WOW, UNDERTALE REALLY SUBVERTS A LOT OF RPG TROPES AND MECHANICS, SAID EVERYBODY

The first of a series of piss-warm takes on indie classics that will likely continue until this newsletter is swallowed up by the way-back machine

There was a while when everybody was talking on and on and into oblivion about Undertale. The boat had sailed off without me and into some maritime cavern. I weathered years of Undertale’s hype until finally deciding to grab it last week. What, fair reader, possessed me to spend the full 14.99 MSRP on a years-old game that looks like a small child tried to recreate Earthbound in MS Paint? I’m predisposed towards Undertale. It’s quirky, it’s made by one guy and it’s put together with crude and idiosyncratic pixel art that recalls the early days of gaming. This would often be the part of the intro paragraph where I write AHA but I don’t actually like this game at all because of x, y and z. I won’t be doing that with Undertale. You already know how good Undertale is because you’ve either played it or you’ve read or watched one of a thousand gushing reviews of it. Either that or you can immediately tell it doesn’t interest you by looking at it. If you haven’t played it, and you are interested at all, you should play it. It’s great. Also SPOILERS.

Undertale is often renowned for subverting various video game tropes, specifically those of the role playing game. It doesn’t really subvert these tropes, though. It often presents them in a novel way, but if anything it puts them up on a pedestal and shines a floodlight on them. 

Famously, you don’t have to kill anything in Undertale. You, the player, and thus the blocky haired protagonist, make a decision in each battle whether you actually want to snuff out the poor monster you’re up against. But you really only get to make the decision once at the beginning of the game. You can either not kill anything, or kill some things, or kill everything. Once you’ve fucked up that first battle and murdered a frog in cold blood you’re in the group that killed some things. I would guess that the vast, vast majority of first time players wind up in that camp. So sure, you’re making a decision in every battle, but your decision doesn’t really effect the outcome- at least for the most part. The morality of Undertale is similar to the morality of Bioshock, another game that allows you to spare some things so that you can get a different ending. Multiple endings based on often-arbitrary player decisions are nothing new in games, nor are they particularly subversive.

In keeping with this theme of morality, Undertale features menu combat that always gives you “act” options that will eventually allow you to spare whatever adorable creature finds its unlucky self in your crosshairs. But this isn’t particularly subversive either, just menu combat systems taken to their logical conclusion. If JRPGs only gave you the option to attack they would be incredibly boring. Many an JRPG has historically given the player the ability to sit a turn out in defensive stance, to poison an enemy instead of attacking it head on, or even to capture or befriend it. Far from being subversive, the ability to spare enemies is just another option for ending combat in much the same way that running away or killing an enemy or capturing it for your party is.

Having said that, Undertale might well be the first RPG where you can spare every enemy from death.* And subversive or not, the battles of Undertale are hard to describe and full of pizzazz. Every battle hazily recalls that weird dating sim/ menu combat fight against the otaku lizard in Super Paper Mario. You flirt with monsters, laughing at their jokes and commenting on how dapper their hats are.

Come to think of it, there is a way in which Undertale’s battle system is subversive. But it has nothing to do with menus. After deciding whether or not to attack you are presented with a simple mini game in which you need to press the “A” button at the proper time as in most of the non-super Paper Mario games. And then all of sudden you find yourself represented by a little heart inside of a little box, dodging enemy attacks like some trippy 1-bit demaster of Ikaruga. This is the only menu combat RPG I can think of that contains a shmup in every battle, and in a way this concept is subversive. Nothing makes menu combat seem boring like frantically dodging a bunch of jumping dogs.

But that’s it. Even the (rightfully) much-lauded story is brimming with tropes from an awkward helpful scientist who has some weird crush on you to a tragic war between two factions to a silly insane clownish enemy that represents pure evil and has no discernible motivation. Undertale is about as subversive of JRPG conventions as a neckbeard holding up a sign saying “LIGHTNING IS MY DREAM.”

…But actually that neckbeard is almost certainly subverting JRPG conventions by holding that sign because Final Fantasy XIII changes up almost every aspect of the genre’s gameplay while delivering something that is immediately recognisable as a JRPG.**

People hated FFXIII for that subversion. They hated the linear nature of the story and world. They hated the fast-paced battle system that initially seemed simplistic and required a few hours to teach its systems to the player. Perhaps part of the reason Undertale is so beloved is not that it subverts the traditions of the JRPG but that it does the opposite, hanging a lampshade on each and every one and putting them all together with a flare and creativity that is rarely seen in recent iterations of the genre. 

*He says as he searches youtube for the phrase “Pokemon red/blue pacifist run” …it seems unlikely that this is intended by the developers, though

**Piss warm take on a AAA game