Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27524978-20160210030742/@comment-4383275-20160802015753

H.N. H.N. Elly wrote:

haven't we done past aesthetics something something? I still don't find Sans looking similar to Ness...

The Duck Test doesn't literally refer to appearance or traits (at least, it doesn't have to). And even disregarding aesthetics (as well as the badge), with the similarities between EarthBound and Undertale in mind, who else would Sans be? No main EarthBound character is comparable in personality to Sans except Ness, since the latter is an avatar for the player and is supposed to feel whatever the player feels.

H.N. H.N. Elly wrote:

That being said, I also recall someone bringing Occam's razor up here, which, i believe, is a good point to think of when someone tries to tie seemingly similar phenomenas together for no apparent reason and no apparent outcome.

That was me, and I genuinely wouldn't argue in favor of this theory if there were a more logical explanation for it. As I've said, the inductive reasoning connecting Sans to Ness is strong.

H.N. H.N. Elly wrote:

You've been given the directions. Re-read my sentence, please, and follow up to the points mentioned.

If you want to make a convincing argument, you need to present evidence to back it up. After all, look at the people saying Toby Fox "debunked" the theory. None of his tweets, posts, etc. suggest any such thing. For all I know, you could have remembered a cutscene incorrectly (not saying you did, there's just always a chance).

Tabbender wrote:

Your stats don't decrease when PSI is blocked. You've just been killed because the game is hard. When PSI is blocked Ness can't use his PSI, but he still hit as hard and tank as much.

That's because Ness have to dodge a lot more things, and things a lot faster than Frisk. You can't really say Sans have more stamina than Ness, since we haven't seen any limit for Ness' stamina. And the fact that Sans got killed by a knife is more than enough to say his body is ridiculously weak compared to Ness'. You didn't take Frisk's strength into account, but regardless, rather than issue vague statements, let's look at some hard stats. Since Sans doesn't do much during his battle, physically, aside from dodging attacks, let's compare the maximum dodging speeds of both characters.

In EarthBound, dodging probability is calculated according to this formula: (2*target speed - attacker speed)/500

Since the "attacker's" (or Ness') highest possible in-game speed is 62, that becomes (2*target speed - 62)/500

The fastest possible "target speed" (or enemy speed) in EarthBound is 230, so that becomes (2*230-62)/500

Simplified, this becomes 398/500, so Ness' dodging percentage is 79.6%.

What about Sans?

He dodges 23 of the 24 attacks that can be thrown at him in the Genocide Run, including the fact that he fell asleep. Even so, his dodging percentage becomes a much higher 95.8%. Sans is mathematically superior to Ness in the only physical trait we can definitively measure.

Tabbender wrote:

He literally called it bad and said he didn't wanted fans to care about it. You still have not given me a source for this information.

Tabbender wrote:

Also i just realized something : if Ness was dead but somehow became a revenant, he would have healed himself with PSI Healing Omega. Unless you assume he did lose his PSI. So yeah, for Ness to be Sans, we have to assume that he lost his PSI, and that he's in another body. And even his character isn't really the same, i mean, Ness isn't lazy AT ALL. Hardly! Ness would have lost his PSI due to two factors: the death of Giygas, before which there were non-living objects imbued with PSI abilities due to the alien's influence, and Ness' subsequent death, which rendered his reanimated corpse a non-living object.