Heart <3 – Undertale -

Indie darling Undertale was a smash hit among the video game community, why is that so?

     I remember watching Cryaotic’s playthrough of this game, I watched the first episode and thought to myself “Hey, this game’s pretty neat. I think I’ll actually play it.”. I then went to play it on a daily basis, usually 1 -2 hour sessions, until I finished it. To think that it would reach this level of popularity, that almost every gaming website featured it and that the fans made so much fanart to support this game.

 

                The story is usually presented through text from character dialogues and item descriptions. What’s cool is that almost every object in the world has flavor text which makes the world seem more alive.  It is also noteworthy that even though the inhabitants of the world are depicted as happy and bright, with the occasional downer, the world itself is dark and foreboding like the world of the Mother series which heavily inspired this game. But most of these these themes and elements are found and had been done before in other games, some of those iterations can be considered to be even better than what Undertale did. Most old school RPGs like Fallout has a vastly superior and more interesting world and not to mention tons and tons of text and dialogue.

So why had it become so successful and adored by so many people?

                You could argue that it is because of its relatively new state, that because it was only recently release, people became jaded and thought it to be better than it actually was. There’s a thing called the “Recency bias” where it states that people are fond of recent and newer events as they can still recall those things, it’s like the opposite of Nostalgia. You could also argue that, because of its relatively old and pixelated aesthetic it resonated with those who played old-school RPG’s like Earthbound and the Mother 3. You could also argue that the characters touched the hearts of the people who played the game, as their personalities and quirks are quite easy to relate to. Last but not the least, you can also say that people enjoy the combat of the game, a unique build between the turn-based combat of RPG’s like Final Fantasy 7 and bullethell- shmups like Gradius and Ikaruga.

                But I think the main reason why people loved Undertale, apart from those I gave earlier, is because of its story – Well not the narrative – but rather the way it presented the story. It gave the player a lot of say in the world of the game. A specific example of this is how they treated the SAVE mechanic, because you can save and reload the game, you have the power to determine the various outcomes that will play out and change them to your liking. It also makes perfect sense within the context of that world and some of the characters will have unique dialogue depending on how you use the SAVE mechanic and it helps that the game can manage to surprise you in a lot of ways that you will not expect. Lastly, it often use the UI as a means of storytelling, making it a perfect blend of gameplay and narrative.