Undertale

Undertale

Let’s talk about Undertale.

Undertale is a RPG where you play a child who has fallen underground into the world of monsters and you must find your way home. It’s very Earthbound/Mother-esque in tone and art style. It’s a rollercoaster of feels. I laughed quite a bit.

The game has three endings depending on gameplay style. Neutral (you kill at least one enemy, but not all enemies), pacifist, and genocide. Evidently you have to get a neutral or genocide ending first to make the pacifist ending possible.

In combat you can either FIGHT or ACT, with various actions that can be used to discourage an enemy from fighting. As the enemies grow more powerful it takes more complex combinations of ACTs to get them to stop fighting. Once the enemy is weakened you may either kill it or show mercy. You can also attempt to flee. Generally the enemies will talk to you, so if you pay attention to what they’re saying or how they’re acting you can figure out the ACTs to wear them down.

The turn-based battles have a heavy twitch element, likely inspired by Mother 3. All that bullet hell practice paid off, to say the least. The twitch games are really varied, enemies usually have multiple types of attacks, multiple enemies attack in tandem. It helps the game avoid the grindy feel of early turn-based RPGs.

The downside of sparing enemies is you get no EXP, so your character doesn’t level up. I attempted a pacifist run first, but I got stuck on a boss battle and learned that you have to get the neutral ending first anyway, so I went ahead and leveled up a bit to increase my HP.

I did get a little frustrated on a few of the battles. There are two boss battles in particular that really challenged me. There is also a little running back and forth if you need to return to town to get supplies. But generally, I think the developer did a good job of avoiding the tedium that can easily accompany this type of game.

So this one gets the Renegade seal of approval. You really want to avoid spoilers, I’ll just say it’s a very clever game made by someone who obviously loves old-school RPGs. It’s funny but also dark, and it’s a testament to the developer how the tone can switch from amusing to dangerous in a moment. I look forward to the challenge of the pacifist playthrough, but I dread the genocide playthrough.

Undertale II

After getting a neutral-pacifist ending and the true pacifist ending, I didn’t have the heart to play a genocide run. After being saturated with so much friendship magic, it was too much to contemplate. As soon as I got to the first room with random encounters I put the game away.

This is by design. By giving weight to all actions, however insignificant, Undertale forces the completionist to consider the negative outcomes that await. In the average RPG one doesn’t think twice about random encounters, but in Undertale every encounter matters. Every monster is a character that can be eradicated permanently. Also, the game knows what you have done. It references previous playthroughs. It will know I’ve gone on a killing rampage long after the rampage is over, even if I cleanse the palate with a pacifist run after.

If I do this, my sins will be preserved. I already regret killing Flowey at the end of my first run, even though my motivations were altruistic.

The game bluntly tells you the true ending is the happiest ending and asks if the player will be content with that outcome or if they will start again and change things. And the only way to change things is to hurt people.

The thing that’s motivating me to push forward is the promise of the undiscovered secrets. I still have questions and players are continually discovering hidden things in the game. It seems that with each playthrough something is different. Weird things are starting to manifest.

I brazenly reset my pacifist playthrough ending save, which I now regret because I missed some things, so I do have incentive to do at least one more pacifist run. I haven’t decided if I should work myself up to it or push the pedal to the floor and go out in a blaze of glory, probably the latter. In the meantime, the Royal Trap awaits.

Undertale III: You’ll Laugh, You’ll Cry, You’ll Die

In the interest of excavating more of Undertale’s secrets I embarked on a genocide run. Spoilers and general musings of a shitty casual gamer forced into the arms of Cheat Engine.

Prior to this, I did a neutral-pacifist run and a pacifist run. The genocide run is shorter than I expected, partly because killing everyone means there are less obstacles and because the game does not make you redo all the puzzles–either because it was my third playthrough or because the game recognized I was a homicidal maniac. 

It was comparatively easy except for two boss battles. The Undying Undine battle was way beyond my depth and I had to fire up the Cheat Engine to get past it. I modified my HP for that battle and I also used instant encounter hack to get the 40 kills in the Core that would have otherwise taken forever. From that point forward, enemies were child’s play until I reached Sans, a.k.a the Hell Battle. 

You have to see this shit to believe it. I somehow created a glitch with the Cheat Engine that made the game crash to desktop after San’s first attack, so I ended up watching it on YouTube and skipping the battle (to do this, edit the second to last line of the 0 save file from 231 to 233). This works because you cannot pass Sans without killing him, so the game assumes he’s dead.

I’m going to segue to note Sans is such a great character. On my first playthrough it was increasingly apparent he was more than he seemed, but it wasn’t until he sat me down and said, “[If it wasn’t for Toriel] Y o u ’ d b e d e a d w h e r e y o u s t a n d,” that I realized he was going to be hell on a genocide run. I had no idea. If you choose to spare Sans at the end of the Hell Battle, he strikes you dead. I don’t think I’ve ever respected a boss character more to be honest.  Well met in every respect.

Let’s talk about what a head-trip this game is. At the end, I opted not to erase the world, and the window flipped out and crashed. To proceed, I had to restart the game and experience howling wind and a blank screen for ten minutes. All inputs were non-responsive.

After a wait I am offered a deal. My soul to restart the game. I say no. The game says fuck you and crashes. On restart I’m back to the howling black screen. I read there’s no way past this but to give up my soul. I check the game files to make sure and see the save files have been wiped. There is no way to play the game further unless I capitulate. If I was using a non-Steam version of the game, I could modify the system_information file. As it stands, my only other option is uninstalling the game.

So I sold my soul, knowing this would affect all subsequent playthroughs.

Goddamn, dude.

Anyway, I’m still plinking away at Undertale (current run is only killing bosses that are actively attempting to murder me), but I need something else to play. I really want to pick up Saints Row IV again, but Fallout drops on Tuesday so I need to stick to something short-ish and probably comparatively non-violent. Maybe Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which has been on my list for a while.