I Finished UNDERTALE for the First Time, Which Was a Surprise to Me

I spent years (since Undertale's release, to be precise) thinking I had played Undertale. When it would come up in conversation and people would ask "genocide or pacifist run?" as if it was some sort of binary, and sort of missing one of the points of the game, I would answer "pacifist" after years of playing Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex games without killing anyone, and being pretty sure I wouldn't kill anyone in the game if I had the option not to. The inciting incident was Megalovania coming on a playlist I was listening to, and with the energy of someone falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole I thought to myself "What is this song?".

Realizing it was the (in?)famous Megalovania I began a strange spiral of searching every digital library I had, desperate to discover where my copy of Undertale was. I had played it. I was certain of it. Of course I had played Undertale. It was a cultural thing. They played that song for the pope. I had seen years worth of fanart scrolling through Twitter. I had watched that Super Eyepatch Wolf video. I had read an unremembered number of think pieces about its themes. Recognized screenshots, and quotes in social media bios. I had recognized the characters at conventions. I recognized a child wearing Sans' outfit at Halloween one year. I knew that some form of Megalovania was used in an Earthbound Halloween hack and Homestuck. I....

I couldn't find the game in any of my libraries. Not in Steam. Not in the PlayStation store. Not on the Switch. Not in Itch.Io. Nowhere. And then a cocktail of realization dawned on me.

I had never actually played this game. The videogame zeitgeist and frenzy and popularity and writing and fan art and posts and everything else about the game had wormed their way so thoroughly into my brain that it built this false recollection that would not stand up to scrutiny. I knew they played Megalovania for the pope, sure, but mostly because the news had swarmed twitter and people had joked about it. I never actually went and listened to the recording. I recognized the characters, but as I thought more about them I couldn't tell you where you met them. Or how. Or what your arc with them was. What I did know was that people were thirsty for Undyne and Mettaton and maybe Sans but maybe that was a joke but probably not and I truly can't tell anymore. Nearly 20 years ago when Napoleon Dynamite came out it was so over-quoted and over-referenced in my school and among the circles I ran in that I thought I had seen the movie because I could basically summarize and quote it from the sheer number of people telling you and wanting to tell you about how much they loved it. One Friday night at a sleepover, a friend put the movie on and I asked as the opening credits rolled, "What is this?" with probably an amount of distaste in my voice.

"Uhh.... Napoleon Dynamite? Dude?" they responded.

I proceeded to watch Napoleon Dynamite for the first time, and basically knew the movie front to back already. The scene with the llama. The awkward conversation around the milk. The older brother who is chatting with babes online. Vote for Pedro. The martial arts commercials. The dance scene at the end. It all washed over me and when it got over I remember thinking "I can't tell if I didn't like that because it wasn't good, or because I knew it all already" and I felt like I had got noting out of the experience. It was the "well, that just happened" of popular cultural engagement experiences.

So the week of Halloween in October of 2022, as I bought and downloaded Undertale, I couldn't help but have a worried feeling of "what am I doing? The boat is gone on this one. Hell, the community has moved on to Deltarune. You're chasing a ghost, and you probably know what's going to happen already. This is like going into [POPULAR JRPG TITLE] knowing that [REDACTED] dies. What are you going to get out of this?"

I'm not here to write a piece about the magic of Undertale. Smarter people have said more, and said it better. What I am here to say is that unlike Napoleon Dynamite, Undertale is worth experiencing for the first time. Also, there's a lot to enjoy about the story and themes of [POPULAR JRPG TITLE] outside of [REDACTED's] death, but that's a story for another time.

Undertale was great! I really like Undertale! I get it! Everyone was right, and sometimes the popular thing is good, actually. Undertale is cool, goofy, stylish, fun, and heartfelt as hell. I said that I'm not interested in writing about the themes of the game. What I do want to write about, however, is how playing Undertale changed how I feel about how people have talked about Undertale. I mentioned above talking to people about "genocide or pacifist?" runs of Undertale. These conversations often went "yeah, I did a full pacifist/genocide run first time, I'm going to do a [opposite path] run this time to see what's different." Sometimes this comment would wistfully be followed with some form of "I just like the world, y'know?" or "no spoilers, I want to see what happens on the other route!" or even "I accidentally killed someone or messed something up first time, I want to go back and get it perfect this time" as if the pacifist run was the "correct" way to do things. After playing the game, though, I came to a bittersweet conclusion:

You don't get to play Undertale more than once. Not really.

It's all right there in the text. Even if you dance around the game and its files, even if you wipe things out, or play the game on a different platform, or try to erase saves:

The game doesn't need to remember. You'll remember. The game doesn't need to know. You'll know. Undertale doesn't owe you a second experience, and frankly, after finishing the pacifist ending on my one and only play through of the game, I don't think it wants to give you a follow up experience. If you don't know, after you finish the pacifist run of Undertale the credits roll, you are thanked for playing, and you are left with a final image that can differ depending on the choice made in a final dialogue box the game presents you with. The ending I got left me with a faded photo of the protagonist and all the friends I had made. It was sweet, warm, and got to me a little. After sitting on this final image for a number of minutes, I figured nothing else was happening and held the escape key to quite the game. Curious about what the final image of the other dialogue option might have been, I immediately loaded the game back up and was presented with the distressed expression on a character named Flowey, who by the end of the game has demonstrated that they "know" they are in a game, and has spoken directly to you, the player, multiple times. This time, before I even got to a main menu, Flowey was pleading with me to think about what I was doing. They assured me that everything was alright, that the friends I had made were doing fine, and that everything was well in their world. They told me that I had done as well as I could, and that the only threat that remained to their world was me. Flowey told me that the only one who still had power to harm the people, or threaten them, or change their current lives, was me. Not as the character I had been playing as, but as the player, the person opening the game.

So I closed the game after Flowey finished their dialogue.

Even before playing, somewhere in my head it was rattling around that this game had meta elements, even if I didn't know exactly how. In-lore the game accounts for you playing multiple times by explaining that there are different timelines, and that when you load a game or reset, or start a new one, you are resetting the timeline. You, the player, not the character you control. To be sure, the character you control is given a different name from the one you enter at the start of your first play through. In-lore there are even moments that account for you circumventing saves, playing on different platforms, and in general trying to rewrite and replay history. What I found so striking about Undertale, however, is that as opposed to games that let you kill wantonly then try to chide you for it, when they didn't give you another option in the first place; Undertale simply lets you feel however you want about things. Does the omniscient Flowey want you to close the game and not reset the timeline? Sure, yeah. But they can't stop you. The whole game knows it can't really stop you from doing much of anything. Only you can control how you interact with it. You can't go on a date again with Papyrus, Undyne, or Alphys for the first time. They won't say anything different. The dates, as far as I know, won't end differently. You can't get the same feeling out of playing the moments you liked over and over again. To cling to these re-playable moments and to try to wring fresh emotions out of them, even positive ones, is to torture your friends. To put them through the same strife again and again and again just so you can play with your dolls....well, the game isn't going to call you selfish. But it isn't not going to do that either. It isn't really going to do anything. It can't, it's a digital program. All it can do is try to appeal to you and ask you where your empathy begins and ends.

One thing I learned in the almost 20 years between Napoleon Dynamite and Undertale is that a lot of people often cause harm and don't mean to when they're chasing feelings. Or at least they don't think they mean to. Whether it's a lack of awareness, or a wilful turning of a blind eye to their own actions, we frequently subject others to our patterns of behavior when we want to feel something, and wring an emotion out of a moment where--

Ah hell, I said I wasn't going to turn this into a think piece about the themes of Undertale. Apologies for that.

I've been writing this as a stream of consciousness, out of respect for the source material I don't want to go back and edit or change what I've said. Out of empathy for you, the reader, I don't want to bore you or say too much of what might have been said before about this game. Out of empathy for you, the reader, I hope you are doing alright as you read this. I'm okay, been better and been worse. Thank you for asking, that was very kind. You don't know if me writing this as a stream of consciousness without editing is true. I don't know if you wondered how I was doing three sentences ago. We'll both have to take each other on good faith, and that's okay, I think.

Finishing Undertale for the first time and reflecting on what I had just played did, however, stir one regret within me. Years ago I visited a family member who is very young now and was very younger then. He was dressed as Sans and playing a small synthesizer on his family's kitchen table. I cocked my head and asked him if he was dressed as Sans Undertale, to which he emphatically confirmed that he was and asked if I had ever played the game in question. I unintentionally lied to him and said I had, and he began to jam on his synthesizer a tune that I am just now realizing was probably Megalovania. I am chuckling to myself as I type this. When his mother asked him to please stop that, he began to regale me with all his knowledge of the game and who his favorite characters were and how he went as Sans for Halloween but didn't feel like may people knew who he was. In my opinion, two years later, his costume was good, if not a little less skeletal than the original. He then went on to tell me about how he accidentally killed a monster in one of his Undertale runs and felt really bad about it, but that one of his friends said he did a full genocide run and that he should too so he could see the secret fight with Sans. He then asked me if I used the Temmie Armor. At the time, I assumed it was a secret item I had missed (not entirely wrong, if you consider not playing a game yet missing something) and said that I didn't think I had used it. He said that he had, and some of his friends said he had it too easy for using it, or that it was cheating or something. The memory is hazy in the minutia. For those that don't know, the short version is that Temmie Armor is a piece of equipment that the game straight up tells you will likely trivialize combat, and recommends you only don it if you are having trouble with a particular fight. The game will also lower the price of the armor when you die, up to a point. I like that this item exists because it encourages you to keep trying, and eventually, seems like it wants to help you along by letting you purchase this item at a greatly reduced price so that you can get on with whatever part of the game might have you stuck.

I bring this anecdote up because I wish I had known what the item was at the time. Sitting here writing this I wish I had encouraged him and let him know that needing assistance isn't bad. I wish I had said something sagely about how we all go at our own pace and that's okay and it isn't bad to need some help, and that just like Temmie who is all too happy to sell you things to help you, I think you'll find that if you're willing to ask, people can be willing to help and empathize. Also maybe don't do the genocide run like your friend said. The harm of that curiosity isn't worth it. And do you really want to do that to those people. The sick as hell music that plays during the Sans fight is on YouTube and almost literally every other music platform, I think.

But he was very young, just wanted to talk to someone about his interests and that (heavy handed) advice from a person in their very late 20s wouldn't be useful. Inflicting my behavior on the kid wouldn't have done anything. You can't force someone to have empathy, even empathy for themselves. They've got to get there on their own. And the kid is getting there on his own, as far as I know, thanks for asking. Maybe Undertale taught him something. I don't know, and it's not for me to say, but thanks for asking.

People born in the mid 1990s or so will frequently bemoan the loss of secrets in videogames. There are no more Mews hidden behind or under immobile trucks in Pokemon Red. But then there never were. There isn't a way to bring [REDACTED CHARACTER] back from the dead. But then, there never was. People who grew up playing, or were of a certain tender age while playing, the kinds of JRPGs that Undertale was inspired by bemoan there there are no more secrets because the internet has ruined it all. Or that now the secrets are intentional, which might be worse. When I finished Undertale I looked up certain things I didn't understand, or wanted more information about. Of course I did. From what I saw, there seem to be secret rooms and enemies and all sorts of strange things in Undertale. But what's really beautiful to me is that, whether intentionally or not, a lot of Undertale's best secrets seem to be in the community that formed around it. Communities form around most games, that's not new. But what I appreciate about Undertale is that by telling you that the best way to love these characters is to let them live without your button pushing, it sort of blows the doors open on there being no wrong answers about what those characters get up to. And if the art and descriptions of fan fiction and fan animations and music videos I've seen cursory glances of are any indication... they uh, get up to quite a bit.

Undertale felt weirdly warm when it asked me for finality. It assured me the people I had met were fine. It assured me that I had done alright by them, at least this time, anticipatory that I might come back for more. It thanked me for said time. There is beauty and talent in being good at an ending. Most people, most things, and most media especially; are bad at endings. I am very bad at endings. I'm not always good at beginnings either. This isn't self depreciating, I just don't like how I start most of my pieces of writing. Undertale really only ends when you let it end. I think that, ultimately, is where my love for Undertale comes from. I had almost seven years since its release to feel like I already knew its characters, and (wrongly) that I thought I knew its music, and settings, and themes and all of it. I knew it would probably reward me for being a pacifist, and I don't need you to believe me when I say that I wouldn't have killed anything in this game if given the chance not to whether or not I knew there were different endings. What I didn't know is that at the end of the ride it would gently and even kindly ask me to go and not come back. Undertale ends when you let it, not when the credits roll. And for me, Undertale is over. Now, and forever.

Now then, on to deltarune.

I am very bad at endings.