This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
If it’s hard to create a game this uninspired, Undertale sure isn’t showing it.
Story
tl;dr: It’s generic Disney bullshit covered in forced memes.
In Undertale, you play as a gender-agnostic 12-year-old who climbs up a mountain to kill yourself because your dad deleted your tumblr account once he caught you getting off to Blood on the Dance Floor fanfics.
After falling into the mountain rather than off it (cuz kids apparently can’t even kill themselves right these days), you find yourself in a budget wonderland of monsters and adventure.
You are then set off on a journey back to the human world, and allowed the choice of defending yourself against monsters who want to steal your soul… or becoming the Undertale equivalent of a walking cum-dumpster.
Other than its reddit-tier writing, Undertale isn’t particularly terrible in the story department… just so long as you realize you are playing something likely designed to get a game dev in the pants of children.
With three endings required to get the “full” experience, there is some depth to this story if you’re willing to dig for it. Unfortunately, that requires tolerating the gameplay longer than any sentient being should have to.
Le Puzzles
I hate puzzles when they’re in good games, and I hate them even worse when they’re in RPGMaker trash like Undertale.
Against the game’s desperate attempts to defend the existence of puzzles in-universe, the vast majority of the puzzles serve not as world-building instruments but as suspension-destroying speedbumps.
While I can understand that Toby Keith (the main game dev, I think) needed something to increase the run-time of his game, forcing players to run slowly walk through empty dungeons only punctuated by terrible puzzles and frustrating mob/boss encounters is not the right way to go about it.
Oh yeah, we haven’t talked about the combat yet, have we?
The Combat
Undertale is fucking hard, and in all the wrong ways.
The basic idea is you have to play a poorly designed bullet hell minigame as you try and convince monsters to fight against the patriarchy or some shit.
If you’re going through the game as intended (“true pacifist” route for all you tumblrinas who wanna play dumb), the damage that enemies do to you gets so progress-destroying that you have to spend time memorizing patterns rather than, you know, actually playing the damn thing. What a sack of shit.
Music
This bit-starved bullshit (quality OST link) brings me back to a time when I wish I didn’t have Undertale’s spiked bat of a dildo using my ears like a fucking blender.
The only way the soundtrack could be worse is if it was playing Little Game like every other fucking homestuck fan tribute that somehow gets stuck in my Youtube queue does.
And I’m still not convinced this isn’t a hidden track.
Characters
I’ll give Undertale that it has a cute, balanced, and memorable cast (that you will soon see ruining your local anime con). But who cares about played-out skeleton memes…
…when you have:
Final Score
DAE like Mother series XD
Fuck this game is so tryhard.
This is strange. Ever since the game was recognized by Tumblr, I’ve been seeing posts like yours all over calling it a tumblrized shite but it really isn’t. Not if you had played the game in September when it was released.
It’s only now that the game has gained notoriety with the Tumblrina’s that everyone is making fun of the game. Quite nfortunate for this game.
Your one criticism about the puzzles stands for every game. Playing adventure games and many RPG’s basically consists of solving puzzles in manner that won’t ever work in reality.
And really… the game was made in Gamemaker not RPGmaker. Calling every RPGmaker trash is also dumb because you have more original (and entertaining) games made there than the CoD/AC crap we see regurgitated every year.
The game is very interesting in the same vein and yet wildly different as Lisa from last year.
As much as I like your sub reviews, this entire “copy+paste of crap tumblr pics and latest buzzword about a 2 month old game that has just gained Tumblr-notoriety” is terrible and a low hanging fruit that isn’t worth posting.
If you need me to break this review down, I can, but I think you may want to give it a re-read, with the understanding that for the vast majority of content on Crymore, the point is what I say, not how I say it. (With the “how I say it” being the fun part.) If it helps, you should imagine me with a shit-eating grin as I forge every sardonic sentence. Additionally, a key part to understanding the posts is to take everything into account — especially the final rating. Notice that I gave Undertale an 8; regardless of the issues I had with it, I still enjoyed the damn thing.
For the record, I really do like the fanart the Undertale community has come up with, and I think it’s to the game’s credit that it has inspired the quality it has. Not exactly sure what you’d point to as “bad” in this post.
For real though, you could have just used an FAQ for the puzzles to speed shit up
I usually wouldn’t say that but people invented like multiple solutions that are faster a few months after the game’s release
http://i.imgur.com/imntI5i.png
Then again, even if you went the route of this, it wasn’t even off one Google search, I had to look in the actual thread which was off like.. “undertale speedrun” and then I had to type in “undertale speedrun archive” on the second search to find this
So the community really isn’t that good and the typical “use FAQ to skip puzzles because of the better parts in the game” is even more inconvenient
But also that’s like 0.6 seconds so you could have looked up the regular solutions and research is a part of even NES-era games sometimes, but that’s just my opinion tho
My first playthrough was (almost) blind — figured that’d be the best way to come to an informed opinion for my review. And I don’t think “you can just use a solution someone else figured out” is a valid excuse for the existence of time-wasting puzzles.
Having sugar within arms reach to sweeten the shit of time wasting puzzles doesn’t invalidate the criticism of the fecal matter being there in the first place.
I mean it’s still sweeter and it takes some amount of knowledge / skill / effort to find better solutions.
I’m still not sure what the hell you’re trying to argue here. But it sure as fuck sounds like you’re saying any game you can find a walkthrough for is a perfect 10/10.
Well, it’s probably user error at that pint nothing to do with the game, but I do think a lot of games are 10/10
The zing in the title was so harsh I began bleeding heavily from all orifices. I expect compensation from you the mental anguish and time away from work this has resulted in.
i really really liked this game but i love you too much to argue about it <3
<3 <3
The Witcher 3 is still the best game tho.
After completing the first Witcher, I’ve washed my hands of that series. 33 hours down the pisser. ;_;
The first Witcher is not even worth playing. Witcher 2 is fine but the third is just amazing.
Nah, I do plan on playing it. Just that it’ll take up a lot of time and if I’m gonna spend hours on leisure, I’d rather use it for something at least tangentially related to the scene; Witcher ain’t exactly the kinda series I’d wanna post about here.