4/5 ★ – Alrob22's review of Undertale.

Beat on 4/27/24 at ~11.5hrs Let me start off by saying that the concept of this game is freaking brilliant. Having tons of multiple different endings that tie directly into the immediate gameplay is such a cool concept, and one that I instantly loved and latched onto. It’s different from games like The Witcher games, for example, where your endings are determined by a choice here and there; the endings in this game are determined by every single direct interaction you have. Do you spare every enemy, or just a few, or many, or none? It’s incredible, and I love the replay value of this game, even if I don’t care to replay it lol. I got the neutral ending where Flowey challenges you to do a run through killing no one and I think that’s just neat. I’ve heard that some play throughs determine your next play through sometimes radically and even that one interaction with flowey was just cool. But does a concept alone make for a 10/10 game? I don’t think so personally. I get why people rate this a 10/10 and praise it as much as they do; it’s unique, funny, has a great story and characters, is challenging sometimes, offers very interesting gameplay, settings, endings, etc. But part of me wants to say that some people put this on more of a pedestal than they may realize. I feel like people just get blinded by the meta-ness of this game in terms of the concept, story, and especially ending and forget about the finer points. For a good chunk of this game, I was pretty damn bored lmao. I’m gonna excuse Snowdin because Sans and Papyrus are awesome and their stupidity justify the silly puzzles, but after that up until the core was mainly slog nation. The only thing off the top of my head that was genuinely incredible was the Undyne/little kid part. There were some other enjoyable parts like I love the block puzzles lol. For most of it, it’s just mindless wandering and stumbling into random encounters. And like I said, I love how the combat directly influences the entire game. I just love the combat. I love the whole mercy thing and I love how you can just chat and do stuff to the enemy. It’s fun to try and figure out how to spare an enemy instead of just mindlessly slaying it. The only thing is that it’s just as repetitive as normal turn based combat. Many enemies are very fun to try and prod for a spare, but most of the time when I was bored wandering around, it bored me too. For a lot of enemies it’s kind of surface level. — And to go a little off topic, I especially have problems with it with the bosses. I hate when games hide information from you, and I feel like this game does that with some of the bosses. I ended up just googling how to spare most of them because like hell no I’m not gonna mindlessly sit there and wait on the spider lady to get a random letter 13 attacks in if I didn’t know that’s what would happen. Waste of my damn time. All of those showboating robot battles were my favorite though because they were either just fun mini games or incorporated something unique like the showboating points system with Ex. — But back to what I was saying about the middle of the game … nothing stood out apart from the Undyne stuff. Idk it just dragged for me. No cool locations, the enemies were all kind of mindless, and no cool characters or story beats were happening. Except for of course Undyne, which I spoke highly of, and Alphys. I CANNOT STAND ALPHYS. For what felt like 3 hours I could not walk 5 feet in the game without Alphys taking me to a grinding halt to tell me something utterly useless. The worst part is, I might actually like Alphys if she didn’t completely stop my freaking game every 2 seconds. But thankfully once you reach the core shit gets awesome. I love the king; he’s so nice but he knows he’s sadly gotta lock it in. And I LOVE Flowey and how he’s the king’s son bro I deduced that shit on my own. I know I just gave this game shit for leaving out information for boss battles, but that’s just for gameplay sake. When it comes to story and character sake, I LOVE how this game don’t tell you shit. Learning just through indirect dialogue that Toriel was the king’s wife freaking destroyed me. I freaking killed her man! The game never indicated that she could be spared … I didn’t know!! But I felt bad when I figured that out. And I spared the king and he said well all live together with him and his wife and I just felt so bad man. It’s so powerful. I mean this game will tell you you’re an asshole, but it really gets you with what it doesn’t directly tell you. I love it. And yeah the Flowey thing was pretty dope at the very end. I love the meta stuff. It’s something that goes further than what the Mother series ever did And I kind of want to wrap this up starting with the Mother series. I think part of the reason this didn’t hit me as hard was because I’ve experienced games like this through the Mother series. The immense hype people give this game is how I felt when I first played Earthbound like 5 years ago. But I went back to Earthbound recently, and I played or tried out the rest of the Mother games, and now I’ve played what is pretty much a spiritual successor. This game does so many things right, just like Earthbound did, but that doesn’t mean it’s the second coming of Christ. This and Earthbound have their fair share of issues, some that can take someone out of the game, like Earthbound’s lack of main drive or this game’s shitty ass pacing lmao. But at the same time, it’s what makes these games unique. I’m not trying to discredit anyone who loves this game and does praise it as much as it gets praised, and I am definitely not trying to discredit this game in its achievements and importance. This, like the Mother series, is a very, very unique game that can mean a lot to some people. I think that is what makes this game extraordinary. I am just simply expressing my experience with the game and my disappointment in the fact that this isn’t an important game to me personally. I also want to challenge those who love this game to maybe try it again, especially if you haven’t played it in a while. It may surprise you in a good or bad way. It’s always interesting to see how you’ve grown when you re-experience these life changing games. Even if I don’t love Earthbound anymore, I will never forget playing it for the first time and I will always cherish playing it for the second time around. Through discovering new grievances, I discovered a part of my journey through the medium of video games and how I got to that points. And on a brighter side, I don’t think I’ll ever forget replaying Red Dead Redemption 2. Everything honestly hit a bit harder knowing what my actions would inevitably lead to. And I just couldn’t help but getting the good ending. Just couldn’t not get the good ending. I think that said a lot to me about how I chose my experiences Also just play Mother 3 please it’s better