I’m sure plenty of people
are sick of Undertale, and even sicker of people saying that they can’t talk
about Undertale. For what it’s worth, everyone is entitled to their opinion and
the game won’t appeal to everyone. It does a lot of clever things that are
better experienced yourself, so it reaches this weird middle area where many
love it but can’t express why. It’s entirely possible that even without hype or
spoilers you could play the game, not care, and wonder why everyone wouldn’t
shut up about it. That being said, I’ve finally decided to say something
related to this game I enjoyed so much, and am giving the proper warning:
THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR
UNDERTALE SPOILERS, AND EXPECTS YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE GAMES ENDINGS. IF YOU
INTEND TO PLAY AT ALL, PLEASE DO NOT READ FURTHER.
SERIOUSLY THOUGH.
F’REALS.
...
...okay, are they gone?
Yes?
I don’t believe you.
...
...okay, now I believe
you.
Undertale does a lot of
things right. It tries a lot of new things with how games and their fourth wall
can function. This can lead to some interesting topics of conversation about
games, but that’s often drowned out by the understandable love of the
characters and humor, or by simplified morality rulings. The genocide route
seems to judge you pretty harshly for killing characters at first, but this is
misleading. I don’t think Toby Fox is sitting in front of his copy of Game
Maker, riding a skyscraper-sized horse and barking down derisive judgements on
the pitiful peasants of the gaming public. I don’t think the game is calling
people who choose to murder (in-game) evil. I don’t think it’s even judging
your choice to do so as wrong. All I think Undertale is doing is getting you to think.
Undertale wants you to
think about completionism.
Video games are unlike
any other medium before them, and this is one of the reasons why. Whether
you’re reading books, watching movies or shows, enjoying art or listening to
music, you typically have the complete work. There are some edge cases like
side stories, prequels and the like. But even then, there isn’t optional
content within the work itself,
except perhaps in choose-your-own-adventure books. Video games, meanwhile, can
have a ridiculous degree of optional content. The medium is slowly starting to
take advantage of this unique position, and Undertale is at the forefront.
It’s also at the
forefront of Number of Dogs to Pet in Battle, but that’s neither here nor
there.
Undertale simply could not work as anything other than a
video game. It could still be something good, certainly. But it wouldn’t be the
same. Undertale is packed with optional content to a seemingly insane degree.
Not optional content as we typically see it, like side quests or bonus missions.
Rather, Undertale makes small adjustments. Little bits of dialogue will change
depending on doing things in a different order, or reacting to a dialogue
choice, or whether you killed someone, or when you come back and talk to the
same person later, or if you’re in the same room when you call them, or if you
said a varying combination of things to them earlier, or if you took a certain
action in combat, and on and on and on and on.
This is absolutely to the
games benefit. The writing of Undertale is strong on its own, but part of the
reason people find these characters and this world so wonderful is because it’s
reactive. Characters like Sans or
Undyne start as fairly broad, simple personalities. Like all stories, they grow
more complex and feel more like real people the more you get to know them. But
unlike writing in any other medium, you’re not just following them along a
single axis of story. When you take a different path through the narrative, you
see a different side of the characters. Undyne’s speech before you fight her
has about a dozen variants, not just for pacifist/neutral/genocide runs but
also changes of varying sizes depending on the lives of other monsters.
There’s a huge change
for Papyrus, and smaller ones for Shyren, Snowdrake, and all five dog guards
both individually and as a group.
I could go on about cool
side content longer than anyone would care to read. The point is that in
addition to the many obvious choices the game acknowledges, Undertale is also a
master of easter eggs and edge cases, both documented (WARNING: TV Tropes link) and otherwise. This does a great deal to make the
world and characters of Undertale feel real.
In most games, even story-based ones, it’s fairly easy to be reminded that’s
what they are: games. The actions you can take are very limited, because it
gets exponentially more difficult to cover every possible motivation the bigger
a story becomes. Undertale isn’t a complete exception. In terms of gameplay
it’s extremely limited. The path is very linear, there aren’t big optional
areas to explore, and the game is fairly short. However, it does the best it
can to fill those edge cases, to give you extra dialogue wherever it can, and
to push those little incidental moments that make a place feel real at every
turn. It’s short, but deep.
When you’re forced to work with people or do something you don’t want you feel a disconnect, even more if you aren’t allowed to voice strong objections. Video game stories are filled with moments like this, and Undertale mostly sidesteps it by being intentionally simple.
We know this is a good
thing. Extra content is fun to explore, duh. But when you reach the end of the
genocide run, suddenly Undertale is saying something different. It says
something that’s rarely brought up, let alone explicitly in-game. Undertale
suggests that more content can be bad.
Unpleasant. Detrimental to your overall experience. In recent years, games media
as a whole has been more receptive to this idea. The wealth of cheap or
variably priced games on digital markets, along with so many short but sweet
indie titles, has brought some to a realization. Sometimes, in our effort to
get more bang for our buck, we drag down the quality of games with less
enjoyable filler. What Undertale suggests now is a step further than that.
Extra content in a game can make it worse even if it’s entirely optional.
Flowey: As
time repeated, people proved themselves predictable.
Flowey: What would this person say
if I gave them this?
Flowey: What would they do if I said
this to them?
Flowey: Once you know the answer,
that's it.
Flowey: That's all they are.
The same source that can
deepen your connection with a game and its world can also weaken it. When
you’re overexposed to a video game, especially if the content is lackluster or
repetitive, you become jaded towards it. Instead of seeing it as a living world
of well-rounded characters, you see it as a product. It becomes something
manufactured, something less engaging. Familiarity can breed contempt, but it’s
capable of something arguably worse: indifference.
Flowey: I've done everything this
world has to offer.
Flowey: I've read every book. I've
burned every book.
Flowey: I've won every game. I've
lost every game.
Flowey: I've appeased everyone. I've
killed everyone.
Flowey: Sets of numbers... Lines of
dialogue... I've seen them all.
The end result of that indifference is treating what used to
be an emotional story that touched you personally as a toy. A device to squeeze
amusement out of, and then abandon.
Chara: There is nothing left for us
here.
Chara: Let us erase this pointless
world, and move on to the next.
Now we run into the
exhausting domain of determining authorial intent. Did Toby Fox intend this
message to be about completionism? Was he opening up a discussion, or was he
simply using it as a vehicle to judge and shock people for their actions? As
with many conversations on authorial intent, I don’t think it matters much. The
conversation has been started whether it was intended to or not. All the same,
I feel Undertale wanted you to think about your actions more than regret them.
Sure, the game seems to judge you at times...
Flowey: “I
don't like this,” I told myself.
Flowey: “I'm just doing this because
I HAVE to know what happens.”
Flowey: Ha ha ha... What an excuse!
Flowey: You of all people must know
how liberating it is to act this way.
But those lines aren’t
from the author, they’re from a character. And that character is fairly biased
on the matter to begin with. There’s another character who speaks on the topic,
one who’s generally seen as a better role model:
sans: no matter what, you'll just
keep going.
sans: not out of any desire for
good or evil...
sans: but just because you think
you can.
sans: and because you “can”...
sans: ...you “have to.”
In spite of everything, Sans doesn’t think you’re an evil
force. I don’t think Toby did either. Even if he did, I don’t. The detachment
that comes with blind completionism can sour your experience, but that same
completionism comes from a place of love. We’ve all played video games and
experienced optional content that was quite pleasant. Undertale is packed with
such moments, and it’s not unreasonable to want more.
This leads to an interesting question. Say there’s optional
content in the game, and when a player goes through it, they ultimately find
themselves less fulfilled than when it began. Perhaps it screwed with some
established canon, perhaps it’s ruining the pacing of the story, or perhaps it’s
simply the latest in a long avalanche of similar content that’s wearing down
the player’s enjoyment of the game. Whatever the reason is, the experience of
the consumer is lessened after completing this optional content. So here’s the
question:
Whose fault is that?
Probably Jerry’s, but let’s
pretend it isn’t for the purpose of this discussion.
Before we find the
answer, let’s look at a couple of different examples of optional content. First
we have Final Fantasy 6.
The later sections of FF6 are entirely optional. However, they’re tied to both
huge mechanical incentives (gathering party members) and narrative ones. A ton
of time and effort clearly went into these optional objectives, including
completely new areas of the world. Without them, the player could miss out on
the conclusion of many main characters stories and character arcs. This is the
type of optional content that makes gamers so eager to consume it. It’s
actually so important the game feels off without it.
Now let’s look at the
game Xenoblade Chronicles, which I’ve yet to finish due to it being so bloody
long. This game has large open world segments where you can take on all sorts
of optional side quests. However, a lot of these side quests are very
MMO-esque. They’re repetitive tasks like killing certain numbers of monsters,
and typically have little story behind them. These put a strain on the
relationship between story and gameplay. You want to complete quests to get
stronger, because even if it’s not necessary being strong can be fun. On the
other hand, there’s so much of this content that it completely kills the
momentum of the main story. It’s a good thing said story is relatively
straightforward, because having half a dozen hours between every major plot
point is not to its benefit.
We have to hurry! Our
friend’s life is in immediate danger! But someone also asked us to kill some of
these animals, so we’ll do that on the way. And we should also stop to gather
those flowers the other villager wanted. Ooh, a rare monster, let’s see if it
has any neat stuff!
I particularly dislike
the automated dialogue in this game. When taking on quests, characters often
chime in with responses based on their affection statistic. Not only are these
lines very bland, but they spout the same sentences over and over quest after
quest. Something to the effect of “I think we should do this quest!” “If
[person] thinks we should do it, than so do I!” This is another case where a
story is actually made worse by more dialogue. It’s very game-y and unlike real
speech, and it’s all you’ll hear out of the characters for hours at a time.
Writing like this should be improved and varied a ton or thrown out entirely.
For a final example, we
have Bravely Default. This is a game I’m quite enjoying, and will no doubt give
its own post in time. However, the late game is absolutely plagued with filler. The main story is building up to a climax and
then takes the wind from its sails with a forlorn fart, puttering about on
redundant nonsense until it’s actually ready to end. To be fair to the game, a
large portion of this filler is optional. On the other hand, the optional
filler offers some interesting new bits of narrative, but only about a tenth of
the time. This is the worst of both worlds, at least for players like me. I
feel obligated to play all the optional content in case there’s something
worthwhile inside, but most of it fails to deliver.
Trying to ignore these
exclamation marks must be what recovering drug addicts feel like.
Bringing it back to the
original question, is it my fault for seeking that content out in the first
place? Ultimately, I think the blame is split. Both players and game designers
should be more aware of filler in games. If you’re playing something that you
don’t enjoy, you should resist the urges that games of old have impressed upon
you. If you seek out all content, even if you dislike it, you’re gonna have a
bad time. The result is rarely worth it. But how much fault lies in the
designer depends on many factors. Roughly summarized, I think they are as
follows:
Effort to Complete: An obvious one. The longer and harder you have
to struggle to complete optional content, the higher quality it needs to be.
Gameplay Quality: If playing Dragon
Suplex XII is more fun than a bouncy castle filled with candy and illegal
narcotics, you may play to your hearts content in spite of the fact that the
story lies abandoned in the gutter.
Story Quality: Likewise, we have the opposite. It may be that Impenetrably Dense Warfare Simulator 3 evokes
all the tedium of optimizing spreadsheets with none of the strategy. But if
there’s an engrossing, complex narrative weaved into its thousand optional
conflicts, it could be worth it to chew through regardless.
Relevance to Story: How self-contained is this optional content? If
it reveals new information about characters, the setting, or the overall plot
then its existence becomes more justified. Less so if some nameless, faceless
NPC wants you to gather flowers because they’re pretty.
Importance of Story: This is a big one. Some games simply don’t
care about story. I’ve enjoyed a ton of repetitive side missions in games like Just Cause 2 because the base gameplay
is so fun. But on top of that, it isn’t interfering with any story, because it
clearly doesn’t matter. Meanwhile RPGs like my earlier examples suffer greatly
from gameplay/story segregation. The more important the central story is to a
game, the more drastic the consequences if it’s overshadowed by optional
content.
Linearity of Story: How much influence does the player have on the
story? Open-world games have become increasingly popular in recent years, but
we still haven’t gotten a good grasp on how to balance them with in-game
stories. Most games settle for merely plopping a linear story in the middle of
a ton of optional content, which doesn’t work particularly well. Games with
high Importance of Story as well as high Linearity of Story are ill-suited to
optional content. Optional content, importance and linearity are going to be in
a constant tug-of-war with each other, and if the designer fails to balance
them properly the game will be worse off for it.
---
Obviously this isn’t an
exact science, but somewhere in those principles can be found a sort of formula
for optional content in games. Funnily enough, Undertale does fairly well in the
above criteria. The genocide run in the game takes extra effort, is dull in the
gameplay department but for two fights, and has a story less dense with options
and easter eggs. However, it’s still interesting and engaging to experience,
even if you’re watching rather than playing. It may not always be fun, but in spite of its oft-quoted
catchphrase, it’s definitely not bad, especially
when it can provoke so much thought and discussion.
I guess “You’re gonna
have a boring time punctuated by brief moments of meaningful regret and a
general unpleasant air to the proceedings apart from two points of excitement
followed by frustration and also there will be some introspective thoughtful
bits near the end” wasn’t as catchy.
The less these principles
are satisfied, the more a designer has failed at his job. As we learn more
about how games and stories interact, we should expect designers to do the
same. We shouldn’t give developers a free pass on content outside what’s
required, as it can not only fail to entertain itself but cheapen the
experience as a whole. That being said, not all blame can be put at the feet of
the creators. If they make quality content and we simply don’t want to
experience it, we as consumers should learn to resist the compulsion that it’s
something we have to do. We don’t.
At the end of the day,
you play video games for only one person: yourself. Remember that.
...
...well, unless you count
multiplayer.
...
Or if like, you’re doing
a charity event or something.
...
There are probably some
other circumstances I’m not thinking of...
...
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