Undertale Analysis

To know how Undertale tells its story, one first needs to understand the mechanics that the game runs off of, as these directly tie into how it tells its story. The game is a retro-styled, top down RPG (Role Playing Game) that follows the story of a young, genderless protagonist as they make their way through the underground (Adam). The underground is a dark place that is home to many monsters, and these characters are what makes up the bulk of the story you interact with. They vary greatly, but all of them, from the allies you meet to the final antagonist to even the frog you randomly encounter, are full of character and charm, with motives and personalities that make each unique and memorable. Some are main characters that you encounter …show more content…
Whereas most games similar in gameplay to Undertale would have you fight through random encounters with the basic options to attack, use an item or flee, Undertale differentiates itself with two extra options: the ability to ACT and the ability to MERCY. The player chooses to fight the foe if they want to, but may also use ACT to try and find a way to reason with the opponent based on what information they can gather about what the opponent …show more content…
The term most aptly used to describe this effect is meta, or “...something that consciously references... its own features (Define Meta).” This may seem to be a simple element looking at the game from afar. Indeed, many other pieces of media nowadays feature meta elements to make their stories interesting or humerous. What Undertale does goes much deeper than that. It knows that the vast majority of its audience is consisting of video gamers, and it reflects this by constantly upsetting the assumptions and understandings of basic game mechanics that gamers normally have coming into video games (Neeves). The average gamer expects that, when playing an RPG, they will have to kill monsters and get xp just to progress, level up and play the game. At a glance, Undertale conforms to this. Every time you kill a foe, you are gifted “EXP” for your trouble, and enough of that will increase your “LV,” or, as a certain antagonist calls it, “LOVE” It puts the first time player off guard, and lures them into standard gaming habits only to analyse and make the player think on what it is they are actually doing later. When you reach a point near the end of the game, it is revealed that these metrics that are camouflaged as standard mechanics are actually representative of the player 's capacity to