2/5 ★ – KingdomSharts's review of Undertale.

On paper, Undertale should've been right up my alley. A comedic, character-driven story bolstered by an innovative game mechanic with a short overall runtime, available on every platform for 10 bucks. I should've been singing this game's praises from the rooftops. I should've been filling up my Stanley with Toby Fox's ass sweat and glug glugging all the livelong day like the rest of the internet was in 2015. Suffice it to say, I was looking forward to playing this. But, my god, what a travesty this game is. Where do I even begin? A 2010s-coded Earthbound-inspired jrpg with bullet hell and rhythm mechanics thrown in is a cool idea, and I'd even go so far as to say the game unambiguously succeeds at its combat system. But the second swab on this dirty little q-tip, the central conceit of "you don't have to fight anyone", is so poorly conceptualized and communicated to the player that I honestly can't believe it's lauded as much as it is. I played Undertale in 2020, and so I wasn't exposed to the exhaustive word-of-mouth that comes with the release of a viral game like this. Now, leaving certain secrets and easter eggs to be parsed through by the community is all well and good -- I'm hip -- but entire game mechanics, THE mechanic that makes your game so noteworthy? Call me crazy but I think you maybe have to build that into the design. You have to make me WANT to not fight, and not just because the little icon of the frog I'm fighting will vanish in a flash of white instead of a flash of red, or I'll get a special little 16-bit cutscene at the end of my playthrough. For whatever reason, Undertale puts all it's chips on the story/characters and, listen, that's fine. But if you're gonna write a story that you want me to care about, don't make it a creepypasta that's overwrought with tumblr humor and geared toward people who had a parasocial relationship with their webkinz as a child. The Super Skeleton Bros are ok, good even. Other than that, what are we doing here? You want me to willingly choose to make each battle take 5x as long just so I don't kill some random pile of goo named Glorpy whose sole character trait is that he likes prosciutto? And then, when i ultimately decide that I value my time and hit the Fight button, you're gonna look at me like I committed a war crime? Like I rated Mein Kampf a 5/5 on goodreads? And then, let's say I'm the terminally online type who likes to know every single thing that happens in a game before I play it, and am therefore privy to the pacifist mechanic, multiple endings, save file gimmicks etc. Let's say I don't want to hurt Glorpy and I want to get the "true" ending where everyone hugs or fucks or whatever. At a minimum, I've gotta play through this whole-ass game two times. If you want to gate some content behind a second playthrough, I get it -- no dev wants to be accused of not having replay value in their single-player-only game -- but an entire ending, the conclusion of the story, no less? Honestly, fuck off. I could go on, but I'm going to take a zyrtec and watch looney tunes (which incidentally has greater entertainment value and emotional depth than this game)... Edit: Brought it up to 2 stars because the music is pretty slammin'.