Triumph In Blog

Or, The Thousand Year Millennial Reich

10 Year anniversary of Undertale yesterday, so it seems. I saw a lot of people showing it a lot of love online yesterday, and I couldn’t help but ask myself “why?” After 10 years, I’m personally astounded that we’re still talking about it, all things considered. I was under the impression that the public falling out between Toby Fox and Andrew Hussie would mean that he was free from the Homestuck curse and we could stop hearing the opinions of 12 year olds so frequently. But that was years ago now, and really only one scarlet letter among many that the internet has tried to place on him. Unfortunately, Deltarune is still popular in equal proportion with Jesus Christ, and the fandom seems to be one of very few that’s large enough to cross boundaries–a lot of people, young and old, who don’t even like video games seem to somehow have knowledge of or interest in these games.

Truth be told, my post from a little while ago lamenting the popular conception of video games was inspired by seeing such posts around the time Deltarune came out. The new one I mean, I think there have been like 3 now? First of all: yes, my posts on here are more or less all catalyzed by me finding people on twitter annoying. Second of all: it’s obvious from both the response to Deltarune and the continued adoration for Undertale that it’s far more than the 12 year olds keeping these things afloat. How exactly has Undertale endured? How did it get famous in the first place?

I’m man enough to admit that I really don’t know. I’ve been asking myself these questions at every mention of the game or its sequels for a decade now, and I’m still baffled. I like to think that I can feel the pulse of our culture for the most part; that I can apply a framework to new phenomena, trace their origins and understand them. A lot of what I’ve written before is exactly that, i.e. me offering my meager assessments of the culture industry by drawing comparisons between the individual blisters on its surface. Throw some “dialectics” in there sometimes, to taste. But I really don’t get it with Undertale, because I can’t wrap my mind around how so many people have responded to it so thoroughly when it seems to me so shallow.

I will temper that as I say it: most of what I want to write here is actually my personal thoughts on the game itself, sans reputation, legacy, and fanbase (nobody laugh at my use of the word “sans,” I’ve used it plenty of times I swear!) I was there at ground zero like everybody else, and I know a lot of that game like the back of my hand given that when it first dropped, everyone who had ever used youtube was doing a playthrough or livestream of it for like a month. Playing it wasn’t enough–it was inescapable for a good long while, and you were gonna see way, way more of it than just one run would give you. In general, I think it, like everything else, deserves critique by its own merit, not just critique by association with kids on tumblr (although that’s gonna come back up pretty soon I think.)

How do I actually feel about Undertale as a game? It’s good, honestly. I grappled with that opinion for a long time, thinking anybody would care, but I’ve grown a lot in ten years and I think there are a lot of components of the game worth recognizing for what they are. For a little context, I was well aware of Undertale for a while before it actually released. As a connoisseur of weird electronic music from the time I was in middle school, Toby Fox was not an unfamiliar name; like many, I remember hearing the original cuts of “Megalovania,” and I remember the Earthbound ROM hack, and I remember that one album of Homestuck music* floating around. I was sort of surprised to hear that the guy was making a whole game, but I had no expectations for it. I liked his music, but I wasn’t a “fan,” I wasn’t watching for the game to release. When it did, it sort of exploded of all of a sudden, and for myself I wasn’t exactly blown away like everyone else.

At the time, I was more opposed to it almost entirely on the grounds that I thought (and still think) that the whole “should we be killing stuff in video games?” ethical quandary for third graders was pretty played-out. It’s bad enough that things like Spec Ops: The Line, which is a game nobody ever fucking played by the way, wormed their way into the collective consciousness of 2010s “games journalism” by rehashing culture war from the 90s as something new. But the laundering of this question through a fantastical, bloodless, and ultimately twee pseudo-webcomic is what sticks in my craw the most. I still find the question of violence vapid and stupid, and I will never stop disagreeing with the whole design of the game orienting around repeated playthroughs to observe the hypothetical answers, but it’s far from my least favorite part of the whole deal.

The tweeness is the real killer, at least to me. In fact, the underlying design of Undertale as a game is actually pretty solid in the moment-to-moment. The story progresses at a pretty solid pace and the individual characters get to have plenty of funny moments (we’ll come back to that too,) plus the one thing going for the game that I would count as an actual “idea” is the system where you circumvent the need to kill enemies by playing a little bullet-hell minigame unique to each one, which counts as “talking” to them. I think it’s a shame that it has to share space with the dumb moralizing aspect of the game, but that’s just me.

Actually playing it, it feels nice and varied, and there’s clearly a ton of love and detail that went into all of the areas, enemies, NPCs, and mechanics. A ton of unique dialogue, some genuinely pretty environments, and the utterly unique and funny character designs courtesy of Temmie Chang have probably endured if for no other reason than just being funny. Obviously the big draw is the music–the soundtrack is one of the best ever put together for any video game period, and it would be a whole other long, indulgent writing to describe what’s good about Toby’s music. The way it all comes together outside of combat makes for some real splendor from time to time, and it informs many of the bigger fights very effectively. The silly little freaks you burn through as you walk around lull you into a sense of comfort before the bigger, louder bosses show up later to bring some intensity. Asgore springs to mind immediately, as does Mettaton, but the issue starts to arise when we examine how few and far between these moments really are.

It’s not a long game, so I’m not speaking in literal terms. It’s certainly bigger and more robust than most indie games of its caliber, which is testament to both the ingenuity of the director and, of course, the power of teamwork. But there’s still enough brevity to make the annoying parts stand out, and in the end that might be my central thesis regarding the whole thing: annoying. Undertale is a game with a lot of fun ideas that ultimately fails to coalesce because most of the playtime is dedicated to epic lore and 2013 tumblr posts. This is annoying. For every fun minigame in the combat or every interesting NPC with a likeable personality, we also have to be subjected to multiple, healthy doses of failennial culture. Intentionally bad jokes, ironic dating simulators, subversive horror versions of cute things, internet meme references, etc.

I said “twee” earlier and that certainly works too. As I’ve described, it’s completely squeaky clean and that’s on purpose. Not that you necessarily need sex, drugs, and violence to make things mature, and in fact trying to include too much of all that usually makes you seem more juvenile (I’m looking at you, Fear and Hunger.) But there’s something about Undertale’s insistence on family-friendliness that gives me a bad impression, being that the game wants to make points regarding violence and the tendency towards while also including a story that surrounds epic family drama. Just how syrupy and freakin wholesome chungus can one game be?

The story of the game is, from the outside, a failennial mass causality event. A child is sent to a scary world of cartoons where the king of the cartoons is racist, and must be stopped. The supporting characters, besides the wisecracking, overwritten skeletons we all know and some love, are lesbian reptiles, matronly furries, nonchalant fast food workers, and socially awkward monsters. Some of the characters are also fursonas of the people who paid for the kickstarter. Some of them are named after internet memes from the time, such as the ever popular “Doggo,” which I believe is an epithet bestowed upon a few characters and enemy types. Much of the humor stems from the abuse of popular character tropes from anime, comic books, and fanfiction, and comes built-in with smug disaffectedness, which is used to couch the frequent recycling.

Of course, that’s all pretty subjective. it could just be me disliking that…brand of humor, we’ll call it, and the story underneath has more to it than that. If you dig a little bit, you will indeed find that it’s secretly more complicated, and dedication to nonviolence will reward you with the true story: a gay little kid was so mad at his parents for doing racism that he gained superpowers. There was also a scary guy at one point who is implied to have done unethical experiments, the results of which you do see in what is actually an interesting moment for the four seconds before lesbian reptiles show up again.

There is a little bit of intrigue there, certainly, but the unethical experiments part stay the fuck in the backseat. Front and center is the gay little kid, who we discern from the epic lore is the child of the false antagonist (Asgore) and the furry thing tutorial questgiver (Toriel,) and is sore over their treatment of some different kid who showed up in the past and may or may not have been the devil. See, it seems like there are some details to this, and realistically there are! But all the lore shit amounts to nothing when you realize that it’s just tedious minutiae that’s gonna end up being a big, indulgent final boss fight with screaming and crying and a cutscene where every character gets a nice happy ending. Good(?) has triumphed, and we got to save some kid from being angsty and save the cartoon monster world once and for all, awesome.

What makes this so juvenile is the idea that learning more about the bigger picture means nothing. It’s not a world to immerse yourself or inhabit, and there’s no attempt at establishing a mood or cultivating a style to speak of. Everything in the story and the environment that isn’t referencing @dril posts or whatever is in service of this seasonal-anime-ass story that ends exactly as you would anticipate. Once the initial gameplay quirk wears off, you will realize that there’s not a thing subversive about Undertale: it is 100% gratification fantasy for people who fucking love Katie Tiedrich. There’s a lot of fun to be had in it, it’s cute–it’s just so flat, and self-interested, and directionless. It’s a disorganized series of occasionally wonderful moments, interconnected by memebase.com posts and finished off with Fallout: Equestria.**

A parable that I think of in comparison is Steins;Gate, if you’re familiar. The visual novel itself has many different endings that sort of depend on your conduct with the various in-game love interests. But, on top of the 5 existing ones, there’s a secret one you can get from flirting with the main chick in the right way. To avoid summarizing the whole game’s plot, it kinda all revolves around this girl’s willingness to die in order to save another person by dying, and her sacrifice in juxtaposition to the protagonist’s pathetic autist chopped chud life is what spurs him to try to live purposefully. The regular ending, if you don’t try for this secret one, results in her and the protagonist confessing their love for one another, but she dies anyway because she accepts that it’s inevitable (in the story, it kind of is,) and the game just leaves the guy–and you, the player!–to sit with the fact that he has to live his whole life in the shadow of that confession. That’s beautiful, right? But the secret ending, the one that’s harder to get? Through the magic of time travel, she gets to live actually, and it turns out that the protagonist wasn’t ever really all that special, and everyone gets the normal life they fantasized about.

That ending is the more popular one, and the one that the eventual anime seemed to make “canon” by including. Isn’t that a crock of shit to anyone else? Why is it supposed to be the better, more gratifying ending that you get an anime girlfriend and fuck off, rather than actually learning something about sacrifice and consequences, and taking something away from the dense narrative? Why is this teenager wish fulfillment fantasy the highest achievement? This is how I feel about Undertale, and its central design of gating extra story behind the already lame moral choice system, only for that story to just be self-indulgent feel-all-the-feels crap. And why does everyone like it better that way?

To me, it’s another case of emotionally stunted Steven Universe type stuff. Stuff that intentionally aims low, presumably to court a younger audience, and ends up with a fanbase of adult babies. That’s how that happens. Again: I have no idea how this particular adult baby audience got so fucking huge, but I guess there are that many old failennials who needed to feel seen in 2015? Seen by one of the Homestuck guys? To me though, it’s undeniable that this is the case, and Undertale is a game seriously held back by its lackluster writing. Much in the same way many webcomics are, it’s a game that doesn’t really know how to construct a story with any weight to it, or any kind of mood, or any point in the end, or really any throughline at all, yet it insists on having so much talking. Just have less dialogue, man! In the words of Too $hort: “you can’t handle all that!”

Not a far stretch to bring up webcomics though, since that’s the cloth this thing is cut from. It’s sort of hard to zero in on what specifically makes Undertale irksome without just devolving into namecalling and shitflinging at stuff online that I personally dislike; but isn’t that the rub? The game mostly sucks because of the things it doesn’t have, but the things it does have are all vapid internet pablum from the same dashboards that brought you Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. This struggles to feel like a real game a lot of the time, divorced from the context that created it, but every moment where it does is undercut by the childish story, the David Cage-tier social allegories, or the befuddlingly, regularly bad jokes.

If Undertale came out today, and I played it knowing nothing about the creators, I would probably reach this same assessment. Undertale is, in the end, a perfectly fine game with some decent ideas and some love put into it, but it ultimately fails to coalesce. It’s not like a game is explicitly dogshit if it has kind of a bogus story, or it’s sort of sterile, or it gets up its own ass. What’s there is good enough often enough to warrant, in the words of Anthony Fantano, a “light 7” in my eyes. Much like Anthony Fantano though, I still don’t know how it got to be so damn popular!

That’s invariably more annoying to me, and it always is. When something is really good and really popular? Okay, that makes sense. When something is really bad and really popular? Okay, most Americans are fat mindless pig people, so I can believe that. When something is totally mids but really popular anyway? Okay, again most people are hogs, so unchallenging stuff makes the rounds. The non-fringe cases though–those confuse me. And confusion is what makes my autism pop off, and then I write posts like these. Undertale is good, it truly is, but it’s not good enough to hold the cultural purchase that it does. I, hand to god, cannot say what pushed it over the edge.

In my mind, tumblr culture from that era was not popular enough and also not worthwhile enough to produce the most popular indie game perhaps of all time (technically that would be minecraft I guess, but times were different in 2008.) I didn’t think enough people had enough love for superwholock and wattpad harry potter fanfics to spawn something so huge, so insurmountable, so institutional, that the creator of “Dr. Andonuts’s Rage” would be on international broadcasts announcing his games for the nintendo switch. Literally how did we get here, and why? We should not be doing this! Do you know how many RPGmaker darlings have been so massively overshadowed by the success of Undertale? Shit like LISA is still just an “oh, I kinda remember that,” and you would only even get that far with people who have been internet nerds for a long time. And for what? Why is it that Undertale is the big winner, when it barely offers anything that you couldn’t get anywhere else?

I rag on Undertale specifically, but it’s really only the biggest case. The life cycle of the indie darling video game is incredibly strange and incomprehensible, and you never know what the next big success story will be or how long it will last. Lucas Pope hasn’t gotten a game off the ground in 7 years, Devolver and New Blood are pretty much reddit catnip now, Lethal Company lasted all of 6 months. Hell, OFF is getting a remake that, ironically, Toby Fox is actually involved in, but still it sort of seems like nobody gives a fuck. Yet here we are, more sequels for Undertale that sell like hotcakes, and all of them are in-house developed AU fanfiction of the first game where all the fun characters are replaced by angsty pseudo-anime teenagers, some of whom are furries or something, and none of it is even as funny as the first go around. Except, some of the characters actually come back as their regular selves, for story-critical non-fanservice reasons. There are occasionally veiled, obfuscated references to sex that the younger fans complain about so Toby patches them out.

This can’t be good for any of us, but I suppose we’re stuck with it. Undertale is immortal now, I can’t stop it. People pushing 40 are posting “despite everything, it’s still you” as if that was a successfully meaningful piece of writing in the first place. We poke fun at “tumblr prose” and thank god that so many of our least favorite posters fell through the cracks, but there are still so many of us “filled with determination.” I resolved earlier on that I was softer on Undertale now, but hypocritically I do still feel a little animosity towards its wretched fanbase as I write all this out. The game is, again, good, and I think a lot of it is worthwhile. It held up then and holds up now. But it just is not what it’s been made out to be, and I’m quite sick of hearing about it by now.

In my perfect world, Undertale would be regarded in the same vein as like, OneShot or Omori or whatever. Tumblr meat for the tumblr meat eaters, that stays contained in a bubble where people can do self-ships and stuff on their own time in their own space, preferably a space that I don’t have to accidentally wander into so frequently. In that world, something like Hylics or Space Funeral could be the RPGmaker underdog that blows up and redefines how we think of narrative video games, and we’d all be better off for having less fucking Tim Buckley type dialogue all over the place. Then again, I could be complaining myself into a corner there: Hylics immediately imploded when it got even a little bit of buzz, and the sequel impaled itself on indie cred by crowbarring in a stupid story, and lore, and extra gameplay gimmicks, and yadda yadda yadda, which everybody liked but I contend are very bad.

Complaining is all part of the job though, and keeping up with video games is important to me, so I’ll keep drinking that garbage. Ol’ Toby is a good enough guy in reality, and it could certainly be a far worse world we live in. Why, we could have something like Ready or Not blow up, and introduce popular games to the revolting-not-even-in-an-endearing-way world of groyper milsim military hardware masturbation. Every game will have to include the gunsmith system from the new call of duty, and you’ll be required by the ESRB to publicly pledge that your game is making comedy legal again before it can be rated. And your publisher will get fined for being woke if you put playable women in the game.

Gee, that sure would be a silly world to live in. Thankfully, nobody’s playing that dogshit, right? Right guys? We’re not playing that, right? Because it’s stupid and ill-intentioned, and gimmicky at the core? So we’re all just gonna ignore it, right? Isn’t that right guys?

…guys?

*I do not nor have I ever read homestuck. I have absorbed some knowledge of it via osmosis, being that I used tumblr around that time, listened to nerd music online, and, later, had sex with a few crazy people who were homestuck people. That last one is not a mistake I wish to repeat. For the record: homestuck may very well be the worst shit of all time

**I’m sorry for referencing this. Matt, I know you know this because I do too, and you’re one of like 2 people who ever reads these, so yeah it was kinda aimed at you. Sorry I made you remember it