Warning: Given the subject of this essay, expect spoilers throughout.
It's tough to call something a
“masterpiece.” When you assign that label, the subject instantly
becomes singled out and scrutinized in a vacuum. A masterpiece
challenges convention and begs to be looked at alongside its more
conventional contemporaries. Context is always important. Take Chuck
Jones's “What's Opera, Doc?” for example. It was voted the best
cartoon of all time by 1,000 animators in the business for the way it
elevated the art form to a new level. If you try to explain a Bugs
Bunny cartoon to someone who has never seen one before and use
“What's Opera, Doc?” as your example, you'll be left with a
person who is probably confused and maybe even upset. Why would
someone watch cartoons if they're so sad? What's with the singing?
Why does that bald guy have an oversized suit of armor? By looking at
this single example, you miss the convention of the Bugs/Elmer Fudd
relationship. You lose the context of the methods the hunter has used
for years to best the rabbit, and the way Bugs has outsmarted him at
every turn. You miss out on how “What's Opera, Doc?” took that
formula and flipped it around completely in order to surprise the
audience and open them up to the larger picture of what animation can
do. Undertale is, I believe, a masterpiece. And to explore how they
did everything right, it's important to see what its contemporaries
did wrong.
In 2013 a company called Eden
Industries wanted to pick up the Mother series' mantle with their
game, “Citizens of Earth.” CoE was an attempt to create an RPG
with a “modern setting and (the) humorous tone of Earthbound,”
according to the Kickstarter page. On paper, the idea was great. Fans
of the Mother series were old enough now that they had jobs in the
industry and wanted to take hints from their favorite game to forge a
Western take on a JRPG that, in turn, was a JRPG take on Western
culture. The trailer for CoE showed off the irreverent humor, an
eclectic cast of characters, and familiar battle sequences that
stirred up visions of Dragon Quest and Earthbound. We had a series
that looked like it could deliver and fill the Mother-shaped holes in
our hearts. A new group of developers could carry Itoi's torch. The
stage was set, and the bar was high.
And, by all accounts, Citizens of Earth
should have worked. The game opens with, in typical RPG trope
fashion, the main character, the Vice President of Earth, being woken
up by his mother. The game knew from the outset exactly how to skewer
the beloved genre. It was as if Mel Brooks tried his hand at game
design. The VP was funny, the battle mechanics were interesting and
engaging, and the game knew its fanbase, sneaking sly nods to
Earthbound in for those of us in the know. But the problems with CoE
became apparent very early on. Load times grate on your nerves,
especially when you're trying to get familiar with a new area.
Directives can be vague, frustrating, or not exist at all. This is
particularly frustrating when moving the plot forward requires a
certain character and the game gives no information to do so.
However, the real failings of CoE lie in the details. The characters,
as varied as they are, have no real personality. They just spout
their lines, and only exist as tools for you to use to battle wave
after wave of the same few enemies, made doubly frustrating by the
insane respawn rate. Items are unimaginative and useless. You'll be
swimming in the same few HP-restoring coffees and donuts for the
whole game. It also makes collecting chests more of a compulsion than
an exciting experience, because an overwhelming majority of the time,
they contain nothing but another coffee.
There's also an inherent problem with
having an aloof main character like the VP who is impossible to
identify with, and only bland support characters to back him up; The
plot loses any momentum. And some of you may be saying “Well, Ness
or Crono never even speak, and those are two of the best JRPGs ever.”
And to you, I say that Ness and Crono are silent protagonists, and
the player projects themselves and their intentions onto them. Those
protagonists are also surrounded by a myriad of characters who DO
have a stake in the game. They become your moral compass. Jeff and
Apple Kid and Lucca and Frog become rallying support for the cause.
CoE's very talkative protagonist who thinks only of himself is
surrounded by characters who have almost no personality at all. So at
no time does the player feel compelled to move forward, because none
of the characters seem invested. Nobody in the game seems to care or
understand what they're doing, so why should the player? The game
also makes the mistake of thinking that ramping up the insanity of
the plot is the same as raising the stakes. You find yourself on an
alien spaceship eventually and for the life of me, I can't remember
why. It's as if it happens simply because Earthbound has aliens. Like
it's expected. And that's the biggest sin that this game could have
made; it did what was expected of it. It didn't rise above its peers,
but instead, it sold itself on the promise of being a Mother
successor and only succeeded in being a serviceable, run-of-the-mill
RPG experience, albeit with a sense of humor. Again, when the great
Mel Brooks makes a parody, it's because he loves and understands the
source material. He know how to make homage and also how to get you
to identify with his characters. There's a heart in his films that
comes across, hand-in-hand with the insanity. Citizens of Earth takes
a half measure in heart and the experience suffers for it. It got the
wackiness right, but Eden Industries making a parody more along the
lines of “Epic Movie” than “Blazing Saddles.”
From the moment you begin Undertale,
the game greets you with visual cues, all before you even enter your
first battle. The pixel art is simplistic and made up of a few
colors. It looks as if it could fit in with the likes of the SNES
brethren that inspired it. Like in every Mother game, Undertale's
protagonist wears a striped, two-tone t-shirt. Like in those
traditional JRPGs, Undertale's protagonist is mute. And the bed of
flowers the protagonist wakes up on looks very familiar to a
recurring flower in Mother 3. You may not even notice that your brain
is taking all of this in, but from this moment on, Undertale has you
exactly where it wants you. And it doesn't let go.
The most clear-cut example of
subversion of expectation is in Undertale's battle system. Similarly
to Citizens of Earth, the enemies are presented in full view, just
like in Dragon Quest or Mother games of old. You're given a couple
options from the menu, as in an old Final Fantasy game, and you're
led to believe that those commands are the same as always. For those
new to the genre, Flowey, the unassuming first enemy of the game,
instructs the player on the unique “bullet hell” minigame that
occurs on every enemy turn. A red heart, a stand-in for the player,
is confined to a small box where projectiles move around and try to
make contact with you. Flowey instructs the player to gather up the
“friendliness pellets” in order to proceed, and with that,
Undertale has introduced its central mechanic by lying to the player.
If you figured it out and dodged Flowey's attack, you feel smarter
than the game. If not, you're rescued by another NPC who will teach
you how to “really” play the game. Either way, you're playing by
the game's rules, even if you don't know it. If you suspect Undertale
is just going against convention and you play along as if it's some
kind of anti-RPG, Undertale knows that, too. The game knows what you
know, and it knows how you can plan to overcome the obstacles it
throws at you-sometimes literally. If you've caught on, be assured
that the game knows this and it already several steps ahead of you.
After you've met the friendly NPC Toriel, you settle in and begin to
learn how to play from someone you trust. Then the game goads you
into accidentally killing her.
Undertale is layer upon layer of
tropes, reversals of tropes, self-referential humor, fourth-wall
shattering dialogue and characters, and surprise after surprise after
surprise. Even if, in a panic, you reset the game because you've
accidentally killed your new friend, the game knows. It knows if
you've played the game before. It knows if you've closed the game in
the middle of important dialogue. The game of Undertale extends
beyond the act of playing it. It's not just a timeline of events from
the intro to the final boss. Undertale is an interplay of
experimentation and branching paths of human choice and itself. The
game invites you to try new approaches, then calls you out on it. The
world of Undertale is a post-postmodern look at not only RPGs, but
video games, morality, and gaming culture in general. Every time you
think you've figured out the game, the rules change. Undertale is the
world's best Poker player and you think you can take them on because
you've mastered Go Fish.
By the time you reach the game's first
“real” boss fight, one half of the comedic skeleton brother duo,
Papyrus. The rules change, and the bullet hell becomes something of a
Mario-style platformer where your heart must leap over giant bones to
avoid damage. The end of the battle showcases the action box expand
ever-upward as your heart leaps over all obstacles. It's hilarious,
unexpected, and just a hint of the surprises to come. Each boss has a
different take on battle, and with each one, conventions fall away.
And yet, the game still manages to surprise you when the final boss
(on one of the paths) shows itself to be a photorealistic monstrosity
of eyeballs and thorns that is as shocking to see revealed as it is
disturbing to look at. “But of course,” you think. “This isn't
REALLY a SNES game. It's been a computer game the whole time. It
doesn't have to adhere to any rules.” Undertale has tricked you
again.
You can play Undertale like a
traditional JRPG, but doing so demonstrates a fundamental
misunderstanding of what it means to play video games. Inventory
management gets skewered when you try to pick up some mystical
object, only to be told that your inventory is full. You drop the
item, and that dropped item runs off with the mystical object in
question. Even the “But thou must” options become irrelevant in
regular dialogue, because the real choices aren't even delivered in
that format, opting for an “actions speak louder than words”
scenario. In battles, you can kill every frog or depressed ghost you
come across to gain EXP and cash, but the game openly challenges you
on it. By the time you reach the end, Sans, the second of the
skeleton brothers, reveals that the traditional EXP and LV, present
in so many JRPGs, aren't exactly what you might have believed.
Altering something so integral to the role-playing experience puts
everything into perspective. Undertale holds you personally
responsible for your actions. After all, that blank slate of a
character was you. It wasn't Ness or Cecil or the Vice President of
Earth. The purposefully nondescript protagonist is a proxy for you,
and Sans makes sure that you know that there is no separation, in his
eyes, between you.
There's a heart in Undertale that makes
it stand out. It plays to the fans of the genre by including
ineffectual minibosses in the tradition of Final Fantasy V's
Gilgamesh in Papyrus, it features an homage to Final Fantasy VI's
famous opera sequence with the killbot, Mettaton. A village of cute,
Mr. Saturn-esque creatures called Temmies, and a sequence in Dr.
Alphys's lab that seems straight out of the Chimera Lab in Mother 3.
It helps you grow to appreciate the characters by giving them
dialogue that changes with your choices. One particularly touching
scene, if you plan to kill everything in sight, has Sans beg the
player not to continue, because he knows that deep down they just
want to “finish” the game. On the other hand, going out of your
way for a perfect ending, nets you a similar sequence begging you not
to replay, because as things are, all the friends you've made are so
happy. This, in itself, is a huge mixed signal, because the alternate
approaches to the game and branching character directions and actions
just beg for experimentation and replaying. But that's exactly what
Sans warns against. This isn't just grinding on FF6's Veldt to learn
new attacks, or mowing down wave after wave of FF4's Bombs to get a
worthless-but rare!-secret summon. It's about the choice and the
weight of every small step you've taken. And that's where games like
Citizens of Earth got it wrong. Playing a Mother game isn't
fulfilling simply because it's funny. The fandom hasn't grown and
expanded because they laugh at the little things. Undertale shows
that being laugh-out-loud funny is done best when there are high
stakes, your characters are likable and full of personality, and you
care about the characters you're interacting with.
Years ago, Roger Ebert asked if videogames can ever be considered art. The internet exploded and rallied
against him with example after example of game design and art and
emotion, but Undertale is the most concrete example yet. Undertale
delivers an experience that can only be delivered in a video game
medium. A film never changes due to your mood, but Undertale in
particular shows that the game is a reflection of the player. It's a
novel in the way you read into and experience characters and
motivations. It's is an art exhibit, from the small things like
character art and music to its lessons on morality and the
consequences of your seemingly innocuous actions. It's an interactive
puzzle in the way it invites the player to explore the very data
files it's contained in to discover it's biggest mystery.
As, I mentioned, there is a bed of
flowers that the player wakes up in at the beginning of Undertale.
They look strikingly similar to the flowers that feature in Mother 3
as a symbol throughout most of the story. At first it bothered me
because this game has no right to compare itself to Mother 3, let
alone be so bold as to appropriate one of the most prominent and
emotional symbols in the game. But it does. Toby Fox and Undertale
have proven that they understand exactly what it means to make a
video game in the modern day. Undertale stands on the shoulders of
giants, and it looks down on them with fondness, appreciation, and
determination.
