Not So Blind Love: Undertale

Not So Blind Love: Undertale

Not So Blind Love is a series in which one of the blog contributors will try to word why exactly they love a piece of art like they do.

Firstly, and by far most importantly, do not read this article unless you have completed the game. If you have even the vaguest hint of wanting to play this game, leave this article well, well, alone, and if you don’t, and want to read it anyway, I really have to question why.

So. Yes. Undertale.

Heart on your sleeve

How do you start writing about your favourite piece of media of all time? Something that you don’t just enjoy, you don’t just love, but you feel shapes you as a person?

Well, how about I start by listing a few of my opinions.

Undertale has my favourite cast of characters in any game, again easily.

It also has the best soundtrack, best match of gameplay to mechanics, best world and best skeletons of any game.

The story is so easily the best story in gaming that I have honestly been struggling to think of anything in its league and have decided it just is that good.

But why?

I love lots of games. Dark Souls, Fallout New Vegas, Far Cry 3, Bloodborne, the Binding of Isaac.

I have so much love and respect for these games, and each tells a thoroughly brilliant story.

So why does Undertale stand out, why do I consider it quite simply a class apart.

(I better have a good reason, because so far for a piece titled “Not so blind love”, it’s been wall to wall praise with no reason yet.)

Sometimes you have to just have to stop and enjoy the view

Games have always had a clear story advantage over any other art form. Movies, TV, books, they all tell a story, often a fantastic story, but a story with a level of seperation that games don’t have, because when you play a game the story is about you. You are the main character! No other form of entertainment is about “you”, the person watching/reading/playing it.  No other form of entertainment will block you from continuing, no other form of media will give you a “bad ending” based on your own actions. So video games have a massive story telling asset by virtue of the medium.

Which so many squander.

So badly.

We don’t have time to get into the history of mediocre video game stories now, but we can look at one specific common aspect.

Moral choice systems. A name referring to the mechanic of a game “judging” you for your actions as you play, meaning you can choose to be morally good, bad, or somewhere in the middle.

And I really wasn’t a fan.

If you had told me a game had a moral choice system before I’d played Undertale I would have sighed. To give an example as to why, let me talk to you about Playstations Sandbox Superhero exclusive, Infamous. I enjoyed the game well enough when I played it, but looking back on it now, I think the moral choice system is something of a fatal flaw for the story as a whole. You can be good, or you can be evil, those are your options. Good gives you different superpowers to evil, and a different story where Cole helps all his friends out instead of pushing them off tall buildings and laughing or whatever. This is an absolute nothing of a “choice”, because it’s not a difficult “choice” to make. Like great, I can be good or bad, but does it make the game more or less fun? Does it affect the characters I care about in any significant way? No, all it means is the game either gives you a flower necklace or waves its finger sternly at you. It all feels so arbritary and basic, and honestly?

Who cares?

Anyway, onto Undertale which has uh, a simple good or evil moral choice system. Just like Infamous.

At least at face value.

The game clearly “wants” you to play one way. The choice is always the players of course, but upon reflection, I asked myself, why would you kill any of the monsters you meet playing the game?

You don’t fight any “bad” guys do you? Sure, you meet Flowie, who on first, second, third, fourth and fifth glances seems like an utterly unredeemable bastard (At glance 200 and something that might change though), but you don’t get the chance to fight him until the finale of the story. All throughout the underground, you are meeting and laughing at a fantastically colourful and whimsical cast of characters. You don’t want to kill the funny frogs at the start, or the enemies so pathetic they burst into tears when you try to help, you don’t want to kill you’re kindly “Goat Mum” who just wants to help, or the eccentric skeleton who clearly just wants a friend, or the fame obsessed robot who turns away from the limelight to help those they care for, nor even the heavily armored fish hero who is so passionately pursuing your demise. Even the final fight, up against the most sympathetic of child murderers is one I could not bare to end in death (What a fantastic sentence that is, I didn’t think it was possible to write a “sympathetic child murderer”). No, the game shows you that you can kill anyone, but asks that you kindly don’t and from that moment I never strayed from the path. I do not know how many, like me, got a true pacifist ending at the first time of asking, but I bet it was very high percentage.

Undertale has a “choice”. But it’s one the game is telling you in no uncertain terms to make one way. And as the player, I listened.

The dark is scary, but only because you don’t yet know it

You may not kill anyone, but you are still fighting, still being set upon by a legion of (Quite brilliantly designed and thought up) “monsters”, but none of them, not a single one, not even the quite obviously pure evil Flowie, are well, pure evil. They fight for specific reasons, and if you honestly did not have you heart strings tugged by at least some of said reasons then what sort of granite are you hewn from. Papyrus would love to be in the royal guard, not so he can fight, but so he can finally have friends, and his ticket into the royal guard is beating you. When you encounter him, the fight ends with him all but giving up on his dream instantly for your sake, his first friend. Napstablook is fighting you yes, but its more a kind of fearful reaction due to his own deep misery and chronic lack of self esteem that when you give him the boost he so clearly needs, he stops the battle at once.  Undyne too, set so totally on her goal, utterly convinced of the evil of man, looks the other way when you show her “human” kindness, because these aren’t “evil monsters” but frightened and trapped characters. The general enemies fight because they think they ought to, because well, humans are bad, that’s what they’ve always been taught, and with very good reason. Talking them down as opposed to killing them is something I always wanted to do, and never something the game had to make me do by marking one option as “good karma” and one as “bad karma”.

So, the gameplay, story and character all intertwine neatly and ingeniously then, but as brilliant as it is it would not make this the “best” game on its own.

Undertale is truly a tragic story. In all but the very best possible end, it remains a tragic story, and even the “best” ending is not free of heartbreak and regret. So it tells a sad story the best way a sad story can be told.

It tells it with puns, jokes and complete silliness.

Now, I’m not trying to knock the Last of Us, I’m really not, but as tragic and well told as the story undoubtedly is, it didn’t hit me. I wasn’t close to tears or even sad. At no point during the game, did I ever feel the characters were ever really happy, just a variation of sad, angry, under pressure, or very, very, cautious. Joel and Ellie are excellent characters yeah, but they’re so miserable, so put upon, so borderline psychotic that I never felt like there was a way back for them. (Yes I remember the giraffe bit, it was fleeting, and I swear to God Joel still feels thoroughly depressed). I couldn’t be truly miserable, because it was basically all the emotion the game had ever shown, the game was an emotional flatline, and sadness can only come if there was happiness to be taken away.

Now granted, Undertale does have a happier starting world than the Last of Us, but how much happier? A race of sentient monsters sentenced to a life underground, unfairly outlawed from the world they should live in, knowing their only chance of getting free is a seventh (SEVENTH!) child murder by a king, driven to terrible things, an awful war that killed so many of his people, AND a second tragic event that killed both his biological son and surrogate child, ending his marriage in the process. Finally, he steels his heart and commits to burden his own conscience with the deaths of seven children to free his people from their misery.

Can you blame him? I can’t

Tell me truly, how happy is that starting point? No wonder the monsters attack you on sight.

But these people, monsters, whatever, they’ve fashioned a life. They tell jokes, go to the bar, play cards, visit the libarby, and at first glance you wouldn’t really know anything was wrong, because trauma like that isn’t sat at the surface, its only when you pry through the underground you realise what sort of world this really is.

A certain short skeleton tells both the story of the underground and of his own personal life in a way so brilliant I still can’t believe he exists.

Honestly, better writers than me have written essays on Sans, and I really don’t think I can do him justice but a few thing’s are very clear. His weird timeline jumping warping knowledge mean he has suffered down in the underground, for a lot longer than anyone else. He has also tried far harder than any one given monster to get out, and most likely lost friends doing it. He has more reason than any to be miserable, but how does he introduce himself?

A whoopee cushion gag.

Sans is my favourite character for so many reasons. On the one hand, I first loved his stupid puns and knock-knock jokes, (I’d say this article won’t upset Naughty Dog fans, but then I’d be telling a fib-ula) and then his weird ability to teleport, (Which I just took as a joke at the fact that in game characters can always get anywhere instantly when needed to), but then his mask slips. You realise how nihilistic his view is, his refusal to interact in basically any meaningful with the world, his hollow eyed stare over dinner giving you no illusion that if it weren’t for a very lucky promise he made, he would have had no qualms killing you for your soul. He was a good “man”, a good skeleton broken by a terrible situation and surviving through, ahem, graveyard humour.

Something to enjoy with your own eyes

None of the worlds misery would hit half as hard if you didn’t see the happiness of some characters, and there wish for what it could be. Undertale then at this point, is a brilliant world, a brilliant story, relatable characters, and with gameplay that is both a genius innovation on turn based combat and fantastically complimentary to the story being told, but for me, what sets it apart, what truly makes it a once in a lifetime game is that well Undertale got in my head.

And it hasn’t gotten out.

Let’s go back to moral choice systems for a moment. I finished Undertale, and just like anyone who’s finished something they really love, I wanted more of it. I had my happy lovely pacifist “good” ending, now I wanted to see the “bad” ending. I wanted to see what happened when I went through the game killing everything I had previously spared.

Or did I?

I haven’t gotten five minutes into the “bad” story of Undertale. I cannot bear the thought of letting Toriel down, of Papyrus crumbling away before my eyes, of Undyne having to protect the underground from me, but with good reason this time. That is what games can do with their story. They can immerse you so thoroughly, make you feel so involved, that when you get the chance to play more of something you love you turn it down. You turn it down because you made friends with a pun loving skeleton and there’s no way you’re letting him down now.

Would you spoil their happiness? Did you?

But dear reader, what about those who’s curiosity overwhelmed their love?

What happens if you do kill everyone?

The game actually genuinely begs for no more. Flowey appears, he asks you by name, the only time it ever happens to leave them, to let them have the happy ending you worked so hard to achieve.

Here, once again, I’d love to know the split. I personally, couldn’t bear to put them through such misery after I’d finished, but here I feel I’m definitely in the minority.

So you do start again. Because you love the game. And because you love the game, you want to see everything it has.

So you kill that first funny frog you see, you kill the weird vegetables and even attack a ghost even though there’s no point to it. You kill Toriel, as she realises with a jolt you neither needed nor deserved protection.

Up to here, sure the games less fun, but you’re seeing interesting new stuff. But now, now the game starts to hate you. You’ve gone from being the fixer, the saviour to the angel of death.

So the game retaliates. It stops being fun.

Sure you can kill everything, but its a slog. Yes, you have Papyrus funny puzzle bit, but you walk through it and upset him because that’s just who you are now. There are big fights coming up, real challenges for a pacifist run, but you breeze through them because these monsters weren’t made for fighting, they never had the heart for it.

Now in a so called “genocide run” there are only two actual challenges, the rest of the game now being a mindless grind of constant murder. One of these challenges was a friend of yours, in another life.

Far more of a hero than you

Here, the game gives you a natural interesting story cut off. Undyne is tough, very tough, tougher than any other fight you’ve faced, because they aren’t fighting out of confusion, or for a cause they’re not sure of. So give up. Reset the game. Call this horrible business quits and pretend it never happened. Lose to the hero of the story and reward her by undoing your mistakes.

Because Undyne is the true hero now. She’s fighting for survival, not just for her, but all her peers. If you get too frustrated if you die too many times and quit, then she’s won. The underground is safe.

You push on though don’t you, because if you’ve made it this far you want to see what the games hiding.

So the game becomes even less fun, even more grindy, less jokey, more oppressively miserable. The game knows its here to be played, but you are very much abusing that power.

So you do it all. You make it to him.

Sans is many things, but principle among them is lazy. You can kill everyone, EVERYONE, bar one creature, and he does not attack you. You have to go out your way, kill them all, very much literally, before the “weakest enemy in the game” attacks.

Now, I’ve never played this fight, but I’ve completed Dark Souls 2, 3, and Bloodborne, and I’d rather do them all with a guitar hero controller than fight Sans. This fight simply is obscene, it’s not a fair fight, he’s not a fun fight, he’s a fury inducing impossibly difficult rage fight. And you have to do it.

This is it for the game. Its throwing everything at you making a challenge as close to impossible as a game can be. Here, it says, here’s (most likely) your favourite character, or very least a well loved character, here’s his impossible fight, complete it, if you are that determined to kill everyone.

You really want to kill him? Not half as much as he wants to kill you…

Now your final reward. Another loved character brutally murdered, the main, but very redeemable villain, brutally murdered, and you, the character you name, looking back at you, telling you to destroy it all.

So you do.

And that’s it.

What do you expect? It’s all gone.

It’s done.

Undertale won’t be the same again, and its your fault.

And no one ever will again

Moral choice systems are all well and good, well they aren’t, but anyway, no other game makes one choice the “not fun one”, you are never really punished for being the bad guy. Undertale does punish you. Undertale makes one choice the wrong one, and it punishes you for making it, because why would hurt all of these fantastic and kind characters you psychopath?

And I did it. I played along with it all. I couldn’t bear to kill anyone, not one of these characters, not for a sec. These pixelated sprites meant more to me than any other video game characters, and the game knew.

I had no issue with bad karma in Fallout New Vegas, or watching Isaac die in various ways, or letting the world end in Dark Souls.

But not doing the best a fabulously clothed cool guy skeleton who had romantically rejected me thought I could? That was a no go.

And that for me is why Undertale is a class apart, because even with the promise of more of it, I couldn’t let down the monsters it had introduced me too, their happiness mattered more than mine.

Thank you Toby Fox.

They matter far more to me than they reasonably should (Shoutout to Frisk for somehow dragging a ghost along)

Thanks for reading!

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