Undertale Review

Back in 2015, I heard of Undertale gradually throughout internet references (especially references to the game soundtrack, Megalovania for instance), and these random and constant occurrences were the major factor which led me to become interested in the game. I didn't have any mediums through which I could play the game at the time, so my knowledge was limited to YouTube videos about it, which gave me familiarity with the characters' names, basic ideas of what the game is about (e.g., that there are "humans and monsters," that there are Pacifist, Genocide, and Neutral routes, etc.), and a couple of unfortunate spoilers.

Two years later or so, my father brought a cheap laptop home for his personal uses, but he never actually used it, which invited me to "borrow" it as my daily driver. One of the first things I did was trying to download Undertale (which I was still very excited to try) from a potentially risky piracy site ("SteamUnlocked," if I recall correctly).

The game presents itself with a silent protagonist, which doesn't allow for much player input when it comes to dialogue, but similar to most RPGs, interaction with Undertale's NPCs play meaningful roles in the story and add significant depths to the lore each time you wanted to dive in deeper. The most important aspect of player input revolves around decisions whether to spare monsters that fight you or not, and with those decisions, different routes are achieved. Since you control a silent protagonist in Undertale, there's no dialogue where you can try to "reason" with the monsters you randomly encounter; you can never ask them why they're trying to kill you (although you find out why halfway through), and you're forced to go along with their "minigames."

As for the combat system in question, the main mechanic is about "bullet hell" dodging during enemy turns, inspired from Touhou Project. You try to avoid damage and each enemy's variety of attack patterns, which continuously get harder as the game progresses. For main bosses, their attacks progress throughout the fight, usually starting with their easiest attacks and breaking out new ones as they move on, as well as by introducing modified dodging mechanics, massively expanding their design space beyond dodging simple messes of bullets. With this, Undertale's entertaining RPG combat system keeps the balance between skills and stats, which is a clear level-up compared to other RPGs where outcomes are determined more by your stats than by how you play, and dodging attacks is trivial and boring.

To progress in the fight, you have two options; to kill or to spare. By choosing the former option, your own attacks are modulated by a system that relies on "timing a beam right in the center," but to stop it from getting too repetitive, weapons you find later make it slightly more advanced (like giving you multiple beams to press, adding much more power to the hits). This is also a level-up from other RPGs where dealing damage is also not really subject to skill, since usually optimal play is to just keep choosing your strongest attack or spell. As for the latter "sparing" option, you are supposed to "act" with the enemies in order to "befriend" them, and there are multiple choices to achieve that, each depending on the enemies you're encountering, whose designs and names tend to be jokes that all their dialogues revolve around throughout the fight.

Anyhow, the game has top-notch pixel art, top-notch soundtrack, and all the main characters are solid, nuanced and have real development. It's also very dense with humorous moments, easter eggs, and secret encounters (which add much more lore than the surface level story the game generally provides). Each ending too holds mind-blowing reveals that other endings don't.

The only annoying inconveniences in the game is the lack of fast traveling and the slow movement (which makes it very unappealing and painful to revisit previous areas for some semi-important scenes), and a certain dog in the game. The fandom community surrounding this game also seem to be compromised by obnoxious furries in most cases, but that's unrelated to the game itself, so just avoid the community as much as you can unless you want to be mentally molested on Tumblr.

Overall, it's an excellent and life-changing game whose references also introduced me to many older gems (like Earthbound, LISA, Touhou Project, and Yume Nikki), which I wish to have discovered earlier. In fact, I still play it from time to time because the story is so immersive and replayable. You should absolutely play it, if you haven't. A-tier.