Patreon Letter: 10th November 2018 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Jackson here with the first of this week’s hot Patreon Letters. Things have been busy so we’re one behind but don’t worry we know, Em’ll get that up some point in the next few days - they’re swamped at the moment so please understand! Anyway, you have me for now. 

In the time since I last spoke with you all, I have played several video games. I am going to briefly talk about them for about 800 words. Let us see how many we get through. How wordy am I feeling today. (Spoilers: I write about one game. I am leaving this introduction here for you to laugh at me.)

UNDERTALE - BIG SPOILERS IN HERE

I finally played Undertale. It was mostly pretty fun! The music is excellent, the style of the game is cute and engaging, talking to NPCs is uniformly fantastic. My favourite characters are Papyrus and Napstablook. Big moods both. However the bullet hell combat got draining and slow fast, and the distance between save slots meant you could end up having to replay fairly substantial chunks of the game. And that sucks because Undertale is not really a game about its combat, it’s a joke delivery mechanism. Especially on its first playthrough. Multiple times I played through a lengthy battle, laughed at the gags, then died, and then you have to replay the gags to get to the newest one. 

Undertale faces an inherent, nigh-irreconcilable problem in its game design and its humour. So much of those gags involve gameplay, around introducing a concept and then subverting it. Let’s take Temmie, an enemy you fight multiple times, who is a dog with big long legs. If you don’t want to get hit, you stay between the legs. After you do this a few times, Temmie will do the same attack, but walk out of the box, leaving there nowhere to go, and no way to avoid their attack. It’s very funny! It’s much less funny when you die to it and have to return to the last save point and account for unavoidable attacks along the way this time. But for the gag to be funny it requires stakes, it wouldn’t work without you actually getting hurt. 

This isn’t a failure of the game. Just a tension within it. Undertale is an extremely idosyncratic game and so being this warm and accessible joke-fest that occasionally slips into I Wanna Be The Guy type shenanigans make sense. It also makes sense I’m not the target audience for its entire deal. It is the game Toby Fox wanted to make. However it exists in this souls-like space where a very specific thing has blown up into a gargantuan cultural phenomenon with a fanbase that, politely, bristles when you suggest it could be more accessible for everyone. There is an infinite health armor. I would have preferred to use it, because I’d still be able to recognise and enjoy the gotcha gags in the game design and I’d have a way better time. But you have to grind for a good while for it. In a game that lasts 6 hours. 

Anyway enough complaining about that, that’s more a surface level design issue that made it more difficult for me personally to engage with the core of the game. Let’s talk briefly about the core of the game!

Undertale is frankly excellent as a melancholy game about trying to survive in a world in which conflict has been forced upon you. The best moments in the game are just talking to the monsters in the world, getting a sense of their relationships and their existence. Undertale sells the underground as a real, living world that you grow to care about through the end of your journey. It all builds to a phenomenal ending where the monsters tell you the tragedy of Asriel and his Human Friend, as you understand why Asgore is killing humans and collecting their souls so he can break the barrier and set monsters free, and that he might even be right to do so. But you would be equally as right to kill him as he is right to kill you. It’s a great final boss. And a great ending to the game. A game with no answers, just people who have been hurt, hurting each other and trying to find a way to be kind as best they can.

And then a flower comes and takes all that ambiguity away.

The metatextual elements of Undertale aren’t bad, they’re honestly pretty above par as far as indie games about the inherent violence of video game mechanics go. But they do serve to unravel all the stuff I truly love about the game. Where once there were no right answers, there are now right and wrong answers at every turn.  Killing is the wrong answer. Pacifisim is the right one. You reject flowey(or Asriel, if you want to get technical)’s premise that this is a Kill or be Killed world, or you don’t and the game reveals that the only entity of pure unredeemable evil is The Player!!!! Woah!!!! Except the game is also about time travel because Saving and Loading are built into the fiction of the game, so in the text of the game The Player is still the ultimate evil even if you, the lower case player don’t ever engage with the murder route. 

The point is it’s a puzzle box that doesn’t hold together perfectly and its subtext worked so well as subtext that being blown up into a deconstruction of the form just serves to water down the extant emotional content that worked so well. The existence of the True Pacifist route as a puzzle with a solution takes away from the power of the irreconcilable differences and generational trauma between Asgore and the Player. In the text of Undertale, there is no such thing as an irreconcilable difference, not if you do everything right. Until there is! And it’s you! 

Anyway it’s fine, I’m sorry for sounding so down on it considering I mostly enjoyed the game! I just feel like the multiple layers of irony and deconstruction, as well as pointed condemnation of the player, ultimately take away from its greatest strengths. But I also understand that it is those very things that have made Undertale into a phenomenon. Which leaves me in somewhat of a weird position, where what I love about it is directly at odds with its cultural reputation, which draws from the elements I find most cynical and off putting. 

That's it tho! Those are my Undertale feelings. I meant to might more about other games but whoops it was a fair bit to cover. I'll see you all next week? The week after? Depends on Em and I's schedule, but soon. I'll see you soon!

-Jackson