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If you like Earthbound and / or WarioWare you should check out Undertale!
 
This game sort of came out of nowhere for me, but everyone on my social networks seemed to be talking about it so I checked out it. So glad I did. This is a gem.

Basically it is an RPG that has the sort of odd zaniness that you find in a game like Earthbound, with a battle system that is essentially like playing WarioWare mini-games. It also has a mechanic where you can decide whether to kill or have mercy on the enemies and it actually seems like it is going to have a point. So far the pacing has been great too, and it has a bunch of really well-timed comedic moments that made me laugh out loud (the early game living block who moves itself to the switch for you... with some misunderstandings... was hilarious.)

The only platforms at the moment are PC and Mac (look Mac people you get a great game for once), but it seems like it is going to be a success so hopefully it will come to others as well.

Check out this trailer!



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11/04/15, 07:15    Edited: 11/04/15, 07:05
 
   
 
@Secret_Tunnel You won't be playing through the exact same way. Not saying there won't be repetition, but new dialog and new areas / plot points open up and the entire ending sequence is completely changed (and also amazing.) Considering how short the game is and how easy you can fly past the puzzle parts and such now that you know them, you can burn through most of the stuff you know to get to the new stuff and it is well worth it.
03/09/16, 17:02   
Is this on Nintendo yet?
03/09/16, 21:18   
@Zero
@nate38

Alright, I think it only took me about six hours to play through my first time, and I can probably breeze through that in four hours now, so... I'll play through it again and check out this true ending. If it were any other game I'd probably say that there's no way it could be worth it, but Undertale has done so much creatively unparalleled stuff already that I'm willing to put in a little more time to see the rest.

nate38 said:
I think it's good to have a kind of closure summing up your "legacy," but I can see why you would have preferred a more stark ending at that point. In the moments leading up to the ending, the game certainly has no misgivings about being abrupt with the player. It would have been fitting to keep building off that.

My personal taste is pretty anti-epilogue for stories in general, haha. I love staring at the credits with my mouth agape, still having a lot of things to think about due to a cut-and-dried, sometime ambiguous ending.
03/09/16, 23:30   
Alright, just got the true ending! It made me want to go hug all my friends and tell them I love them. I still actually really love the dark, WTF nature of the nuetral ending, haha... but the Pacifist ending did such a good job of putting a bow on things and letting us see what all the characters were up to. You don't get classic SNES-era RPG endings like that anymore. I remember thinking Shovel Knight did a really good job of capturing that feeling with its ending too.

I think the only things I'd change would be:

1. Take out the phone call with Sans in the neutral ending.
2. Make it more clear that you have the option to go hang out with Undyne.


I'd easily put this game up there with Earthbound or Chrono Trigger or any of the other SNES RPG greats. None of those SNES games are at the top of my all-time favorites list, but for people who do really cherish those, I can totally understand why they love Undertale so much. I might even go so far as to say it's my favorite RPG too.
03/11/16, 10:13   
Told you it was worth it.

Some people saying the genocide run is worth doing for some new, awesome boss fights but I just can't get myself to want to run around killing everyone after the true ending experience. So I let it end on a good note and moved on with my life. Maybe someday.
03/11/16, 19:14   
@Zero Same lol. I don't think I could bear to strike down my silly monster friends.
03/11/16, 19:44   
Yeah, maybe I'll do the genocide run someday, but... not anytime soon!
03/11/16, 20:24   
I played through Undertale right around New Year's, and it was so good. I think it's my favorite game of 2015, and it's definitely one of my favorite games I've ever played. I tried to avoid the hype, and tried to read as little about the game as possible prior to playing it for myself, so I wouldn't have it spoiled, and I'm glad I did. Finding out the game's little quirks and interesting design elements on my own, was mindblowing. Oh my gosh it's so cool. It's a lot like EarthBound, definitely, but I feel like it stands out in its own way as well. I don't necessarily want a sequel to it, but I definitely am going to pay attention to see whether Toby Fox will make any new games in the future.
03/16/16, 08:27   
Just did the genocide run. That was definitely worth it. Lots of really cool stuff in there that just reinforce that this is probably the smartest game I've ever played. You guys need to do it if you haven't yet!
05/13/16, 09:34   
@Secret_Tunnel I don't want to fuck up my game permanently, or make everyone hate me
05/13/16, 13:34   
Yeahhhhhhhhhhh I mean I hear it is cool and has some good boss fights but I really have no interest in letting my beautiful experience turn into one where I murder everyone.
05/13/16, 16:49   
After this playthrough, I actually like some of the characters even more! It's very dark, but there are still tinges of positivity that make you love the game's world.
05/15/16, 01:26   
I dunno. Maybe someday. Really though I feel like my experience was so near perfect and ended on such a perfect note, it's tough to want to change my ending, so to speak.
05/15/16, 01:47   
And that's why I'd want to play it in the opposite order of that, which is why I think it's dumb the game "punishes" you if you play it the way you want.
05/15/16, 21:27   
@Mop it up I'm prettttttty sure (though you'd have to check on this) that you can get around the whole "once you do X you can never do Y" thing by deleting the rights files or whatever. With that said supposedly the genocide run only really makes sense in context of the other runs or something?

It is bizarre though to have an option that poisons the other options. There is a certain point where I think developers get too "clever" with some of this stuff and forget that players want to you know... play their games.

Mind you, probably no one would really think to kill EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE first try through anyway unless they heard it was a thing.

WITH THAT SAID, a student of mine heard about the genocide run but didn't know it poisoned the other options so he did it first...
05/15/16, 21:45   
Edited: 05/15/16, 21:57
It's really meant to be done last, and I can't imagine anyone accidentally starting it without already knowing about it--you really have to go out of your way to play the game that way, and they make it abundantly clear to you what you're doing. Like I always say, the game is always a step ahead of you when it comes to this stuff, and it's fully aware that you're only doing it because you want to see what happens. It's playing off of people's completionist tendencies. That's the whole point!

The most brilliant moment in the whole thing is when one character tells you that at least you have the guts to do it yourself, unlike people who just watch someone else do it. "There's probably someone like that watching right now!"

And the "punishment" isn't even bad. It changes one minor detail in the game's "The End" screen, and that's it. Granted, you're not supposed to know that there's a punishment going in...

...I like it when developers get overly clever though. It's like when I got mad about having to replay the whole thing because I killed one frog at the very beginning to get the "true" ending. On the one hand, yeah, that sucks, but on the other hand, it makes perfect sense within the context of the game, and expecting anything less would feel a little fake. Having played like 500 different games in my life, it's really easy to see where games tend to cheese things a little bit to make their experience more "player friendly," and it takes a lot out of the game for me when I can pick up on that.

It's like how none of your choices in the Mass Effect games actually change anything in regards to which missions you do, which party members you recruit, and what the overall story is. "Oh, your Salarian doctor died in Mass Effect 2? Conveniently, here's an identical Salarian doctor in Mass Effect 3!"

Having a game with actual consequences is a breath of fresh air to me. It ups the stakes by a lot.
05/15/16, 23:33   
I don't mean overly clever to mean making choices matter, I mean overly clever like in "ha ha you did this one thing now you can't ever do this huge chunk of the game." But it seems everyone was over-exaggerating what doing the genocide first does anyway. I was under the impression that if you do that first you can never do the other paths.

As for the whole cleverness of something like SOME PEOPLE DON'T EVEN HAVE THE GUTS TO DO THIS THEMSELVES AND THEY'RE WATCHING RIGHT NOW... my brother was telling me all about it and I was like... "meh". I don't find that particularly clever because I don't find it a particularly interesting statement. Guts is irrelevant, people are watching because that is modern gaming culture. Even though I don't personally get it AT ALL, these let's plays and stuff are huge. I highly doubt there is much of anyone out there who chose to watch instead of play because they just felt too bad about killing digital creatures themselves. Most people are watching because that's the easy way to experience a game without having to put in the work nowadays. Or whatever. Hell, I have no idea why let's plays are so huge.

I'm already so over the whole ha ha you're actually a bad person for doing the violence the game asked you to "cleverness" anyway, it's getting pretty overdone and it was never particularly interesting to me. Maybe because I never drew much of a line between smoking waves of enemies in say... Uncharted... versus doing it in these games anyway. So at the end of Hotline Miami when the whole twists turns out to be THERE WAS NO POINT TO ANY OF THIS AND YOU MURDERED TONS OF PEOPLE FOR NOTHING?!!? my first thought was... is there ever really a point to most video game violence besides "violence is fun"? Sure a lot of games try to build some story to obfuscate that fact, but they usually start with "violence is fun" and go from there.

And of course this is where Jack Thompson was wrong... more or less I'd say video game violence is a pretty innocent act precisely because it is a video game and not real life. That's not to say I think there is NO connection between media violence and real life violence, but it's certainly tough to find a clear one. I'm not saying it can't make us FEEL bad, but there is no real moral weight behind that. I don't want to kill all of these enemies in Undertale because the ending I had made me feel nice and that was a good place to stop, not because I actually think it would be ethically wrong of me to do so. So it's hard to make a game that can actually make me feel like they "got" me with their clever tricking me into partaking in violence, because I've partaken in violence in games for years and I never deluded myself to think that it wasn't because, on some level, violence in games is fun and that's (probably?) ok. It's not some hard fact I'm going to be shocked to find out about myself. I mean, the only reason I ever gave a shit about Mortal Kombat is the gratuitous violence that went beyond anything I'd played to that point. Ripping out spines and stuff well... that was fun.

For awhile, anyway. Got kind of old fast.

With that said I do tend to be more interested in non-violent games nowadays because I think they can tell more interesting stories and, hopefully, give more interesting gameplay than the stuff I've been playing for years (because you know, violence IS fun and thus it is one of the quickest go tos in gaming), and that is why I thought Undertale was brilliant... it turned non-violence (and making friends, etc.) into a serious gameplay mechanic in a genre that we rarely see non-violence in.
05/15/16, 23:54   
Edited: 05/16/16, 00:14
I could well be missing the point (since I haven't played the game), but it seems stupid to me that a game with multiple endings (and therefore encouraging multiple playthroughs) would lock you out of any of them if you did them in a certain order. I understand they wanted to make choices matter, but when I start a new game, it should be a new game. There should at least be a way to start with a clean slate without doing anything special.
05/16/16, 00:12   
Zero said:
I'm already so over the whole ha ha you're actually a bad person for doing the violence the game asked you to "cleverness" anyway, it's getting pretty overdone and it was never particularly interesting to me. Maybe because I never drew much of a line between smoking waves of enemies in say... Uncharted... versus doing it in these games anyway. So at the end of Hotline Miami when the whole twists turns out to be THERE WAS NO POINT TO ANY OF THIS AND YOU MURDERED TONS OF PEOPLE FOR NOTHING?!!? my first thought was... is there ever really a point to most video game violence besides "violence is fun"? Sure a lot of games try to build some story to obfuscate that fact, but they usually start with "violence is fun" and go from there.

I'm with you there. Well, I liked it in Hotline Miami because that was one of the first games to be all subversive and do it, but now it feels like you can't do the same "twist" again without covering the same territory. Undertale understands this though, the characters in the Genocide run who are more aware of what's really going on are basically coming at you from the perspective of, "You're not good or evil, you just want to see what's going to happen, but either way, we can't let you do that."

I think regular Undertale does a good job with the opposing violence theme because it straight-up tells you not to do it, and you have the option not to. Stuff like Spec Ops: The Line is cool, but there's a little bit of suspension of disbelief there since it's a totally linear game and unless you want to just stop playing entirely, you don't have any other choice but to press forward.

Granted, there's suspension of disbelief either way because the games aren't actually real, but I think certain games do it better than others.
05/16/16, 01:13   
@Mop it up If it really bothers you, there is a way to permanently delete certain key data from your computer that gets made for Undertale (which isn't normally deleted when uninstalling), so that you can truly start the game over like new.
05/17/16, 10:19   
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