This review won't be divided into typical sections like my other reviews. Rather, I'll be jumping around without much structure to it all, and while I apologize that it might be confusing when I randomly change topics, I promise this is the only way I'm going to be able to communicate my thoughts on this game to all of you. By the end of this rant, I hope you'll understand why exactly Undertale is not only one of the most best games that has come out in decades, but also one of the most important. And yeah, if you have been following the hype-train of this game, you probably have heard all of this before, how this game is amazing and emotional and blah blah blah. But for once, I'd encourage you to listen to those mulling sheep, because Undertale is not only just as good as you've heard, but most likely better. Am I overselling this game too early? Yeah maybe.
You may have heard that within the hype of this game is a trap, because you'll enjoy Undertale the most if you go into it knowing basically nothing about the story or the characters or anything. That way, the tricks the game has in store for you, both in terms of narrative and in terms of game-play, will be able to inject you with their full effect. Knowing what happens before hand will just spoil the fun, so with that in mind, this review is going to be containing all of the spoilers. I'm not going to be holding back on talking about whatever I want to talk about, because there's just too much I want to discuss, and putting perimeters on the conversation won't be helping anybody. From here on out, I'll be talking about the core mechanics of the plot and game-play, so if you're still around, either you've already played the game and simply want a second opinion on what the hell just happened, or you're willing to take the spoilers head-on so you can know whether the game is worth like 10$ on Steam. Spoiler alert: yeah it is, so if you're one of the people in the latter category, go do yourself a favor and go buy this game. I promise it'll be worth it.
So, by this point, I hope I can assume whoever is still reading this has already played Undertale, or is so apathetic towards what I've been saying that no further encouragement will sway you from the determination of reading the rest of this review. In which case, hello people of "The Wired", my name is Quan, and from the bottom of my heart, I hope you're having a great day or night. Today, is a review of that game. Let me take a few breaths. Okay. Let's get started.
I first began suspecting Undertale when I was walking through a cave illuminated by a ghostly blue light. I was about two hours, two-and-a-half into the story, and firmly in the role of my player character, a small child of unspecified gender who had fallen into The Underground, a subterranean labyrinth populated by monsters. After losing a war against the humans an unclear amount of years before, the monsters were banished into The Underground and trapped by an unbreakable barrier, sealing the monsters in a prison that they can never escape from, never to breath the air of the surface or to see the yellow glow of the sun again.
Up until that point, I had been having a pretty good time in The Underground. The monsters I had met as my character had been not like the traditional definition of the word, they had been affable, pleasant creatures with their own personalities, hopes and motivations. I had met a gentle motherly goat named Toriel, a skeleton with an endless supply of bad puns named Sans, and his hapless yet massively egotistical brother Papyrus. I had been subjected to quirky puzzles, some really bad skeleton puns, and I had found myself starting to enjoy the ugly-yet-charming pixilated graphics that make the game look like it was made decades before it actually was.
Anyway, in this blue-lit cave was where a type of plant called Echo Flowers grow, flowers that hear snippets of conversations that take place near them and repeat them. The game heavily encourages exploration, usually rewarding you with fun secrets and exposition, so I was taking my sweet time listening to what all the flowers had to say. I was looking for some jokes mostly, because up until that point, I thought Undertale would be a game that thrived on its humorous and playful approach to the typical JRPG formula. I found it funny that most of the "monsters" you encountered just turned out to quirky bystanders or simply misunderstood - like how Papyrus is always going on about killing humans who enter The Underground because it is his best chance to join the Royal Guard(his greatest wish), but in reality he's such a kindhearted guy that he couldn't hurt a fly. Sure, the option to fight them was there, which I found a little strange since I didn't get why I would ever need to fight these creatures, since simply complimenting their looks or listening to their problems is usually enough to get the frightened and provoked monsters to stop attacking you. Since Undertale always gives you a choice whether to spare monsters or fight them in tandem with its "bullet-hell" style of game play, I never ended up fighting anyone. I never hurt anyone, I just ended up making a lot of new friends, characters that I wanted to see this adventure through with, even if figuring out how exactly to befriend them was a little bit of a puzzle within itself. And because of that, until I entered that ethereal blue hallway decorated with flowers, I didn't have a clue about the what the game was really all about. So when this first clue fell into my lap, I finally started to suspect whether Undertale really was as simple as it had made itself out to be in its first few hours.
As I said, I was looking for jokes - surely the flowers would catch snippets of amusing conversations from the monsters passing by, but instead what I found were mostly grave. The first flower I found captured what seemed to be the noise of someone running for their lives, desperately calling out for anyone to help them. Another flower seemed to hear a soliloquy of a monster cursing the humans for trapping them underground, wishing that they could see real stars instead of the glowing crystals that formed in the cave. Those things on their own weren't enough to make me pause however, until I heard a conversation between two friends. Upon making their friend promise not to laugh, the speaker admits that its greatest wish is to escape The Underground, stand under the stars, and look out at the world around them. Despite their promise the other friend can't help but laugh, and the two engage in some light-hearted banter - until the friend explains why exactly they laughed.
"hey, you said you wouldn't laugh at it!"
"Sorry, it's just funny... That's my wish too."
"Huh", I thought. Somehow, I feel like I don't quite know what this game has up its sleeve yet.
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| Same. |
Looking back, the game had been constantly dropping hints about its true nature throughout, even if at that point, I wasn't entirely what that nature was. For instance, the very first encounter in the game. Upon falling into The Underground, the player character meets an unassuming golden flower, who enthusiastically introduces himself as Flowey the Flower, offering to give you a little tutorial about how things in The Underground, and explains how down here, getting more LOVE(abbreviated as Lv.) and Exp. is how to get by in The Underground. It seems like it's just a matter of the game trying to teach you to basic of gameplay organically with a character instead of through text on the screen, but when Flowey teaches you how to fight enemies, things get weird. Flowey's expression suddenly changes from a perky grin to a twisted evil smile, and he calls the player character an "idiot". Because apparently, in the Underground, it's kill be or be killed. Though Flowey is quickly defeated and the player character rescued by resident bad-ass goat-mama Toriel, the encounter stuck with me, despite how light-hearted the rest of the game was until I reached that cave. It seemed out of place, almost like it could have belonged to an entirely different video-game. Even though I didn't know it, Undertale had already pulled the first ace from under the table.
Undertale as an experience can't really be talked about or judged until you've finished the game. It's not that it gets better as it goes, because it doesn't really, the basic gameplay of dodging various enemy projectiles and story approaches remain much of the same throughout all of your playthrough, but rather that the whole picture of how exactly this game is brilliant is only pieced together in the game's final moments. As you continue your journey through The Underground, Undertale slowly begins to clue you in that all of the quirky adventures and actions you've taken are going to have long-reaching consequences in a grand plot that you've only just begun to scratch the surface of.
At its heart, I suppose Undertale could be categorized as a "choice-game", though categorizing this game seems pretty pointless honestly. From the very first moment you enter The Underground, your decisions -whether to kill monsters of spare them, talk to characters or not - are going to drastically determine which of the endings you get, all of which can be put into three separate sets of varying severity. One of the Neutral Endings is what most players will undoubtedly get their first time playing through the game. Any of the Genocide Endings are absolutely horrific(and don't even mention the True Genocide Ending, jesus christ), and the True Ending is quite possibly the most beautiful and masterful weaving of story, characters, gameplay and music that you will ever see. That's what I mean by Undertale can't really be appreciated until you've seen all of it.
All of these endings tie into the grand narrative in someway, as they connect character motivations, world building and other hidden information across the microcosm that is the game. It's really quite amazing the amount of depth that has gone into making nearly every single play-through different, and tanjunctarely rewarding on different levels. You can't really appreciate the beauty of the True Ending until you experience what happens in any of the Neutral Endings, which thankfully the game is practically structured to have the player experience one right after the other. You can't understand the depth of a character like Sans' until you've completed a genocide run and trigger his boss battle, just like you can't see the absolute of the game's darkness until you've seen what come next after that battle, and how truly haunting it really is. And don't ever think about trying to reset your progress so you can make all of the right choices the first time through. Undertale remembers. Undertale remembers everything. Every choice in every save file is going to come back to haunt you. Because if there's one thing Undertale preaches: it's that you can't escape the consequences of your own actions. Killing even one person is never going to just be conveniently forgotten. Trying to escape that responsibility is only going to dig yourself deeper. And if you think for even a moment that you can just change your song and dance halfway through a playthrough because you don't like the direction it's heading, Undertale will make sure that you can't forget the sins crawling up your spine.
If looked at through a purely analytical lens(though doing so doesn't really give the game justice), Undertale could be viewed as a meta-commentary on not just video-games, but how video-games are played. It challenges the notions that most gamers have stapled into their brains, and then flips them on their heads in new and unexpected ways. It makes you question the way you're playing the game, and how morally skewed it actually is. For instance, isn't it kind of messed up that most games allow you to go on a killing rampage, then just just allow you to restart and go about like nothing happened? Why do most gamers go so far to achieve a 100% status on a game, even if that means doing utterly unspeakable acts? The answer, that most people would give anyway, is because it's just a game. To which Undertale remarks: "yeah, but it isn't a game to the characters living in it.". Just because Undertale is a game doesn't mean you won't be held accountable.
Most gamers have become desensitized to whatever they do in a video-game because it's all controlled through a character, an avatar. They can do whatever they want because in their minds, no matter how horrible, it isn't actually them committing those acts, it's the avatar doing it. Undertale completes shatters this illusion numerous times throughout the game, appealing to the player directly to do the right thing, regardless if it makes sense for a video-game. Yeah, it makes sense to beat the final boss of an area because it's a video-game. Yes, it makes sense to attack the first monster you meet in a random encounter because it's a video-game. Yes, it makes sense that you want would to gain as much Lv. and Exp. points as you can, because that's what the smiling flower in the beginning told you to do. It makes sense until you reach the game's final act, learn from a pun-obsessed skeleton what all those things actually mean in the context of the game, and wonder why the hell you had such a screwed up mind-set in the first place. I was actually lucky that I figured out early on that every single monster I met could be reasoned with, because if I had played Undertale the way that the gaming industry has taught me that games are "supposed to be played", I can't imagine how shitty I would have felt about myself. There is no avatar in Undertale. The choices you make are the choices you make, and whether you like it or not, they will determine how happy the ending will be. The Genocide Ending is probably the most inherent example of this. Playing it through, straight without any hesitation, will take you through one of the haunting descent into nihilism you will ever experience. Your in-game character will start being corrupted by the soul of the first human who fell into The Underground: Chara, until at the end of it, after killing every single character, you have literally destroyed the entire game, and only now have a black void on the screen left. What I love is at this point, there's nothing else you can do. Chara gives you the option to destroy the game or preserve it, and no matter which you choose, the result is the same: you die, and Chara presumably goes on to ruin the surface world's shit. Why is this? Because Undertale gives you choices, and depending on which you make, it can also take them away. If you have done so much awful things to get here, if you have reached this nadir of absolute despair, then you don't even have a choice to restart the game to get a happy ending. You don't have that right as a player anymore. Because after all, as Chara says...
Right now, my copy of Undertale is sitting on a computer in the next room, practically untouched since I finished the game for the first time more than 12 months ago. I cannot count the amount of times I have gotten a strong urge to replay the entire thing from beginning to end. But I haven't. Instead, I've mostly curbed my desire by watching other people play the game on Youtube, or listening to one of the songs for the billionth time. Why? Because I don't want to do that to the characters.
Naviagate Elsewhere
I guess now is as good a time as any to talk about the game's soundtrack. Legend has it in the outskirts of the Steam forums that Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, actually composed the soundtrack for the game before he had even started coding, feeling out certain scenes with music before writing them. If that is indeed the case, it more than shows, because Undertale's OST is likely one of the best for any that you will ever see. Look, it's not like every single track is exceptional, but the amount of great-to-amazing songs is simply remarkable, and in a soundtrack that compiles more than 100 different tunes, the fact that hardly any of them are anywhere near forgettable or mediocre is a feet in-of-itself. Toby Fox is primarily a music producer after all, and judging from the of interviews I've read about him, and how he earnestly tries to incorporate all kinds of inspiration into his music(whether that inspiration comes from video-games or elsewhere), I have no doubt this incredible soundtrack is the result of a lot of time and effort. There's so many good songs here that I really don't have time to list them all, but Sans' theme "Megalovania" is the kind of boss theme that gives so much exhilaration that most games wish they capture half of the hype that this song manages to dish out in just two-and-a-half minutes. The game also finds it retro roots(since, to be fair, this is all technically a 2D JRPG) in what most players will have their final-boss theme for their first play-through: "ASGORE", a infectious old-sounding video game theme that will have you nodding along with the perky tune even as you play through your tears fighting the titular character.
Undertale has the kind of soundtrack that I simply cannot imagine belonging to any other piece of media. The music and the plot are so beautifully, perfectly intertwined that taking one away from the one just does the final product a disservice. Never before has this kind of synchronization been more encapsulated in one single tune than in the track "Undertale", possibly the best song to come out the current gaming generation. Most dramatic songs would try to communicate the emotion with elaborate instrumentation, but with just a few simple notes played in various reiterations, "Undertale" is able to communicate more emotion, thoughts and power than most media could even dream of communicating with everything they have. I literally still tear up upon hearing the first few notes of this song, months after hearing it for the first time, and for someone like me, that says a whole lot about the amount of dramatic power that this song is able to exert for those who know exactly why this song is so special. And more so about how much the entirety of the game means to me.
Asking me one reason why I love Undertale is like giving one reason why I appreciate breathing. There's simply too many points to count, and putting one over the other is almost impossible. I'll never forget how brilliantly the game incorporated game-play and story(which to be honest, it does brilliantly all the time, as character's emotions directly correlate with the kind of attacks they hurl at you(but this off track now)) when I was preparing for my final fight with Asgore, and he literally smashes the SPARE option with his weapon, signifying his stubbornness and the fact that I might really need to kill him if I ever wanted to make it back to the surface. How blown away I was when I realized during Asriel's dramatic final monologue that the character I had named at the beginning of the game wasn't, in fact, the character I was playing this entire time, who turned out to be named Frisk, but rather the first human who had fallen into The Underground and sparked this entire sorry situation. Or how my jaw hit the floor when Sans revealed that Lv. and Exp. didn't stand for Level and Experience Points, like in literally every other video-game ever, but rather Level of Violence and Execution Points, ways of quantifying the amount of harm I had inflicted onto others.
But perhaps the biggest reason I love this game is just how good it makes me feel. I love this game. I love the characters. I love the plot, and I love the music, and I even love the muddled pixelated graphics. This game inspires loving. In an era where the chief complaint about video-games is that they glorify mindless violence or are emotionally hollow beyond the simple objectives of gunning down foes, Undertale will forever be the game I point to in order to counters that argument. It's not a game about violence, it's a game about mercy. It's about finding the good in every single thing you meet, because nobody is completely evil. As preached by the tagline of the game, Undertale is a game where "nobody has to get hurt", because its philosophy is that there is never a scenario where even one person is so far gone that they can't be saved. Just look at the characters of the game. Every monster you face in The Underground is acting because they either are trying to do the right thing or are fighting an insecurity. The actions of all the characters who do bad things: Asgore, Undyne, Sans, Megaton and Asriel, they make for very specific reasons that when you learn the whole story, you honestly can't even blame them for. It's a world where the conflict is born because of the emotional hang-ups that everyone has, which is suitable, because once you get to the end of the game, you learn that the "maleficent mastermind" behind the whole plot Flowey (or Asriel as he is eventually revealed to be), is acting according to an even smaller emotional hangup that has inadvertently begotten the storyline of the entire game. I mean honestly, who can blame a 10-year old child for not wanting to say goodbye to his friend? Hell, even Chara, who most casual observers of the lore would say is the true villain of the game, is just a confused kid with a completely justified hatred of humanity, who is redeemed or not based purely on your actions as a character. I love this game because it loves everything back.
ASGORE
Megalovania
Undertale
But perhaps the biggest reason I love this game is just how good it makes me feel. I love this game. I love the characters. I love the plot, and I love the music, and I even love the muddled pixelated graphics. This game inspires loving. In an era where the chief complaint about video-games is that they glorify mindless violence or are emotionally hollow beyond the simple objectives of gunning down foes, Undertale will forever be the game I point to in order to counters that argument. It's not a game about violence, it's a game about mercy. It's about finding the good in every single thing you meet, because nobody is completely evil. As preached by the tagline of the game, Undertale is a game where "nobody has to get hurt", because its philosophy is that there is never a scenario where even one person is so far gone that they can't be saved. Just look at the characters of the game. Every monster you face in The Underground is acting because they either are trying to do the right thing or are fighting an insecurity. The actions of all the characters who do bad things: Asgore, Undyne, Sans, Megaton and Asriel, they make for very specific reasons that when you learn the whole story, you honestly can't even blame them for. It's a world where the conflict is born because of the emotional hang-ups that everyone has, which is suitable, because once you get to the end of the game, you learn that the "maleficent mastermind" behind the whole plot Flowey (or Asriel as he is eventually revealed to be), is acting according to an even smaller emotional hangup that has inadvertently begotten the storyline of the entire game. I mean honestly, who can blame a 10-year old child for not wanting to say goodbye to his friend? Hell, even Chara, who most casual observers of the lore would say is the true villain of the game, is just a confused kid with a completely justified hatred of humanity, who is redeemed or not based purely on your actions as a character. I love this game because it loves everything back.
When I cleared the True Ending, Undertale ended by practically begging me to never restart the game, and to just let things end. Because finally, the endless cycle of pain and death was over, and if I started a new file now, it would completely undo everything I had accomplished throughout the story. Well, according the game's narrative, anyway. In truth, playing a new file on the game wouldn't really change much, as long as I simply repeated my steps. But I haven't, simply because I care too much about the game to play through it again. Can we just talk about that for a second? How just utterly crazy that it? I'm not replaying this video-game, this set sequence of 1's and 0's because, I don't want to hurt its feelings? Because I, the player, the one who is supposed to be the one controlling things, doesn't want to fulfill San's greatest fear, that everything will restart, and everyone will be back to the places that they were. That's how much Undertale made me care about its narrative and its characters. A narrative that isn't just limited to the context of the actual game, but stretches past the screen, changing forever how I'm going to interact with fiction. That is incredible. Undertale is incredible. Which, I hope at this point, shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone.
To be honest, after all I've said, giving Undertale a score at the end of this review seems ultimately pointless, since as an experience, to compare it to anything is counterproductive, because I've never played anything like it before. And if I had to guess, neither will I play anything like it again. But, as a reviewer, assigning a number is at least my obligation. And since I have to, only one number seems appropriate.
Final Verdict: 10/10
~
Good night, everyone.
Naviagate Elsewhere
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| https://hummingbird.me/users/Quan |
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| https://twitter.com/QuanReviews |
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