Here is Zero Punctuation’s full review on Undertale:
“Undertale is a good game.”
This was a quick review he did for the sake of being able to include the game on his top 5 best games of 2015. At spot one.
My full review probably involves a lot more slobber, but let’s just get straight to the point: Undertale features some of the strongest storytelling, characters, and humor I have seen in gaming pretty much ever. The gameplay is innovative and interesting, offering a truly wonderful take on what is usually the weakest part of JRPGs, the combat system, and it feels like work was put in to make even the throwaway bit players like the town NPCs or the random encounters interesting and meaningful. When’s the last time you teared up at a game? The finale consistently makes me break into tears. That’s how strong the writing is in this game.
(I also have no idea how to convince people around me to play it, because actually explaining any of the above in detail entails major spoilers, and the less spoiled you are, the stronger the impact is.)
But seriously, if you have any interest in story-driven gameplay, if you derived any enjoyment whatsoever from any JRPG in the last decade, The Stanley Parable, Cave Story, or pretty much any Bullet Hell shooter ever, please go buy this game. At $10, it is dirt cheap. I bought it for Christmas, and my girlfriend has since sunk something like 60 hours into the thing and spent most of the last week either playing the game, watching other people play the game, looking up secrets in the game, or exploring the fandom for the game.
Undertale is really, really, really good, and you should all buy it.
I played it without killing anyone, though I only played it once through. It was hard, but doable. I’ve heard it is actually harder if you choose to fight the enemies, something this game does not require at all.
Has anyone leveled up and fought enemies? I didn’t feel like playing it again to find out what that is like.
I haven’t bought/played it since JRPGs aren’t really my genre to go looking for clever twists on them. Most reports from friends have been positive; the most “negative” being that it wasn’t as amazing as some reviews made it out to be and it had some over-hype. A lot like Tale of Two Brothers in that regard.
I strongly advise against reading spoilers until you’ve beat the game. That said:
Okay, you know that scene near the end where you’re in the “final hall” and that guy comes and talks to you about what you did? Kill too many people, and he will fuck you up. Easily the hardest fight in any game mode, and truly worthy of the title “bullet hell”, with an intro that’s reminiscent of the first few seconds of Through The Fire and Flames in terms of difficulty spikes. But by that point, you’re going to feel like you deserved it. You monster. Oh, and the Undyne boss fight is cranked up to 11 as well. And the best part is, the game even messes with you about it - that you’re doing it just to see what happens, that you’re killing all these people just to see what will happen if you do. It really is incredibly well-thought-out. Definitely not as impactful as the pacifist / true pacifist ending, though. I actually tried doing a genocide run… Couldn’t get past Papyrus. Not because the fight is hard (he dies in one hit), but because I literally could not bring myself to do it.
I played through this game recently after seeing it ranked highly on GOG and looking a lot like Earthbound (and was on sale). It definitely has some of the best writing, humor, characters, and such that I’ve experienced in any game. The only thing I would have to say about it that I disliked is that it was extremely short. For a $10 game with retro graphics, I expected a bit more content. Now, it turns out that there’s a lot of extra content in playing the game through multiple times, and depending on your actions the story can change slightly, but only in the most extreme cases. Just playing through it randomly again doesn’t help - you have to actually know what you’re doing to trigger each of the changes in the story. And the real problem is that you can’t even get at least one of these endings (if not all) your first time through the game, so if you play in a way that would trigger one of the endings your first time through, it actually doesn’t work.
So while I suppose there is enough content for a $10 retro graphics game if you are willing to look at the wiki and figure out where all the additional content is, I was rather disappointed in how fast the game ended. I was expecting that what turned out to be the final boss was more of a gateway to the rest of the game. If it was Earthbound, it felt like it was ending at Fourside. I don’t regret purchasing it, because the content that does exist is well worth the purchase price, I just had expected, or at least hoped, for more than just a few hours for a basic play-through.
I just finished it last night and I loved it. Never could get into Earthbound, but I loved Undertale. The music was outstanding, and they did a great job of combining levity and gravity. While what they had to say about traditional RPGs was pretty in-your-face, I love how they made a non-lethal run play so much like a normal RPG. You have your enemies, you learn which actions satisfy them, you execute said actions. If you’re doing a pacifist run, you just Beckon and then Pet the dog, rather than casting Fire 3 on it.
[SPOILER]I did think that the fakeout in the Toriel fight was irritating. I wanted to spare her, but there didn’t seem to be a way other than getting her HP low. Then, when she’s 3 hits away from dying, it hits her for 10x normal damage. If they’d just let me whittle her down to the point where another hit would obviously kill her, I’d have reassesed my strategy. Instead, they basically trick you into killing her, and then yell at you for reloading to spare her.
I also liked how they gave me hints on how to get the True Pacifist ending at the end of my Neutral run. Luckily, I hadn’t killed anyone, and the game was good enough to let me run back and befriend the characters I needed to. I appreciated that. A lot of games would have made the process so obtuse that I would have needed a walkthrough to figure it out. Or, they would have put a point of no return at the end, forcing me to start a new game if I wanted the better ending.[/SPOILER]