Undertale was written in September 2015 by Toby Fox. The game is a set in a world after a war between humanity and monsters, where monsters were sealed underground by humanity. The game follows Frisk, a human child, who follows into the underground and must go through it, meeting a bunch of monsters to get home, finding that the monsters are far more affable then might be believed. It is the latest of my favorite series. Undertale is pretty interesting because of how quickly and massively it boomed as a phemonema. For a game made by one guy, to explode in popularity to be one of the biggest original IPs of the 2010s is quite impressive, and I think speaks to how universal it's appeal is, more so then Toby Fox probably imagined, and to it's staying power.
3 Reasons I love it:
0th Reason is that it makes legit magical girl references beyond the most obvious or stereotypical things you can imagine.
1: One of the best things I can say about a work is that it's meaningful and one of the worst things I can say is that it feels meaningless or arbitrary. I really like when works have the sense that everything in them is there for a reason and UT is a game whose goal seems to have been to put meaning in where there is usually none; I know this point is perhaps a bit overplayed these days, but Undertale took a genre where you are just expected to kill legions of faceless nameless monsters and gave the monsters likeable personalities and made it so you didn't have to kill them to make you ask yourself what you are doing and why. I very much appreciate how much of UT feels like it's trying to get you to think about the meaning behind your actions.
2: Undertale makes better usage of it's medium then any game I've ever seen. Plenty of games make a fourth wall break as a joke here and there, but Undertale is a game whose plot is inextricably interwoven with it's nature as a joke. The User Interface, usually something that is tried to make as unintrusive as possible is instead used as a form of narrative. Instead of the game trying to make you forget it's a game, it instead tells a story that explicitly uses it's nature as a game to directy address and comment towards the player.
3: I really like the cast of Undertale, and while I'm worse at describing why I like characters as opposed to other reasons I will do my best. The characters in Undertale are very distinctive and very evocative, helped by each having their own musical track to compliment their personality. While some characters have a greater presence then others, none of them have poor presence and this applies as well to versaility and compelling, all the characters lack any weakness in characterization and feel very filled in as characters as well as having specialties like Papyrus and Undyne having high presence, Toriel and Alphys having high compelling and sans and Asgore having high versatility.
3 Flaws:
1: I am not very fond of the actual bullet hell gameplay. I have poor reactions and the bullet hell style game is not particularly fun of mine. I like Undertale despite the gameplay, not for it. Apparently I'm not alone on this complaint as many play for the story with the gameplay viewed as incidental.
2: The dialogue in the game can get very blunt at times with characters just outright saying what they feel, what you should feel, and what the lesson is. Flowey in particular is written very bluntly after his malevolence is revealed and Chara's speech at the end of the Genocide route lacks much subtlety. In general the game lacks subtlety.
3: The game suffers from some pacing problems. Ruins, Hotlands, and arguably Waterfall have a lot of just walking around, not helped by lack of a run functon or any way to easily increase the speed which you go through the area, while Core arguably has the opposite problem, having too many encounters.
My Favorite Part:
Get ready for a big surprise, because it's the only part that everyone loves that being sans surprise fight at the end of Genocide route. Absolutely amazing in every way, with creative usage of powers and metafictional narrative, deep rich symbolism and characterization for sans, and emotionally complex. This is probably the most liked moment in the game, and with good reason.
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