#zettel sourced from: [[Live Alive]] # Live Alive's Influences on [[Undertale]] - Gamer Morality I think that Live Alive had a pretty significant influence on Toby Fox as he made Undertale. Beyond the obvious "Megalomania" and "Megalovania", there's the idea of having a sense of morality while playing. This manifests in the idea of player choice throughout, and is seen specifically in two very distinct moments. The first is almost the entirety of the Twilight Edo of Japan story, where the whole point is to infiltrate a castle, and along the way you can choose to kill everyone, kill no one, or kill some people throughout. If you do the "kill 'em all" path, then you get a specific weapon as a result, but the game is MUCH harder from a completionist perspective. Amusingly, the "mercy" route is almost harder to complete since there are certain encounters that you might accidentally trigger that don't have a "flee" option, which kills the run. At the same time though, but runs offer different perspectives of the castle: the former you're searching every last nook and cranny to kill every human, while in the latter you're doing a different kind of searching to avoid any kind of bloodshed. This is then seen in Undertale through direct gameplay in combat: you can either level up and increase your strength, or you can survive the bullet hell segments to get the "spare" option. The second obvious example is after fighting the Purity of Odio. Oersted offers the player an option to do the coup de grace, and kill him, or you can flee and get the true ending by showing mercy, ending the cycle of hate. The true ("best") ending result is therefore to show mercy, much like how it is in Undertale, because if you kill Flowey after everything, then you can't get the true ("best") ending. From there, all the party members (in Live Alive) all the party members fight their respective chapter bosses with their new strength and easily defeat them, while in Undertale you have to then save your allies before you can fight the true final boss. The remake of Live Alive captures this, but I can't talk about the Sin of Odio for the parallel even if it feels VERY similar in general since it wouldn't have been able to influence a game coming out 7 years before. However it's interesting to speculate if the Asriel fight was inspired by Toby Fox's imagining of what a final confrontation with Odio to save Oersted might look like.