Nobody's Ever Going to Finish Undertale

undertale is without a doubt one of the best and most influential games of the 2010s it utterly set the internet on fire it opened up a million people's minds to the unique position that game design as a medium is in to make meta statements it carried on the legacy of one of the best games of all time in a fantastic way and it's never truly led it's illusion break for all the data mining secret hunting glitch exploiting and restarting Toby Fox the game's creator was one step ahead of the community the whole way this is a game that famously remembers everything that you do regardless of how many times you reset your save file it's metal all the way to the core it does the classic earthbound thing of asking the player what their name is to speak to you directly in cutscenes it talks about why players want to reset their games even after a happy ending why we play games pacifistic Lior violently when presented with the option and it even encourages editing your save file to access a secret that can't be reached otherwise so there's no denying that this game has plans much larger than its surface level narrative but what are those plans and here's the question that's been bothering me since the game's release how deep is this game arch statements profound and meaningful just what is this game trying to say well to get to the bottom of this we'll have to start at the beginning no not there we'll have to go back farther to some of the most significant examples of branching narratives and early gaming while I could go back further let's start with I have no mouth and I'm a scream it's a game from 1995 that has a boatload of endings some good some bad while the choice of the lead different endings can seem a bit arbitrary they're there for a reason so that the player can see the consequences to their actions and how they personally would affect the story multiple endings and games are designed to teach us as much about ourselves as they do their worlds do you guys remember your first playthrough a Virginia and RPG rife with narrative decisions to make where you could truly play how you wanted to fallout Planescape torment tides of numenera tyranny or even games like The Walking Dead or the wolf among us odds are on your first playthrough you probably tried to make decisions as you'd make them in real life and make your player character or reflection of yourself and return for that dedication the stories teach you a bit about yourself by showing you how you would fare in the worlds that host them me telling my friends to go through life like they're going for the good ending doesn't come from nowhere anyways that is to me the most powerful aspect of branching narratives well behind all that magic in every branching narrative ever told digitally is a series of flags check boxes and numbers I've briefly dabbled in making an RPG of my own I would spend hours writing long intricate scenes filled with complex character motivations and tons of decisions to make and behind that glassy exterior was a simple set of flags loudly murdering a homeless man who was working as a barker while secretly trying to spread propaganda in favor of an incoming society that was going to annex the town was all boiled down to set flag burger status zero set flag Raider rep one then if he wanted the sheriff to chastise the player for their brash actions it was as simple as if flag burger status zero flag Raider rep equals one print sheriff meeting dialog 3 well if that game we're ever finished and if it went viral like undertale did then for the first couple of weeks that exchange might be seen as natural mysterious and above all else personal DJ a however after a while players would replay the game over and over searching for all the game secrets learning about it online and eventually they would see this simple simple bit of programming is just that simple programming players are entropy in action when it comes to branching narratives they want to know exactly how many century you have to kill before caesar's leaved and starts attacking you on site they want to know exactly how many Freeside drifters you can execute before the NCR takes notice and they want to know exactly what will happen based on which followers you take to me raffle puzzle well they want to destroy the illusion of the games and dissect them to their cores well where does this put a game creator who wants to make a branching narrative it's a frustrating seat to be in and I think that undertale was in part born of that frustration to know that no matter how emotionally connected the player might be to your story after two or three playthroughs they'll see right through the illusion and probably even be looking for external sources for more info must be incredibly irritating well with that irritation comes opportunity and again it's an opportunity the games are in an especially good position to take advantage of undertale leans into that irritation by encouraging us to look at that game from a meta perspective and again Toby was right there with us through the entire meta journey that we took with this game first it was a simple playthrough without many fool on fourth wall breaks well then once we quote-unquote finish the game flowey shuts it down and we reboot it and we get this the opening cutscene glitches out something weird happens with our save file and then we see flowey destroy it then we get this nightmare fuel this fight literally takes place over multiple reboots of the game if we die the game crashes we reboot and the fight continues from where it left off this is all really damn cool but what does it mean for the game well it means that undertale and by extension Toby Fox has gone beyond the game now our Steam library is a part of the game too as is our save file pressing the play game button and steam is part of the strategy to be flowey and after this fight if we choose to spare flowey as most players probably did it tells us that we were still missing some stuff and that we'll have to load our save we're starting to play for her to genuinely beat the game Toby Fox knew that players would be messing with the timeline loading an old save in order to get the true ending whether flowey told us to or not but by having flowey tells us to do so we're forced to recognize that we still aren't outsmarting the game loading your save multiple times in Fallout 3 in order to see both endings with one playthrough is us outsmarting the game but thanks to flour we essentially explaining the concept of saves coming to us we're forced to acknowledge that we still haven't outsmarted the game we beat the game sure but even after getting the true ending the game still isn't finished well now the next logical step is to do that genocide playthrough that everyone was talking about this requires that you farm random encounters until you've exhausted every single enemy in the game and then doing the infamous sands fight the genocide run combined with the true ending pacifist run sort of reveals pretty much every bit of literal story in this game after both endings we understand that flowey as Azrael died and put into the body of a flower and it has the ability to load it save and see what else it can do to this world just like us we learned that Kara is a sort of demon inside of frits our player character and represents the same sense of catharsis that we get when our stats go up as we kill we learned that sands is something of a Time Lord which explains why he's able to teleport around and break the fourth wall we get the briefest allusions to WD gaster which is all most players will ever get about him without cheating so after getting or watching the two-and-a-half main endings we were all so intrigued that we had to know more this game is so so full of secrets and teases that literally nothing is as it seems one good place to start when trying to break a game would be to use a save editor to put your character and typically impossible scenarios when you create a save file an undertale you're randomly assigned to fun value different fun values make different secrets appear over your playthrough if you have a fun value of exactly 65 there's a 50% chance that you'll find yourself in this sound test room when going to this screen and snowed-in i would argue that most people who have seen this screen in game probably reached it using a save editor but regardless of that you can listen to a couple and complete loops of songs here and when you select gastrous theme you can no longer change the track and you just have to wait for the song to end I won't go into what's up with WD gassed or quite yet but it's tangentially relevant to what I'm getting at here so we'll definitely be touching on that some we aren't done using save manipulation there were a whole bunch of rooms that are inaccessible during normal gameplay and they've been documented quite thoroughly on the wiki almost all of them are just little test rooms that you'd find in most games quote-unquote levels designed to test animations sound effects game mechanics and that sort of thing these rooms apply a variable to the player known as dog checked when you try to access them an annoying dog sprite appears over a black screen and one of two dog seem toon starts playing this game is one step of us yet again however there's also room 264 aka room gaster in here we see a series of symbols appearing on the screen and with each symbol that appears a random eighth of a second or so from abc123 a dog blaze these symbols are a pixelated version of the wing-dings font from windows the to skeleton characters in this game sans and papyrus have names that are based on the fonts they use in dialogue sans uses comic sans and papyrus uses well papyrus well when we see wingdings here in room 264 it's the only other time we see a unique font this would be WD gaster wing-dings gaster when we translate this to a readable font it reads entry number 17 dark darker yet darker the darkness keeps growing the shadows cutting deeper photon readings negative this next experiment seems very very interesting what do you two think I'm not going to go to into detail on who WD gaster is because the deepest parts of this game floor aren't all that relevant I had an absolutely crazy theory that was too insane to be true so I decided to take a blast from the past and check out the game theorists and map Pat's theory was actually the same as mine I don't quite agree with all of his evidence but I recommend checking out his three-part video on WD caster if you want some more info link in the description what's also relevant here is that when you go and listen to abc123 a dog the sound file that gassed resins are made from you get this message please keep all this between us this is a plea to the players who tato mined the game to not share this stuff on the internet and saying that data mining ruins the integrity of the experience definitely relevant to the frustration with the players that I was talking about but it's also yet another gotcha moment from toby fox as of the 1.001 this arm was cut down to just play this Oh Toby is still messing with us even post-launch when people date a mind a program they go in with the intent of finding out things that the Creator never intended them to learn but by having this sound file here with a very intriguing filename that shows up at the top of an alphabetical list toby is showing that he knew that the playerbase would eventually start data mining and in a way this means that all of these files were intended to be seen by the players eventually as always this game is one step ahead of us now back to gaster I'm not all that interested in his lore what I'm more interested in is the reason for all of this cryptic storytelling let's say the gaster does have a story and Toby knows the truth behind it all why is it a secret or possibly in code well as with loading our saves resetting our saves data mining and reinstalling using a save editor to access more clues about gaster is all part of the meta game Toby messes with the casual players by showing that the game remembers what you've done even after resetting he messes with the more seasoned players by showing that the game knows all about save scumming he messes with the really dedicated players by showing that he's considered what the game will look like to a data miner and he messes with the map hats of the world with things like WD casters cryptic storytelling to someone like me discovering secrets hidden by a developer as the second most exciting thing about a game like undertale just like matpat myself and hundreds of thousands of like-minded fans wracked their brains trying to figure out who gaster was how sam's bend all this where he and papyrus came from and all the other mysteries we were all trying to outsmart the game just as the data miners the save editors the savory setters and the saves goomer's work we're all queued up in a pyramid each layer thinking that it's able to outsmart the game until the game shows us time and time again that we aren't well we haven't reached the top of that pyramid yet we're only at the penultimate chunk I said that theorizing about the mysteries of the lore was the second most interesting part of games like this for me well what's the most interesting part it's what I've always done on this channel analysing the artistic intent behind those decisions when I was crafting my analysis on 2001 a space obviously I first had to look at things from the perspective of a channel like game theory I had to figure out exactly what I thought happened on the letter using a litany of subtle Timson clues once I had finally settled on a series of events that I thought was indisputable I had my story and it was time to think about what that story meant well that's where we reached the top of the pyramid 2001 a Space Odyssey to me was a warning about us gravitating towards using art to evolve art rather than using art to evolve ourselves as I was originally created for well what's the deeper meaning to undertale it's proven that it was one step ahead of the saves Gummer's the savory centers to save editors the data miners and the game theorists is it one step ahead of us poetic analysts too probably but let's find out I've got a weird taste in my mouth so I should know now that I'm in no way saying my channel is superior to map hats or anything like that I'm just saying that an analysis like mine has to come after the kind of analyses that you find on his channel I literally can't do what I do here unless I first do something like what matpat does we're both just machines in the factory of understanding art so anyways where do we even start with a game like this well I already did start but to give my thesis at statement I think undertale is about the frustration of creator fields knowing their work will be scrutinized picked apart and relatedly devalued and how that creator overcame that frustration by leaning into it and encouraging it so as I said I've already started the essay and because this game is weird how well the game caps off that message will be related to how smoothly I finished the essay if I manage to wrap my head around this and articulate it perfectly then the game is no longer one step ahead of its players and if I fail to do so then the game achieves its goals perfectly from the bottom of the pyramid all the way up to the top at least if I'm right about those goals so in short the better the game is at finishing off what I think its goals were the worst this video will be it stumped everybody from the bottom to the top but will it stumped me the person is going to try to look at everything we've learned about the game and explain what it all meant well whether the game accomplishes its goals or not is completely nebulous to you and I whether or not this work holds up to my scrutiny is really only for Toby Fox to know so Toby if you somehow picked us out of the thousands of videos on this game keep up with the pace and don't tell me how I do I don't think this game lacks a deeper meaning I mean it clearly does it's about a game creators frustration with the inevitable decay of all works in there medium there's a reason our character looks so utterly bored for the entirety of the game it's because the game is working under the assumption that we've seen it all a few times before and were bored with it flyweight group bored with its ability to reset the timeline and do things differently just as we all did a few years ago when replaying this game was practically a daily routine so there definitely is a deeper meaning at play Toby didn't just elude the one to mess with people like me the real question I'm stuck with is whether or not Toby has me fooled too it's Toby one tier above me on the pyramid is the fact that I still don't know whether or not I'm right proof the Toby still has me beat I mean going back down to more concrete evidence from the game it's clear that annoying dog is Toby's answer for himself in this world the game remarks that annoying dog still has to patch out a couple holes but that he's very slow at it because he's a dog he's undermining himself saying he's too slow to patch out the issues with the game and that he's an annoying dog so am i completely wrong and all these fourth wall breaks are just gags and ways of creating some metal horror my analysis of this game is a paradox I literally can't be right and I can't be wrong if I'm wrong than Toby in the game or doing exactly what I thought they were doing and if I'm right then this game is doing more than I'm able to comprehend Toby has all of their demographics of his player base under his thumb is this what it feels like to be under his thumb to sitting here in my head spinning thinking about save modification the wrong number song interdimensional ghost stupid skeleton puns the mini worlds theory dog marriage the very reason I play and analyze video games at all and at the center of it all sets this annoying dog [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 432,464

Keywords: undertale, toby, fox, analysis, reading, essay, explained, meta, metanarrative, postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernist, wd, gaster, sans, genocide, meaning, toriel, asrial, asgore, chara, fritz, flowey, secret, deep, discussion

Id: l_5el6ianBA

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020