When I first played Undertale in 2015, it was all the rage. Gaming publications at the time gushed about this weird indie game made by one guy. I was a little stand-offish. It had a very minimalist look to it, almost reminding me of an old Commodore 64 game or something. And it was a sort of fourth-wall breaking RPG that encouraged pacifism. None of that exactly turned me off. I like weird games. But the hype was just so huge.
I can remember my wife and I taking a bus trip to NYC and overhearing a teenage girl describing the game to her mom. Her mom sounded like she was really struggling to fake interest in this game. But I realized then that Undertale was an anomaly. When I was a teenager, a game like Undertale would not have been mainstream in any way. In fact, the two most obvious inspirations for Undertale had almost zero impact on American audiences back in the day. Earthbound (1994) hit the American market with a whimper upon release, taking at least a decade to be recognized as a true work of genius art and a coveted holy grail amongst SNES collectors. Meanwhile, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (1997) never even left Japan. I have to imagine that no publisher thought that Americans would even appreciate the game, and thus it languished on these shores until it was finally localized in 2020. But you can draw a line through those two games and find your way to Undertale. Earthbound is obvious. Yes, it's a JRPG, but unlike Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy it takes place in a more modern setting and has some truly bonkers dialogue and story curveballs. More importantly, you could reference Toby Fox's "Halloween Hack" of Earthbound as a sort of dry run for the work he'd later do on Undertale. Thematically, the comparisons to Moon are way more obvious, though. Moon is literally an RPG about a boy whisked away to a strange world where he must help the inhabitants instead of hurting them. Moon's cult status was long that of an "anti-RPG," a label which could quite easily be applied to Undertale as well. Going back to the Halloween Hack reference, Undertale is tonally weird. The game's simple and cute graphics are at odds with the somewhat unnerving story and setting. In Shin Megami Tensei games, you mostly kill monsters and sometimes talk to them in hopes of recruiting them. In Undertale, your goal is to always avoid fighting (even though it's the first option) and talk to monsters in hopes of flattering, flirting, threatening, and so on in hopes of avoiding any and all conflict. All the while there's an overwhelming vibe of depression, loneliness, and despair. Monsters literally cry. The landscape is often barren. It's discomforting, and yet hard to put a finger on. Maybe the best way I can describe it is, did you ever see Pan's Labyrinth? Imagine if that was a 16-bit RPG. Imagine if Dragon Quest was a literal nightmare. The battle system is equally as interesting. Whereas most throwback RPGs would choose to stick with the tried and true turn-based battle systems of yore, Undertale swerves hard. Instead, how about if battles are played out in a danmaku shmup sort of way? How about if you're represented by a tiny hard and must dodge a whole hell of bullets? You can't fight back. Just dodge. Your goal is to just hang in there each turn and hope you have enough HP to take another turn and resort to peacefulness? In reality, you can actually fight. You can kill stuff. But that's not the point. In my first playthrough of the game back in 2015, I did get desperate and kill something. And then everything went downhill. The game got infinitely harder, and I had to keep killing to survive. That's a way you can play the game, but not the intended way. Undertale is very much a game about nonviolence. I don't know Toby Fox, so I can't say for sure that he's preaching any sort of agenda. But certainly it's an interesting take on a genre. What if the most basic thing you're supposed to do in an RPG (kill stuff and grind XP) is completely removed from the genre? What would that look like? Then there's the weird characters. Take for instance the motherly goat that you first meet that introduces you to the underworld. Or Sans and Papyrus, the two skeletons who have gone on to be something of the faces of the game. These are odd characters with completely unique personalities. And dare I say, they can even be funny. All of this amounts to something of a fever dream in game form. I don't think I can accurately describe the insanity that Underworld turns into when you're suddenly thrown into a televised game show that's being hosted by a robot. I'm not making this up. This is something that happens in a video game that wasn't created by David Lynch. Ultimately, Undertale truly is an anti-RPG. It's fairly short; it's linear with no backtracking; there's no weapons or armor or spells to upgrade. Basically, it goes out of its way to break nearly every convention that you'd be accustomed to from any other RPG. Because of that, I find it a totally interesting game. But one thing that nags at me is that on the second playthrough I felt that I was having less actual fun. I think that the first time around, I was so interested in the story and seeing the subversions of the genre, that that was enough to keep me invested. Going into it knowing fully what to expect this time, I found that the battle system (or rather, anti-battle system) and the puzzles that make up the actual game play weren't all that compelling to me on their own. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game. It's an impressive game and labor of love by one developer. And it's a game I think everyone should experience once. I just don't know that it holds a lot of replayability for me.
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