Undertale!

Not too long ago, back around the first full week of this month actually, I finally got around to downloading a game I've heard a bunch about from various friends -- first my sister (if you remember reading "there's a lesbian fish-monster" on my random quotes list a while back... that was part of her description of some of the characters in the game XD), and later several of my friends from college, all highly recommended it, and eventually I broke down and looked up some random bits of things about it (...and encountered spoilers, but not too many spoilers, and half the time I didn't know what was a real spoiler and what was someone's weird fanfiction since there's so much stuff out there, so even some of the actual already-seen things still came as a surprise when they really happened in the game) and then finally, when I had money to spare, bought and downloaded the game.

And last week I finished my first complete playthrough of the game.

Soooo... this is going to be a post going over what I thought of the game! There may be spoilery things here and there, for those who haven't played yet, but the "general stuff" sort of thing at the top before I go into the "what I did in my first playthrough" part should be relatively un-spoilery, with occasional minor things scattered throughout.

Overall -- probably my favorite part of the game is the characters, their interactions, and the writing in general.  There is just so much silliness packed into these little text-boxes.

This isn't actually a thing that happens in the game, but it could've been. XD

Weird silly character designs all over the place, too -- a lot of the NPCs kinda look like something you'd find scribbled in the margins of my worksheets from college, actually.  Sometimes they remind me of the weird awkward ones that I look back and go "what the heck was this supposed to be??" when I find them -- the sort of diamond-stick-figure things in one area and the weird stretched-out guy staring at a donut, completely freaked out by how much he paid for it, both come to mind.  One odd thing I noticed is that the game seems to be really good at taking a character trait that you might not be fond of in people and then making a character who has that trait really, really likeable somehow.  Papyrus is always bragging about how great he is, but he's so funny that it doesn't bug you and there's definitely more to him than just "funny skeleton" even if that's the most obvious part.

This also doesn't actually happen in the game.  But there's Papyrus in it. XD

Sans talks in all-lowercase, which usually comes across as having a sort of nasty dismissive tone when real people do it on the internet, and yet he doesn't really give me that impression -- he's more of an "all lowercase because he's just too lazy to use the shift key" sort of guy.  Asgore is the guy who kickstarted the whole "kill every human who falls down" thing (...we've all said stuff we regretted when we got pissed off sometime, right? well... that's his regrettable angry moment) but he's not really a villain at all, and I ended up really feeling bad for the guy by the time I met him and got to know a little about him.  Toriel's initially nice but turns out to be overprotective to an almost crazy extent... but then again, Asgore is one of the hardest fights in the game and she thinks Asgore really does want to kill all the humans (...is that why they broke up?), so it kinda makes sense that she wouldn't want seemingly helpless little kidlets going off to fight him and probably getting killed (...twice.  maybe three times.)

And here we see why Toriel uses fire magic
for cooking rather than the oven... XD

And Mettaton's a killer robot who puts you through all these sadistic game-show trap puzzle things and then tries to turn you against Alphys (...who is absurdly cute... and okay maybe the robot wasn't entirely making everything up, she was also absurdly lonely and tended toward self-loathing and people sometimes do messed-up things in that kind of situation... but I get the feeling that Mettaton was exaggerating a little, he does try to make everything super dramatic after all), but by the end of his fight I actually ended up liking the guy, especially when it turned out that he actually cares about his fans and decided that he'd rather stay down there with them than go to the surface and become even more famous if he had the chance.  And so on.  I basically ended up liking pretty much every major character and even some of the minor ones grew on me way more than expected.

...and then there's that flower, who I kinda want to strangle, especially after what he did near the end of the game.  Buuuut... yeah, overall I really like the characters in this game. XD

The music is also really great (...I kinda regret not going ahead and buying the game+soundtrack bundle when I got the game itself), and it's always nice to see a game as recent as 2015 that doesn't feel the need to throw in "3D for 3D's sake."  Seriously, it really annoys me that pretty much all the major game companies (even Nintendo has jumped face-first into the bullshit bandwagon now it seems, aside from some download-only games...) no longer make games using 2D sprite-based graphics, everything has to be 3D models now even if it looks way worse with 3D than the same game with high-quality sprites (or heck, even medium-quality sprites) would.  Look at the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games for a good example of great sprites degrading into garbage 3D as the series went on.  But yeah, while a few of the sprites are kinda awkward, overall they work really well and the characters' different facial expressions (everyone has a ton of them for their textbox-portrait graphics) and the battle sprites' animations definitely add a lot to it.

Now the more spoilery part.  Here's how things ended up going in my playthrough.  Everything was going well for a while, I was leaving the harmless critters alone (why would I kill slightly confused frogs and terrified little bug things??) and laughing my butt off at Napstablook saying "Z" out loud rather than actually snoring (I was not expecting that one, I actually cracked up and laughed out loud when the textbox mentioning that came up), and then stayed at Toriel's house for a bit.  Then came the fight with her, and I assumed based on the fact that she killed me in about 10 seconds the first time that you were supposed to fight back and (like she said before the fight) prove to her that you were strong enough to survive outside the ruins.  Was fighting, not getting killed by fireballs  this time, and then her HP got to around the 1/4 mark and I figured maybe sometime soon she'd admit I wasn't just a wimpy harmless kidlet and let me go.  No sign of change in behavior, no name turning yellow indicating you can end the fight by sparing her, so... okay, maybe I need to get her HP a little lower?  Apparently not because I attack again and out of nowhere do 300 damage rather than the 25ish I had been doing before.  I accidentally killed Toriel.  I think I actually said "No!" to the computer the moment it happened, it was completely unexpected and I really was not trying to do that.  Then Flowey shows up and tells me that he hopes I'm happy with my "choice."  His reactions when I dodged his "friendliness pellets" in the first encounter cracked me up a bit, but this... yeah, that flower got on my bad side at this point.  THAT WASN'T MY CHOICE YOU STUPID FLOWER I DIDN'T EXPECT TO GET A RANDOM SUPER-CRITICAL-HIT OUT OF NOWHERE AND KILL HER! But before I could throw a brick at him he ducks back underground and... pretty much vanishes for the rest of the game, oddly enough.  I don't think I ever encountered him again until the end.  I guess maybe he only shows up to taunt you when you accidentally (or not-so-accidentally) kill someone, since I didn't kill anyone else in my playthrough.  I was actually probably a bit overly careful not to kill anyone for a while after what happened with Toriel, to the point of hardly even using the Fight command (I think Undyne, maybe Mettaton, and Asgore might've been the only ones I actually hit, including random encounters... and Asgore didn't give me any choice.)

After that was the Snowdin area, and Papyrus and Sans' appearance.  Papyrus cracked me up.  His final sequence of attacks, with the "COOL DUDE" spelled out in bones and the humongous bone that stretched the screen just so it could fit and the dog stealing a bone and everything just cracked me up.  And how he had spaghetti hidden in his hat, and also populating his half of the fridge, and how he apparently AGES SPAGHETTI IN A BARREL before cooking it.  Is that something you can even do with pasta?  Barrel-aged pasta?  Is it like... a bunch of regular ol' dry spaghetti stuck in a barrel for days/weeks and then pulled out to be cooked, or does he make his own from scratch and then dries it in the barrel, or what?

Anyway... after that was the Waterfall area where you are being stalked by a lesbian fishmonster.  It's also populated by a bunch of other random critters, and is apparently the home of Napstablook who owns a snail ranch (somehow I avoided stumbling across any mention of this during my pre-playing-the-game poking around, too.  I guess Napstablook's goofy moments aren't ones that get posted all over the internet over and over.)  I had an armless yellow thing follow me around for a while, carried a seemingly pointless umbrella (...was there a point to the random stash of umbrellas?), and ran into something called "Temmie" which panicked and ran away when I flexed my muscles (which also somehow summoned the horse-merman guy out of nowhere for a flexing contest.  Apparently he can hear the sound of muscles flexing from a mile away.)  Undyne -- the aforementioned lesbian fishmonster -- apparently knew that I'd killed Toriel somehow, and apparently did not know that it was by accident, because even after I gave her water when she got all dehydrated on the lava bridge (which she chased me over while trying to kill me with spears) she never actually let me into her house or anything, not even when Papyrus suggested that all three of us hang out.  This led to another funny Papyrus line -- something along the lines of "I don't remember murderering anyone -- though I am a pretty hardcore kind of guy."  Yes, he says murderering, not murdering. XD  I really want to see whatever silly scene happens if you do get to hang out with Papyrus and Undyne, so I know I'll be doing at least one more playthrough at some point.

This is Undyne.  She suplexes huge boulders just because she can.

After Waterfall was Hotland, where the bridge located over convenient fish-dehydrating lava was found.  And also a big ol' mad scientist lab sitting right out in the open.  This was home to Alphys the adorable scientist lizardsaurus monster thing, who I'd become mildly obsessed with during the week or so leading up to me playing the game (she's just.... ridiculously cute for some reason.  I want to give her a hug. XD)  Between her and Papyrus I'd probably have a really hard time bringing myself to killing Undyne -- Papyrus and Undyne are friends of course, and then there's how Alphys has a huge crush on the fish, and I'd really rather not see her reaction to finding out that not only is her favorite fish dead but the human who she's been helping out was the one who did it.  I'm not sure if she even finds out if you do kill Undyne, though, considering that she mentioned in my run through the game that she forgot to actually watch my fight with Undyne and was going to call her to ask about it later (...and then it seems like she procrastinated a lot and didn't even do that.  Though Undyne does randomly call her, apparently to talk about the weather... except that there isn't really varying weather down there so that wouldn't be much to talk about... hmm.)  But anyway... I was not expecting Mettaton to suddenly burst through the wall of Alphys's lab for a quiz game, nor was I expecting the ridiculously rigged questions ("how many letters in Mettaton?"... and then it endlessly adds more N's to the end until they wrap around the screen.)  However, I was expecting the answer about who Alphys had a crush on -- I'd stumbled across fanart and such referencing that scene before -- and picked the fish right away. XD

Further into Hotland, there was something called "the core" which apparently is how the monsters generate their electricity.  I think it was mentioned that it had something to do with geothermal energy, but it seemed like more than that was going on there going by just how weird the place was on the inside here and there? I dunno.  Also, apparently Mettaton owns a resort hotel built into this power-plant-type structure.  Complete with food court (where I finally found out who the fast food worker cat guy I've seen pictures of was) and sketchy alley out back (where two critters with strong "like, totally" accents sold me garbage and tried to get me to bring them burgers, but then wouldn't actually take said burgers if I did.  Oh, and apparently the burgers from Mettaton's restaurant are made out of edible sequins and glitter, however that works.)  Somewhere in here there was also a Mettaton cooking show, and a spoof of Final Fantasy 6's opera house scene featuring Mettaton (in "rectangle" form) in a dress, singing about how "you're going to die... a lot... it'll suck."  This was another one of those scenes that actually made me crack up laughing out loud.  Somewhere in here there were also unexpected spiders -- I knew about Muffet, but had no idea what point in the game you actually encountered her and until I came across her spider-bake-sale stand this far in I thought she might be earlier in the game but in an area I somehow missed, for some reason.  That led to a somewhat long fight, but in the end Muffet decided to let me go because I'd bought some cider from the other spider bake sale way back at the start of the game.  After all these Mettaton encounters (...and spiders), I finally got to fight him -- well, sort of.  First I flipped a switch on his rectangle form's back and then he became his "humanoid with really long legs" form and started spontaneously dancing all over the place, and apparently trying to kick me while dropping bombs and such from the ceiling.  After a while he ended up like the Black Knight in Monty Python -- not just disarmed but dis-legged too, just sitting there as a torso attempting to bleed on me (but since he's a robot that sent electrical sparks flying everywhere which would actually be kinda dangerous.)  And then... his battery ran out, and Alphys dragged him off for repairs.  Apparently dancing on actual legs drains his power supply a lot faster than wheeling around like a demented unicycle in rectangle mode.

At some point after this Alphys's lab closed up.  Not sure what happened there, and since Alphys never gave me her phone number (she only added me on monster-Facebook) I couldn't even call to check like I could with Papyrus and... well, not Toriel since I accidentally killed her. :(  I guess she must've been busy repairing Mettaton.  Anyway... after a bit of further exploration (somewhere around this point I went back and found the Temmie Village, paid for one of their college tuition, and... saw them add some super expensive armor to the shop that I can't imagine ever affording), I went onward to the capital city (it was mostly just a background, as it turned out, since I pretty much took an elevator that skipped right to the path leading to Asgore's place.)  And... yeah, Asgore's house was pretty much an exact copy of Toriel's, all the way down to the big comfy chair.  I'm not sure if that means Toriel was the one who decided on the house layout of both houses and Asgore just never changed it, or if Asgore somehow arranged his house to look just like Toriel's house after they broke up (...did he send someone to her place to see what furniture she had just so he could get the same stuff, or what? XD)  I found a knife that described itself as being "good for chopping weeds," and it turned out that I actually got to use it for its intended purpose a bit later on.  Oh, and Sans showed up to say... well, not a whole lot, besides explaining that Flowey was full of it and it's not actually "love" that you're accumulating when you kill monsters, it's a higher level of violence -- so "LOVE" was an acronym.  I know thanks to spoilers that if you've gone around killing everyone he'll actually attack you here, but apparently my level of accidental murdereryness was acceptable (...I did get the feeling he never found out that I killed Toriel, though, since he talks about her a lot later on in the game and never implies that he knows she's dead.)


And then... Asgore.

 (...yeah, I just inserted his theme song into this post.  Honestly this may just be my favorite song from the game.)

Big ol' goat king with a great theme song and a really hard boss fight.  He smashes your Mercy button with his shicker (I knew this happened ahead of time  but seeing it in action the first time was still impressive), forcing you to either fight or talk to him... and talking doesn't seem to accomplish much.  After two or three deaths to His Goatiness, I finally manage to beat him -- I was so relieved to see that my last hit didn't actually kill him, it just knocked him down to a small sliver of HP and I still had a chance to let him live.

...well, I would have if FLOWEY hadn't shown up and killed him instead, anyway. >_<

And then Flowey got even creepier, basically turning into a Cthulhu monster (and the only full-color boss in the game -- everyone else was mostly black and white with a few colors for special effects on attacks.)  I somehow beat this thing on my second try, even though Asgore took several attempts.  And then... Flowey in his usual shape pops up on the screen again, crumpled up and weak, with the Fight/Mercy buttons and nothing but wind as the background music.

Unlike Asgore's Fight/Mercy choice (which took a split-second), it took me like 10 minutes of back and forth to decide, but eventually I decided that Flowey killing Asgore was not something I particularly wanted to forgive and used that old knife for its intended purpose and chopped some weeds.

...and immediately felt like I had probably messed up.  Immediately he goes into creepy-face mode and starts taunting you again, even up to the moment he finally gets hit and... randomly reverts to a normal non-creepy-faced flower.  (I later attempted to go back to my save file and try letting him live instead, but this just changed Asgore's final speech -- he mentioned his son's name this time -- and had him kill himself rather than Flowey doing it.  Though Flowey still showed up afterward, breaking Asgore's soul-heart-thingie and taunting me again before vanishing.  Apparently you can't fight Cthulhu Flowey again in the same save file after beating him once, which means I never saw what happens if you choose to spare him at the end.  I guess I'll have to save that for another playthrough.)

And then, the ending.  My lost kidlet (I named the main character "Fritos" just to be silly) has escaped the underground... somehow... but now Undyne is the ruler of the place, everyone thinks I was the one who killed Asgore (I guess Flowey kept himself hidden from most of the monsters...), and Undyne is training up a massive army in preparation of another war against the humans.

So... I escaped, and I can still call skeletons on the phone whenever I want... but I also have a lesbian fishmonster wanting to kill me, if she can ever figure out a way to get through the barrier.  Oops.


At first I was a little confused about why Undyne suddenly wants to kill me so badly (I mean... she knows I was nice to Papyrus, she should know that Alphys liked me, if she's been in touch with Alphys she also knows I didn't kill Mettaton, I even gave her some water when she was dehydrated!) but thinking a bit more, I'm guessing it was all because Asgore died.  She was the head of the Royal Guard after all, Asgore being dead is the absolute last thing she'd want happening.  There's no way they could've known that I didn't do it when Asgore disappeared, they just would've found him mysteriously gone and the hall leading to the barrier torn up from a fight.  Basically... it's all the freaking flower's fault.  I have to wonder if sparing him at the end changes that any, though -- I mean, I doubt he'd tell Undyne that he was the one who killed Asgore instead of the human doing it (that's probably a good way to get speared in the face), but maybe he'd at least stick around long enough that somebody might see him there when they came to investigate the king disappearing and have some suspicion that it could've been him?

I guess I must have gotten what people call a "neutral" ending, though as I've found out since then there's not just one neutral ending but a whole bunch of them depending on what you did (who you killed, who you befriended, etc.) throughout the game -- I haven't spoiler'ed myself on what the others all are, but I am aware that the reason mine turned out the way I did was because of how things went.