iangitax

[iangitax]

The genocide run being intended as this creepypasta-esque thing is super important. Undertale, unlike Deltarune, was designed without the understanding that the game would become immensely popular. Discussions of Undertale’s themes tend to take on this birds-eye view where we can see the consequences of every decision mapped out before us; it’s a very different experience through the lens of someone who doesn’t know how the game works.

Undertale is designed to be as reactive to the player as possible. Generally, if you think of something stupid to try, it will be rewarded with a bit of narrative or a hidden gag. The spare/kill dichotomy is at the core of this; the tree of unique neutral endings for every possible variation of bosses spared versus killed demonstrate it nicely. The various metafictional elements of the narrative similarly allow the game to fold every aspect of your interactions with it into the magic circle.

What makes the game stand out so much though is the way it plays with the signals it sends to the player in order to make said reactions feel unexpected. The very first NPC the player encounters is Flowey, who delivers a deliberately misleading tutorial, followed shortly by Toriel’s own faulty guidance. That cumulates in the Toriel fight. Up until now, attempting to spare enemies has resulted in immediate and obvious feedback. Toriel does not respond to any attempts to spare her, and it takes a significant number of turns before her patterns change at all. Thus, it’s very likely for a blind player to assume they have no choice but to attack her, especially since lowering a normal monster’s HP also allows you to spare them. (Asshole neutral route where you beat everyone up but then spare them afterwards is a very funny way to play that more people should do.)

I see people complain about this type of thing a lot, as the game judging you for engaging with it on its own terms. I don’t think that’s really the point here though - the shock of the death scene is meant to make the game feel like it can react in ways you can’t anticipate. There are two other possible outcomes to the fight, and they both do so in their own ways. If the player is doing badly, Toriel attempts to avoid hitting them, and should the player get curious and deliberately get killed to see what happens she reacts with shock in the brief moment before the game over screen. Should the player persist in trying to spare Toriel, despite their own actions having little effect she will eventually wear out, her attack patterns weakening, and give up on stopping the player. Regardless of the player’s decisions, they are shown that the game will react in ways not only outside of what one would normally expect from an RPG but outside of its own internal language.

With that in mind, consider what the pacifist route asks of the player. Normal enemies can be spared by solving some sort of puzzle using ACT options. Boss fights, on the other hand, largely lack that puzzle element. They rarely if ever provide indicators as to your progress, and rather than providing hints as to how to spare them the game often builds up how dangerous and merciless your next foe will be. All of this cumulates with Asgore, a gruelingly long fight against a man who has, six times before, rejected the possibility of mercy. A man who every other character tells you will not surrender until you’re dead. A man who literally blows up the button on your UI that says “mercy” to indicate how unwilling to accept mercy he is. Consider how that looks to our blind player, who has no foreknowledge that there must be a pacifistic solution to the fight. It is probably not going to dissuade them, but it’s certainly enough to make them doubt themselves during turn after turn of no visible progress.

The thing Undertale asks of a blind player to complete the pacifist route isn’t being more skilled, or smarter, or to pick the morally correct option from a list. The thing it asks for is determination. It asks for the willingness to press on in spite of the whole world telling you to give up. It asks for you to have faith in the goodness of others, for you to believe in their ability to make the right decision if you give them a chance.

The genocide route, similarly, looks very different to a blind player. It’s easy to look at the genocide route from above, see the cool boss fights and exclusive content, and ask “why is the game punishing me for engaging with it?” For our hypothetical player though, the game has done nothing to telegraph that this route exists! They could easily replay the game many times over without ever encountering it. It takes an exhaustive degree of curiosity to try grinding for levels until every single enemy is dead. It’s designed under the assumption that the player has already ceased to engage with the game under its own terms. It’s a straightforward horror setup: you thought you were “safe,” that you were operating outside the boundaries of the narrative, but really you never escaped it. The game is still reacting to you, still alive. When you push it to its outermost limits, it fights back.

If the pacifist route requires you to believe in its characters, the genocide route assumes you don’t. That, through attempting to map out the possibilities of the game, you see them as fully within your control. That assumption doesn’t work a lot of the time, and you can certainly argue that’s a major flaw in the game’s structure, but I still find the end result compelling. (Deltarune, being designed with the knowledge of how popular it would be, is a lot more robust in the structure of its equivalent route.)

You've written extensively on Homestuck and its various progeny, I was wondering what your thoughts are on Undertale and Deltarune? In terms of exposure and cultural grip they seem to have eclipsed their forebears while retaining some of its DNA. Both works seem to, while eschewing some core Hussie-isms, retain an experimental mindset to their respective media as well as an interest in grappling with metanarrative topics.

I've only played Undertale, not Deltarune. On top of that, the last time I played Undertale was shortly after it came out, in 2015 or 2016. On top of THAT, I only played Undertale once, doing a pacifist run.

When I played Undertale in 2015, I loved it. It definitely "feels" Homestuck; it's as much as a spiritual successor to Homestuck you could ever get, created by Andrew Hussie's direct acolyte. You have the same humor, the same metafictional style, and the same music (sometimes literally the same music, in the case of Megalovania). There was a time where I would have counted it among my top 10 video games, a very prestigious list that otherwise consists of Final Fantasy 6, Cave Story, and 7 Nintendo games. (Actually Elden Ring is probably in that top 10 now, so I'm slightly more diversified.)

My interest in it has cooled significantly since then, though. Undertale has the same issue nearly all games with a moral choice element have, which is that they are only really interesting to play at the extremes (i.e., full good or full evil), and on top of that, by all accounts a Genocide run is a tedious, boring, and grindy slog that mandates you systematically root out and kill every generic enemy, with the only reward being two good and challenging boss fights. By playing the game only one, and only as a pacifist, I played the game the "correct" way, as any deviation from that route will openly accuse the player of being a piece of shit, but I also played the game in a way that most directly leads to a less complex, less fulfilling, and ultimately more forgettable experience. The game really does expect you to play it both ways, genocide and pacifist, which makes all its smarmy fourth-wall accusatory statements in genocide seem pretty hollow and pathetic in the end, no? It calls into question the whole thematic premise of the story, the whole metafictional element, and once that's gone all that really remains is some cute characters, memorable iconography, and banger music, which is all fine in its own right but not really something I'd consider a titan of the medium. It winds up feeling like a pale shadow of both Homestuck -- less expansive, less ambitious, less complex -- and its more oblique moral choice metacommentary forefather, Spec Ops The Line, which tied its question of the player's ability to choose good or evil within the rigid confines of a game to a real world soldier's ability to choose good or evil within the rigid confines of the military structures that guide them. (Spec Ops The Line is very Ender's Game in that regard.)

Again, though, it's been 10 years since I played it, so I might have forgotten some key component of what impressed me so much back then.