SuperBiasedMan

Undertale - No need to kill things, even if they try kill you

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So I'm kinda late on this one but this game is kind of amazing?

Incredibly detailed, pushes the boundaries of storytelling in games in so many little ways... depending on how you play it, one of the most genuinely funny and charming RPGs or one of the most genuinely unnerving horror games out there.

There's so much going on here it's hard to talk about any one thing that's especially amazing. Though it's not really perfect, it has some pacing issues and some communication issues, it's outstanding and innovative in so many respects I find it hard to hold those against it in the long term.

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This was the first video game I played in 2016. I agree, "kind of amazing" is a fair assessment. 

 

It's certainly my favorite RPG in several years. Which is, I must admit, not a terribly meaningful accolade coming from me: I haven't managed to finish a typical-length RPG video game since Mass Effect 2 (which is way on the short end of "typical length").

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I haven't lost any enthusiasm for this game months after the fact. I've absorbed more criticism of it and become more aware of its flaws but it's basically one of my top games now.

Also PM, I think I saw your post linked on Critical Distance earlier.

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It does seem to have been linked! I've had a few linked recently, which is real nice :)

tbh didn't really consider it an especially strong piece which is why I didn't link it here. Like I said, there's so much going on with the game I find it really difficult to drill down on one thing to talk about.

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Yeah there's a lot of aspects that could be examined. I think I most latched onto the counterpoint to games' predisposition to violence. Like Spec Ops: the Line, it's a critique of the portrayal that violence often gets in video games. I'd been anticipating something nailing this narrative. Especially with RPGs where you are encouraged to grind, ie. Kill waves of endlessly respawning creatures with no agency. I was so pleased to see this done well it's what I paid attention to the whole way through.

 

EDIT: This article was also linked by Critical Distance and is interesting:

http://www.popmatters.com/column/the-dark-side-of-pacifism-in-undertale/

 

It delves into Alphys's character and ending. I was most unsure of what to make of her. Which is weird, considering her story is front and centre while Mettaton's is hidden and I figured out Mettaton's whole deal. The True Ending with Alphys was confusing and uncertain to me but that article has some interesting thoughts though I don't entirely agree.

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Yeah, I think that's the most common thing people grabbed on to. And there's a good reason for that, since the way it handles it is really interesting: Not really moralizing about the violence, just getting progressively darker and scarier the more violence you bring into it. It's not the first game I've seen harness 'creepypasta' type techniques into its storytelling, but it's probably the most successful and undoubtedly the most well known.

 

I think there's also been a sort of tacit assumption with games for a long time that the more 'hd' they are the more expressive they can be, and this challenges that on so many fronts: So many ways that this game expresses itself wouldn't be possible with a lot of the 'advances' in game design. If the combat was 1:1 realistic, the opportunity for characters to express themselves through their attacks would be lost, if there was voice acting the many tricks played with text sound, scrolling speed, and music would be lost, if items were all represented graphically most of the jokes behind them would be lost, etc. It's a fantastic argument for how a game can more fully express itself when it's abstracted away from literal representation. So maybe I'll write about that too. That's probably a fresher take.

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That'd be great actually, it's very true and I agree not as much has been said about it. I didn't really think of that angle at all. With the music I did feel like it utilised it's limitations but differently to what you mean. It's mostly very simple chiptune-y but then some of the songs layer on a 'richer'* layer of music to try and give it more impact by contrast. Particularly the boss fights, where it's meant to be a climax. Toriel's is the most obvious for this, where there's a really simple melody intro and then it builds to a more operatic feeling sound.

 

 I am not a music savvy person, there's no doubt a better real word for this.

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Yeah I tend to think of stuff like that as still being fairly well within the traditional expressiveness of game music, though that is a cool production element. Something that I haven't really seen before anywhere was that it would slightly tweak playback speeds and pitches of character themes to express their current state, the most hilarious of which was Undyne's freakout in the trash yard, where her text starts scrolling madly while her theme plays incredibly fast and high pitched. It took what would have already been a funny scene totally over the top.

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I finally played this game recently, and it really is as wonderful as people say it is. It's charming as hell and it's sense of humor resonates with me really well. I find myself thinking about it a lot, both because of what it did well, but also because the more I think about it the more I realize how many problems it actually has.

 

That article about Alphys makes some interesting points about her narrative arc, but I think that even from a pure entertainment perspective she's the least interesting major character to interact with. Every time she's on screen it feels like the same joke repeated, and it wears thin pretty quickly. I think it's telling that the my favorite part of her character was her relationship with Undyne, since that's mostly due to how cool Undyne is (seriously, Undyne is the radest). 

 

But the thing that I think is the game's biggest flaw is something that I haven't really seen mentioned. Isn't the fact that a game that is so much about funny dialog and making friends with wacky characters, has a (mostly) silent protagonist really fucking weird? The game, at 3 different times, drops you into a minigame about making friends with a character, but said minigame mostly involves being present while the character talks at you until they eventually decide they want to be your friend. This isn't even an issue of it being barely interactive (although I don't think that helps), but the PC hardly even has any scripted dialog to speak of. I played the game twice and I still have basically no idea what sort of person Frisk is supposed to be. Does she think Sans's jokes are actually funny like Toriel does, or does she roll her eyes like Papyrus? Does she actually think Papyrus is as cool as he thinks he is or does she just appreciate his enthusiasm? Why does everyone want to be your friend despite you barely saying 3 words the whole game? How did she end up underground anyway? Does she have a family or friends on the surface? The game doesn't seem to care to answer these.

 

Anyway, there are a couple of other mechanical things that didn't work for me but this is already kind of rant-y so I'm gonna leave it for now. And I do think the good outweighs the bad pretty heavily so whatever.

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An interesting trait of the game is that a lot of the stuff that bothered me in one playthrough would actually be resolved by either doing or reading about another one.

For instance, it bothered me the way the souls revolted against Flowey in the neutral ending seemed like kind of a Deus Ex Machina, since it seemed like absorbing a soul should either make you stronger or make you an amalgam soul and the ambiguity here seemed ad hoc. However, the true pacifist ending reveals both that Flowey is already kind of split between two souls with different agendas, that his current body isn't really home to either, so it makes sense that there wouldn't really be a dominant personality.

 

I feel like the criticisms you're bringing up here have a very good reason to be the way they are, but again aren't something that makes sense unless you're familiar with some esoteric parts of the game and some of the concessions made for the greater good of the design. Alphys is a lesser example, in that the stereotypical traits of her character are shown to be mostly a facade hiding the genuinely fucked up shit she's avoiding which you find in the true pacifist ending.

 

Frisk, though, gets into both the endings justification and the thing I mentioned before about how the game relies on abstraction to do certain narrative tricks. Frisk can be different things based on how you play, and those different characters would be at best extremely difficult to narratively resolve against each other if they were given an explicit character. Is Frisk an innocent fallen into a strange world, or a vengeful spirit set on destroying that world? They can be either based on the circumstances, but they're really an interface through which the game's characters interact with you. Frisk is the shell through which you experience the world, and though that's a common idea in games, your Gordons Freeman and whatnot, it's a much stronger presentation in Undertale because it acknowledges this. Flowey will most frequently address the player directly, but I'm pretty sure Sans is supposed to know what's up too since Sans seems to know everything.

 

So yes, it's weird, but it's that way for an extremely important reason.

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I agree that Alphys got a lot more interesting after the secret lab section, but I still think the "look at this huge nerd" joke overstays it's welcome. I feel like she would have worked better as a minor character like the nice cream man.

 

I get that it would have been hard to write a player character that fit the wildly different ways you can play the game, but that doesn't make it less frustrating to me, you know?

 

And maybe I'm alone in this but I didn't find the meta stuff to be very compelling for the most part. Some of it worked, the way the Flowey fight breaks the constraints of the art was really effective, for example. But the way Flowey and Sans acknowledge your ability to SAVE came across as a few degrees too clever for me to take seriously.

 

 

I feel like I should balance out this negativity with some stuff that I really did like:

One of my favorite moments in the game is when you finally meet Asgore. The game does a great job of building Asgore up as a capital F capital B Final Boss. Whenever his name is said, it's printed in red. Toriel straight up tells you "Asgore will kill you". Papyrus says something about him being a fuzzy pushover but he seems nervous, or at least unrealistically optimistic. Various NPC's mention how much they love their king, but the game never drops the idea that he;s a serious dude who means business. The guy trained Undyne for fuck's sake.

 

And then you see him, and he's a big warm fuzzy goat man, and he seems so genuinely sad that he has to kill you. He even gives you multiple chances to turn back, "I understand if you are not ready, I am not ready either". And when you finally do fight him he becomes an incredibly imposing mountain of a man, and the fight is quite a bit more difficult than anything so far. The game completely drops the humor at this point, too, it even changes your inventory items to have less funny names (the "bisicle" and "unisicle" are changed to "popsicle" for example). 

 

My read on it was that he knows that sparing you at this point would mean he killed all those others for nothing and he couldn't live with himself if he did that, so he convinces himself that he just need one more, and it'll be worth it. That is a really fucking compelling hook for a final boss, and a lot of it is communicated through the art and music rather that being spelled out, and I just love it.

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I would agree that some of the fourth-wall breaking concepts are a bit precious, but I think it makes the experience overall stronger that it takes that stuff and runs with it rather than trying to go by half measures.

Maybe it would have been more effective if they hadn't called it 'save', but the idea that the main antagonist of the game also has access to the save system and is using it to fuck with you is so fucking audacious I can't help but love it.

 

At this point, after having played the game the way it is, I feel like trying to play a version where Frisk had their own lines and character would feel like kind of a violation. There's probably no perfect answer here, but I feel like Undertale made largely the correct call in making the player character mostly a cipher through which another the player expresses themself -- the character being an empty avatar is an idea that, again, they take and run with in the genocide ending, which really helps sell the choice.

 

I like that all the things you're saying about Asgore are true, where he's built up as both a huge badass and a huge softie and those both turn out to resolve beautifully into one character, but he's also ultimately called out for his hypocrisy by Toriel. He has the resolution to do what he must to justify all of the deaths up to this point, but not the resolution to do the dirty work himself, just kill off humans when fate happens to drop them in his lap. It's a really good example of the way even kind and reasonable people will justify some really heinous shit to themselves.

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Additionally I love that Asgore repeatedly believes that he has no choice but to do what he does, but Toriel calls him out on this lie. He says that to make himself feel better about his choice, but just like the player he had a choice the whole time.

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Oh I just saw the Alphys article (didn't see it at first because it got edited in) and... wow I disagree a lot!

First off, categorizing her failed experiments as a 'war crime' is pretty simplistic. It was an experimental life-saving procedure with what were basically willing organ donors, and one that showed every sign of being successful in its early stages. Though the end results were weird amalgam monsters, it's made apparent by the true pacifist ending that these new entities can still lead fulfilling, if weird, lives. More harm was seemingly done by her denial of her mistakes than by the mistakes themselves, which are grotesque but didn't actually cause a death toll. I think it's fair to consider this a colossal fuck-up, but how this makes Alphys a war-criminal rather than Asgore, who greenlit the project and has murdered several non-combatants, seems questionable.

In fact, Undyne has more to answer for, being complicit in those 5 murders, and I think her awareness of that fact is what makes her so ready to help Alphys through her issues. I'm also confused why the author seems to think the relationship with Undyne comes out of nowhere: Alphys seems to kind of crush on everyone to varying degrees (even Toriel briefly in the ending), and a bunch of her social media updates center around Undyne early on. All I can imagine is that the writer answered 'the human' during Mettaton's quiz and assumed that was the only correct answer, rather than all four answers being correct.

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Speaking of Alphys...

I still don't know if Mettaton was telling the truth when he says Alphys made everything happen on purpose just to become friends with the Frisk...

Mettaton claims she reset all the puzzles just so she could help, but she "tweeted" about how she didn't want to spoil the puzzles for Frisk.

Why would she waste all this time trying setting traps and such to impress Frisk instead of Undyne?

Do you really a could be so manipulative and conniving and yet not notice she friended Frisk on social media?

Alphys has crippling self-esteem issues... I just don't see her even capable of doing all this...

 

At the same time, isn't Mettaton friends with Alphys? At least Alphys cares for Mettaton, so why lie?

A) For ratings?

B) To somehow help Alphys? Maybe Mettaton thought that if insisted Alphys was the genius behind it all to make her more popular?

 

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I think Mettaton just likes putting on a show, even if it's for an audience of one. Also, Alphys still hasn't finished his perfect body because she's scared he'll stop hanging out with her if she does, so he might be going along with it to try to get her to finish what she started.

Also someone mentioned earlier that Mettaton's house suggested he was a monster before getting a metal body, but I think maybe he was supposed to be a ghost and related to Napstablook somehow? Regardless of actual gender switching, I still think it works pretty well as a trans narrative, having an image of who you are that just doesn't match the body you currently have and acting to rectify that.

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Yeah, there's a locked house right by Napstablook's. If you get in you find diary entries from a monster who is friends with Alphys and mentions how Alphys has found a way to give them(her?) a body.

It definitely fits a trans narrative, with the true body and all. Bur speaking of gender, is Mettaton explicitly gendered? I feel like they aren't, but I might be retroactively trying to support my interpretation of the story.

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I'm pretty sure I noticed male pronouns for Mettaton. And yeah, because the house was right next to Napstablook's, the same shape, and apparently part of the same snail ranching operation, I assumed they were related: Not sure if that would make pre-Mettaton also a ghost since we don't really know what ghosts are in Undertale, but that's the way I read it, as a ghost who was unable to become an entertainer due to not having a corporeal body.

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Oh the diary directly references Napstablook and says they were in a band together, so the connection is spelled out clearly.

I feel like I'm approaching the time when I'd be up for replaying this, it's been a while now and it'd be worth the revisit.

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Well Shyren also joins the band and she doesn't have a house there so I meant a more fundamental connection. Mettaton's house is part of the Blook family ranch, so I read it as like they were cousins who also worked together or maybe they used to be in a relationship or something. Dunno, at this point we're reading a lot into five pretty brief journal entries. I guess he was either a ghost or a monster, of some gender, who is affiliated with Napstablook in one or more ways which included being in a band.

I'll probably be cautious about replaying this one given the mildly traumatic experience of trying to see what happens during a more murdery run. I think Austin Walker's point about how it kind of punishes people who want to see every last bit of content is quite well-made. I certainly felt some of the same sort of uncomfortable internal scrutiny after playing it that I did after playing The Beginner's Guide.

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I'm pretty sure Mettaton was Nabstablook's cousin and the other ghost from their family was one of the dummies? Isn't that in the diaries or something?

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Okay I looked up the actual text of the diary entries to check.

It seems like the salient points are:

1. The training dummy ghost is mentioned to be Napstablook and Mettaton's cousin. That would make them related somehow, but in a not-specific way. It's likely they're cousins as well, though.

2. Napstablook is referred to as 'they', which suggests that ghosts have no gender. This may be one reason Mettaton wanted a corporeal form, which supports the trans narrative, though from an unusual perspective.

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Very cool, I noticed some of the repeated themes and melodies but it's nice to see it all broken down like that.

 

Also another interesting thing I found out about the music is that the track Megalovania actually appeared in Toby Fox's earlier work as an Earthbound rom hacker and animation for Homestuck, a webcomic.

 

You can hear it here, although this apparently contains massive spoilers for Homestuck if you care about that:

 

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