Undertale Review

                                                O   H   H   H   H       Y      E     S    !   !    !
    It's been long enough now that I can properly put together my thoughts on this game. Entering long-term memory, the Undertale experience was the first sleepless weekend of my life. It challenged my morals in a way a video game has never done before.

 Undertale is a 2D sidescrolling RPG released in September, with simple 8-bit graphics and art somewhere between Mother 1 and Yume Nikki ; and overall style and gameplay inspired by the JRPG genre as a whole. Its music brings together analog and 8-bit music to make something I'm not really good at describing. Go ahead and listen to Death by Glamour or Bonetrousle and you'll see how it meshes perfectly with the game.

   Its creator, Toby Fox, presents Undertale as his first original game. It was originally a project on Kickstarter which drew fans from his previous projects, which include a Halloween hack of the classic game Earthbound and music production for the webcomic Homestuck. One of his more widely recognized songs, Megalovania, has made an appearance in both of these, and reappears in Undertale.

  Undertale presents a story and batch of characters unlike any other. The main story involves a long-standing war between Humans and Monsters, the latter of whom are damned for eternity to the ruins of the Underground. The player character, a human child, falls into a mountain and finds themself trapped in the Underground, only to emerge after they confront the king of the monsters, Asgore.  Early in the game the player will meet Toriel, a compassionate monster widely loved by the game's fans, and the goofy skeleton brothers Sans and Papyrus (named for the respective fonts they talk in). The player can also encounter Undyne, a valiant fish lady bent on destroying the player, and Alphys, who conceals her difficult past - and her giant crush on Undyne- with anime references.
 
    In addition to conversation-based gameplay, a major element of the game is several overworld (Underground?) puzzles. Most puzzles occur earlier in the game and character development becomes generally more frequent as the game progresses. The puzzles are short, and perhaps too easily solved. They serve mostly as catalysts for hilarious interactions between characters, and are a short break from the emotional distress caused by sometimes thrust-upon choices of morality.

      The battle system implements a unique bullet hell style that is challenging without being impossibly so. Of course, nobody has to die in Undertale. Part of the game is choosing whether to spare or fight, and exploring the outcomes of your choices.  Sometimes, a character will befriend the player; in other playthroughs they will attack. Every choice is remembered and affects the ending of the game; even after restarting completely, characters will bring up the player's actions from a previous game. Video games have always been at the mercy of the player, and provide feedback according to the whims of the human being controlling them. Undertale is no different. If the fantasy setting and graphics didn't convince you of the realism of the game, its dialogue with the player will. It knows what you did, who you killed. Even after you turn off the game.

   I played through Undertale about six times, obtaining a different kind of ending each time. Once the player gets used to the general rhythm and the gist of the puzzles, it's easy to breeze through it in under an hour. That's not to say it's only a blip on the radar, but Undertale offers so much in a small package that it's no surprise it's produced the biggest amount of fanworks I've seen in a while. The art is, in a word, adorable. The music is, I dare say, better than Fox's contributions to Homestuck. The puzzles are rewarding.

    But what kept me holed up in my room during the weekend was time to really notice what changes between iterations of the game. Every character (except Jerry) is ridiculously likable, even in the worst situations or the bleakest of endings. The absolute WORST ending obtainable - achieved by killing every character in the game, who's the monster now- is not something I have the heart to obtain, but it is such a dramatic turn from the "neutral" playthrough that I would even consider it a different game.

  I have always loved RPGs. They're meant to appeal to those who have never touched a game in their life, and the same can be said for Undertale. I thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was, and when it surprised me I loved it even more. Plunging headfirst into a new experience brings out the human in you. What kind of person will you be when you emerge?