It’s just a good story using meta elements as a metaphor for power dynamics. I thought people here would appreciate that.
Undertale’s message isn’t “doing RPG thing make you bad”, it’s that if you are in a state of privilege, you have more moral responsibility than those who are not. As a protagonist with the literal privilege of warping time and space, it is treated in-game as cruel to kill monsters because they are a political underclass that is nearly powerless to your massive systemic advantages.
The good ending is what happens when you show solidarity with Monsterkind and have genuine sympathy for them. That’s why it’s so cheery and positive, it’s the result of you leveraging your own systemic advantage against the human/monster class system and for liberation, allowing Monsterkind the space to develop a true mass movement and escape the Underground. This is also why, despite doing stuff like killing six children, people like Asgore are not treated narratively as evil, merely cowardly. Undyne, someone who I would never describe as cowardly but is arguably just as murderous, is treated in a significantly more positive light, even though she is also trying to kill children. This is because the children she (and Asgore) are trying to kill are members of a reality-warping upper class, and humanity are the people that put truly put those children into this position, not the monsters trying to kill them. This is reinforced by the heavy implications that all of the human children that fall to the underground are ostracized or struggle with immense mental health issues- Humanity both literally abandoned them and figuratively abandoned them by putting them into a situation where they have to choose between their own freedom and the freedom of Monsterkind.
This isn’t me doing the whole “media I like is communist!” thing, by the way. It’s a reading of the game that other people have mentioned and talked about. There’s an entire essay online of someone from Ireland comparing the themes to the Irish independence movement. It’s not even really subtle, the way the game actively treats the violence of monsters as less reprehensible than the player makes it the only sensical analysis of it.
This entire thing is also heightened even more by the fridge logic when you realize that all of the other human children that fell would have ALSO had the ability to save and load (UT Yellow sadly can’t be canon because of this), and would have to had to actively give up to die like they did, meaning that at least some of them likely realized the state Monsterkind was in and actively sacrificed themselves to work towards freeing them, an echoing and final act of solidarity between ostracized people. The high capability for humans being able to kill to gain more power means that with proper saving and loading, it probably wouldn’t be hard for any of the children to do a more low-intensity equivalent of the no-mercy route and escape, so this theoretically implies that every single child made this choice independently.
You don’t have to enjoy the game, but the hype isn’t really unwarranted IMO. It’s a rare example of genuine art in the medium getting actually popular. There’s plenty of other artistic and well made (and arguably better!) games out there, don’t get me wrong, but we live in hellworld and for some reason none of them get the attention they deserve. Undertale is just a rare exception to that.
This is also why, despite doing stuff like killing six children, people like Asgore are not treated narratively as evil
Okay I know they murdered 6 innocent children but if you look at the narrative...
I agree with your interpretation generally but fuck do most of the monsters deserve to be beaten up if not killed from a purely game play perspective. Do their souls disappear if they die of old age? Why not give them a happy life underground, use that one soul to travel to the human world, kill 6 landlords, and then go back to free everyone like Toriel explained.
It helped me through some rough times in my life. Probably not the healthiest coping mechanism but better than other roads I've seen people go down. I don't play anymore, as much as I like the game it's such a ridiculous time sink.
You’re not wrong. It helped me through very dark times during my teen years and once again during the height of COVID. A fantastic game, but ultimately the largest time waster in existence.
I think that's intentional from the devs in response to strip mining. The current meta post-Caves and Cliffs seems to be to raid structures in the early game to build up an iron/gold/diamond stash before transitioning to the renewable resource farms in the late game.
YMMV but it unironically gets good in the first expansion and the third expansion is actually great. However it is a very lopsided experience so I guess I wasn't left wholly satisfied
I've felt like every expansion is better than the last, but I also feel like ARR is really boring and that in general all of the updates to classes and dungeons have made the early game content worse with time. There isn't a single class that feels good to play at level 50 or 60 anymore, all of the gimmicks from old dungeons have been smoothed over leaving nothing interesting or memorable behind, after the initial "new player experience" where you learn the basics of the game you then have to play about thirty hours of formulaic slop until you get to about halfway through Stormblood and suddenly the game starts introducing new mechanics again.
I kept hearing "just get through the MSQ and it gets good" and after finishing the first expansion being bored out of my fucking mind the whole time I started to feel like I'm getting pranked. Then people start saying "Shadowbringers is where it gets REALLY good" and I'm like, okay, time to play another whole expansion of riveting report-to-boring-cutscene gameplay to get there, I guess. And then I just never kept going.
Depends on what you are looking for. If you just want to raid it definitely is the case of mining a lot to get to the good stuff. If you want a good story then YMMV since even Heavensward requires you to pay attention to some things in the base game for its story to feel impactful.
I'm pretty dense and it took me a couple minutes to figure out what this meme was getting at, but now that I get it I love this image. Does anyone have the original image?