it.

The entire game was a very fun trip from beginning to end, in my eyes. I really liked the creativity on display from every little corner to look at, it made it fun to go out of my way to see everything. Figuring out how all the monsters ticked was fun, I kinda like how absurd the world is and how it's rolled with even though the world itself is built in an extremely bland and linear manner. I can see why everybody on Tumblr got so lost in this game for the longest time, it was fun to think about and see these characters be taken in whatever direction the game took you on.
I will say though, the game is very easy. And not all too surprising when it comes to the video game part of the video game. A lot of things feel like they're there just because more than for any particularly thoughtful purpose. I think they're fun attractions, but that being said, a lot of the appeal of this game can be gotten from a Let's Play, which is very unfortunate to say about a video game. This might be true about a lot of RPGs, but even the mechanically blandest ones I remember playing still had some more thoughtful engagement during battles, rather than the endurance matches Undertale 1 puts you though... But oh well. Nobody remembers Undertale 1 for the gameplay.

I remember way back when I was a particular snot-ridden little kid and ate this game up when it was new, I used to really like all the meta stuff it does with saving being canon to the world's rules and things like hints of whatever you've already done once being sprinkled in even after you start over.
Playing it now... I still like it! I think the way that the term "SAVE" was used in one of the endings was really fun, and I particularly love one of the Final Bosses messing so much with the game's own established norms as a way to show off how powerful they are, like a real final boss. Extending the power of SAVE files into SAVE states in particular is genius to me, I love that.
Not all the meta stuff is a winner though. Some of the presentation for it is particularly foolish and some of it really makes me groan. I call these "Toby Fox" moments, and I remember dreading them when I was playing the spin-off game I mentioned earlier, NUDE ALERT. I want to stay hopeful about these though, and I'd like to believe that the work on Undertale 1 was to make mistakes and learn from them before making the spin-off sequel thing. ...But I might be wrong, seeing how much fans loved that stuff if I remember correctly.

Anyways, I liked this game. If you wanna see everything, play it yourself. If you just want the jist of it, watch a Let's Play or a Longplay or whatever.
...Though, you probably have learned a lot about this game already, completely against your will.


Actually, I forgot something very important.

I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate Alphys. i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate alphys so much you wouldn't believe it
real ass spoilers for undertale 1 ahead
i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate that she talks like a tumblr user, i hate that the first thing she does is try to herself look good by putting you in fake danger, i hate that the reason she even wants your trust is because she's been watching you and treating it like her anime
oh my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ god her anime addiction, i want to kill her so bad - for like the entirety of the area where she's relevant she's on twitter non-stop talking about her problems and how she's trash and mew mew kissie cutie like HAHAHAHAHAHA YES, WE GET IT TOBY FOX SHE'S A LOSER, WHY DO WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT
like
ok so there's this plot point where because she's the royal scientist she tried to mess with what are basically dead bodies to find out how to make monsters live forever, and she does! except they all end up barely being able to live and they melt together into amorphous blobs of consciousnesses sharing one body
so imagine you let your wife or your parents or whatever loved one be taken to hopefully help them recover and continue living, right? imagine that for several years, the person responsible for taking care of them refused to answer any questions you have about them, doesn't give the body back to let you have a proper funeral for them, and then you find out that she's some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ neet that does nothing but watch anime all day, and when she is tending to your family not only did she turn them into these abominations but all she does is like, feed them literal dog food to keep them from getting pissy
like how can you not want to kick this person's jaw off and paralyze them from at least the waist down
she just gets off scott-free in the end, nobody really says anything and she never has to deal with the problems she caused, she just gets everything she wanted while you have to deal with your loved one being turned into this barely sentient affront to god
like there's this very brief glimpse of her redeeming herself but we never see it and what we do see of her considering not being a degenerate creep writing stories about people she knows irl getting together romantically gets discarded immediately
i am so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mad that alphys is the one character that you never get to kill yourself, no matter what you do - there's never a point where you can stab alphys and turn her into dust like she deserves, the very best you can do is kill her crush and listen to sans say "yeah we dont know where the royal scientist is, maybe she killed herself" at the very end of the game
i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate alphys
i hate alphys
i wanna kill alphys
i want alphys to suffer oh my god
please tell me theres a way to kill her in deltarune i beg you
why else would you create such a massive punching bag mister fox
please i beg you, let me kill her

if you like the wacky little men from sonic talking and being characters this is for you

I can't remember the last time I played a game to completion in one sitting, or the last time a game made me cry more than once.
Dropsy is a unique game where the only goal is to make people smile and enjoy life, even if they don't particularly like you at first. But that's okay, because even if you're not the most handsome clown around there will still be ways you can bring joy to people's lives, directly or indirectly. Hugging everyone isn't your goal, it's just proof that you made someone happy.
It's weird, I feel like I can barely talk about anything in the game's story that isn't the people you help. Maybe it just doesn't matter, whatever this Dropsy fellow is doesn't matter as much as what he does for everybody.
Everything will be okay. You can always be happy.

haha i really liked the game running around as a funny little hedgehog is very fun

Such an incredibly odd and fascinating game... It barely scratches the surface of being a game, but this really wouldn't function any other way. With such an odd surreal world for you to explore and relate to and interpret in who knows what kind of way, this wouldn't work if you couldn't interact with it.
0/10 it's just an undertale clone from 2004

I really wanna articulate myself well here, so bear with me. This is another review not of the game but of the ESG patch situation going on from Monday, the 26th of June of 2023. If you just wanna know about the game, it's perfectly good and insanely fun, and perfectly serviceable for the players like me who aren't super into fighting games but like having a skull ceiling to build up to for fun, online or offline.

Anyways, the ESG patch, or the Content Updates and Revisions as described by Sairus and MightyZug of Hidden Variable, changed a lot of the visuals in the game. A couple of the fighter's alternate color palettes, some animations (What's wrong with haircombs?), but more notably a lot of artwork that was included in the game was just removed entirely, and a lot of the art for the Story Mode have been censored in some way or another.

Some of these changes I can kind of get, but some of these are pretty big details showing story elements (particularly for Big Band) and the designs of some of these were changed entirely (Parasoul and the Black Egrets). With these bigger changes I can't help but feel like the team behind these decisions are missing the point of these details.
There's a point to showing such brutality, such oppression, such violence and such lewdness, isn't there? Are these characters not supposed to be soulful and powerful and creepy and whatever they are?

Even if you wanna ignore that, the update straight up removes some content from the game and doesn't make up for it in any way. There's some artwork removed (ironically the only example I really noticed involved Beowulf in clothing too revealing), some lines of dialogue in the characters' additional voice packs being removed as well (also implying lewd stuff) and the soviet announcer pack was just removed entirely, which is a shame because I really liked that voice pack and now... It's just gone.
Some of the names for the combo counter were also changed but that's not a complete removal so it's not quite the same, but I still feel like it's worth mentioning.

You will not keep the game you are being advertised unless you go against these people to keep your game.
These people do not respect the game they're working on, and they don't respect you for enjoying it. They want to "rescue" the game from its creators and from its audience of normal people who were perfectly happy with and enjoyed what they had. They're taking steps towards merging this series with the gray slop being produced nowadays just like ever other huge series with endless potential. They can't build anything on their own, so they're taking this down bit by bit to bring you to their level.

Maybe it's my fault for not seeing the signs that this was coming. Last I remember it was bringing in the avatar mascot whatever of some guy people really didn't like, though I didn't care because it was in one corner of the game and was a random chance of even showing up. Maybe it was the split with Lab Zero Games and Mike Zaimont, one of the original co-developers of the game, that should've told me I was boarding onto a sinking ship. Looking further into this it turns out some of these changes were here way before the update when it comes to the Story Mode portraits and nobody ever noticed. Even if I never got into this game, it's incredibly sad to me to see such potential and greatness be thrown away because of the sensibilities of completely different people.

To everyone who loves what Skullgirls was, I'm sorry. I hope the memories and experiences it brought were lovely and plentiful, because I know it created incredible feelings for many, big or small.
To those who think I'm exaggerating or don't think this sort of thing is big enough of a deal to complain about like this...