It's the little details that make Undertale so special, and I wanted to see them all. That said, I don't regret any of the extra time I spent walking around, because I got to find things like Thundersnail and the echo flowers. (The other shopkeepers don't buy items because they don't want your trash.) At one point I had run out of gold and needed to buy healing items, and the only shop that would buy items off of me was about a 10 minute walk away. I also found myself trudging back through areas I had already cleared just so I could beat a boss or get an item, and while it was absolutely worth it in the end, I wasn't terribly excited to do it. Fighting enemy after enemy replaced the puzzles in the peaceful runs, however, and the tradeoff felt very balanced and ultimately meaningful to the story. In a violent playthrough, I had to grind quite a bit to meet certain story requirements and grew tired of it after a while. Some fights can be frustrating or even tedious, however, at least at first.
When I was trying to go for a more violent run, fighting monsters I’d once flirted with made Undertale’s message about humanity hit even harder. It made it hard for me to summon the aggression to attack any of them - and that’s precisely the point. Most of the main characters are also very well developed with consistent personalities across different dialogue and story routes. Different monsters talk about each other in front of you, so once I met them I got to discover who they actually were, as opposed to what their reputations suggested. It was silly, until the last flower repeated: “Sorry, it’s just funny… That’s my wish too.”Įxperiencing the depth of the monsters’ hopes and dreams is crucial to Undertale’s exploration of morality, personhood, and conflict. A monster didn’t want to share her greatest wish - that one day she would climb the mountain that traps all the monsters underground and look out at the world - for fear of being laughed at, and although her friend promised they wouldn’t, the friend ended up laughing anyway.
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A favorite was a series of “echo flowers” in a beautiful, ethereal hallway that repeated snippets of an overhead conversation. Small, semi-hidden notes and dialogue enrich the world and build on an already compelling story of humanity and morality. Undertale’s writing is consistently funny, but it can also be touching. I spammed Z until she burst into flames, and the Thundersnail organizer told me that “all that pressure to succeed really got to her.” It was, like many of Undertale’s one-off jokes, extremely relatable - and knowing and predicting its audience is one of Undertale’s biggest strengths. I entered a snail race (called Thundersnail) and was told to press Z repeatedly to encourage my snail to win. I especially love Undertale’s humor when it has something to say, however subtle. An anime-loving character’s “selfie,” for example, is actually a picture of a garbage can with pink sparkle filters over it (and speaking from experience, this is very accurate). There are tons of jokes that appeal to internet nerds, and I often felt like Undertale was talking directly to me, like it knew what I was thinking. Undertale has to be a game, and that’s the key to its brilliance. That clever manipulation of gameplay mechanics adds weight to a story that couldn’t have been told in any other way or medium. That first berating from Flowey shaped the rest of my experience - I learned I couldn’t bank on a soft reset, so I had to tread carefully. Undertale expected me to have played RPGs before and played with those conventions in unexpected ways. Then Flowey, Undertale’s chaotic evil, fourth wall-breaking flower, tore into me for having the gall to abuse the power of the save state. Dialogue had changed to reflect that I’d seen her die. So I restarted without saving, as I would in any other game when I needed a do-over. But I made a mistake: I accidentally killed a monster in the beginning. For my first playthrough I took a pacifist approach, being as kind and merciful as possible as I searched for a way back to the surface. As a lone human fallen into an underground world that serves as a prison for monsters, I had my journey laid out for me, as most RPG protagonists do.