Undertale

Undertale is an amazing game. I finished it at nearly 4AM last night. It's one of those games that you just want to talk with someone immediately about and read all the things on the internet about it because the experience is that good. I'm not going to spoil the entire story or anything, but I am going to talk about some memorable/surprising moments where the game defied my expectations. If you don't want to be spoiled at all, why are you still reading this? Go play Undertale, ya fool! You won't regret it. Promise.

Anyway, this game throws all standard RPG conventions on its head right out of the gate. After years of RPG playing, having things attack you and fighting seemed like the standard fare. And fight I did, initially. The only thing is, I had other options. At no point in this entire game do you have to kill anyone. Instead you are given the option to show mercy and perform different actions based on the enemy. Each enemy is different. Some just want you to laugh at their jokes, some are broken and need consoling, some just want you not to pick on them. Since literally every single other RPG I've ever played was all about getting better at stabbing things in the face by stabbing a ton of things in the face, this was really jarring and wonderful.

The mechanics of fighting or sparing a monster are the same. Each turn a box will appear on the screen with a red heart placed in the middle that you can control. The monster will attack you, throwing projectiles in various patterns. Each turn you must dodge these projectiles and protect your HP. Lose all your HP and you have to restart at the last save point. Some of these fights, especially boss fights, are insane. The rate and number of things you have to dodge is sometimes absurd.

Sometimes in these encounters, it seems like it would be easier to just fight them and kill them because figuring out the route to mercy sometimes takes a LOT of rounds to get through. At one point I couldn't figure out how to spare an individual I was fighting, so I ended my pacifist streak and killed them. I felt completely terrible and reloaded my last save, but this was another instance where the game went against everything I'd ever seen a game do. Even though I had spared that person the second time, it KNEW I had killed them before, and it called me out on it! Mind blown.

This realization that there are truly no reloads in this game made every decision all the more important. I tried to spare every single individual I battled. I showed mercy even though it was the much harder road, even when those characters had been hounding me forever. The game rewards you for this, though. Several of your antagonists can be transformed into friends before the game is out. These monsters you encounter are fully formed characters with their own goals and motivations, sense of humor, and ultimately heart of gold.

The characters are great, the music is great, the art style is charming, the fact that everything you do actually matters is fantastic, and every time my expectations were shattered was amazing. At one point, I had just defeated an incredibly difficult boss. I had tried numerous times and failed, and when I finally succeeded, the game crashed... I was so pissed. I reopened the game and everything was glitched out. You slowly realize that the crash was all part of the game as a means for another antagonist to toy with you. I was grinning from ear to ear. So unexpected.

As I'm going through the ending, I wonder how many people gave up throughout the course of playing this game, who didn't realize the crash was on purpose and merely rage quit, who never made it through certain battles because you actively had to die multiple times to continue on, who stopped after seeing the first batch of credits and didn't probe deeper...

The theme of the entire game was DETERMINATION, and through the entire game, you absolutely had to prove you had that. I got the True Pacifist ending, as it's called, and holy hell was it worth it. The ending will give you all the feels.

Undertale is a truly amazing game, and I can't really give it enough props. If you haven't played it, you need to. It's one of the most satisfying games I've ever played.