What Was Undertale Actually About?

undertale was pretty weird wasn't it who'd have thought that a scrappy indie game developed by a relative unknown would become such a massive hit that's still kicking around in the public discourse coming up on four years on now with the release of deltarune undertale's sequel follow-up sidequall alternate universe meta fanfic thing officially in production and with a shiny new demo out to similar rave reviews it's got me thinking about well what undertale was actually about that seems like a straightforward question but for the life of me i couldn't actually figure out a satisfying answer the internet was no help either you'd need to wade through an obscene amount of steven universe song parodies that are somehow more popular than the originals a bunch of web comics and of course game theory only to discover that no one's really attempted a comprehensive reading before between you and me i think undertale itself is at least partially to blame here because the game seems to deliberately avoid coming to any sort of thematic conclusion or while throwing an endless stream of unrelated concepts and ideas at you is it about violence well kind of maybe dealing with grief not quite but there's definitely something there the game's got to be about something right that's why it fell to me to desperately try and wrangle some sort of cohesive reading out of a game that actively resists any attempt to pin it down well after many a sleepless night i think i've managed to crack it oh just a heads up by the way pretty much everyone has played undertale so i'll be abridging quite a lot of the plot so this video isn't like 90 minutes long i think that unlike a lot of other meta fictional games like the stanley parable or bioshock which focus much more on the creation of games undertale's metafiction deals much more intimately with how and why we play games and engage with stories in the first place but to understand that we're gonna have to go right back to the beginning buckle up i think if there was anything about undertale that has yet to receive the praise it deserves it's the first five or so minutes the introduction of the game is this rollercoaster ride of subverted expectations and deceptions that excellently sets the stage for what's to come there's the subverted intro where it turns out the big bad monster army lost there's the fact that you're playing a different character to the one in the intro there's flowey turning out to be evil only for him to be replaced by toriel who's nice it's complete narrative whiplash and for a very good reason once toriel takes the lead any anchoring undertale has to a typical gaming opening is shattered when she skips you past what's obviously supposed to be a training puzzle and then tells you you're not supposed to kill the randomly spawning monsters don't kill the monsters in an rpg what the hell is this game we've been trying to do well it is a tutorial just not for the thing you think it is chances are you already know how to solve basic puzzles and play an rpg undertale is actually teaching you how to analyze stories undertale wants you to make decisions in the full knowledge that you are a player playing a game not as if you are part of the world the problem is that we've been so conditioned into experiencing games a certain way that undertale needs to break down what you know so you can approach things from a fresh perspective just before toriel lets us off the leash to start the ruins proper there's a scene where she tests your independence by having you walk across this room without her this seems like pretty straightforward characterization of toriel and there's also a cute easter egg where you can find her hiding behind this pillar but it's actually a subtextual hint to the player that they'll need to rely on their own intuition in order to make it through as demonstrated by the fact that you need to defy her in order to continue despite teaching you how combat works just minutes ago undertale doesn't let up each of the different monster types in the ruins all work slightly differently to how you'd expect them to for example winston will automatically spare itself and you're actually supposed to run into some of vegetoid's bullets in spite of what you learn from flowey undertale rather than keeping its meta fiction for a late game twist never wants you to get fully immersed all the weird tricks and twist simples aren't supposed to be particularly challenging they're meant to prevent you from settling into a routine this causes you to be constantly aware of how you're experiencing the game rather than absorbing it passively this is proven at the end of the ruins once you're reunited with toriel she nicely takes you into her nice house makes you a nice pie and gives you a nice room to stay in which is very lovely of her however it quickly dawns on you through talking to her and poking around in the various rooms though not only does she have no intention of letting you go you aren't the first kid she's adopted this way tutorial character subverted once again when you try to escape toil goes to destroy the exit to the ruins and enters the fight with you the catch though is that as you lose health toils attacks will also do less damage and eventually they'll avoid you entirely in effect toriel can't actually kill you this serves a dual purpose both to demonstrate toriel's mercy but also to kind of frustrate you toil is the hardest enemy to beat pacifist style in the whole game and i think that's deliberate see in order to beat toriel you can't talk to her like you can with every enemy up until this point and sparing her doesn't really appear to do anything even going so far as to repeat the same responses to trick you into thinking you've exhausted her dialogue most players based on this evidence will conclude that they're going to have to reluctantly fight toriel and get a nasty surprise when they out of nowhere do about 15 times more damage killing her instantly this is an emotional gut punch and rather than simply accepting it as part of the story your new meta fictional perspective is all too aware that you've failed that you could have saved her if only you've done better two things happen here either you'll be locked into the so-called neutral ending of the game where you've killed at least one person and the memory of killing toriel will drive you to think more carefully in the future or more likely you'll realize oh hang on a minute this is a game you can just reload your save and not kill her this time in doing this you've accepted undertale's nature as a game that you can manipulate well done but it's not done with you yet moments after killing or saying goodbye tutorial flowey pops back up and has a bit of a chat with you if you successfully spared toil first time round he'll talk you about eventually needing to kill out frustration and give a vague warning about his future plans but a far more interesting bit of dialogue gets shown if you reload to save her flowey knows what you did he knows you used the power to save in order to bend causality to your will and in doing so replaced him as de facto manipulator of time and space this revelation that you're somehow like flowey kind of makes you feel gross and guilty like you cheated and that's something that's difficult to rationalize away because well you did you bent the rules of the game so that you could feel better about yourself even if you didn't save toriel you're confronted with the fact that you could have saved her but chose not to and without undertale's help you would have never been able to realize what that decision really meant media has the power to teach us things about ourselves and that's what the next area is all about you meet sansa skeleton in a genuinely creepy scene where he ambushes you in the woods immediately after being told how dangerous the world outside the ruins is luckily sans is pretty cool and he's quickly followed by his brother papyrus who initially wants to capture and or kill you the main problem you have to face in snowdin is the repeated and entirely unsuccessful attempts by the great papyrus to capture you and haul you off to the monster capital these little interactions are the absolute highlight of snowden for sure each one is a little vignette that shows papyrus's very ambitious schemes crumbling around him usually owing to his own incompetence my favorite is this randomly generated and ridiculously complicated labyrinth possibly sets up only for it to generate in the easiest possible solution it's brilliant however the highlight of snowden from a conceptual point of view is the emphasis on the power of stories and media to give us the chance to self-reflect let's start with the obvious stuff the random monster encounters in the ruins getting rid of baddies nonviolently required maybe some out of the box thinking but it was never particularly hard here though and for the rest of the game non-lethal solutions to monster encounters are a fair bit trickier than the alternatives each one requires surviving multiple bullet hell rounds as well as actually paying attention to the monsters which isn't something most rpgs have you do for example the only way to pacify snowdrake is to realize he wants to be a comedian perform a neutral action so he tells a joke and then laugh at it to show that he's funny it's quite a lot of work to put in considering that running away also keeps you on the pacifist track and you'll only really miss out on money which is basically everywhere anyway murder on the other hand will lower the encounter rate permanently on top of making future fights easier by levelling you up and giving you more hp the choice to care about the monsters sacrificing an expanded health pool and perhaps more importantly your time is a difficult one to make and one that gradually becomes more frustrating this is deliberate undertale is once again offering you a chance to interrogate yourself to figure out how you feel and to make an informed choice about whether you care about these monsters after all it's much harder to bludgeon greater dog to death after you learn he just wants some pets this self-interrogation is also why undertale likes asking you weird pointless questions all the time there's no option not to answer the question and no rewards for either answer so your eventual choice forces you to look inwards do you prefer junior jumble or are you a dirty liar do you prefer you know sans or the great papyrus you might subconsciously already know the answer but undertale offers you an opportunity to consciously figure out your own opinions and biases and act accordingly all this is shown in very clear terms through your interactions with papyrus just like how playing undertale has given us a chance for some introspection so has playing the game of monsters vs humans offered papyrus a chance for a bit of soul-searching himself over time papyrus goes from directly adversarial in the first puzzle to helpful in the xoxo puzzle and by the end he even deactivates the deadly gauntlet of terror because he's realized something about himself papyrus isn't violent he just wants approval and friendship and learning that has made him realize that he doesn't actually want to hurt you just like the other monsters you've met of course you've learned stuff too at the start of snowden sands appeared pretty sinister and papyrus looked like a credible if bumbling threat however now you know the skelly bros as well as the other centuries are basically harmless all because for a brief moment your personal story and theirs intersected and you were both able to learn from each other this is what i mean when i say undertale is meta fiction as it relates to audiences while there are some obvious parallels between toby fox and papyrus as two people who both make games most of the meta fictional commentary centers around us and how humans can learn from stories even if they don't realize it however our relationship with stories is a little bit more complicated than that something the next area waterfall goes into in more detail but before that please give me a moment to gush about the dating scene with papyrus it's not really relevant at all to my reading but it is however the funniest bit in the whole goddamn game look at his outfit he's so cool and the music oh it's so good and and crime radar crime radar egg okay right back to serious talk all right i'm gonna level with you waterfall is probably the least interesting area undertale has to offer the puzzles don't have much in the way of subtext there aren't very many interesting values to talk to and there is a lot of walking around yeesh the main focus of this area is your repeated run-ins with the scary captain the royal guard undyne as well as learning about the history of the war with humanity and that's where i want to start the most obvious theme that runs through the entire history of humans and monsters is that it wasn't a fair fight it was a total bloodbath not a single human was killed and countless monsters were destroyed the game makes it very clear that monsters and humans aren't equal it'll take the souls of nearly every monster in the underground just to match the strength of yours no wonder azkal wants to get his hands on them there's some interesting parallels between the continuing human monster hostility and our relationship with fiction human beings have evolved to understand the world through the medium of stories in the olden days humans used to tell stories of gods moving the sun across the sky it was wrong but it did correctly explain the idea of days and things haven't really changed that much since the point is humans learn through stories and because those stories inform so much of our understanding people tend to get quite attached to them when confronted by someone who's experienced different stories or the same stories from a different perspective and has come to different conclusions the default human response is well violent rejection it's this pushing away of things that contradict our worldview that has informed basically all of human history cultures clash people die no one has a good time this is what happened when the differences between humans and monsters became too great and the humans won now this is the part where you're probably expecting me to say we should be tolerant for everyone and respect everybody's beliefs right not quite what we need to do is to keep an open mind this is made blindingly obvious when you face undyne she unlike papyrus or toil really wants to kill you she's convinced that humans are evil so convinced in fact that she'll break orders so she can fight you sooner and lie about every monster wanting you dead even though you know for a fact that isn't true in combat undyne can't be reasoned with and unlike toriel she can't even be worn down in fact it just makes undyne angrier if you don't validate what she already thinks it's very easy for violently inclined players to write her off as someone who'll never see your side of the story and in doing so they ensure they won't see hers either the solution to beating undyne as a pacifist as with any other monster is to make an effort to understand who she is what she wants and importantly what she believes and it's only by realizing that undyne wants to kill you because she thinks you're a threat that you can do something about that you've got to run away until she passes out from exhaustion and then prove her wrong whether she likes it or not breaking that cycle of violence then you can go to one night's house and like with papyrus help them realize something important about herself through the medium of play namely that humans are not actually a threat and that friendship is the greatest competition of all and while keeping that end up cutting that jesus christ even though she wanted to kill us it's through understanding undyne that we were able to beat her without fighting and outright rejecting her worldview learning some valuable lessons about why the monsters feel the way they do in the process however undertale also makes it clear that whilst we should keep an open mind and we should analyze everything to try and learn from everyone it doesn't mean everyone is right take the mad dummy miniboss for example they're unique in the fact that they've got almost no redeeming features offer no real opportunities to learn and refuse to do so themselves you can't even really beat them pacifistically naps the blue casters step in and chase them off the enemy of undertale such as it exists isn't people who disagree with you and hold a different world view like undyne and at one time most of the monsters because we have a lot to learn from people or stories we disagree with no the real enemy of undertale is those who for whatever reason refuse to admit that there's any valid way of looking at things other than their own people who isolate themselves away from any evidence to the country and as a result are unable to learn anything about the world let alone about themselves people like flowey for example who's incapable of seeing beyond his kill or be killed shtick this revelation also points to a solution to the monster's problems at large we need to set them free and reopen a dialogue with humanity because the two groups have a lot to learn from each other such as just to put an example from the top of my head here the wonders of anime and video games but we'll get to that the end of waterfall is near enough the halfway point of the game and also where undertale goes from setting up our knowledge of our relationship with stories to showing the consequences in the ruins we were introduced to the idea that undertale is a game about the way we play games and engage with stories we're also taught to understand the importance of self-awareness and a critical eye when examining texts snowden follows up on this realization by explaining how stories can allow us to understand the world and ourselves better and in doing so prepare us for life's challenges and waterfall is all about understanding that we often react violently when introduced to ideas that challenge our own but that's an impulse we have to fight because the more we reject the outside world the more isolated we become and we lose out on precious opportunities to learn and become better people that's something we'll find out all about in the next area i'll make no secret of it hotland is my favorite area in the whole game every set piece is just bursting with personality and the main two characters on display get almost constant screen time and a good thing too because hotland is really all about putting what we've learned into practice as we meet and then break down the characters of alphys and mettaton the initial impression of outfits we get is that she's kind of a joke character she's awkward likes computers plays video game hang on alphas is actually a pretty spot-on representation of not just the typical nerd but also of the undertale demographic alphys suffers from anxiety difficulty talking to people as well as a lack of self-esteem however like many a nerd all those things melt away when she gets the chance to talk about the things she loves alphys is stacked up against mettaton who very much represents the other end of the social scale mettaton is charismatic confident and if you don't mind me saying a real looker there's the small downside of the fact that maxton has it out for humans but don't let that distract from his boxy charm despite appearances these two are emblematic of a lot of the same ideas most of hotland is spent to venturing through some pretty tricky puzzles and battles in between these big set-piece encounters with metaton where he'll mimic her classic tv show format before trying to kill you there's a cooking show featuring human souls as the main ingredient a news broadcast where it turns out everything is bombs and even an opera but as luck would have it your new friend alphys always manages to save the day with a new gadget like this jet pack or an upgrade for your phone that makes it shoot lasers it's it's not very clear over time alphys opens up to us about her insecurities she talks about how she lacks self-confidence but after teaming up with us she was able to face her fears conquer her demons and appreciate all the things that make her special does that sound familiar to anyone oh i'm sure it's nothing observing your progress in deer due to alphys and was what made her decide not to kill us in the same way interacting with other monsters got them to see us in a more favorable light alphys arc is kind of like a repeat of papyruses a non-violent monster learns to accept who they are by hanging out with us right no it's a little bit more complicated than that when you arrive at the core mettaton's lair alphys suddenly loses all composure as things go wrong and she bails seemingly undoing her growth it's only after you talk to mettaton before his final battle that the reason is revealed alphys has been lying she asked meriton to pretend to be a villain so that she can insert herself into your story artificially making herself the hero alphys love of video games and anime is a good thing it's a fundamental part of her personality and should be celebrated but instead of using fiction to ask herself who she is what she's done or who she loves alphys has retreated into this childish fantasy and refuses to actually engage with the world as encountering new ideas would mean asking herself some uncomfortable questions humans and monsters alike react negatively when our preconceptions are challenged but that reaction can be even more dangerous when it's directed ourselves mettaton has a similar arc both alphys and metaton who was at that point a ghost like napstablook met at a human culture fan club and it was through experiencing human stories but more importantly getting to know alphys and her perspective the mettaton began to form a cohesive sense of self-identity this culminated in alphys building him a body that reflected this new identity in a transparent metaphor for gender transition but just like alphys mettaton's good intentions went astray he became absorbed in the inauthentic glitz and glamour of human celebrity and ended up forcing people around him to conform to an increasingly narrow world view and alphys didn't make the cut it isn't until all of metrotom's fans call in at the end of his battle that he realizes he's become the inspiration for a new generation of monsters and reconnects with why he wanted to change in the first place the mistake both alphys and mettaton made is that they use stories to avoid learning about themselves and becoming isolated from the world alphys in trying to recreate the game she loves attempts to substitute the cliche character growth of mew mew kissy cutie for actual personal introspection mettaton 2 tries to fill the void his friends once occupied with luxury and showbiz glam rejecting anything that reminds him of his roots rather than letting stories and media give them a chance to understand more of the world and themselves these two hide from the uncomfortable truths they'd rather not address alphys hides from the past and mettaton from the person he used to be for an alternate much more constructive example look at how sans and toriel share the love of jokes which yes are a kind of story this mutual passion allowed for both of them to deal with their isolation in a constructive way leading both of them to become more receptive compassionate people who didn't as sanses kill you where you stood unfortunately the same can't be said for most monsters if you've been paying attention to the stuff going on in the background you'll have realized that monster kind is fixated on the story of the war long after humanity has forgotten about it and moved on kids play humans versus monsters they've got these obvious human murder simulators lying around and even what passes for monster religion has become all about justifying the war instead of looking for new stories and new opportunities to grow monster kind has largely isolated itself more than humans ever could using the narrative of the war as a security blanket to ignore their problems and deflect their personal issues but why has this gone on for so long surely the monsters would have moved on after hundreds if not thousands of years right and was to deal with asgore the monster king as miserable as his war has made the monsters they've got nothing but nice things to say about the guy well we're about to find out as we enter the final area new home but before we can do that alphys has one last light reveal it takes more than the power of a human soul to cross the barrier trapping the monsters underground you'll need a human soul plus a little bit extra a monster soul in order to escape you'll need to kill asgore and if you don't he'll kill you well [ __ ] the long road through the monster capital starts completely silent giving you some much needed time to decompress after the hectic metastone fight and the plot of fields that surrounded it that is until you find a house that looks spookily similar to tutorials except it bears all the telltale signs of her absence that's when the monsters start appearing and instead of trying to fight you they tell you their story the only one they've got asgore's reasons for going to war with the surface aren't born from bruised pride greed or even plain old anger he's grieving the tough part of this story is that it paints asgore as the most sympathetic character in the whole underground he lost everything and he's still trying to do the right thing for those he cares about but he's wrong asgore has failed to come to terms with the death of his two children at the hands of humans and followed the same sort of path as alphys and mettaton in killing humans to save the underground asgore is trying to symbolically save azrael and the human child the problem is that all this will do is reinforce his trauma in destroying human civilization the monsters will remain isolated many will die and it still won't bring his kids back we're left with an impossible choice if you kill asgore who has every reason to feel the way he does you undo all the work you've done to help the monsters on your journey and crush any hope they have left proving asgard right but if asgore kills you you'll create even more suffering justifying all the worst beliefs amongst society about humans and he'll never be truly able to come to terms with what happened it's kill or be killed things are made even more complex when you enter the judgment hall and are judged for your sins by sands of all people this is his real job to judge anybody who makes it this far and also to helpfully wrap up the themes of the game for those who miss them basically exp and love are not the simple game mechanics you thought they were they stand for execution points and level of violence and it's that second one that sans has the most to say about love is a representation of what we talked about earlier in waterfall the more you kill stuff the easier and easier it becomes to justify your violence and the deeper you spiral into this singular obsession the harder it becomes to see anything else conversely as sans says by keeping your lover one it means that you're open and receptive to the stories the world has to offer and are more willing to learn from what you see and become a better more complete person that doesn't mean you're passive or easily manipulated it just means that you're accepting and you have an open mind however asgore's mind is closed he surrounds himself with the golden flowers that was such a large component of his children's death and even keeps the souls of the children he murdered close at hand to constantly remind him of his doomed mission asgore is kind to you he even gives you the time you need to get your affairs in order but all that belies and inner stubbornness as far as asgore is concerned either your death or his is inevitable and there's nothing that can change that and so with no other options you eventually agree to fight [Music] the battle with asgore feels almost wrong unlike with toil there's actually no pacifist solution reflected by asgore literally destroying the mercy button when he starts fighting you even clicking the fight button maybe for the first time feels like a betrayal of your values your remorse over being forced to fight asgore is juxtaposed with the pumping boss music and deadly attacks to create this brilliant feeling of unease like this shouldn't be happening but despite that there's a hope that eventually there'll be a way to talk him down evidenced by the fact that his attacks will reduce you to one hp before killing you showing that somewhere deep down asgore has some mercy left in him after a hard-won battle asgore will eventually collapse and basically ask you to kill him it's at his lowest moment that asgore confronts the reality of what he's done and why he's murdered six children because he can't accept the deaths of two he's turned monster society into a war machine that attacks outsiders on the spot just like the humans did to azrael all those years ago stories don't always have happy endings and in many ways it's the ones that make us feel sad or angry or uncomfortable that we have the most to learn from asgore's story is a lesson in how even the most well-intentioned people can do the wrong thing just because they weren't willing to look inwards and maybe change remember that one for a little bit later eventually asgore offers you the chance to kill or spare him but regardless of what you pick flowey turns up kills asgore becomes god and then crashes the game uh well um let's vote it up again i guess oh dear yeah in absorbing the six human souls flowey has become the most powerful being in undertale and has wrenched back the ability to influence the world pretty much making him god the final ingredient for his metamorphosis is the seventh and final human soul yours flowey's final fight unlike everything else is almost deliberately devoid of depth yes it's a flashy boss fight but it's actually really quite forgiving there's allusions to the personalities of the six human souls but ultimately they end up being a bit of a plot device to defeat fly once and for all through the power of friendship or something it's all a bit shallow even once we've beaten flowey and are offered the chance to spare or kill him we still haven't really proven his philosophy of kill or be killed wrong we've just delayed it if we kill him not only will he be proven right but he'll come back to life the moment we reload our save sparing him isn't much better flowey openly admits that he has no intentions of changing his ways so mercy here is just going to put us back where we started even the credits are a bit somber and it's not like we get a particularly happy ending for the characters either they're still trapped underground with no chance of freedom but then flowey pops up and tells us that because we were so nice and spared him he could get us a better ending i mean well that sounds like a deal that definitely doesn't have strings attached for quite a lot of people undertale actually ends after the fight with flowey because let's be honest it's quite a law word to go through the game twice just because you killed toriel and i actually think that's okay because even if you don't realize it i think you would have already done what undertale was trying to get you to do trust me for the rest of you the true pacifist route as it's called adds a bunch of extra content that activates only after you reload your save post flowey fight and have done some special things like not killing anyone as well as going on a date with papyrus and undyne speaking of which the first thing on the menu is for you to deliver a letter from undyne to alphys which admittedly is a bit of a step down from fighting an insane god but it's worth it i promise so we go all the way back to hotland and deliver the letter it turns out that the letter was a romantic confession and in only the best ronkon traditions there's been a bit of a mix-up what follows is a very awkward date with alphys that ends in us role-playing a conversation with her and the person she actually likes undyne this is a bit of a metaphor for what we've been doing this whole time using a game to learn something about ourselves eventually undyne gets added to the mix in a brilliant scene and the two have a bit of a heart-to-heart everything seems like it's worked out well but has it really you can bombard alphys with all the affirmations in the world and say you love her for who she is as much as you like but that's still not the same as actually taking the time to look inwards and ask yourself some big questions and alphys has finally figured that out after being directed to her lab alphys tells us via the medium of what looks disturbingly like a suicide note that she's gone to face the life she created far too long ago and that it's something she has to do alone she also says that if we want to learn the truth we can go down and see for ourselves regardless of if you want to save alphys learn her dark backstory or both the only way to proceed is to step into the elevator and descend into the darkness now there is a lot to talk about in what's called the true lab several really crucial law questions get answered and a lot more get introduced but let's start off at the beginning with the concept of determination determination supposedly is a quality that only humans have that allows their souls to be much more powerful than those of monsters and this whole place was designed to extract it from the captive human souls and experiment with it the result is uh these things amalgamates see injecting determination into monsters actually causes them to melt and mutate into weird composite beings of everything they used to be this is what's traumatizing alphas not just being directly responsible for creating the amalgamates in the first place but the prospect of having to face their families and explaining what their dead loved ones have been turned into and who buy it's pretty easy to understand why she chose to hide from reality in the first place the way to get past the amalgamates isn't to fight them in fact you actually can't instead you've got to help them remember who they were and come to terms with their new identity snowdrake's mother for example needs to be brought to her senses by re-familiarizing her with the love of jokes allowing her to stabilize her form enough to let you pass also if you kept holding your stick from the start of the game this dog amalgamate can be easily skipped in the true lab we also learned some more details about the first fall in human and azrael it turns out that the first child coerced azrael into a plan that involved them committing suicide and azrael absorbing their soul presumably as a way to break through the barrier and we know how that turned out also that name you picked at the start was actually the first child's name we also learned that alphys was unwittingly responsible for the creation of flowey speaking of alphys eventually after a close call with some hungry amalgamates we meet up with her and alphys says she left the note not because she wanted to die but because she was afraid the fear of coming clean would keep her down here forever but thanks to the support of those around her alphys has had the chance to learn about herself and more importantly change for the better she's become a woman who's able to face failure head-on and stop deceiving herself and she never would have done that had she not been exposed to the stories the world had to offer and used the knowledge they gave her to direct positive growth alphys story finally gets the happy ending it deserves and with that we've done all the steps we need to do in order to claim the happy ending the reformed flower promised us if we go back to our school and try to fight him things start out the same way same intro same badass opening theme same terrible choice in front of us but then toriel turns up and saves the day followed by everyone else as you might expect this was all a ploy by flowey to gather all the monsters in one place so he could steal their souls as well as all the human souls allowing him to ascend to his true form asriel dreamer the son of toriel and asgore ezreal slash flowey is the final enemy in the game and as such represents the antithesis of everything undertale wants you to understand azrael is an embodiment of the refusal to learn and a refusal to change in baiting you in with the promise of a better ending and constantly resetting the world asriel ensures that he can carry on playing childish games with his friend forever indicated by the fact that you literally can't lose this fight but what's weird is that when you listen to his petulant demands of you and his way to edgy names for things god of hyper death really we realize that azrael isn't threatening he's almost pitiable really both has a flower and has his true self asriel's entire world view is simplistic and stunted he never grew up and doesn't want to face the realities of the world or who he's become asriel resets our friends back to the way they were when we first met them but we can restore them by giving them opportunities to question their old selves we show undyne our peaceful intent allowing her to change her opinion of humans once again we remind toil and asgore that the love of their children will never leave allowing the two to move past their deaths for the second time and we show alphys that she needn't be ashamed of who she is allowing her to try for the self-doubt for good this time flowery slash asriel on the other hand has spent so long literally running away from everything that could ever possibly challenge him and seemingly spending every waking moment trying to convince himself that his obviously flawed ideology is right that he's lost even those basic self-analysis abilities that we learned in the tutorial the only way to end this endless battle is to teach asriel ideally with the help of magic rainbow powers how to look inwards and grub as a person just as undertale taught us by now the pattern should be obvious stories whatever their form songs books jokes games the stories of people's lives even can tell us so much about ourselves but true personal growth has to come from within undertale excel's unearthing biases and opinions you didn't even know you had for example the question undone ask you about whether anime is real or not sneaks in some complex morality about the ethics of lying for the greater good and the subjective nature of belief whilst pretending to be a joke with every question undertale asked of you you get a new opportunity to affirm your beliefs or change for the better in meeting and making friends with all these monsters they've also learned about themselves and have decided to change not just the named characters but all the side monsters too where once they were all simply baddies defined by attack patterns hp totals and maybe a pun for a name if they were lucky now they're able to determine their own identities see what i'm getting at determination is the ability to change or determine who you are and the only way to make that choice is to learn about yourself through you guessed it stories without stories to direct our personal growth we'd end up like these guys monsters have had determination this whole time and don't even know she does we just had to help them realize it the message of undertale if you want to call it that isn't really a message it's more of an imperative undertale doesn't demand you learn a specific thing or come to a particular conclusion all that it wants is for you to learn something and become a better person for it it doesn't matter whether it got you to think about the ethics of violence about family grief whether you prefer butt scotch or cinnamon all undertale asks is that you learn from it once he's finally been worn down and forced to confront himself asriel relents he lets his twisted game finish and returns to his childlike inner form honest with who he is and the growing up he needs to do with this knowledge in hand and with the awakened determination of the monsters within him azrael shatters the barrier and sets everyone free by now both your job of setting the monsters free and undertale's job of communicating the relationship between people and stories is done and a good thing too because this particular story is over once the barrier is shattered you're kicked back out into the overworld and given a chance to say goodbye to everyone you can wander through the various worlds and you can see how everyone has changed for the better for example the snowdrake family has learned to accept each other through a mutual love of comedy sunderland has realized that they weren't really in love with the player after all and froggit has learned just a little bit more about the universe but if there's one thing every monster has in common it's that they talk about this being the end of their life in the underground and moving on a pretty obvious hint for what you should really be doing remember that bit in the tutorial by toriel tests your independence after explaining the basics to you that's what's happening here undertale has armed you with the basics of narrative theory and giving you a few really great starting points for you to go out into the big wide world on your own it helps you take that first step but the rest as they say is for you to determine in my first playthrough of undertale i reacted really quite strongly to the way alphys used her gaming passion to hide from her personality flaws that prompted me to adopt a new philosophy when it came to my love of games i wouldn't just passively absorb them i try and learn something about myself or about game design from each one i played and eventually i started writing those observations down yeah without undertale i might not have even gotten started with this whole youtube thing it seems toby fox at least partially used undertale to help come to terms with making the earthbound halloween hack a basically pretty bad and way too edgy romhack he's on record as regretting making representing it as one of the sad forgotten about amalgamates which looks a bit like gigaios the final boss of earthbound and if you go right to the very start of the game through the big doors to the ruins and back to the patch of flowers where you first landed even asriel here all on his own has had a chance to learn from his sad story and in a small way change but eventually if you exhaust his dialogue he's only got one thing left to say to you don't you have anything better to do and of course you do there's a whole world out there for you and the monster to explore just outside the barrier there you get to watch papyrus drive a car for real undyne and alphys make out asgore and toriel starting to move on with their separate lives and everyone being happy on the surface there's even a little fake out ending before toby fox says thanks to all the people that made this story possible and then there we have it the end but that isn't the end at least not for some people after finishing the game and booting it back up asriel appears and asks you not to reset the game telling you that everyone is happy and that the story is over but that isn't enough for some people after all there are loads of unanswered questions what's the first fallen humans deal how did flowey gain the ability to manipulate the timeline what's sans's weird fourth wall breaking deal or simply what happens if we intentionally defy the game and start killing everyone resetting your progress means consciously choosing not just to subject all the characters to the events of undertale all over again but to reset your own progress in learning about stories and growing because of them because you clearly haven't learned anything you've become just like flowey originally i was going to talk quite a bit about the genocide group but i think that would have been a mistake for those who don't know the so-called genocide roots is the alternate ending where you kill every possible enemy instead of making friends with every possible enemy see in plumbing undertale's depths in order to find the mythical real true ending where you can save azrael or find out all the law details like whatever wd gaster is supposed to be you sacrifice actually learning something about yourself from the game the genocide brew is a trap the same one that alphys mettaton asriel asgore and a bunch of other people fell into it requires you to treat undertale like a regular rpg closing yourself off not just at the evidence to the country but all the monsters telling you to stop and even your own lack of fun the combat in undertale is really boring and you have to do a lot of it in the genocide run to even start reaching new content that new content is a revamped undyne fight and a whole new final boss battle against sans they're okay i guess but most of the difficulty particularly in the sans battle comes from the janky controls that were never really built for fighting in the first place and that's kind of the point you aren't supposed to be doing the genocide run and your reward for beating sans you don't even get the catharsis of killing flower yourself the game takes away control there and then you're treated to an encounter with the first fallen child which doesn't answer any plot questions and permanently taints your save file ruining any future pacifist endings with a violent twist it's a hollow frustrating pointless experience undertale did everything it could to stop you from playing but it can't make you grow it can't make you change only you can but instead you've tried to find a lesson in undertel when it makes clear it wants you to find one in yourself which is a shame really because for all the people who matpat to this day continue to obsess about undertale matpat whilst also simultaneously missing the point completely matpat there's a whole world of people out there who've been inspired to grow or change or make something new as a result of their time with the game from art to spin-off fanfics song remixes or even whole new games these people have embraced the story of undertale taken away something from it and have grown as artists writers musicians or just plain old people as a result even toby fox has learned from undertale delta room the follow-up game shows clear signs of improvement over its predecessor the combat has much more depth the writing is snappier and the pacing is much more consistent but the influence is still there clear to see the influence our time in the underground has had on us will never leave because we used the stories it had to tell us to become who we are today but and it might be uncomfortable to admit we've learned all we can from undertale it's time to move on after gathering all the footage i needed for undertale i took my save file put it in a folder and then uninstalled the game almost certainly for good undertale shattered the barrier for us and now it's time to step out onto the surface [Music] hi hello and thank you for watching all the way to the end this was a hell of a video to make so i'm sorry about it taking a whole month to do wow hopefully you enjoyed it and if you did and would like to see other similar videos hopefully on a more regular basis then why don't you throw me some money on patreon i promise it will go almost exclusively towards buying chocolate and salt vinegar crisps in addition to funding my snacking top tier supporters get a shout out and those people are samuel vanderplatz alex deloch dirk jan karen beld rey's dad joshua binswanger lunar eagle 1996 ivar olofson leach ii philippe hinson daniel metchers lucas slack strategy in ultima patrick romberg baxter heal william johansen brian latariani assaran jonathan kirkensen and chow thank you for your continued support over the last year and i'm really looking forward to what the channel has to offer for 2019 so uh watch this space um i don't script these so i'm not really sure what to say so um [Music] bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 811,838

Rating: 4.9192939 out of 5

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Pc Gaming, Gaming, Review, Analysis, Critique, Video Essay, Adam Millard, AoG, Architect, Architect of Games, Undertale, Genocide, pacifist, true pacifist, Deltarune, Sans, Literary Reading, Papyrus, Flowey, Toriel, Asgore, Alphys, Undyne, Asriel, True Ending

Id: _am0RobOxAs

Length: 46min 55sec (2815 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I spent the past 45 minutes watching that