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Okay. I'm going to talk about Undertale now. Here, also, are the Steam and TVTropes pages for Undertale (view that latter one at your own risk, especially if you are spoiler averse).
Here is a demo for the game. I might actually go back and play the demo myself at some point, because I've heard there are some tricks that it does that even the full game doesn't do, such as manipulating the demo's manual based on how you play. As such, you should probably look at the demo's manual before, during, and after you play the demo. (As far as I can tell, the full game doesn't have a manual at all.)
First comes the non-spoilery bits. I'll provide a LJ-cut and tons of spoiler spaceand even <lj-spoiler> tags once I get into the really spoilery stuff, so don't worry too much. Just be warned that there'll be some slight spoilery stuff even before that, though. (EDIT for Dreamwidth) Be warned, the <lj-spoiler> tag does not work in DW, so all previously hidden spoilers are now not hidden, except behind the original cuts. (/EDIT)
Undertale is a RPG that is very heavily inspired by the Mother/EarthBound series. (At one point, for example, if you stay at the inn in Snowdin, the Buzz Buzz sound effect is directly lifted from EarthBound, and one of the monster encounter music tracks in a later section of Undertale sounds suspiciously similar to the section just before you reach Giygas in EarthBound. And that's just the small potatoes stuff.) Beyond that, I also tasted shades of thematic flavors from other games such as OFF, Contact, and Omikron: The Nomad Soul (and, hell, just mentioning those games may be spoiler-ish, in and of itself) and, occasionally, Yume Nikki (a game I haven't played myself, but which I have egregiously spoiled for myself) and even Silent Hill, as well as (mostly) non-game entities like Homestuck.
Okay, more descriptive stuff, rather than mere comparisons to other games. Undertale may not look like much at first glance, and indeed it took me getting a little ways in before I fully warmed up to it, but this is one of the best games I've played in a long while. By the end of the Snowdin section, the boss fight there, and the aftermath of that boss fight if you go back and talk to said boss afterwards (assuming you don't kill said boss, of course), is when I was fully hooked. (Pro-tip: once you get said boss's cellphone number, you'll probably want to do what I did and go back to every room prior that you can still reach and call him in each one, as he'll have something funny [and, occasionally, perhaps even useful] to say in all of them. And then do it all again later when the situation changes and there's someone else to make comments about everything.) Maybe not so much gameplay-wise, since I'm not the biggest fan in the world of bullet hell games (which the combat in this game most closely resembles, especially later on), but even that was still fun, if frustrating at times (and is most definitely frustrating in my current, second playthrough, but more on that down in the spoiler section). But overall... yeah. Best game I've played in quite a while.
The game places you in the role of an ambiguously gendered child who has fallen out of the human world into a world of monsters. In typical RPG fashion, you randomly encounter monsters along the way. Unlike most RPGs (outside of, maybe, games like the Shin Megami Tensei series and spin-offs [yeah, snuck a couple more comparisons in there]), you don't necessarily have to kill every monster you encounter. You can show them mercy by sparing them, after successfully interacting with them in certain ways, unique to each monster type. Or you can just kill them. Your choice. Slight spoiler: In order to get the best/true ending (before which you must see the neutral ending at least once before you can get it), you must spare all monsters, which includes bosses. Fortunately, you can do this in a single playthrough, as when you reload your save after seeing the neutral ending, the requirements to get the true ending will be made available for you to do (assuming that you went full pacifist up to that point beforehand). Basically, if you want to see the good/true ending, don't even think about touching that FIGHT button at all, until you get toASGORE and then Omega Flowey at the end of the game (and even then you'd be well-advised to still spare them when given the chance to do so). One of the earlier bosses actually requires you to flee from the fight when you get the chance, if you want to end the situation peacefully.
The music is awesome. Hell, I'll even do an impromptu, half-assed Game Music Thing, right here and now.
Just a very few (ever so slightly spoilery) examples from the soundtrack:
Ruins theme
Home theme
Toriel's boss theme
sans's theme
Papyrus's theme (and his boss theme)
Snowdin town theme
Waterfall theme
Temmie Village
Undyne's (real) theme (and her boss theme in the normal route and her hero theme in the bad ending route [which I'm hearing quite a bit of now, as described below in the super spoiler section])
Muffet's theme
ASGORE's battle intro and boss theme
...
And, more spoilery...
...
sans 's boss music (and though I haven't made it that far yet in my current playthrough, I expect to be hearing a lot of this before I get any farther [EDIT] actually, I made it to sans in my No Mercy run, but only once did I survive against him long enough to hear that music, even for a little bit, he kicked my ass that hard [/EDIT]). If you're familiar with Homestuck, you'll probably recognize MeGaLoVania there. If is, after all, the same track with the same name. Of course, Homestuck is actually not where that particular piece of music originated. (Just to note, Toby Fox, who made both Undertale and the EarthBound Halloween Hack [which I have not played or had even heard of prior to learning about Undertale, but will definitely be playing at some point in the near future] also makes music for Homestuck. As an aside, I could and probably should do a GameWebcomic Music Thing just for Homestuck itself someday.)
Now onward into real spoiler territory...
Spoiler space
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That's probably enough.
And here's a <lj-spoiler> tag, on top of everything, just to be extra safe. (EDIT for Dreamwidth) Again, the old spoiler tag from LiveJournal does not work in Dreamwidth, so be warned that spoilers are explicitly visible now. (/EDIT)
To say that this game breaks the fourth wall is a bit of an understatement. It may not seem that way at first, and it will probably take a few playthroughs (or restarts) to notice, but... well... things are not as they seem at first.
I'm seriously warning you, beyond here there be unmarked spoilers for sure. Do not tread forward if you don't want to see them.
Still here? Okay. Characters in this game remember things from playthrough to playthrough (or after a restart or even simply a reload of a saved game). Mainly, this would be Flowey, the first character you meet in the game, and sans, the first character you meet once you leave the Ruins and enter the monster world proper, though several other characters can sometimes exhibit this trait to lesser extents as well (such as Toriel remembering whether you said you liked cinnamon or butterscotch more at the beginning of the game). Flowey, in fact, has the same ability to save and load games that you do, although your powers as the player supersedes his (at least until near the end).
Also, you are not who you think you are. Or, at least, the character that you name at the start isn't the character that you are actually controlling for the entirety of the game. In fact, the game seems to acknowledge the existence of three distinct entities: you as the player of the game, the player character that you are controlling, and a third, more mysterious character (which is the one that you're naming at the beginning, instead of the one you're controlling).
As for me, I have completed the True Pacifist ending (i.e. I beat the game once normally without killing anything, and then reloaded my save and went back and did the additional requirements to get the true ending, again without killing anything). I loved the characters in this. Toriel, Papyrus and his brother sans, Undyne, Alphys, even Mettaton (who I found merely annoying, at first), and even ASGORE. Flowey is kind of a shit, true enough, but he's got his reasons, as explained in the true ending. The story is touching and heartfelt, and I'm man enough to admit I had tears in my eyes at some points toward the end.
Now, however, I am going through what is called a Genocide or No Mercy run. Extinction or Extermination could also apply. (Apparently, the creator of the game doesn't like people to use the word "genocide" to describe this route, but... well, that is essentially what you're doing in the route, by the very definition of the word.) Basically, I'm now going through the game and killing every character in the game in this second playthrough. I mean, you really have to go out of your way, because you have to kill monsters in random battles in each area until monsters simply stop showing up at all, at which point the game... changes. The music gets much more evil sounding, and characters who could have been your best friends in the pacifist run now treat you much differently. You'll find villages that were once filled with quirky and interesting characters now completely deserted, because they evacuated when they heard you were coming. The game goes out of its way to try to make you feel like a shitheel for playing the game this way. More than that, you can never truly get the True Pacifist ending ever again once you do a No Mercy run, because the True Pacifist ending is forever after "tainted" due to events that happen during a No Mercy run, even if you do a "True Reset." The only real way to restore your game to "factory settings" is to actually go and delete files outside of the game. Assuming you don't "cheat" like that ("Not cheating. Winning." --Batman), then your game is indeed permanently tainted if you complete a No Mercy run. As of the time of this post, I've run into the first real roadblock of the No Mercy run, which is the boss battle against Undyne the Undying. From what I hear, there are only two such challenges in the No Mercy path, because all other monsters, including most bosses, go down in just one or two hits. I also hear that the second such challenge is probably several orders of magnitude more difficult than the one I'm stuck on now. Let's just say that I'm definitely having "a bad time." (EDIT) Update: My No Mercy run stopped when I made it to sans. My playthrough as a murdering asshole ended with sans just completely and repeatedly obliterating my ass to the point that I simply didn't care to try anymore. The only survivors were sans, ASGORE, and Flowey (and Napstablook, I guess?). So, sans won. Good for sans. I deserved it. (/EDIT)
Except that... I'm not having a bad time. Not really. It's actually pretty fun, even if Undyne is repeatedly kicking my ass at the point I'm at now, and I'm sure sans will kick my ass even harder when I reach him later. (EDIT) Which, of course, he did, to the point that I just stopped. (/EDIT) (As a true villain might say [and I could indeed very definitely be considered the villain of the game at this point], "They have to win every time, but I only have to win once." Though I suppose that's true of any boss fight in any game, really.) Does this make me a socio/psychopath or something? The game would certainly like to make me believe that is the case, sure. My character is definitely becoming one, given that they're now often acting even without my controlling them to behave in a more sinister, evil manner than they did during the pacifist run. But, hell, you're talking to the guy who enjoyed playing the dark side path of Knights of the Old Republic more than he did the light side path, the guy who gleefully Force Dominated Zaalbar into murdering Mission Vao at the end of that game (and Mission was probably my favorite character in the game), and was impressed that the game actually let me be that evil in the first place, even taking into account everything that had come before.
As such, while I fully recognize that what I'm doing is indeed pretty vile, at least in the context of the game's universe, at the end of the day it is still truly only bits and bytes on my harddrive. It's just art assets and music and computer code. As much as the game may want me to feel otherwise, I'm not truly harming anything or anyone by playing this game in this manner. And the game even acknowledges that. It says that the only way that you'd even be able to play the game that way is to detach yourself from the horror of killing all these beloved friends that you'd made during the pacifist run. Some people may very well not be able to do such a thing, but as for me, sure, I'll gladly accept the "bad time" to come. (EDIT) Well, up until I got bored with repeatedly losing to sans and just gave up altogether. *shrug* (/EDIT) And if the game is wanting me to feel bad and have a bad time for doing this, in such a meta sense... well, I just have to ask... is not the designer of such a game even worse than me, as the player of the game? Hmm? Why would said designer even allow players to go down such a dark road in the first place, why even give them the possibility, if it's such a terrible, evil, very bad thing? Food for thought.
Yes, there's some deeply meta stuff in Undertale that isn't evident from the beginning or even through most of the game. (Hell, there's even a character who doesn't actually exist in the game proper, aside from a couple of very obscure references, who can only be sorta kinda encountered via messing around with and editing game files.) The game is indeed a deconstruction of RPGs in general and the concept of completionist gamers in particular. I like it. It's cool. Even (perhaps especially) the super dark stuff that happens on the No Mercy route. (EDIT) And I'm even satisfied with the "sans won, I lost" ending to my own attempt at the No Mercy route. I almost assuredly will do a True Pacifist run again at some point in the future, but I will never attempt a No Mercy run ever again. (/EDIT)
I'd recommend that if you do play the game, though... go for the True Pacifist ending first. Especially if you plan to play it only once.
So, yeah, you should give Undertale a shot. It's pretty neato, I think.
Here is a demo for the game. I might actually go back and play the demo myself at some point, because I've heard there are some tricks that it does that even the full game doesn't do, such as manipulating the demo's manual based on how you play. As such, you should probably look at the demo's manual before, during, and after you play the demo. (As far as I can tell, the full game doesn't have a manual at all.)
First comes the non-spoilery bits. I'll provide a LJ-cut and tons of spoiler space
Undertale is a RPG that is very heavily inspired by the Mother/EarthBound series. (At one point, for example, if you stay at the inn in Snowdin, the Buzz Buzz sound effect is directly lifted from EarthBound, and one of the monster encounter music tracks in a later section of Undertale sounds suspiciously similar to the section just before you reach Giygas in EarthBound. And that's just the small potatoes stuff.) Beyond that, I also tasted shades of thematic flavors from other games such as OFF, Contact, and Omikron: The Nomad Soul (and, hell, just mentioning those games may be spoiler-ish, in and of itself) and, occasionally, Yume Nikki (a game I haven't played myself, but which I have egregiously spoiled for myself) and even Silent Hill, as well as (mostly) non-game entities like Homestuck.
Okay, more descriptive stuff, rather than mere comparisons to other games. Undertale may not look like much at first glance, and indeed it took me getting a little ways in before I fully warmed up to it, but this is one of the best games I've played in a long while. By the end of the Snowdin section, the boss fight there, and the aftermath of that boss fight if you go back and talk to said boss afterwards (assuming you don't kill said boss, of course), is when I was fully hooked. (Pro-tip: once you get said boss's cellphone number, you'll probably want to do what I did and go back to every room prior that you can still reach and call him in each one, as he'll have something funny [and, occasionally, perhaps even useful] to say in all of them. And then do it all again later when the situation changes and there's someone else to make comments about everything.) Maybe not so much gameplay-wise, since I'm not the biggest fan in the world of bullet hell games (which the combat in this game most closely resembles, especially later on), but even that was still fun, if frustrating at times (and is most definitely frustrating in my current, second playthrough, but more on that down in the spoiler section). But overall... yeah. Best game I've played in quite a while.
The game places you in the role of an ambiguously gendered child who has fallen out of the human world into a world of monsters. In typical RPG fashion, you randomly encounter monsters along the way. Unlike most RPGs (outside of, maybe, games like the Shin Megami Tensei series and spin-offs [yeah, snuck a couple more comparisons in there]), you don't necessarily have to kill every monster you encounter. You can show them mercy by sparing them, after successfully interacting with them in certain ways, unique to each monster type. Or you can just kill them. Your choice. Slight spoiler: In order to get the best/true ending (before which you must see the neutral ending at least once before you can get it), you must spare all monsters, which includes bosses. Fortunately, you can do this in a single playthrough, as when you reload your save after seeing the neutral ending, the requirements to get the true ending will be made available for you to do (assuming that you went full pacifist up to that point beforehand). Basically, if you want to see the good/true ending, don't even think about touching that FIGHT button at all, until you get to
The music is awesome. Hell, I'll even do an impromptu, half-assed Game Music Thing, right here and now.
Just a very few (ever so slightly spoilery) examples from the soundtrack:
Ruins theme
Home theme
Toriel's boss theme
sans's theme
Papyrus's theme (and his boss theme)
Snowdin town theme
Waterfall theme
Temmie Village
Undyne's (real) theme (and her boss theme in the normal route and her hero theme in the bad ending route [which I'm hearing quite a bit of now, as described below in the super spoiler section])
Muffet's theme
ASGORE's battle intro and boss theme
...
And, more spoilery...
...
Now onward into real spoiler territory...
Spoiler space
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That's probably enough.
I'm seriously warning you, beyond here there be unmarked spoilers for sure. Do not tread forward if you don't want to see them.
Still here? Okay. Characters in this game remember things from playthrough to playthrough (or after a restart or even simply a reload of a saved game). Mainly, this would be Flowey, the first character you meet in the game, and sans, the first character you meet once you leave the Ruins and enter the monster world proper, though several other characters can sometimes exhibit this trait to lesser extents as well (such as Toriel remembering whether you said you liked cinnamon or butterscotch more at the beginning of the game). Flowey, in fact, has the same ability to save and load games that you do, although your powers as the player supersedes his (at least until near the end).
Also, you are not who you think you are. Or, at least, the character that you name at the start isn't the character that you are actually controlling for the entirety of the game. In fact, the game seems to acknowledge the existence of three distinct entities: you as the player of the game, the player character that you are controlling, and a third, more mysterious character (which is the one that you're naming at the beginning, instead of the one you're controlling).
As for me, I have completed the True Pacifist ending (i.e. I beat the game once normally without killing anything, and then reloaded my save and went back and did the additional requirements to get the true ending, again without killing anything). I loved the characters in this. Toriel, Papyrus and his brother sans, Undyne, Alphys, even Mettaton (who I found merely annoying, at first), and even ASGORE. Flowey is kind of a shit, true enough, but he's got his reasons, as explained in the true ending. The story is touching and heartfelt, and I'm man enough to admit I had tears in my eyes at some points toward the end.
Now, however, I am going through what is called a Genocide or No Mercy run. Extinction or Extermination could also apply. (Apparently, the creator of the game doesn't like people to use the word "genocide" to describe this route, but... well, that is essentially what you're doing in the route, by the very definition of the word.) Basically, I'm now going through the game and killing every character in the game in this second playthrough. I mean, you really have to go out of your way, because you have to kill monsters in random battles in each area until monsters simply stop showing up at all, at which point the game... changes. The music gets much more evil sounding, and characters who could have been your best friends in the pacifist run now treat you much differently. You'll find villages that were once filled with quirky and interesting characters now completely deserted, because they evacuated when they heard you were coming. The game goes out of its way to try to make you feel like a shitheel for playing the game this way. More than that, you can never truly get the True Pacifist ending ever again once you do a No Mercy run, because the True Pacifist ending is forever after "tainted" due to events that happen during a No Mercy run, even if you do a "True Reset." The only real way to restore your game to "factory settings" is to actually go and delete files outside of the game. Assuming you don't "cheat" like that ("Not cheating. Winning." --Batman), then your game is indeed permanently tainted if you complete a No Mercy run. As of the time of this post, I've run into the first real roadblock of the No Mercy run, which is the boss battle against Undyne the Undying. From what I hear, there are only two such challenges in the No Mercy path, because all other monsters, including most bosses, go down in just one or two hits. I also hear that the second such challenge is probably several orders of magnitude more difficult than the one I'm stuck on now. Let's just say that I'm definitely having "a bad time." (EDIT) Update: My No Mercy run stopped when I made it to sans. My playthrough as a murdering asshole ended with sans just completely and repeatedly obliterating my ass to the point that I simply didn't care to try anymore. The only survivors were sans, ASGORE, and Flowey (and Napstablook, I guess?). So, sans won. Good for sans. I deserved it. (/EDIT)
Except that... I'm not having a bad time. Not really. It's actually pretty fun, even if Undyne is repeatedly kicking my ass at the point I'm at now, and I'm sure sans will kick my ass even harder when I reach him later. (EDIT) Which, of course, he did, to the point that I just stopped. (/EDIT) (As a true villain might say [and I could indeed very definitely be considered the villain of the game at this point], "They have to win every time, but I only have to win once." Though I suppose that's true of any boss fight in any game, really.) Does this make me a socio/psychopath or something? The game would certainly like to make me believe that is the case, sure. My character is definitely becoming one, given that they're now often acting even without my controlling them to behave in a more sinister, evil manner than they did during the pacifist run. But, hell, you're talking to the guy who enjoyed playing the dark side path of Knights of the Old Republic more than he did the light side path, the guy who gleefully Force Dominated Zaalbar into murdering Mission Vao at the end of that game (and Mission was probably my favorite character in the game), and was impressed that the game actually let me be that evil in the first place, even taking into account everything that had come before.
As such, while I fully recognize that what I'm doing is indeed pretty vile, at least in the context of the game's universe, at the end of the day it is still truly only bits and bytes on my harddrive. It's just art assets and music and computer code. As much as the game may want me to feel otherwise, I'm not truly harming anything or anyone by playing this game in this manner. And the game even acknowledges that. It says that the only way that you'd even be able to play the game that way is to detach yourself from the horror of killing all these beloved friends that you'd made during the pacifist run. Some people may very well not be able to do such a thing, but as for me, sure, I'll gladly accept the "bad time" to come. (EDIT) Well, up until I got bored with repeatedly losing to sans and just gave up altogether. *shrug* (/EDIT) And if the game is wanting me to feel bad and have a bad time for doing this, in such a meta sense... well, I just have to ask... is not the designer of such a game even worse than me, as the player of the game? Hmm? Why would said designer even allow players to go down such a dark road in the first place, why even give them the possibility, if it's such a terrible, evil, very bad thing? Food for thought.
Yes, there's some deeply meta stuff in Undertale that isn't evident from the beginning or even through most of the game. (Hell, there's even a character who doesn't actually exist in the game proper, aside from a couple of very obscure references, who can only be sorta kinda encountered via messing around with and editing game files.) The game is indeed a deconstruction of RPGs in general and the concept of completionist gamers in particular. I like it. It's cool. Even (perhaps especially) the super dark stuff that happens on the No Mercy route. (EDIT) And I'm even satisfied with the "sans won, I lost" ending to my own attempt at the No Mercy route. I almost assuredly will do a True Pacifist run again at some point in the future, but I will never attempt a No Mercy run ever again. (/EDIT)
I'd recommend that if you do play the game, though... go for the True Pacifist ending first. Especially if you plan to play it only once.
So, yeah, you should give Undertale a shot. It's pretty neato, I think.
