Undertale - Weaving together Narrative and Gameplay

Introduction

Turn-based JRPGs are a crucial part of videogame history and they still go strong today, despite the prevalence of more action-based titles in the market. In 2015, inspired by his love for JRPGs but also disillusioned by the staleness of the genre [1], Toby Fox released Undertale in an attempt to integrate its medium and storytelling. The game came out to critical acclaim and immediately became a cult hit due to its innovative design, writing, and colorful characters.

Back then, I did not pay much attention to Undertale despite its prevalence on many social media, particularly Tumblr. However, in 2018, I decided to give the game a try after hearing a few tracks from its masterfully composed soundtrack.

And live up to its expectations it did. What I played was an incredibly well-thought title that perfectly blended its narrative and gameplay to form an excellent narrative experience.

This analysis will attempt to lay out the design decisions that allow the game to weave its narrative themes masterfully into every facet of its design.

Warning - if you haven’t played the game, spoilers are 100% abound. I would highly recommend you finish it before reading this!

Narrative

The game's premise features a stock-standard fantasy journey home plot with the main character, Frisk, accidentally falling into the world of the monsters, the Underground, and attempting to return home to the surface.

To be able to understand how the game integrates its narrative and gameplay, we must first lay out the underlying themes behind the surface level plot of the game.

"Causality and Power Privilege."

The game is mainly focused on the consequences of one’s actions. These questions of causality are particularly focused on individuals who possess the privilege of power: you, as a player, are an example of this, as a transcendent being above all characters within the game’s plot.

Undertale chooses to examine this topic through the deconstruction of its medium. While it is by no means the only technique it uses to push its narrative theme, it is the most outstanding considering the uniqueness of its execution. Intentionally created within a genre that is severely riddled by systems which are heavily gamified, Undertale attempts to break down the core tenets of the genre by exposing the inherent morality issues that players are commonly desensitized to in the name of “fun”.

Combat

The most straightforward example of this can be seen in the way Undertale handles encounters in the game. While the game’s tagline: “The RPG game where you don’t have to destroy anyone,” might seem like a mere marketing tactic, the game actually takes it very seriously: players in Undertale can choose to spare or kill every single encounter within the game.

Inspired by the mid-battle negotiation mechanics that stem from the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games, in which the player can attempt to parley with hostile demons to appease them, Undertale also provides players with the option to resolve conflicts peacefully within the game. Furthermore, each monster has a unique interaction that enables the Spare option in combat, which removes them from the conflict. Personalizing each enemy to a different, conversation-based strategy allows Undertale to avoid reducing enemies to a mere expendable increase in experience levels.

The Greater Dog is a miniboss that requires the player to spend multiple turns playing with it as if it was an actual dog. Players must dodge its attacks during these turns.

Undertale also deconstructs the expectations of common RPG growth systems. Close to the end of the main storyline, the game’s statistics: LV and EXP, while functionally identical to conventional levelling and experience systems, are instead revealed to be short for Level of Violence and Execution Points. By challenging the core of a classical RPG – the growth system – Undertale chooses to question, ethically, an implication that fans of the genre rarely consider – are the

enemies that you grind on actually living beings that suffer from your violence?

LV and EXP are also crucial to determine the ending that the players get at the end of the game - after all, it is a representation of how many lives have been taken by the plot’s conclusion. As dealing with encounters arguably forms the core of Undertale’s gameplay, it is able to lend agency within the plot to smaller gameplay loops. Thus, the player is allowed to be more involved with the direction the plot is going as the game goes on.

Route Design - Pacing and Tone

As briefly touched on above, the game has multiple routes based on the number of kills accomplished by the end of the game. Particularly interesting, however, is how each route is designed to reflect the effects of the player's actions in combat as mentioned above. As a result, the pacing and tone of each route varies greatly.

These come in three main flavors: the Neutral route, True Pacifist route, and the Genocide route.

Neutral

The Neutral route occurs when the player kills enemies during their playthrough, but not enough to wipe out the entire population of the Underworld.

The route’s pacing in its challenges are mostly similar to the Pacifist Route, however, due to it allowing the player to gain raw stats as they like, the route’s difficulty ranges from mildly difficult to nearly inconsequential. This ambiguity, unfortunately, also bleeds into other aspects of the route’s design - a third of the world’s lore is left obscured and unexplained. The game also provides a quick epilogue phone call based on who you left alive during the course of the game, which ends with a short, lackluster credit sequence with no BGM.

Additionally, the plot only vaguely wraps up the main conflict of Frisk falling into the Underworld by hinting that after defeating Photoshop Flowey, they used the power afforded by the 6 SOULs to escape instead of freeing the monsters trapped in the Underground.

Confronting Photoshop Flowey.

This is a reflection of the actions taken down the route - as Frisk is neither portrayed an overwhelming force of kindness or an oppressive maelstrom of malice, they choose to serve themselves at the plot's conclusion. As a result, the overall design of the route feels unfocused and dissatisfactory, reflecting the player's irresolute range of actions within the game.

True Pacifist

The True Pacifist route occurs when the player goes through the entire route without taking a single life, and goes out of their way to be nice to everyone.

As touched on before, the True Pacifist Route is slightly more challenging than the Neutral Route, with a similar pacing. However, this route is the most hopeful and touching in tone, which include the brightest and most colorful visuals within any encounter, and the most upbeat and hopeful background music in the game [3] [4].

Battling Asriel. [5]

Through the route, the player also gets to find out most important details pertaining to the world's lore, and the backstory of several of the main NPCs as well. The game even ends with a unique credits scene in which the player gets to play a minigame dodging all of the names of the Kickstarter backers of the game, and view special art of certain enemies based on whether the player successfully Spared them.

This is even more clearly reflected in the final boss fight - the denizens of the Underworld rush to your aid immediately due to your kindness to them. Additionally, even after Flowey traps all the monsters and uses their power to transform into Asriel, the game allows you to appeal to the possessed monsters and gain their encouragement through the fight. These dialogue options harken back to your interactions with them while going through the course of the route, which reinforces the emotional link from the characters to the player.

Everyone is cheering for you!

Subsequently, Frisk gets through to Asriel, causing him to use his power to break the barrier and free all the denizens of the Underground, properly resolving the world's plot as well.

Again, the route's design properly reflects the player's choices through the game - through going out of your way and being nice to everyone, you represent Frisk as the great force of good, and thus, the game evolves into a powerful message of love and hope.

Genocide

However, the route with the most interesting design philosophy is the Genocide route, occurring only when the player opts to kill every single monster within the Underground. Deliberately designed to make the player feel the maximum amount of discomfort, it instead features a lot of the design decisions which would only be commonly seen in horror games instead.

First off, the pacing of the game is incredibly off-putting and arrhythmic. As the goal is literally to massacre every living being, the route features incredibly long bouts of grinding encounters that are so pointlessly easy due to your extremely high LV. On top of this, as players clear out areas, the encounter rate gets lower and lower, forcing them to spend even more time as the kill count goes down. However, two of the hardest bosses are also on this route, which are deliberately designed to be extremely frustrating and only beatable by countless losses and pattern memorization. This is particularly conspicuous considering that the fights are balanced with Frisk at the highest LV possible in mind, meaning that they are the most powerful encounters in the game bar none.

The first of the two encounters, against Undyne the Undying. [6]

Additionally, the game also deliberately removes all tutorial sections, which further punishes first-time Genocide players by denying them the knowledge of vital boss fight mechanics.

This results in an experience that jumps irregularly from a monotonous, repetitive slog to unfair, brutally punishing encounters, ensuring that players never settle comfortably into a good rhythm throughout the route.

A chilling message you find in the world that you emptied by hand.

Additionally, the route’s tone is unavoidably nihilistic and dark, and contains many tracks and visuals that would be at home within a work of horror fiction. Through the route, you barely get any characterization from the game's NPCs, as they are brutally killed before they get much interaction. A prime example of this is when the player is grinding out enemies within the game’s multiple locations: as the player wears down the population, the track gradually gets slower and slower, until it is replaced by a dull and eerie ambient track [7]. The battle text that announces a monster’s arrival is also replaced with a chilling “But nobody came.”

Finally, going through this route also irrevocably corrupts any future playthroughs of the game. In the ending, Frisk’s unhinged violence manages to awaken an eldritch being, Chara, that kills them and the entire world of Undertale together with it, force closing the program.

To restore the world such that any New Game Plus attempts are possible, you have to renounce Frisk’s soul to them. As a result, after any True Pacifist Routes, it is hinted that Frisk is possessed by Chara and goes on to continue their murderous rampage on the surface world or the Underground. This is possibly the key example of the game’s stance on causality - the player’s crimes have gone too far and now the damage done to the game is irrevocable and irreparable.

Saving

Another example of how Undertale uses its knowledge of the medium in which it is contained to avert common gaming tropes is a concept closely tied to its main theme of causality – Saving.

The very concept of saving and reloading in games is, in principle, directly opposite to Undertale’s main focus on causality, as the system allows players to erase any outcome they determine as non-ideal. However, as a key part of any classic JRPG, Undertale cannot shy away from it either. How does the game deal with such a conundrum then?

Diegesis

Firstly, Undertale gives recognition to immaterial concepts such as saving and determination within the game. Saving is an ability afforded to only the being with a human SOUL, and the most Determination within the Underworld. This relationship mirrors the non-diegetic relationship between these two concepts: a player only continues to save and reload a game after a loss with sufficient motivation. Otherwise, something sufficiently daunting can drain their determination enough to make them quit! Formalizing these concepts reintroduces them into a player’s mind and lends them power when they are most commonly desensitized.

Autosaving

Instead of just applying an auto-save feature commonly seen in games which want to enforce the finality of a player’s decision (Dark Souls, Animal Crossing), Undertale chooses to use it in a slightly more creative way. Instead of completely eschewing the concept, Undertale utilises it to imply that characters have memory of events that were reset by the player. The strength of this concept varies between NPCs: some recall vague emotions related to reset events, but others outright embrace and abuse their knowledge of reset events within the game. This both allows players to recognise that they do have the autonomy to reset as they wish to get a desired outcome, but again, by introducing the implication that characters might remember, players will make decisions influenced by the perceived weight of their actions.

Toriel recalls your favourite pie flavour if you've told her before.

Characterization

Out of all the characters who are used to strengthen the concept of saving, there are two particularly evident examples. Furthermore, to give a more comprehensive representation of the subject, these two beings are diametrically opposed to each other.

Flowey

Flowey is a persistent antagonistic presence throughout the entire game. Having shown to have a memory that is completely immune to the player’s resetting shenanigans over the course of the game, he reveals to Frisk that he had the ability to SAVE until they arrived. By the start of the game, he had already exhausted all possible outcomes by SAVE scumming, and this process, coupled with his inherent lack of emotions, caused him to turn into a psychopathic nihilist, driven mad by boredom, who seeks to trap the player forever in the name of fun. This characterization mirrors a common gamer’s role to the world, particularly ones that abuse save scumming to view all possible outcomes, with Flowey’s apathy closely matching the various examples of desensitisation mentioned above. The game itself even explicitly mentions its disdain for this completionist mindset - after getting a True Pacifist ending, with his last bit of conscience, the newly reformed Flowey begs you to leave the save state untouched such that Undertale’s denizens can live their happy ending forever.

This also extends to the gameplay of his encounter: at the end of the Neutral Route, he manages to obtain the 6 captive human SOULs, and the ability to SAVE himself. However, he also gains the power to shatter the player’s SAVE slot, and, on top of this, gains 6 SAVE slots of his own. During his fight, he constantly abuses his SAVE powers to load players directly into the line of fire of his attacks, and threatens to continually reload the players so that he can torture them forever.

This blatantly metafictional action places the player’s privileged position into consideration: by wresting control of the only advantage that the players have against encounters in the Underworld, the game forces the player to think, realistically, about how much power is afforded to the player based on something they take for granted. In this, the game manages to put to the forefront the implication that having infinite saving and reloading makes any kind of conflict insignificant as a resetter can constantly abuse this to get the desired result.

Sans

Sans is another key example which contributes to Undertale’s main theme of causality. Tortured by the knowledge of Flowey’s constant reloading and the realization that his actions mean nothing when they could be reset at any time out of his control, he has turned into a depressed defeatist who has no motivation to do anything with his life.

As opposed to Flowey, Sans is instead portrayed as a victim - his severe depression is a grim reminder to the players of what a denizen of the world would feel if they fully understood the scope and consequences of resetting in their lives, and further acts as encouragement to live with your decisions and not reset the game.

Similar to Flowey, his encounter is also designed to supplement Undertale’s themes.

Sans' pre ass-kicking monologue.

As the final boss of the Genocide route, he comes to the realization that the only way to preclude an omnicidal and near-omnipotent being such as yourself is to get them to give up. Therefore, his boss fight is the singular most infuriating encounter in the entire game, which breaks every single convention that the player has learnt over the course of the game. These include being the only enemy that can dodge the player attacks, and attacking players during their turn in the action selection screen. His own turn proper also has the hardest attacks to dodge in the game, and since he can dodge the player’s attacks, the fight drags on for a monumental 22 turns before he grows tired of fighting. Eventually, the battle culminates in him refusing to act on the final turn of his fight, attempting to eternally delay the conclusion of the fight.

One of Sans' strongest moves. It is also the very first attack of the encounter. [9]

From all of these, it is expressly clear that the encounter is deliberately trying to infuriate the player enough to get them to stop playing the game, instead of merely providing a fulfilling but challenging experience to the player. This design decision stands out as something that is unique to Undertale as a product of its self-awareness and dedication to its narrative themes.

Conclusion

Undertale proves that to reinforce its stance on its themes, the chosen medium is not a constraint that limits narrative decision, rather, with clever manipulations over common assumptions, can be an excellent supporting pillar to strengthen narrative. By introducing multiple classic RPG elements at the beginning of the game and challenging the player’s assumption of their role within the game gradually as the game goes on, the game makes a narrative experience that can be enjoyed by both veteran gamers and new players alike. With an accessible, easily understood base plot supported by diegetic elements, the game provides a narrative that can be appreciated by every player, regardless of experience.

Therefore, this analysis concludes that the game has crafted an incredibly deep and well-thought out narrative, and would be excellent learning experience both in terms of narrative, and how mechanics can be integrated into the world behind the fourth wall.

References

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GettREgt7BiZBZSEB19fjpS0fp-XFTjMq4i-_Tui440/edit?usp=sharing