Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-34404946-20180120072411/@comment-31147727-20180129173526

He does have a point here; all the other bosses when you one-shot them, a number appears that (I'm assuming) represents not how much damage you dealt, but how much HP they lost. just like how in neutral runs your final blow depletes their remaining health, pulling a bunch of BS damage (come on, I can't be the only one who felt cheated when they pulled 346 damage in their first battle with Toriel). by this logic, if Sans had only 1 HP, then you would not be able to do more than 1 damage. This is also shown by your health bar: no matter what, you can't have less than zero HP. This would be true of monsters as well.

Then again, Frisk isn't the one who makes the final blow, Chara is. And Chara, being a ghost, is not limited to physical attacks like Frisk is. Therefore, it is possible that Chara can damage somebody beyond their physical HP, (possibly) able to also attack their soul directly.

Additionally, it would be just like Undertale to make the hardest battle in the game be with someone with the weakest stats in the game.

On the other hand, if Sans only had one HP in-universe, then one would think that Papyrus would be more protective of his brother, rather than Sans being protective of Papyrus.

however, I think in all honesty, HP is kind of a useless mechanic in the game, at least for boss battles. Seriously, with all boss battles, the final blow deals more damage than any other attacks. in the genocide run, all attacks done to bosses do significantly more damage than to random encounters. Which, by this logic, would mean that the random encounters are actually tougher than the boss monsters, as they can actually take a hit. Even with your battle with Undyne the Undying, you do way more damage than you did before the boss battle. even if you leveled up from the final battle in waterfall, such a large leap in damage from a 1 number stat increase makes no sense.

basically, in the genocide run, HP, AT, and DEF seem arbitrary, as the game just overrides them for plot purposes.