Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26297545-20160211131553/@comment-27701762-20160212212429

TheNickElement wrote: i feel like asking him would do something but unfortunetely we cant contact him There's no need to contact him, though. We can easily reason through the issue ourselves.

Given the amount of time poured into this game both by players and by dataminers, if it were possible to save Asriel then the information to accomplish that would be somewhere on the Wikia. Yet there is nothing on an alternate Pacifist ending where Asriel is present at the ending cutscene.

Given the sheer number of people who would like to save Asriel, we could presume that if it were possible to save Asriel, then there would be numerous people talking about this ending and the conditions to make it happen, even if that information were not up on the Wikia. Yet a Google search turns up nothing on the subject.

Even if we were to suggest that it is a recent addition from the patch, once again the sheer number of people playing and replaying the game and datamining would certainly turn something up. Yet nothing has been posted regarding the change.

In order for the screenshot to be real, we would have to presume two very important things:

1) That Toby would put in a secret ending without even the slightest possible hint to its existence or how to achieve it. Given that basically all of Toby's secrets have some type of hint to its existence, this would be a bit out of the norm for the game.

2) That Toby would completely rewrite a major story point at the end just to keep one character alive. Since the entire reason that Asriel is able to regain his form is that he absorbs six human souls plus (almost) all of the monster souls, returning the souls of the monsters and humans (or even just the monsters) would result in losing his form. So the ending would need to be rewritten to allow for Asriel to keep his form.

In addition, given the number of people who want to keep Asriel alive, we should be in no way surprised if fans were to either make a screenshot of the end which included Asriel, or if they hacked the game in order to keep Asriel at the end. Either case would sufficiently explain where the picture came from.

So the evidence points to the screenshot not being taken directly from the original game.