Subject #2: UNDERTALE
Undertale, developed by Toby Fox(Link) is an indie game that got massive appreciation for its story-line, simplistic game-play and amazing sound direction.
This time I’ll be doing a complete, top-down review for its design because it excels at making people actually care for what it delivers. I am still an amateur though but I will try my best.
Get ready for a long read! :P
By the way, spoilers(alerts) will be provided where needed. However, I can’t be completely honest with the game’s design unless I assume the readers have played Undertale. It shouldn’t have been like this but it’s necessary.
Game Flow — Beginning
As the game starts up, players meet Flowey, and immediately the game sets a bad image of him in their opinion. This is crucial for the rest of the game since this is not the last time they will be hating this character.
Next Toriel kicks in and shows us the Ruins. Her dialogue has been specifically structured to sound polite, dominant, and to an extent goofy enough to keep the player actually interested in her character.
This connection that the player develops is tested when he has to fight Toriel to get out of Ruins. A particular decision that the player makes at that moment bugs them for their entire journey into the underworld.
Game Flow — Tutorial Mode
The first few rooms in the ‘Ruins’ area is basically a tutorial that was designed in a way such that you can teach the basics of the game to the player without actually making them realize that they are learning something.
Examples of these pseudo-tutorials are:
- Flowey showing the player that the combat is mostly in bullet hell format.
- Toriel teaching them how to talk it out with monsters you meet.
Some big plus points of this tutorial format were:
- It didn’t make the players realize they were being tutored per se
- An actual story-related dialogue in between tutorials makes the tutorials a part of the story.
The game also walks the players through their first encounters after the tutorial. The first monster you encounter is a Froggit that Toriel scares away.
I suspect this to be a primer to future combat situations so that the newbies ease in.
The game starts to show what it really is only after you confront Toriel.
Game Flow — Mid Shenanigans
Majority of the story is the player trying to get to the castle i.e. where the King is. But along the way the story makes the players indulge into the underground world’s local mishaps, only to make them reconsider their decision to leave the underground.
Essentially the game instils the idea of non-extremism in making decisions to the player’s mind. It makes them feels that there is no right or wrong and that everything they do has a reasoning behind it; that’s why they were forced to do what they did.
This feeling is very reminiscent of the way the real world works. Well obviously I am not comparing the game’s underground world to your own neighbourhood but I am just saying that it’s this little detail that helps to make the player aware of their own decisions. Knowing that their decisions will have arbitrary effects in the future makes them extra careful and attentive to what’s going around them.
Game Flow — Ending
Undertale has basically 3 endings to its story, Neutral, Pacifist and a Genocide ending.
The user only gets one of these endings and only by completing specific tasks in the game.
A first time player is most probably going to get the Neutral ending because it’s requirement is to kill at least 1 monster, leaving some though.
And it the end, the game hints at the player to replay the game with no violence whatsoever, which will essentially lead them to the Pacifist run.
This is brilliant because it makes the player realize the replay factor of the game. Near the end of the game, [spoilers] Sans makes the player realize the meaning of LV and EXP and that surely makes them feel guilty. This guilt motivates them to play the game again.
The Pacifist run is basically them trying to be friends with everyone. Near the end of the game, this ‘pretending to be good all the time’ helps the players to bond with the story characters not only because it makes them feel good but also because it literally results in extra gameplay time with the different characters and it’s not boring for one bit. Well except a few areas in the True Lab…
And the end of the Pacifist run unhesitatingly takes advantage of this bonding to dramatize the emotional tension in the atmosphere.
Now after they have played both the Pacifist and Neutral run, finding of the Genocide Run is more of an Easter egg. But let’s just say it’s better for casual players to stay from that.
Sound Direction and Design
To get a player deeply indulged in a drama story it’s necessary to have excellent sound direction.
Toby Fox has used leitmotifs excessively in Undertale and there is a solid reason for that. He uses leitmotifs to drive the story.
For example, alongside is the music that fills the room where you fight Toriel.
And below is a clip from Asgore’s theme, which plays when you find him in the castle.
You can clearly see Toriel’s symbolism in Asgore’s theme. This is clearly signifying the kind of relationship Toriel and Asgore had after she left him. Her leitmotif appears in his theme but not vice-versa.
However, some of these leitmotifs are so morphed sometimes that it’s generally not possible to realize the existence of a leitmotif in the song.
In Undyne’s theme, it can be seen, however how difficult it is to figure it out on the first listen, that it is a sped up version of Ruins background music. However I don’t think it was done on purpose but instead it is a cool easter egg(and it reduces production time).
Undertale also uses a lot of tone-shifts to imply different types of changes in the atmosphere.
Let’s take up this moment when you intentionally evade the ‘friendliness pellets’ (read ‘bullets’) that Flowey throws at you.
And now the Flowey theme music shifts a note and the entire song sounds a bit unsettling to the ears.
This is the basis of horror sound effects.
The reason why horror sounds sound, well horror-like is that there is something not right about it. And whenever there’s something not right, there is confusion as to “what” is wrong. The abstraction of that “what” in our minds helps to fuel horror.
This is used heavily in the True Lab’s series of events during the Pacifist run.
Try to spot some of these ‘unsettling wrongness’ in the following video:
The wrongness may be very subtle but I think you might agree it’s there to some extent.
More of this concept is used in the visuals to imply horror. Read ahead!
Graphics
The game has 8 bit like graphics and it is debatable that it’s objectively ‘beautiful’. However, I find the graphics really appropriate for the art style that it follows.
The market is currently having a big demand for retro style games and it is certain that Undertale delivered to this need.
I should mention that Toby’s goal of making the protagonist gender neutral is actually accomplished by the ambiguous dialogue and partly by how the character looks(this is basically a bait for being called out for not being politically correct but lets just say I am only using this point as a probability).
It goes without saying that the nostalgia in retro graphics is another selling point in such visuals.
The game excessively uses visual distortions and just weird visuals, in general, to attempt to imply that there’s something wrong, either in the game or in the environment. It uses these visual cues as tools to progress the story.
Some of the monsters in the True Lab are merely glitches. Implying more horror.
Combat System
The combat system in Undertale is termed as ‘bullet hell hole’. It’s basically a turn-based dodge-ball game but the ball can kill you and you have a health bar.
The actual combat style is very varied and it changes for every monster you fight.
But the better part of the combat system in Undertale is that you can almost always talk it out instead of fighting. Through this, you are able to collect information about them or even change their lives.
This is a good mechanic to somehow include the side-characters into the story. The True Lab monsters are required to be talked to so that you can identify what monsters are they an amalgamation of. For this, you need to know the specifics and stories of all the monsters you meet in the underground.
The True Lab only opens if you talk it out with every monster there is, and it tests your knowledge of these monsters now that you’ve interacted with all of them. Genius.
A lot of these encounters are actually easter egg secrets, especially during the Waterfall sequences but that belongs to another blog written by another Undertale fan.
Story
The story clearly signifies the greyish nature of all real-life interactions. Each action has a consequence in the future and also the ending.
To further solidify this idea in its story, the game tries to implement a moral compass to everything the players do.
Story—Moral Compass Mechanics
A first instance of a moral compass was just a silly gimmick in the game.
These encounters are just gimmicks and only provide comic relief.
More such instances are encountered as we move in:
But some are more serious and morally difficult:
This game does an amazing job at setting these scenarios just so that there is a perfect amount of tension in between both the choices.
Sometimes the choices are not black and white, there are times where it’s a choice of being right or being right for others. Kudos to the Toby Fox for such an amazing story-line.
Voice Acting
A big part of character building and actual interaction with the characters is the voices that the game gives them.
A bit weird isn’t it?
Having voices in an RPG?
But voices accomplish so many things that simple text can not. It can make references to certain people, give tones to dialogues and set the mood in general.
In the case of Undertale, the reference is made by a unique humming sound that each character has. The tone is set partly by the character portrait that appears in the dialogue box and partly by the narration.
This replacement is actually very clever because obviously, the developer couldn’t afford a team of voice artists and a recording studio. This combination of unique humming sounds and character portraits helps build their character.
Plus the players are supposed to come up with a voice for every character, which helps to create a unique experience for every individual.
Also Sans and Papyrus speak in the font that they are named after. Pretty cool.
RPG Elements
However the focus on item collection and resource management isn’t the point of the game and the items don’t really help you unless they increase health or help you in combat, which you may or may not need depending on skill level.
The game still acquires a lot of features of a traditional RPG game, since it is made on GameMaker: Studio(home to a lot of homemade RPGs), and I thought it was worth mentioning it nevertheless there’s not much to say about it really. It looks a lot like an RPG.
Hidden Mechanics
What I mean by ‘Hidden mechanics’ is that there are these systems that the game uses to make the the experience better and more so unique for different players, but it doesn’t tell them about it.
- Fun Value
For every play-through, there exists a specific “FUN” value associated with it. It is decided by the game when it starts up and it randomly assigns your play-through a number.
This number decides whether some events will be happening in the game or not.
For example, take a lot at this FUN value chart that lists the things that will be happening for a specific FUN value of the play-through:
To find the FUN value of your play-through, open up this file:
C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME HERE>\AppData\Local\UNDERTALE\undertale.iniIn that file you will find your FUN value mentioned. Mine looks like:
[Flowey]
Met1="1.000000"
[General]
fun="83.000000"
Name="Boy"
Love="1.000000"
Time="265741.000000"
Kills="0.000000"
Room="12.000000"[I am actually curious as to what these other variables mean. A lot of them are obvious but some are just weird. If anyone knows what those are, please leave a comment below!]
2. Save file changes
The game detects any changes that you make to its .ini or save files. Thus you changing the FUN value only results in you being greeted by an annoying dog when you open up the game.
Breaking 4th Walls
Undertale is very self-aware. It counts how many times you have died, how many times you restarted the game, other meta things and it alters its dialogue to suit the same.
For example, if you killed Toriel in the Ruins and anywhere mid-play-through you decided to start the game again because you weren’t feeling good after; then the game actually tells you that you have cheated for your good through an exchange with Flowey, when you enter the Ruins again.
There are countless other examples where the game does that. Sometimes the game intentionally crashes on you as a gimmick in the story-line.
This makes the game different from anything else the player has played before. At moments like these, the game appears to be reaching farther from the virtual world that it is locked in.
This feeling of being ‘not in control’ is absolutely terrifying to the player’s conscience and it’s been used in the story terrifically.
Ending Notes
Concluding, Undertale has been a game very close to my heart because it was something I always wish I could play. A game that is as memorable as my own name.
It has been an absolutely amazing journey researching, compiling all this information for Undertale. In retrospect, I cannot even imagine the amount of thought and effort that Toby Fox put into this one heck of a game.
Anyway, that’s my design analysis for Undertale and it’s been a great time.
Thanks for pulling through this long-ass blog post!
P.S. If you have read my previous blogs, you might have noticed that this time around I have tried to list every possible aspect of the game and put up points supporting at how those aspects were shaped to suit the game. I am planning to keep this format because however, it slows down the process, I find these incredibly fun to write!
