What was so good about UNDERTALE, anyway? (A mildly deranged retrospective)

In which I attempt to compress 7 years of shower thoughts into something resembling a video essay about a game that drove me insane once. Digressions about "metafiction", "suspension of disbelief", and "themes" ensue.
Patreon: / andrewcunningham
Discord: / discord
Credit to Novaphyer's uncommentated playthrough for most Undertale footage in the video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQY0V...
FULL SOURCES LIST:
docs.google.com/document/d/1m...
SOUNDTRACK:
Sound of One Hand Clapping - 0:00
Sunset Breakfast (Tunic OST) - 0:04
Amphibious Assault (Tunic OST) - 0:52
Good For Health, Bad For Imagination (OMORI OST) - 1:38
Portabellohead (Crypt of the Necrodancer OST) - 2:15
Something (OMORI OST) - 3:04
Let’s Get Together Now (OMORI OST) - 3:11
Skies of Skaia (Homestuck OST) - 3:52
Farewell (Celeste OST) - 5:20
Last Surprise (Persona 5 OST) - 7:12
Snowdin Town (Undertale OST) - 9:23
River’s End (Outer Wilds OST) - 10:09
Hotel (Undertale OST) - 11:17
A Walk in the Woods (Inscryption OST) - 12:03
Sburban Countdown (Homestuck OST) - 13:04
Your Best Friend (Undertale OST) - 13:24
Undertale (Undertale OST) - 13:54
Laurence, the First Vicar (Bloodborne OST) - 15:57
Sunset Breakfast (Tunic OST) - 18:44
I Think My Dad Shops Here (OMORI OST) - 20:16
Abstract Map (VLDC 9 OST) - 20:37
Daybreak (Stray OST) - 21:32
Reconciliation (Everhood OST) - 24:47
SAVE (Encore) (DM Dokuro) - 28:40

[@samuelmcghee7941]

YES. Who else is in the "Never replayed Undertale but looked up a playthrough and was completely sucker-punched by Flowey completely calling out people who would look up a genocide playthrough online" group?

[@sharzinlalebazri5673]

I knew he would say it so I never watched a full Genocide playthrough of Undertale. (also didn't want to see all the monsters die but eh... details)

[@Ataraxia0]

i viewed it as less as a jab at people who watch playthroughs, and more at people committing genocide through undertale rather than, well, actually doing it

[@ToyElizabeth05]

yeah, I remember whatching so many playthroughs that I knew all the game, but I'm a baby so I only play pacifict route.. I only play the pacifist to see my fav chracter, Asriel lmao.

[@mmaaaaaxxx]

@@ToyElizabeth05 dw genocide playthrough is pain to actually play... (took me forever to defeat the two main bosses)

[@cementcitron9428]

@@mmaaaaaxxx I played it like 4 times, becasue I had no idea what to acctually do (I didn't kill every monster in the area, just every monster I met, and killed mettaton with like 5 monsters still remaining)

[@32th]

So I guess in a way Flowey being cool was the answer all along

[@YouMayKnowMeAsNate]

Hahahahaha

[@whim165]

Wait, the answer is Flowey? Always has been. Although if you think about it, the true answer is "Flowey makes the brain of the player break", or at least for me

[@user-xy5yg6se1k]

pretty much

[@zippah]

he is pretty cool though

[@Kayta-Linda]

And that’s why he’s your best friend.

[@winteriris13]

jesus that genocide section with the streamers reactions as they were slowly coming to terms with the violence was wild, toby played our emotions so hard

[@aturchomicz821]

He played the player like a goddam fiddle💀💀

[@slbhugomarques2]

Yeah that was pretty awesome

[@kohammy]

viewing it through a lens like that was lowkey disturbing ngl

[@Dharengo]

SINCE WHEN WERE YOU THE ONE IN CONTROL?

[@reiphas]

Glad to know I'm not the only one who felt that way. I remember watching my fav youtuber playing genocide because his audience wanted him to fight Sans. He finally agreed and started it almost a year after his initial pacifist playthrough and for the entire run he seemed simply angry that he was doing it. He's a salty person in general, but he was so sincerely unhappy with doing genocide from start to finish it was kinda funny, but relatable.

[@bruceainsworth5513]

it's always really strange and existential watching people mash through genocide sans' dialogue

[@mimszanadunstedt441]

I guess its akin to dialogue skipping people irl. Like, ignoring what they have to say.

[@absoutezeo2126]

Eventually, he gets the memo too. "Let's just get to the point."

[@Vylmyl]

Idk i mashed trough sans' dialogue on my first geno run without thinking

[@musingsofmessa]

Take it from me, I had to stop spamming A + B during the battle with Sans. Any time that happened, I would always skip the dialogue before his final attack without healing, and that always killed me. I killed him yesterday, though. I was so happy, I cried. :D

[@puiu102006]

@@Vylmyl thats like the worst thing you could do when playing a game like Undertale

[@pokopakku]

flowey not only expressing the arc of a disillusioned player during the no mercy route, but CALLING OUT THE INEVITABLE PEOPLE who are watching game footage to see what happens, is an utterly insane move.

[@tweer64]

When does he do that?

[@kaystar64]

@@tweer64 during his big monologue in new home, he comments that (roughly paraphrasing) "hey, at least we have the strength to do it ourselves, we arent like the sickos who just sit around and WATCH it happen"

[@imveryangryitsnotbutter]

@@kaystar64 "I bet someone like that's watching right now, aren't they...?"

[@riymeep6708]

@@imveryangryitsnotbutter That person is me. But in my defense I didn't have anything to play Undertale on

[@KysEcstacy]

I think him saying that is more related to the player, i dont think the majority of genocode run players would kill someone

[@isaquedopao6667]

when i realized that the frase 'The more you kill, the easier it becomes to distance yourself. the more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt. the more easily you can bring yourself to hurt others' was about me it legit sended goosebumps up my spine as i slowly realised how i felt nothing from killing toriel, papyrus, undyne, sans, asgore and flowey and also that after i was done with them, i would just throw them away like broken toys, just like flowey said

[@pablogonzalezhermosilla4210]

Did something change in you after that?

[@isaquedopao6667]

@@pablogonzalezhermosilla4210 Not really, i still continued the cycle of reseting when i wanted after this. And i still hold the same beliefs that it's ok to use violence in video games, but not in real life if you don't have to use violence. But i still remember how it felt when i realized that the frase was about me, it shook me a lot i suppose.

[@zachanikwano]

I remember people getting mad about the genocide route being "depressing." Well yeah??? That's part of the narrative??? They criticized the game for it, which they have the right to do, but as anyone has the right to not like or play a game ... People who make games aren't obligated to make it exactly how a player wants or expects. Not excusing genuinely poorly made games. But people are allowed to make games like Pathologic where its near impossibility is part of the narrative, the whole point of the game.

[@blurb9319]

@@zachanikwano The critique that the geoncide route's general overbearing and unsubtle messaging somewhat detracts from the experience is valid, but I do agree that it's likely intentional.

[@elcalabozodelandroide2]

Nice fanfic

[@andrewnebz]

I'm planning to have a friend watch me play the genocide route on his behalf just to see how he reacts to being the subject of Flowey's "too weak to do it themselves... I bet someone like that is watching right now" line. Nobody tell him!

[@andrew_cunningham]

based

[@devlinmcguire7543]

Honestly, you're a good friend.

[@keiyakins]

I have never seen a single act so profoundly a good friend thing to do and also a dick move. It's honestly beautiful

[@raindancejam9466]

​@@keiyakins😂

[@alejandrobautistaperez2101]

Well, how was it?

[@quietsamurai1998]

"I never replayed the game. And at this point, I probably never will." That's exactly what happened to me, and honestly, it hurts. I really, really want to experience the headspace I was in when I first played the game, but I can't even replay it to get a shallow imitation of that headspace because the mere act of replaying the game makes me feel like a monster who doesn't really care about the characters, and I love it.

[@mimszanadunstedt441]

Listen to the album, it brings what you want, surprisingly.

[@DogsRNice]

Same with me and Oneshot It does the same thing with its story as what happens at 25:30 It's been over 5 years since I played it and even just listening to the soundtrack makes me emotional

[@helloofthebeach]

There are a handful of things I wish I could scorch out of my memory so I could experience them again for the first time, and Undertale is at the top of the list.

[@tweer64]

The thing about undertale, is that it isn't just one bubble, it is a bubble in a bubble. The outer bubble is virtually indistinguishable from reality, and most people who play the game haven't realized that they have already suspended their disbelief and entered that outer bubble, so when they try to leave the undertale bubble, they end up in that outer bubble. Undertale doesn't acknowledge reality, it acknowledges the outer bubble.

[@nautilume7114]

So wait, does that make deltarune a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble? The bubble list looks like (Player & timelines (Menu UI with player selection (Light world (Dark world)))) or am I just thinking too hard

[@supC_]

@@nautilume7114 Not yet at least. As of chapter 2, Deltarune is a traditional story with one normal bubble and no particular acknowledgement of an outside player, although it has dropped hints that future chapters may not keep it that way.

[@supC_]

I really like this take. It explains why the game is able to “surround reality” as was demonstrated in the video. It doesn’t actually, it merely surrounds its own second bubble that you never realized it had and had perceived as reality. This makes it very difficult for the player to break the illusion and realize that the act of (true) resetting does not actually take away the “happiness” achieved by the fictional characters, which is the narrative provided by the second bubble and practically the only point where it differs from reality.

[@FlamingLily]

@@supC_ Arguably, the dark worlds are a bubble within the realm of the deltarune bubble, but as of yet no deltarune bubbles exist 'above' the deltarune universe the same way undertale's do

[@willow5945]

@@FlamingLily So Deltarune is a story about the sort of people who play Undertale.

[@YaGuyALT]

When I first played Undertale, after flowey crashes your game after he obtains the six souls, I remember feeling actively terrified of opening the game again. Like I hovered over the games icon for what felt like forever, it was like it froze me in time

[@yurifairy2969]

Probably my favorite boss battle ever. Everything about it is perfect.

[@YaGuyALT]

@@yurifairy2969 oh for sure, it's def in top 5 for me just bc of how memorable of an experience it is going in blind

[@Turtlesrule6]

Bro, same. I first reached that boss fight at like 2:30am, and let me tell you, the fourth wall breaking scared me like nothing else I've ever experienced in media. I somehow felt like I was in actual danger, somehow.

[@HalfBreadChaos]

I'm so happy someone finally broke down the flowey-thing and set it to the backdrop of a bunch of streamers slowly losing their minds playing the genocide route. I keep alluding to it in my own stuff, but I always feel bad for not diving deeper. For me the moment Undertale broke me, was the moment I beat the game, showed my very-good-friend and roommate the game, and they, looking at my smirking eager face, dodged Flowey's bullets. And then I realized Toby thought of that. And then I slowly came to realize, Toby thought... of EVERYTHING. .... and that is how Toby stole my SOUL right out of my chest. ;p

[@JonnySpec]

Well, there are at least two things Toby definitely didn't think of. 1. Resetting after the Asriel fight instead of getting the True Pacifist ending. 2. Attacking Toriel one spare before the music stops. (literally causes a graphical glitch, smh) But Toby did think of a lot of things, yeah.

[@uncroppedsoop]

@@JonnySpec and new details and easter eggs are constantly being found even to this day

[@Juliasn68]

@@JonnySpec And thirdly, sliding Undyne's letter under Vulkin for some reason

[@newman_real3079]

Oh hey it's my favourite undertale youtuber

[@zSphericle]

hi hbc

[@Seeks_stuff]

15:58 This part of the video was brilliant. Slowly realizing how we end up becoming Flowey (aka the character the game teaches us to antagonize) has only made me like this game even more

[@TheAdvertisement]

Yoooo Seek once again demonstrating your based as hell taste. Absolutely love how even just the prospect of the geno route tempts us to become Flowey. I'd heavily recommend Schafrillas's video on Undertale, they found Flowey's character really cringy up until they did geno and their video goes over the metamorphosis really well, even if the video's pretty short.

[@emmaw52]

The part that got me with Undertale was probably Flowey’s post-pacifist monologue, where he says that although everyone is safe and happy, there’s still one last threat- a person who could erase everything… “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

[@Josh0639]

liam neeson

[@giggycresent2757]

"If you're wondering what's outside the circle, it's just azathoth" I see you're a man of culture as well

[@YouMayKnowMeAsNate]

I loved that part but have no idea what that is, would you direct me to where I can familiarize myself with azathoth?

[@giggycresent2757]

@@YouMayKnowMeAsNate unfortunately it's pretty difficult, hes an obscure part of the lovecraft mythos, sooooooooooooo idk

[@Blue-fg8vt]

@@giggycresent2757 Google?

[@uncroppedsoop]

@@YouMayKnowMeAsNate essentially the god of the Lovecraft mythos. Everything is its dream. I say "everything" as opposed to "reality" or "the universe", because those are concepts made up within its dream. For all we know, even the idea of dreaming doesn't exist in its waking world. When, not if but when, it wakes, everything will cease to exist

[@uncroppedsoop]

@mlg noob I don't know too much about that but if what I know is at all accurate, it's far beyond the scope of that

[@FlaminFaux]

So. My experience with Undertale. I had depression. I’d been dealing with it for about 8 ish years at that point, I’d had it since I was about 12. Undertale came out in 2015 and I was 20 at the time. Listless would be a charitable description of me at the time. I didn’t play Undertale until 2016 I think. I finally got it because my Tumblr was just full of this weird skeleton dude and people begging others to play the game with no reasons given, no spoilers whatsoever. I finished it, neutral and pacifist, in the course of 2 days. When I was done I was just left sitting on my bed for a while. There was this dual feeling of both a deep, utter satisfaction and a heat in my chest. It hurt, kind of, and I couldn’t understand it. I’d just had my first deep, cathartic cry in years and years during the fight with Asriel. “I’m so alone. I’m so afraid.” It spoke something into me at the time that brought me to tears. I started crying a lot afterwards at everything. It was weird and annoying. Fun movie? Cry. Song I like? Cry. Tasty food? Cry! It was maddening! I couldn’t understand why it was happening! I went years and years without crying or feeling much of anything aside from a numbness, and now I kept feeling this heat and crying at the slightest provocation of emotion! And one day, sitting and really trying to figure it out, I realized something. That I was feeling again. Not just muted, colorless emotions, but full blown, fiery, painful emotions like genuine happiness, sadness, melancholy, rage, and so on. I was crying because my body couldn’t handle them after having not dealt with them for so long. They hurt so much, but it was an indescribable and wonderful kind of pain. It didn’t cure my depression, but it broke me through the worst of it. I don’t need medication anymore. I’m 28 now. The tears still happen occasionally, and Undertale still brings it to me. I’ve only done the pacifist run, albeit a few times, but I’m satisfied now. I still feel my emotions, hot as ever. I love this silly damn game.

[@CarMedicine]

THIS JUST IN: Undertale has been reported to have massively helped with somebody's depression, the madlad Mr. Tobias Foxtrot has done it once again. It's only a matter of time until he is the cause of something even more expectedly unexpected.

[@sino3318]

this is beautiful. :o

[@helloofthebeach]

​@@sino3318 I was about to reply "this is beautiful" and then opened the replies and saw you'd said exactly that, and so instead I'm going to say "yeah, it really is"

[@GODofTimewaste2]

Are you me? You just described what happened to me as well with this silly game a very silly dog cooked up. I'm still struggling though, I was off meds a while but my depression swung back, and it swung hard. I don't want to sour the mood, but I feel the need to express my gratitude to Toby and what Undertale/Deltarune mean to me; a few years ago, during especially dark times, one thought that kept me from taking the self-checkout aisle, so to speak, was that I need to see how Deltarune ends before my time comes. I kinda wish I was joking, but it's true. I'm glad that I found the determination (pun intended) to keep going, even if it was occasionally from a game made by a maraca-playing dog. I guess it goes to show how meaningful these silly games can be in all their silliness. I don't know why I chose this place to dump these thoughts and feelings; it's 1 in the morning and I've work tomorrow, but I'm grateful if someone cares to read them. Be well, my fellow UT/DR goblins (and non-goblins too).

[@lukadark9761]

⁠​⁠​⁠@@GODofTimewaste2 Sometimes you just need a small reason, and games like Undertale that drag you in and force you to accept it’s terms are very good at that. I’m glad you’re still hanging in there, even if that reason was just to see Deltarune, and I hope that, eventually, you can pull yourself out of this struggle in your life. Stay safe

[@jamesverner9132]

You just know that if Toby snapped his fingers he could get on any stage with 60 strobe lights and people would cheer even if it’s just to unveil his tune fish sandwich lunch

[@chrisheartman9263]

"obamna" "SODAH!!!!!11111111!!!!!" *what you just described*

[@thecrimsoncreep6665]

I would be there

[@mintjam5170]

What really had an effect on me was how this game confronted the player's guilt over choices. In other story driven games, players are sometimes given narrative choices that grant them an opportunity to do something unethical. If they choose the "unethical path" and don't like the consequences (if there even are consequences), they can simply load up their save and forget it ever happened. Undertale does not allow this. From Flowey reminding you how you killed Toriel, to pacifist runs after a genocide route, the game always remembers. You did those horrible things and those characters experienced the consequences. Just because you retreated to your save file doesn't erase the pain they went through. You, the player, chose to do those things and that makes you feel bad. So what do you do about it? Well, you rationalize of course. But Toby Fox has anticipated this and has got it covered. Rationalization 1: The player character did it, not me. Toby Fox Counter: Frisk is a blank slate. To say it is within character for Frisk to choose to do literally anything would be dishonest. You chose to do this, not Frisk. Rationalization 2: I just wanted to see what would happen. Toby Fox Counter: Flowey (see above video) Rationalization 3: This is just a game. It isn't real. Toby Fox Counter: Buddy you're literally a character in the game. Rationalization 4: I literally don't care. Toby Fox Counter: "The more you kill, the easier it becomes to distance yourself" I think I had always wanted the games I played to confront me about this. I think I felt guilty deep down about unethical choices I made within games. But the games I played never called me out on it. So I just kept that repressed guilt in the back of my head and forgot about it. But Undertale wouldn't let me ignore the fact that my choices hurt the characters in the game, even if I didn't save those choices. Undertale exposed my sins and I was finally able to repent. Undertale makes your choices real. While this may create feelings of guilt, it can also create feelings of pride. While a genocide route is all your fault, so is a true pacifist run. Everything about guilt from unethical choices could also be applied to pride from ethical choices. The game goes out of its way to not only make you feel bad about your "evil" choices but to also make you feel good about your "kind" choices. and wow its almost 2am. thats where this half-baked comment ends i guess. i could go on but i dont even know if this reads. great video btw. loved the mother3 streams too. best of luck to ya andrew oh and teen me unironically lamented at the fact that "sans wasn't real" many many times and i wore hoodies like every day so i could be more like the bone man EDIT: yooo chill out in the replies. be nice to each other lmao

[@whim165]

This is just my experiences but we'll written and out together lol. And thanks for sharing that I wasn't the only one who wanted the characters to be real... Hehe

[@yellowsnake7300]

That was so well written. Undertale is a game about choice. Explaining how those choices feel more real then other games like that is somethingI many fans have struggled to articulate, I think. I’m so happy we are at a point where we can put it into words. Reading this comment is cathartic, because it’s finally voicing what I never knew how to say.

[@dattos140]

Great comment, but some counter arguements for 4, 1. Is that you can grow bored and distant without needing to kill anyone, you can simply play the pacifist run over and over again, and sure you technachly kill asgore over and over again, but you kinda stop caring about killing him once you figure out that its the only way to succeed, so it never really gets "Easier", It simply goes away. 2. Since its a video game, you can interpret it as not killing anyone at all, i mean are they really truly dead if they were never alive to begin with? And if i can just bring em back whats the point in feeling bad about it? and last, 3. Some people simply never felt remorse in the first place for these monsters, people play and enjoy video games in different ways, some choose to skip dialouge and only focus on gameplay or speedrunning I just feel like the "Not caring" part of part 4 is more due to the fatigue of playing the same thing over and over again with minor variations, i mean once you know everything theres not really a point right? sure you can play it because you enjoy the characters and the world, but eventually you'll want to move on to something else. I dont mean to argue or anything just making some comments for the fun of it, i like discussing pointless shit

[@mintjam5170]

@@dattos140 Thanks for replying. I'm all for further discussion. Here are my thoughts on your points. 1. Imagine having to live the same day over and over again for an eternity. You might think that there are so many possibilities of what you are able to experience within a day that you would never get bored. But an eternity is a long, long time, longer than anyone can comprehend. You will inevitably live billions of identical lives billions and billions of times. There would be no surprises, no mysteries and nothing left to chance. The boredom would drive you mad. So what is it that drove Flowey to kill? Boredom. Flowey doesn't start off as a homicidal maniac. He tells us that once he gained his power to "save" he started off using it to befriend everyone and do good. We can assume that these are Flowey's own "pacifist runs". But Flowey lives outside of time. He may have unlimited time but he still has limited experiences. Eventually the boredom for Flowey becomes so great that he desperately needs a new experience. This drives him to kill, something he had never done before. The boredom of eternity drove Flowey to do his own "genocide runs". While Flowey had unlocked a new set of actions by disregarding ethics, he only delayed the inevitable. He would still be doomed to live an eternity with finite experiences. The difference between Flowey and the player is that the player has the ability to walk away from the computer and go do something else. All Flowey can know is the world of Undertale. Imagine if the only thing you could do for the rest of your life was play Undertale 24/7. Of course you would push the game to its limits. You would explore every nook and cranny of it to escape your boredom. Eventually you would see everything there is to see, make every decision, and experience everything it had to offer. Without the ability to walk away from the game, your decent into genocide is inevitable. 2. On the point of "the characters aren't actually alive" watch 4:00 to 7:20 . Andrew describes this better than I can. The idea that you can just load your save and "bring back" characters you have killed seems fine from the players perspective, but think about it from the character's perspective. The characters in the game still experienced the pain you inflected on them. Just because you now inhabit a new timeline or the characters memories are wiped (the game is unclear on what exactly happens) this does not eliminate the fact that their suffering happened. On top of that, why did I choose to kill in the first place? Out of sadism, curiosity? Either way, I don't like what this says about me, even if the actions were within the bounds of Undertale's universe. I don't think its unreasonable to feel bad about actions taken in interactive fiction. Though, to your point, it would be quite silly to believe that killing in Undertale is unethical. I have done a Genocide route and, while it made me feel bad, I don't think I'm going to go to hell for it (I'm going to hell for other reasons). 3. There are so many different ways to play, interpret and share this game. What I described to you was my experience with the game. It wasn't the "right" way necessarily but it was a way that granted me a lot of wonder and amazement. There may be no wrong way to experience art but there may be an intended way. I don't think it is a stretch to think that Toby Fox wanted the player to connect with the characters in the game, feel joy when the monsters were happy and felt sorrow when they suffered. Connecting with the characters is probably the single biggest reason the game is so popular. If you play Undertale just for the bullet patterns or the music or the speedruns, these aren't "wrong" ways to play the game, you just probably won't have my experience (which is ok). thanks for your reply. you really made me think more deeply about my arguments and this game that i love so much. if you have anything else to add i would love to hear it (tho im probably done writing novels in a yt comments section)

[@dattos140]

@@mintjam5170 Honestly im done writing novels too lol, i will say that your arguements are def really well put together, and yeah i can't speak for other people's experiences, afterall we only have our own experiences, and i can't say i've actually ever met anyone who HASNT grown attached to the characters in undertale Because toby is a really good writer, your flowey point is really good too, though i would argue that flowey has more options then we do when it comes to what he can do since he actually lives in the world of undertale and can interact with it a lot more freely, like he could literally glue all the toilet seats of every monster in every house if he felt like it, we can't do that, so floweys probably been alive for an EXTREMELY long time, if he was telling the truth about actually doing everything.

[@StarrySkies]

Honestly what I loved about undertale is how connected it made me feel with the characters, in a time when I was alone these characters were like friends to me They felt so cheerful and optimistic in a terrible situation, the only exception being flowey which made perfect sense and the characters truly do care for one another and your actions influence so much in the game Killing monsters has consequences and you aren't necessarily the hero Everyone is living their own story regardless of whether or not you're in it Every character was unique and different and fun and it was a game that really made me smile The characters are just really well done

[@whim165]

You could say, they hit you, in the bones? (Laugh track)

[@StarrySkies]

@@whim165 they truly did with their wonderful tales

[@whim165]

@@StarrySkies they did so well, it went full up until, bizarrely, went under... Circle logic

[@StarrySkies]

@@whim165 okay sorry for late reply but I'm on my last two braincells so can I ask what the joke was here?

[@whim165]

@@StarrySkies lol there's no logic to the joke, it's just the, if you go too much up you ended up down, cause you know, it rotates and stuff. Don't think too much, idk either

[@PlayersUnitedArt]

This. This perfectly encapsulates EVERYTHING that undertale is to me. Growing up with undiagnosed mental issues, I always had trouble making connections. Then in swept this game. Suddenly I felt true emotional connection to what was the equivalent of 1’s and 0’s behind a screen. I felt, even though these characters were incapable of being anything more than just that, characters, and were completely unaware of my existence, they cared about me as much as I cared about them. Papyrus and sand were the friends I never had, Toriel and Asgore were like my parents in so many ways that I couldn’t help but love them, Mettaton was a lovable celebrity I had the pleasure of knowing, and napstablook and alphys were people I wanted to aggressively cheer up. Undyne was a turd sometimes, but the most loveable kind, and asriel was a sweet little boy I wanted to protect from harm. Then came the flowey complex. I craved more. I didn’t want to say goodbye yet. I loved them too much. I wanted to learn more about them, I wanted to show them to my irl friends and family, I wanted to understand their nuances and deepest pains that I couldn’t stop reading fan fictions and tear jerking, chilling comics about. I just had to know them better. I booted up the game… only to see flowey’s face staring back at me, not with his usual cruelty but a certain resigned sadness. And suddenly the rolls were reversed. I suddenly held the power to destroy this world’s happiness and flowey was trying to stop me, with no hope of success. So what did I do? I left, created a new account, and birthed an entirely new, separate world, so I could continue giving happy endings to my friends without disturbing the previous timeline. Was it a cheep loophole? Maybe. But I was satisfied. At least for a while. But something kept bugging me. That elusive Genocide run. “I could never do that though, I’m a good person”. Then “well I need footage of a boss fight, and I can always back out. It’s not like I’m doing it because I enjoy it. I’m not like those other sickos. I care” then “ugh, why won’t she just die?” Until finally I reached the infamous sans fight… and that’s what broke me. Seeing what I once thought of as my favorite character suffering, lamenting our lost potential as friends, missing his family, and frankly, calling me out in my crap, utterly LOATHING me. Dying over and over, unable to be mad at him for it. That’s when I turned of the game. I never finished the Genocide route, and I never intend to. And it all boils down to the very reason I started it. I care about them. However irrational it is. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still watch Genocide videos or find any sort of joy in the dark depth it gives certain characters, which, according to flowey, is worse than doing it myself. But I couldn’t kill flowey. With him begging for his life only to die a gruesome death. That’s something I’m not willing to do. Because he was the one that made me see I could never forgive myself for hurting these characters, and absolutely desecrating the work of art that is undertale. In the end there would be no one to blame but myself. Not flowey, not frisk, and ESPECIALLY not chara. They’re as much of a victim as noelle was in the snow grave route. Manipulated by the player into believing they needed to “get stronger” that there must be a reason for your actions. After all, they’re just a kid, who had already suffered way too much trying to save their family. Who made mistakes born out of justified hatred, but we’re still kind and loving nonetheless.

[@yellowsnake7300]

THIS The hold this game has, and what it brings out in people, makes it a masterpiece in my book. Because it genuinely, _genuinely_ makes people care. It makes people care about things they didn’t think they could care about. It makes people care when sometimes nothing else will. And the way it reaches out and touches the real life person, it succeeds in the perfect illusion of creating a personal, honest, _real_ connection with the person on the other side of the screen. I think you getting another copy to relive the joy while leaving your original Undertale universe untouched was the perfect solution. I’m actually a little happy that I wasn’t the only one to do so.

[@MigattenoBlakae]

“Papyrus and sand,” lol (light hearted)

[@ShayyTV]

9:12 Hey, I think I know that guy!! 11:42 ...Oh. Great video!

[@XxguaxinimxX.]

Oh... you here?

[@andrew_cunningham]

Stop producing so many perfectly topical clips Shayy, people are going to think I'm harassing you...

[@YouMayKnowMeAsNate]

You can tell that the video will be good based on what songs he uses when

[@whim165]

I know right? Anyone that uses Celeste songs has at least my attention

[@46.ri9]

plus he actually includes the titles of the music he uses. every youtuber should do this

[@Jake28]

@@46.ri9 100%! I don't get why so many youtubers don't credit songs

[@asperRader]

Reconcilliation at the end? Oh, we're in for a real climax. Narratively speaking.

[@evo683]

Necrodancer!

[@monkee9878]

DUUUDE FINALLY, SOMEONE WHO WAS DRIVEN INSANE BY THIS GAME IN THE SAME WAY I WAS!!! I still vividly remember bawling my eyes out seeing Flowey look down on me from my monitor when I re opened the game after my pacifist run, feeling like a disgrace for even having considered reseting their world and just wanting to apologize and asure him that I wasn't going to do it because I did care for all of them. After closing the game, I never played again, just opened it up from time to time to stare at the void for little whiles, thinking about "how they were doing now in the overworld" even if I was fully aware that nothing from this game was real, not a single pixel. I have even sort of worked my way around all of the "oh but you still look at other people's gameplays of the game" by generating my own little explanation, that being that every copy of the game is a different universe, even if it looks the same, and every playthrough that the owner of the game does is a different timeline of said universe; so, if I look into other people's game, it's just taking a peek into one of these other universes, all while letting the one I interacted and formed a bond with still exist on their own, with the happily ever after I gave them. Makes me feel better, don't laugh. I'm getting a new computer soon, since the one I had before (where I played Undertale that singular time) broke down about a year ago. Once I get it, I'll download the game, and I'll give the characters I love so dearly a new happily ever after, just now in a different universe :)

[@yellowsnake7300]

Oh yay I’m not the only one who adopted the “every file of the game is a separate universe” mentality. I believed that each copy of Undertale was unique to the player(s) that played them. And I felt bad for the Undertale universes with speed runners as their player. I also spent way to much of my time wondering how my Undertale characters were doing, living their lives on the surface. The fact that they weren’t real and that no such future existed didn’t register for way to long, I really believed they were out there somewhere. Living happy lives. Obviously, I know they aren’t real. They’re just pixels in a game file. But for a while, this game skewed my sense of reality so much that I couldn’t grasp that simple fact for a pretty long time. Basically, Undertale was so powerful that it genuinely made me believe in multiverse theory for a good chunk of my life. The fact that others had a similar reaction is a testament to jut how impactful Toby’s work was.

[@ari638]

That's cute, best of luck to you buddy!

[@anonymoususer9197]

Most sane Undertale fan

[@esquiloide1426]

Every undertale copy is personalized

[@a.n.9800]

That’s a really sweet way to look at it.

[@cycloneabsol9405]

This was, without a doubt, the most BATSHIT INSANE video essay I have every watched. About the most batshit insane game I have ever played. And I fucking loved it.

[@sierrajade3926]

I'm so glad that the only thing I knew going into this game some years ago was "There's a skeleton people like, and a flower that may or may be not be evil"

[@thepebbleinstitute7702]

With absolute sincerity and zero hyperbole, I do believe that this is the greatest video on Undertake that I have seen, and one of the best videos on the web. There is no textual equivalent to a standing ovation, so you’ll just have to imagine it. Thank you Mr. Tesla.

[@BrixVGM]

undertake

[@thepebbleinstitute7702]

@@BrixVGM shuddup

[@someguy4405]

undertake

[@floweyfangirl69420]

i agree😊

[@melonyswife]

I tried to replay Undertale today for the 7th anniversary. I wanted to buy the Temmie Armor, so I did the thing where I bought a bunch of Tem Flakes (ON SALE) for 1G and sold them for 2G over the course of probably two hours. In the end, I managed to buy the temmie armor. Proud of myself, I decided to sell my excess temmie flakes for inventory space. With my brain on autopilot, I accidentally sold the temmie armor for 500G. I have not turned my switch back on today.

[@GoobAndCo]

I can confirm I was there when this happen

[@EleIsEpic]

RIP

[@32th]

Buying cloudy glasses from Gerson and selling them to Temmie is much faster. Some people call it Gerson and Temmie money laundering

[@ab-qf1iv]

Oof. I always just sell Dog Residue

[@Klui_]

I whispered to myself "he's just like me fr" multiple times throughout the entire video. Absolutely outstanding work, this is probably my favorite thing you've ever put out and quickly became one of my favorite essays ever, will probably come back to it many times in the future. The writing, the editing, the pacing, the jokes, you're narration is incredible and whether you keep making UT related content or move on to other subjects I will be there to watch cause I find your content too good and interesting to stop watching solely for a change of media. My experience with Undertale, whew, this game re-wired my brain, it changed the chemicals it produced, nothing was ever the same for 13 year old me back in late 2015. To mention all the ways it impacted me would create an even bigger comment but as a showing, I literally mastered English just so I could interact with the community and read a soriel bible tumblr post that was going around back then. I played through the game with a semi broken understanding of English (didn't even understand well the Flowey-Asriel connection until further analysis with better knowledge some time later), little hispanic boy was so struck with emotions by a game he didn't fully understand that he speedran the english language so he could go on tumblr. I later read all of Homestuck partly because Toby Fox had made some music for it, and also to get a friend to play the game in a deal (she never played it lmfao). I spent every single day going on tumblr and youtube looking up gameplays, AUs, art, comics, voice acted comics, animations, fan songs, reactions to said animations and songs, remixes, secrets. I told everyone who even so much as showed a small amount of interest to play the game or watch a gameplay cause I believed the writing to be powerful enough you wouldn't need gameplay to love it. Made my older sister draw me a Mafiatale Sans once and I love her for not questioning why I wanted a skeleton in a suit with a gun and a cigar. HELL, I ended up contributing to the unofficial Undertale spanish translation for the Sans fight, my impact can be felt in all the kids who played that version and developed the same brainrot as me. To say this game was my life for around 2 years is an understatement, I lived for this game's message of kindness and empathy, and I still do. Can't even say it was only 2 years cause mr fox decided to do a funny and release Deltarune which has twice completely overtaken my life for a couple of months to the point of me being unable to do anything out of excitement for around 8 hours when ch2 was dropped last year. I love this game, I'm so sane and normal about it :^))))))

[@j4yd32]

you didn't even escape by not resetting because flowey mentions that there is probably someone watching the genocide gameplay because they cant do it themselves. this means you are still inside the plot of undertale by trying to not not (yes 2 nots) follow the script

[@Mysterygii69]

My first exposure to undertale was through Scratch if I remember correctly, that block based coding website I grew up on. So many people were depicting themselves with these glowing eyes and stretched out toothy grins, at the time I wasn’t aware of what it meant. At some point in the future I came across undertale proper on KZbin, at the time it just seemed like a nice little RPG. Flash forward to a couple years later and I hear about something called an Amalgamate and the true lab. After blazing through a longplay of said true lab section I was utterly fascinated and terrified at the same time, I was young to say the least. I later googled “Amalgamate” and went to the images tab only to see fanart that would keep me awake all night with a piece of gum in my mouth, too scared to get up and spit it out. I eventually got over it, but that took quite a while of delving further into Amalgamates and learning what they are and how they came to be, gaining a large appreciation for them. Flash forward again to a year or so later, after hearing about a so-called genocide route I look up the ending on KZbin only to be terrified by everything chara related it contained. I repeated what I went through with the Amalgamates, being horrified before delving into it and gaining a vast appreciation. About a year and a half later, undertale releases on the Nintendo Switch, I later beg my mom to use the magic card in her purse to let me buy it and she obliges. I boot it up pretty much knowing the whole plot at this point and blaze through to what I thought would be the true pacifist ending. After dispatching of Omega Flowey I looked up why I didn’t have my happy ending to learn I needed to hang out with my skeleton friend and his fish friend. I of course do so, finish the game and there was my happy ending. I close the game, and reopen to be met with flowey begging me to leave the world he inhabits be. Knowing what I wanted to do I didn’t heed his words and began my genocide. The subsequent murders of Toriel and papyrus stabbing a needle into my heart to let it bleed out. Eventually making my way to undyne and her souped up determination fueled anime transformation. Struggling through the fight for what felt like hours I began to recall floweys words in a different light. Realizing what he meant I simply gave up, not wanting to put all these goofy people I loved through anymore suffering (and also getting frustrated trying to kill one of those goofy people). I exited, reset, and that was it. I only opened the game later in 2021 to see sosorry. On another note, I envy the way you articulate your thoughts and philosophical nonsense in the way you do, wish I had that power.

[@alzhanvoidsansado]

Man, years in between routes? Wow, that's a new level of taking your time. Were you banned from using the internet while growing up?

[@Mysterygii69]

@@alzhanvoidsansado no, my interest just waxed and wained over the years, at first it was just “that’s neat” and then moving on. But eventually I got deep into it.

[@teamloganvcairns]

did someone say Undertale on Scratch 👀

[@aturchomicz821]

​@@teamloganvcairns **NerdOverNews' 2015-2020 background music starts blasting as your life flashes right before your own eyes** monkaS 👍🏻

[@chrisgarrett6305]

Opening the game to see so sorry, I feel so bad for you.

[@jichanbachan2837]

!!!READ THIS BEFORE ANDREW CUNNINGHAM DELETES!!! I was able to decipher the first paragraph of the blurred out text shown in the text document at 1:47 of the video preview. I’ve decided to share my findings here in the comments so that I can expose Andrew Cunningham for the villain he is. Here is how the text reads: “Chara Undertale did nothing wrong. Gaster is non-canon and has nothing to do with Deltarune. Spamton is overrated. Asriel’s name being an anagram means nothing. Entry 17 is non-canon. The “G” in “Gaster” is pronounced the same as the “G” in “GIF”. Papyrus is a non-character and won’t be in Deltarune. Toby Fox is a hack fraud. No Mercy route is the only canon route in Undertale. i ate a live frog when i was twelve years old and he is still alive in my stomach today i call him jumpy :). Toriel is a neglectful parent. I pirated all my copies of Deltarune chapters 1 and 2. Berdley is a funny character actually. Ice Wolf is the Knight. Flowey is innocent. Chess theory is fake. Kris is a player stand-in. I hate all my viewers.” I am severely disappointed to see that my favorite Noita youtuber has such terrible and controversial opinions on minor indie game Undertale. Since this is Andrew’s first offence I will be reporting this to the authorities. Please understand that if this sort of behaviour continues I will unsubscribe.

[@tacticalguy6473]

sanest Undertale fan

[@V-i-X]

@@tacticalguy6473 true

[@robertwyatt3912]

Andrew Cunningham was The Work all along, hense the myserty.

[@hannahbrown5465]

So shocking

[@charlieburnham39]

Jaster

[@CupertinoEffect]

I'm the kind of person where when I become privy to the fact that some clever writer or game designer has been subtly manipulating me into feeling things a certain way and my brain suddenly ticks over and notices what's been happening, my instinctual reaction is to go *yo that's so fucking cool how did they do that* and laugh at it. I laughed whenever Pyramid Head made me feel like I was going to die. I laughed in the Genocide route. I laughed the first time I completed the Deltarune gonermaker on Halloween night and realised that Toby had secretly released Undertale 2 taking the form of a sketchy zip file disguised as a survey and that he had shadowdropped it for free through Twitter, how he had effectively made the very knowledge that there *was* a sequel to his game a spoiler, for all the few hours that lasted before the internet at large caught on. And I must say. The image of the MSPA reader holding a gun and having his reality consumed by Undertale like some Lovecraftian meta-entity that was angered by the notion of putting the game down while the funny Gaster gif danced over him to punctuate the point that some random Undertale fan's video essay had been building to for 25 minutes is probably in the top 3 stupidest things to have gotten that kind of reaction out of me. Like a portal back to that exact moment in 2015 where I had finished killing all these characters I loved and was confidently understanding what the game was getting at when suddenly I found myself being curbstomped so hard that I saw the Earth's core to the sound of Megalovania blaring, but distilled, concentrated, and visualised with an even more absurd image than the funny MS Paint meme font skeleton throwing a bunch of bones at my menu options on my turn. Good shit, Andrew. Hope this is a deranged enough comment for you.

[@mayapop4955]

As a person who barely can speak or UNDERSTAND F***ING ENGLISH all I got is : you Know that feeling of zooming out while watching a movie or playing a game and forgetting the fact that you are setting at home, and when the movie ends you go back to reality. Yea undertale sort of do the same thing on extra hard mode, where that feeling doesn't really end with the game but still stick with you it's like you are a part of the game/movie and what happened in the game/movie is now a memory of yours. You don't remember "oh I remember that seen when that happened and I remember a picture of myself looking at my computer" it's more like "yeah I remember that happening to me and it still hits hard" _ if the good effect that you feel when playing a game was a cigarette, undertale is drugs.

[@funnylittlecreature]

"if the good effect that you feel when playing a game was a cigarette, undertale is drugs." well said

[@taylorvelvet]

everything about the "player entity" being canonical in undertale pretty much perfectly sums up why it had such a big impact on me. it allowed the dialogue (especially flowey's) to almost feel real in some way, like someone confronting you personally - so much so that for a while after i finished undertale, knowing i didn't do the weird route almost felt comforting, like some kinda surreal validation of my morality lmao. it almost felt like the actions i did in-game had a tangible impact, on someone, somewhere. also the characters also feel strangely familiar in some kinda sense, like they have so much personality that makes them pop out - like toriel, stopping you from advancing in the game for your safety, embodying a mother figure, such and such // having to travel all the way back to snowdin, then hotland to help undyne reach alphys etc etc. it feels like you actually engage a lot with the characters. also, the production quality of your videos is absolutely insane. real treat to watch : ) i'd love to know how you did the physics simulations with the magic circles

[@vanderkarl3927]

[Looking back after reading this again, I didn't intend for it to be this long. I guess I just wanted to get it off my chest. Use your time with discretion.] I never formed such a close bond with the characters until well after I had played the game to death. It was only upon reflection that I began to resonate with them. Before that, I didn't have a favorite character, none of them really stood out... in a positive way. I did have a LEAST favorite character, the one that had made me feel the strongest, and that was Alphys. I had a whole list of things that made me loathe her, which I won't get into now, save for the lying. To me, that was the most prevalent and least forgivable trait of hers. After looking back on the game years after playing it, coincidentally shortly before the announcement of Deltarune, I started to look closer at why I felt as I did, or didn't feel as others did. The latter was more simple; I had already been inundated with countless casts of quirky characters since indie games were my main sustenance growing up. Only after developing more nuanced ideas of what makes characters well written did I come to appreciate how outstanding Undertale's were. There's more to it, perhaps, but considering my diet of video games was so immense that the rest of my life suffered for it, I'd say that's a sufficient overview. The former question of why I felt so strongly about Alphys is a bit more telling, if not interesting. I only started to think critically about it after the release of Deltarune, which started conversations about Undertale up with my brother when trying to get across why I liked Deltarune. When I brought up how I despised Alphys, he mentioned that maybe part of it was that she was a bit like me. I denied that vehemently, of course, the thought offended me deeply. The conversation moved on, but that idea stuck in me like the prick of the most tsundere of plants. How could he say that I was like Alphys? She was annoying, nerdy, and her scientific method was as flawed as her dishonesty was pervasive. Then again... Okay, I thought, I guess growing up I was always described as annoying, and my nerdiness was undeniable (I was an Undertale fan, after all). Those things led to my lack of friends, a trait that Alphys was only spared from thanks to the unnatural compassion of monsterkind. That made me feel bad for not extending Alphys the behavioral latitude that I wished others had given me. But still, I thought, putting aside the whole "bad science" thing (we'll re-examine that after I get my tech degree and start publishing research papers) the dishonesty was unforgivable. She lied to everyone, including those who she purportedly cared the most about, as well as herself. It was monstrous. It was unnecessary. It was... exactly what I was doing, myself. Not to get into it too much, but 7-10 years of my life were characterized by constantly lying to everyone around me, everyone I cared about, trying to postpone consequences for my failures. Just like Alphys. Sure, my lies were mostly regarding schoolwork, not necromancy, but it still eroded me in the exact same way as it did Alphys. I couldn't forgive Alphys, because I'd have to forgive myself first. And, just as Alphys found out, everyone I had been lying to forgave me far, far more easily than I could forgive myself. Even after betraying their trust repeatedly and constantly for years, even when I got so much better at lying that the last time I had been stringing them along for years before it all came apart, they forgave me. They loved me enough to. I graduated high school, started college, and then Deltarune chapter 2 came out. And the superbly written characters just keep coming. Not every character will hit home for everyone, but if they're all written with the care and nuance that Toby Fox can muster, then there's bound to be a character that will most resonate with a given person, and at least one person that will resonate most with each character. I've forgiven Alphys, and now she's my favorite.

[@yellowsnake7300]

This may sound weird, but that was the most beautiful comment I have ever read. The emotions this game brings out of people is unreal. Thank you so much for sharing that.

[@vanderkarl3927]

@@yellowsnake7300 Thanks! It felt good to articulate.

[@Shalakor]

So glad you shared this.

[@cureabees9440]

wow... that was so sweet and well written!

[@funnylittlecreature]

You're just like me..!

[@thepopulargoat6896]

Your example of a player not solving the piano puzzle correctly by getting the notes from the statue, but rather from simply knowing Asriel's Theme is exactly what happened to me on my second playthrough. Didn't figure it out my first playthrough, forgot to go back, tried out songs I'd heard in my first playthrough and stumbled onto the answer. It was a strange feeling to solve the puzzle that way, and I've wondered if anyone else has had that experience.

[@theythespian]

I actually used flowey's no mercy monologue as my performance final in the theatre school I went to (and I did really well at it I think). But yeah, thank you for articulating a good chunk of the reasons this game has given me chronic brainworms :) this game means so much to me and it's really nice to see other people with similar feelings :)

[@aturchomicz821]

Least deranged UT fan:

[@vissersixty-nine6246]

One of the weird things about Undertale is that the emotions I felt playing the game for the first time haven't gotten much dimmer over time. I first played the game when I was around 14, and I was (to not go into details) a weird, lonely kid. I've been thinking about it since. Now I have a degree in psychology, and every time I think about the game I have new context on it. Undertale says SO MUCH in so little time; I've seen novels and shows and games twice its length with half its staying power. The way Alphys and Undyne meant didn't mean a lot to me when I was a kid. Now, every time I think about their relationship, that's one of the first things that comes to mind. Details like that get into the grooves of your brain and then get better over time. I already left an extremely long and deranged comment about Chara, my favorite character and absolute beloved, on your video about the narrator, and God knows I could leave about 20 more. I love them so deeply, genuinely might be a top 10 fictional characters of all time

[@vissersixty-nine6246]

UGH I HAD A WHOLE ASS COMMENT AND THEN MY TAB CLOSED. basically my deranged remark was going to be comparing this to the very good horror podcast I Am In Eskew, in which ignoring the plight of the protagonist is asserted to be an extension of the systems of violence we participate in daily, and the ways in which cornerstones of society distance us from our empathy, compassion, and sense of community. the protagonist is forced to turn a blind eye to bullying, institutional abuse, and propaganda trying to get people to jump off a bridge in the same way we oftentimes turn a blind eye to the same things (maybe not the last one but you get my point). at one point, he is thrown out of his home due to a Thinly Disguised Metaphor For Gentrification, and he becomes one of the many homeless people he had previously politely ignored, and is justifiably not happy at the people politely ignoring him. Eskew isn't nearly as fourth-wall breaking as Undertale, but it pulls a lot of the same tricks; ignoring the protagonist is the point, it's something you have to do, and yet every effort you make to justify this cruelty only makes it more and more obvious that you are justifying something cruel. it's just really really good please listen to it it's so underrated www.iamineskew.com/

[@cureabees9440]

@@vissersixty-nine6246 oops rip, really nice comment though, i will check out that podcast it seems interesting

[@CallMeCarson]

This video is insane. Fantastic work on the editing, the care put into this video is next level

[@effello5622]

cargskin

[@aspol12]

how do you only have 2 likes you have 2.8 million subs

[@roysparkizay]

nah this video stinks

[@andrew_cunningham]

Damn you were being stealthy down here for a channel of your girth... didn't even notice. Thanks for the high praise, I put a lot of time into this one.

[@nerdwisdomyo9563]

I was NOOT expecting to see you here, agree, this video is lit

[@jyfunnel]

lesson learned, do not underestimate the power of what 3 dollars can do to your brain; I am not recovering from playing this diddly darn game.

[@zephyreon4]

after I played the game and learned that flowey was going to stay in the empty underground by himself, I was destroyed for an entire day. I was so upset I just went numb, thinking about how he was stuck alone for the rest of his life. now I realize that other monsters stayed, and flowey could leave whenever he wanted, but, hey, I was young.

[@gabrote42]

Alarm clock disproved this thankfully

[@alzhanvoidsansado]

In reality, the only one who stays alone is you, the player. All the monsters get to enjoy their lives thanks to your efforts, but your very status as a higher entity means you can't truly follow them into that reality, only make pale imitations in the form of fanfics to cope, staring at your computer screen in sadness, munching on chips in the dark. Flowey parallels this, alone in the Underground. You and him, both resetters who are left behind once our spheres of influence are exited. Of course the difference being, Flowey is not a true higher being, his exile is self inflicted and if he wished to do so he could join them all into the light.

[@gabrote42]

@@alzhanvoidsansado And he does.

[@matti.8465]

If it makes you feel any better, the alarm clock dialogue implies that Flowey is still around. He's not part of the family, but he's been keeping an eye on everyone at least.

[@flix256]

I'm gonna be honest, when I replayed undertale, I moved my save file on my desktop, so that I could believe that I wasn't resetting anything. So I could believe the characters still got their happy ending and not feel terrible about myself. I'm glad I replayed it though, it was just as good the second time.

[@akino138]

Holy shit, I don't think I've ever heard a more in-depth and genius analysis of a piece of media. This dissonance we feel having experienced what felt like an emotional rollercoaster that guaranteed a core memory, contrasted with the ever-present NEED to find out more, succumb to FOMO and see what would happen is such a dilemma that blurs the concepts of immersion and detachment from the fictional world. It is a feeling that I'm very familiar with, having also played Omori - a game that I found absolutely beautiful, binged in what felt like about a week, brainrotted about, cried, genuinely had felt like I was part of the story (elevated by calling Sunny my real name) - that was destroyed after I'd gone online and watched other people play it; calling the main character not by my own name, not having the same reactions, making hundreds upon hundreds of memes... I genuinely feel like it ruined the experience for me. What felt so personal and important to me, was but another story to experience and put away for others. I'm not meaning to gatekeep how media should be experienced - everyone has their own ability to be immersed and mindset when playing; my attachment is something that I'll have to deal with. Right now, I don't think I'll ever be able to play Omori again. I'll remember it as it was - beautiful, making me wish for the childhood I never had along with the characters. And I'll cherish Undertale too - for being the first game to truly push me towards wanting to make my own games in the future. Thank you for this video.

[@drakath5727]

Huge respect for putting one of the most underrated songs from one of the more unheard of UT inspired bullet hells face first into the climax of the video.

[@untrollquifaitdesblaguessa2584]

Everhood is so cool.

[@drakath5727]

@@untrollquifaitdesblaguessa2584 It is, that's why there is an Everhood 2.

[@elporritas_uwu3635]

Another point I consider to be very, very interesting (see what I did there :D) is the fact that the game can not only call you out on your detachment over the game if you decide to do a true reset (to probably go to genocide, as it's the only thing left to see), but it also accounts for the possibility of you NOT WANTING to feel that way BUT only in your own safe file of Undertale. So, you go into KZbin to see that obscure and mysterius at the time genocide route, without having to click True Reset yourself, thinking that you have escaped Toby's ingenious writing thanks to, now, a “double” detachment barrier; you are not even a player at this point, you are just watching a YT video… only to be hit by THAT Flowey remark almost at the end of his monologue… You can't escape the clutches of Undertale, no matter which way you decided to try…

[@RemnantCult]

So, largely my response to this essay is simply that one clip of the dude crying while interviewing pro wrestlers saying "IT'S STILL REAL TO ME GODDAMN IT!". But really, Undertale digs deep at the soul and your conclusion as to why it was so good just gave me an emotional flurry of thoughts on why I like the game so much. It wasn't even that long ago that I finished Undertale as I've played it off and on since 2016. The game was simply an indie darling that had a goat mom that everyone liked. Sure, Flowey knowing about me was cool but I had other stuff to play, like a fourth playthrough of Deus Ex or continuing my five year long playthrough of Morrowind. I tend to stick with games that I'm familiar with and that I can go back to at any point of my life. They are hot springs scattered between the fluidity of my livelihood, always there to perk me up and always there to take me out of the game of life, even just for a few hours. For Undertale to strap me into its State-Of-The-Art emotional rollercoaster and then tell me that for me to ride it again, I have to deconstruct the entire park is so unlike those comfort games I've listed. I can return to Vvardenfell at anytime I want. After all, I have that power. I could do the same with Undertale as with any other game but I'd have to damper the experience with guilt and with the feeling of cheating myself out of being able to hold my first time so dear. I'd like to imagine that, for some, this is why theory crafting and fan creation is so prevalent for Undertale: we're trying to recreate that first experience. The scene that hooks me tightly is the beginning of the True Pacifist ending, where Toriel and all those loveable monsters stop my usual fight with Asgore. Fallen Down (Reprise) plays during this which is probably my most favorite track in the game. Suddenly, these fucking pixels care about me. Maybe breaking out of the Underground isn't what I want. I'm not sure what Frisk's background was, but I had the feeling that staying in the Underground would do just fine for them. I was starting to feel that it was just fine for me too. I felt warmth, the kind of warmth that a tight hug from mom gives you. Mother spoilers, but Mother's main theme, I feel, is love. Love that can make you face hell itself. That love is something we can't just throw away. The lack of love, not the acronym, can turn you bitter. That love is something that gives meaning to being. Now here's Undertale sharing that reverence and offering you a hand, saying "I know you seek refuge. Just know that you have a place here". That love is threatened for one last time as you share it with someone who needed it the most, then everyone is saved and Love rules the day as it should. Then the fucking game kicks you out. That part of your conclusion, that one of the things that makes Undertale so special is how it tableflips the external and internal worlds of belief and entangles you in its narrative web hits the mark yet again for me. The game showed me love and joy but now it's telling me that I should probably move on. I should let those folks live their lives. After all, I helped them right? It's what I want, right? But what if I really just want to experience it all over again. But, than again, I'll just be cheating myself. A bit of a detour, but there are games that get close to doing something similar, but always do it in a dismissive way that can be seen as discrediting the player. Metal Gear Solid 2 spoilers, but what that game does is that it creates a mirror of you and then tells you to move on immediately. That mirror, the main character, throws away a nametag with your name on it. He states that he will live his own life. You should probably the do the same too but you're welcome to carry a piece of the game with you, spreading your experience as a meme, a gene of thought. MGS2 is the parent that kicks you out while Undertale is the parent that insists you move on out of home, knowing what's best for you. This tableflip also hits so goddamn hard because of how I interpret art and media as I am autistic. I don't want to assume that everyone's experience with being in something as complicated as the Autism Spectrum is the same as mine and I certainly don't want to bring it in just because it's there for me, but I've often get really deep into fiction because of it. I think that for many that are in the spectrum, they use fiction as a means to make sense of the world around them and so fiction becomes very deeply ingrained in their lives. I wish I could just live in these fictional worlds, but it's impossible for me to. That wish really gives Undertale's ending that final push to impact me beyond what I could have anticipated. After all, I only really started to finish the game because I wanted to see what Deltarune was all about and I certainly got more than what I bargained for. I hope this paragraph is relatable with others in the same boat as me, so to speak, and that I've helped others like me too with it. I hope this little rambling session on how Undertale impacted me doesn't wear out its welcome, but I do want to say thank you for making this video. Not only have you nailed explaining why Undertale meant so much to you, but you have also helped me realize why it does for me to and to others as well. I'm always more interested in the emotional aspect to analysis like this. Feelings do matter sometimes. Now then, I wonder if Deltarune will attempt something like this. What could it possibly do that could overtake the meaning of Undertale's tableflip? Without overhyping Toby's pet project, I'm excited to see. Thank you for reading my comment.

[@yellowsnake7300]

Please, these are the comments we need more of! Thank you for sharing, it was a lovely read.

[@whim165]

Dude, this was amazing to read. Yes, fiction is a powerful tool to help people better understand the environment around them I think the phrase that best described what you say is "you can never truly return home". But it was more than this, it's also "you can return and rediscover more". Idk, maybe I'm spouting nonsense. I will hold myself to not say too much, but I will thank you. It's great seeing other people experiences and that helps me too

[@heliax9924]

what do i have to say beyont that this comment is amazing

[@sierrajade3926]

Your comment was better than the academic paper on Undertale that I'm currently writing

[@denpa3055]

This is indeed a deranged retrospective and I love it. It's one of the most thought-provoking, well-written, and well-edited videos I've seen probably ever. Undertale and Deltarune are my favorite games and I feel like that's never going to change. Deltarune chapter 2 settled this for me. Even after all these years, Toby's characters make me giggle like a child, and his stories are incredibly poignant to me. But I think you've perfectly put into words the "secret ingredient" for my obsession with them. I remember, back in 2015, being in full post-Undertale fangirl mode, and while I was crying to a video with sad music over bittersweet Undertale fan art, thinking "why do I feel like the characters are so *real*?" Now I'm sure it was because it destroyed suspension of disbelief and integrated the game's world into reality by acknowledging it so far. Of course, this still requires the story to be interesting, funny, and moving. If I don't care about a game, I don't think these tricks are going to change that. But once Undertale made me care, it was impossible to pull back. There was nothing to pull back from, because the game had acknowledged its existence as a game wholesake, shattering the barrier between fiction and reality and making them both coexist in the same plane. Saying that, yes, you experienced this while sitting on your chair in front of a monitor and moving the character with a keyboard, we know that; yet nothing here is going to admit otherwise, we aren't going to reject that, so you can be sure that the feelings you had at the characters and their jokes and tragedies were real, part of you behind the screen, and whether everyone was made of flesh or of bits you still spent time with them and felt for them. I'm excited to see what Toby has in store for Deltarune. I feel like, just by sharing some version of the world and the aesthetic, Deltarune inherits these meta qualities; but it seems to be going even further by removing the blank slate of the protagonist and acknowledging you as a separate entity in a higher layer from the start, strongly reminding you of this all the time (e.g. the character creation, the repeated mention of choices, Spamton's "Heaven" talk), and now with the Snowgrave Route having your actions as someone controlling Kris be somewhat noticed by several characters and impact them directly in more involved ways than just pressing a button to kill them.

[@Galeforce017]

Here's some (assumedly) regularly scheduled praise for that Genocide Run montage, that was put together seriously well and it gave me chills.

[@Homeostase.medicina]

Man, this must be the coolest "Patreon thanking" ending I've ever saw in a KZbin video 💕✨

[@flannsyn]

Flowey had caught me there as well, but my reaction was different. Instead, overjoyed with a thought I'm interacting with a so-called Player 2, I've played the game over and over in neutral, messing with Flowey and watching his reactions. Til this day, Flowey and Papyrus are my favorite characters because of just how much you can interact with them that it sometimes feels like a real dialogue you're having with a person. But the thing that touched me the most with this game was making the save/load mechanic diegetic. The roof of my head was swept away and it never came back. Undertale is, indeed, one of the greatest games I will ever play.

[@Gibilloarrate]

i cried over the Jaru train dilemma

[@savvythedivineyethuggable7493]

"Yet, in terms of the impact they left on me, none of them hold a candle to Undertale." I saw Oneshot in that pile. The fans are going to throw an absolute fit over that.

[@forkgodsdescendant2503]

Omori fans too. Also, the old “You killed Niko.” ending speed-runs dragging the external mode into the internal mode.

[@RemnantCult]

Uh oh, you're releasing a new video! Let's get one thing clear: I can dive deep into the well of metafictional analysis all by myself, okay?

[@caninehelicopter5200]

One of the greatest comments on KZbin, wow

[@JaxVids69]

Good meme

[@ssbbmaster12345]

The realization that I’d only had about halfway through reading this that it was referencing that toothpaste meme hit me like a truck

[@erikm8373]

_Zooms out to beyond even Azathoth, revealing Toby Fox playing the maracas_

[@aturchomicz821]

15:54 This whole sequence must be one of the best retrospective things I have ever seen been made about Undertale. Toby played us, the players and watchers, like a goddam fiddle💀💀

[@leightonpetty4817]

I think the coolest thing about Undertale is that the payoff ENTIRELY depends on the game, characters, music, writing, whatever, being good enough to suck you in. Toby Fox wrote the meta elements under the assumption that “My world will leave you wanting more.” And good lordy, he was right.

[@Yuti640]

The Sunk Cost Fallacy, the system that makes it exponentially harder to stop doing something the more time you put into it

[@PrincessFelicie]

Another set of words for internal/external: Watsonian vs Doylist! I know it's not a _perfect_ match cuz those are more about the author perspective, but they're still a within-fiction vs real-world dichotomy.

[@KPOPDanceDeepDives]

This is the most relatable video ever, (and the editing is stellar) although my "fiction is taking over my life" phase was with Harry Potter. I've never played Undertale, but I have a weird attachment to the Dan and Phil playthrough. Can't quite describe that feeling. "This is where an extraordinary quirk of human psychology comes into play: the fact that, in the name of entertaining ourselves, we are willingly able to become utterly batshit insane. This high level yogic technique is known as suspension of disbelief ..." This is so fucking funny to me you don't understand.

[@seeinred]

4:24 ".. It's just Azatoth, stop thinking about it..." This channel is something specail, i can feel it already.

[@ryannoorizadeh6255]

The 4chan to grass gag made me spit out my coffee

[@yellowsnake7300]

To some up: Undertale is so good because it managed to make external mode a part of internal mode. …even the short version sounds deranged. This summary both makes perfect sense and blows my mind at the same time. And anyone not in the know would have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m impressed.

[@imveryangryitsnotbutter]

The snake's mind has been expanded. [MERCY] > Spare

[@mimszanadunstedt441]

Making people swap from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation is one of the healthiest changes a person can make.

[@SilverIV]

I played Bloodborne a couple months ago, returned to this video and can say for certain now, Laurence’s music theme, while thematically not being related to Flowey’s story themes, fits terrifyingly well into the section where streamers are playing the genocide route. You can feel how the streamers are, from the perspective of the characters in the game, succumbing to some kind of madness. The cherry on top of the 5-star sundae is the collection of quotes from sans & Flowey talking about how players will most likely feel upon disconnecting from the game world. Fantastic, and chilling, too.

[@dakotahholtman]

The ending. That’s what it is for me. It’s great characterization and all as well, great writing and humor, but the thing that really stuck with me, is how the ending to a 2D experimental rpg-esk indie game made me ball like a small child again. It made me feel heartbroken and simultaneously satisfied and hopeful, and brought me back to the days of naive childhood philanthropy and love for others.

[@TheSkyGuy77]

The only way to "break" the game's logic is to edit the files directly. (But even THAT is accounted for sometimes!)

[@matti.8465]

There is an in-universe meaning for the file manipulation, but we still don't know what it is.

[@TheSkyGuy77]

The only file edit that seems to be out of the game's eyesight Is the secret ones that are persistent between playthroughs, save manipulations, etc. But its so weird how thorough the game is at getting its hooks into your reality. (Kinda like its an experiment).

[@tweer64]

Get it on a new device. This just feels like creating a new timeline, rather than resetting the old one.

[@cognitiveAfflatus]

Having finished watching this, it makes me wonder what Toby is going to do with Deltarune in this aspect. It's quite obvious that he wants to lean into this sort of meta deconstruction further, look no further than the player's interactions with Kris, Gaster, and Noelle, but I'm wondering what form the beast will take in comparison to Undertale's Flowey? Toby mentioned he always wanted to do something by playing with people's sense of nostalgia, presumably with Earthbound I'd imagine, but it didn't have a wide enough audience to really capture what he was going for. Obviously this is no longer an issue considering more people probably know his game than Earthbound itself, but what exactly is that going to mean for the story? I love watching videos like this because it gets me going on this kind of shit, and it's the absolute most entertaining thing to do, so I applaud you on another absolute banger. But if I've got people's attention anyway I'd love to hear some thoughts in the replies. It's obvious it's going to be something to do with player agency in relation to their self-inserted player character, but I honestly can't pin where Snowgrave is trying to go thematically beyond some sort of parasitic desire to spread the "perverted sentimentality" Chara accuses the player of having in the worst way possible. There's just so many layers to this story, and while I can't imagine it actually happening, I hope Toby doesn't drop the ball in this department. I'm going to love the game either way, but I just hope we get something as good as Flowey in Deltarune, too.

[@ConvoBreaker]

On "perverted sentimentality", that only happens when you go back to destroy the world again. Or any number of times past the first. The first time, it's more about reaching "the absolute" in that world and "Moving on to the next." Unless you go back and do it over and over again, I don't know if that'll be noticeably applicable to the narrative?

[@SJrad]

So far it seems to be having the theme of the player and the playable character being separate entities. I feel like the vessel you created will be important but idk what direction toby will take it in. The idea I’ve seen thrown around is that kris will break free from our control and we will then inhabit the vessel, but I wonder if toby knows we think that and so won’t go that direction with the story.

[@matthewbennett7867]

Really the part that "blew my mind" with undertale was the fact that at the beginning of the game flowey unintentionally told you the truth of what LV stood for Love, because it takes and an obsessive amount of it(20) to go through all of the "main" endings and keep playing even with killing the characters that made you fall in love in the first place being simply another aspect and expression of that obsessive love. Flowey followed by chara are the closest to "getting" it but chara misconstrues it for hate. Of course this brings the phrase "if you truly love something you should let it go and if it doesn't come back it was never yours" to mind... and you know what that's what most undertale players do, with deltarune being our final reward.

[@carrotsshirley5792]

I heard somewhere that the Snowgrave route wasn't even initially planned for Deltarune, and was only added because the community was asking for a real second route besides a slight difference in how the ending was handled. So maybe Snowgrave (and anything on that route following it) will be a commentary on something to that effect?

[@cognitiveAfflatus]

@@carrotsshirley5792 i really doubt toby would be the type to revise his stories based on the whims of his audience, especially not a story he's been planning for basically a decade. he's not a hack writer, but im sure that was going to be a part of the route regardless. guess we'll have to wait and see.

[@thesmartestidiotonearth8782]

Undertale literally saved my life A lot of horrific things happened to me at a really young age and all throughout my childhood, and I repeatedly returned to the world and characters to remind me that it's possible to overcome horrible events and stay optimistic or determined in dark times It's now dearly close to my heart and I will probably always treasure it. I'm getting a "stay determined" tattoo for Christmas!

[@shadowdemonaer]

What hooked me is it was the first game that remembered and made me feel like my actions had consequences. I remember when I was a kid being scared of choosing the "wrong" actions like saying rude things to characters, but my experience in gaming over the years taught me "you can do anything and your actions here will never be a problem. You can try new paths and nobody will talk to you about it later". And then, I played Undertale and accidentally killed Toriel, like most new players do. The game remembered. And then Flowey called me out about it. I was completely hooked, and my standards for the games I've played are so high now that i just about can't play games anymore. Undertale did something to us all that we've never had done before, and became timeless. It will never be forgotten, and trying to match this game in any way, shape, or form, is almost an impossible task.

[@benwaffleiron]

my first exposure to undertale was, very unfortunately, through jacksepticeye's letsplay on youtube. i couldnt really play it myself, so basically my entire experience of the story and characters was through just watching someone else play it, and my entire experience of all the more obscure dialogue and gameplay choices and whatnot were from scouring youtube for clips of them. so much time had passed between my first exposure and getting the chance to play it myself, that by the time i was actually playing the darn game, i'd not only seen most of what it had to offer, but i'd kind of spoiled the experience. like, when i read flowey's "you know who i'm talking about" dialogue, i hardly even thought about what it meant, and just considered it another cool piece of dialogue. i think it's also because of this that, until recently, i've considered the player not as myself, but simply as another in-game character that i happen to play as. i'm discovering that there's this really cool moment where toby fox reaches out of your screen and grabs you by the collar, and that i managed to miss out on it. watching your/this video(s) has been the closest i've gotten to actually having that experience, and for that i'm grateful. i think all of this is also why im very happy deltarune exists. i finally get to play this game for myself, to e x p e r i e n c e it myself

[@cureabees9440]

;-; i feel the exact same way, although i still intend to play undertale someday despite the fact that i've probably literally seen everything. even though i loved it and became a huge fan of it just from seeing it second hand, there's no doubt that it would be nothing like experiencing the game for myself blind. and yea, i'm happy cuz i get to do it with deltarune now

[@NexusCubed2950]

I would like to hear Andrew deconstruct OneShot with these magic circles. I know the video was originally planned to be about both games, because undertale took too much of the stage light in the development process. As you could probably tell from my profile picture, I had the reaction andrew had with undertale, but instead i experienced that with oneshot, so you could say i felt a little cheated when Andrew said that oneshots storytelling doesnt hold a candle to how undertale made him feel.

[@cureabees9440]

yea that would be cool... and I also experienced that with OneShot! I've played it twice, but it feels like I've played it 1/10 times (idk if that makes sense :p). I guess that's because I played it when I was younger and the emotional impact it had on me seems stronger, and also I haven't oversaturated my senses with content about OneShot online nearly as much as I did with Undertale (which incredibly I've never played.) So the feelings and experiences it gave me feel more personal and intense, and I'm kind of scared to replay it because of the overwhelming nostalgia and nerve-racking emotions it gives me lol... But my heart just can't let go of it...or Niko ;-;

[@terrace15]

for every KZbin comments section, there will be a Niko pfp...

[@savvythedivineyethuggable7493]

Well, if you feel so cheated, then maybe make a video essay on why you're right and he's wrong. He's provided such a good and expansive explanation, and yet you just say "I like ONESHOT! I hate how someone likes Undertale more!"

[@cureabees9440]

@@savvythedivineyethuggable7493 they didn't say that andrew was wrong about anything, just that they would like andrew to cover oneshot. i think you're overinterpreting the "a little cheated" phrase... this comment was not intended to be nearly as censorious as you think it was

[@KisekiFox]

Oh wow, I never expected to see my reddit post appear in an undertale video haha. You echo a lot of the same sentiments I share, while I was able to do another playthrough many years later with the ps4 version i got that wonderful collector's edition of, I still have that same pacifist save file on my computer still, never touched, a genocide route never experienced to this day, because I love how much art can affect us, pixels on a screen to some, living breathing characters and worlds to many others. It was something truly special to me, and restarting that save feels like I'm spitting in the face of all the genuine emotions and memories I made playing it. I'm really grateful for Undertale's existence, and how much its inspired so many people. I don't think I've ever seen such a creative and talented fandom in my life before haha. Even if sometimes peeps can be "cringy" and as with all hobbies there will be people who take it too far, what it did for people's imaginations and ways to connect with the media they experience is something truly remarkable imo. Too many times have I seen the most jaded of people have their sense of disbelief melted and shattered by this game, and it warms my heart every time.

[@andrew_cunningham]

I assume you don't mean the one about the Outer Wilds passwords. If so, I didn't pick it randomly. I've actually had that post bookmarked for some reason ever since I replied to it all the way back then. It was one of my first interactions with the UT fandom. I'll leave it as a mystery as to what reply is mine though.

[@KisekiFox]

Art is so cool, I'm glad silly little fresh outta high school me could leave a tiny impact for someone else by spilling his emotions all over the keyboard haha.

[@MegamanStarforce2010]

something unaddressed but so so cool is the raw power of the genocide ending's 'permanent side-effect' on people. people cared so, so desperately for this world that even the idea that the people(not characters) in it would be forever cursed was like a stab in the heart. altering save files, reinstalling the game, replaying it all the way back 'the right way', what raw investment in a world man.

[@enor9379]

Andrew leaked that the video is 28 minutes long in the desc

[@mechamedegeorge6786]

not 7 hours 0/10

[@andrew_cunningham]

31 actually

[@YouMayKnowMeAsNate]

@@mechamedegeorge6786 Jaru fans be like:

[@partymix1997]

@@andrew_cunningham 2 whole seconds of I want a apology and for you to win everything on the spamton sweepstakes

[@Messier__]

@@partymix1997 Spamton sweepstakes?! I'll call the Japanese TV show hosts.

[@Ammiteur9]

Well, you asked for my Undertale experience, so I'm not holding back. My experience began even before I knew what Undertale even was, and somehow those meorys are even more fun to look back to for me, than the memorys of me playing the game. *Chapter 0, encounters of Undertale before I even knew what it was*, ~skippable I saw Mettaton EX in a Pokémon video. I didn't know where he was from or what he was even, but seeing him in this video like this helped to give me this feeling of strangeness and danger. It sounds bad, but that's just because I'm bad at describing, I hold this feeling very dear, because I like to look back at what I thought a piece of media would be, and compare it to my current feelings. Then I entered a phase in which I read a bunch of Pokémon comics, where I saw Sans for the first time. He bothered me very much because I thought he was a weird Pokémon character I've never seen before. I couldn't find out from which game he was, and I especially didn't like that he basically didn't fit into the Pokémon world at all. One day, months after seeing Sans for the first time, I somehow ended up seeing a DDLC fan comic and saw Papyrus for the first time (I forgot if this comic was just in a comic compilation of Pokémon comics again, or if I actually already liked DDLC back then). I only remember 2 things from that day 1. I thought he was strange, and 2. , and I quote "His name isn't seriously Papyrus, right?". I very quickly clicked the video with the comic away. The last timeskip for now is when I came across an honest game trailer of Undertale. Four things that stuck with me is one clear memory of me seeing Papyrus talking about the date after the fight, and the papyrus date, which again gave me the same feeling of this strangeness and danger I felt with mettaton, and 3 unconcious memorys/thoughts: 1. through that feeling and the black and white artstyle I was able to connect Mettaton with Undertale 2. I remembered vaguely how Alphys looked like and 3. I learned you don't have to kill enemies in Undertale. Other small instances of me encountering a wild Undertale include: Me being weirded out by the Frisk Stronger Than You parody ( don't know exactly why I felt that way, but them saying they should be hurt as a punishment kind of struck a nerve with me), Me watching a DDLC crack video and thinking that in order to save undertale, you don't just have "normal" savepoints, but that you have to gather determination through fights or something and when you have a certain ammount of it, only then you can save, which sounded awful, but I quickly forgot about it, and one day I looked up Megalovania lyrics, I forgot why, and though I clicked away very fast, I kind of liked the lyrics I heard, and the way they were sung. *Chapter 1, how I ended up buying the game*, ~I think this isn't that skippable but do it if you wish to My sister and I talked to each other one day, as we talk to each other everyday, and she mentioned that there was a game she really wanted to play called Undertale, but she was unsure about it because of the dark and scary things aka. Flowey. She thought our mother wouldn't allow us to play it because of that. I had heard of Undertale before but basically had no idea about it, and I was pretty sure our mother wouldn't mind at all, so I decided to look a bit into what it was and then to buy it for my sister's birthday. So the first thing I came across was the Sans is Ness theory by Game Theory, where I was warned not to get myself spoiled, so I closed the video and downloaded Earthbound for my 3DS since now I knew that the two games are similar. Long story short, I sucked at Earthbound, but knew now where the "on days like these, kids like you" line came from before even playing Undertale. Anyway it was decided now that I'd buy my sister that game and talked to my best friend about it, who warned me to not get involved too much with the fandom, because it's toxic... I at least kept it in mind, but you might know what ended up happening. The day of my sister's birthday I told her that we can download Undertale for the switch, and after school, I think we started to play it (maybe it was on the weekend, I don't remember exactly) Chapter 2, the actual experience while playing the game*, ~ this might be skippable as well, there will be a TLDR version at the very end So we started the game and I was suprised that the game started with a tale in sepia colors. I didn't know what I was expecting, but this feeling of strangeness I associated with Undertale, let me to believe the game would start a little differently. Also this intro created my headcanon that all the humans have the same haircut as frisk, and it's still my headcanon to this day. While reading the tale outloud to my sister, I translated everything into our language. Nowadays I don't need to do that anymore, but it's a precious and fun memory I like to look back to. Then came the time to choose a name. My sister wasn't sure if maybe we should name us the actual name of the Character (she herself forgot wether she wanted to name us Frisk or Chara, but she thinks it was Frisk) but we decided against it because of spoilers (but if we truly did name us Frisk that would've been pretty funny). We decided, after fooling around a bit to call us the now iconic jokename "Dieda", named after the totally famous cat from the totally famous "Dieda & Derda" storys, which translates to "that [female] one there" (btw I know that both Chara and Frisk go by they/them pronouns). So "Dieda" wakes up and I'm of the assumption that "Dieda" is the name of the little child we control, and that the little child we control is the same child from the tale we were told just now, like any newby would. We walk a bit and encounter the totally unsuspicious, creatively named Flowey the flower. Due to his trusworthy nature I was very suprised when I totally fell for his bullet trick, and when he told us that in this world it's kill or be killed, I lost my trust in Monster kind. So Toriel comes, rescues us, and tells us that she's, how I wrongly translated it, the janitor of the ruins. I don't know if that's the reason, but I somehow I created this image of her in my mind that she's not really a motherly figure, but rather a friendly helper that now has to hide us from her bosses, but will definetly betray us later. So as I said, I was already familliar with the option not to kill anyone (or now that I think about it maybe it was just because Toriel explained it? I don't think so..) so I decided we would be nice and additionally to not killing anyone, we would wait until Toriel comes back. She never came back, but we did get to hear Toby stealing her phone on the first playthrough which is pretty cool. Also figuring out how to act was very fun, and we encountered Blooky, who quickly became a beloved character of ours. ~intermission~ Something funny, but when we were asking Toriel if we could leave, I sort of already knew that our goal was to get out of the Underground, meanwhile a few months later when we showed my grandma the game, she didn't know what our goal was. I thought that was the goal because the intro said that we're unable to escape the Underground, meanwhile, there not being an explicit goal really fits the "continuing because we have to" theme of Undertale. Ok Toriel is now trustworthy, and we meet a scary fellow in the woods, whose joke I did not fully get, but I found his name pretty weird. I forgot if I recognized sans as the Pokémon character, but who I did recognize was his secret older twin brother (I firstly assumed he was older, now I know he's younger) Papyrus, who immedialtly disrespected his brother's name by calling him "sandpaper" and that was definetly not me who made fun of Sans's name through making it sound more alike with Papyrus's... I won't go into detail, because, though I definetly didn't trust Sandpaper or Papürus at some point as well, their charms worked as intended and we quickly grew to like these characters. All of the comedy, excluding San's jokes, was also very effective, and though we did beat him in two or so tries, papyrus was a tough challange as well. Also we got a fun event, where Alphys calls us to order a Pizza, on our first playthrough, yay! Though we got Papy's phone number we rarely actually called during the first playthrough. ~intermission 2~ What I really liked about snowdin was that characters like Undyne and Alphys got mentioned, but not explained. It helped to convey that these characters do actually live in this world, since they don't need to explain who they're talking about, they already know. (to be continued in the replies)

[@Ammiteur9]

Onward to waterfall, and the scarest man in the Underground: the Knight of the shadows, Undyne, and Papyrus, who will definetly betray us for sure this time. He never did, but waterfall was great. The puzzles were very fun, and Tem exists, which is always a reason to smile, and walking around with Monster kid and looking at the castle in the distance was also a nice feeling, which helped me further to associate Undertale less with strangeness and more with a feeling of warmth and one I'll describe later. Also I never heard of the name Undyne, and like a significant part of the Deltarune fanbase I never noticed Papyrus using she/her pronouns for her, so due to her armor, I thought she was male. After managing to escape Undyne, by her destroying the bridge, we were shown the dream of Asriel, and I really like my thoughts from back then: "finally someone who calls us by our name" because I was a little sad that everyonejust called us "human" the whole time. I actually thought it was Blooky who said this to us. Jumping forward a little and we're about to face Undyne in a battle. Turns out Undyne is 3 things: 1. she's a woman, not a man... my bad 2. She is very tough to beat, we tried and failed many times, until our father researched online and told us that we can run away from her 3. She is very scary. When we finally did run away from her I was so scared by her sprite and her chasing us, I closed my eyes and let my sister run us to safety, which was a little tricky since we figured out during the fight who is good with which bullet patterns and we took turns. My turn was always shortly before running away, and the tension was too high for me to stay calm. Undine is scary, but we coudn't let her get fried in the heat, so we got her a cup of water, she went home, and after her we went as well (I can't remember if we met Alphys already or not, but I think we did), to my then favourite jokes with Papyrus, which are him jumping through the window, and him using reverse psychology on Undyne. I also really liked the joke with Mettaton feeding himself with grapes while lying on Undynes Piano. Hanging out with Undyne did lead us to become friends, but it also lead to this unanswered question: who does Undyne think we're similar to? She says that we're a loser with a big heart or something, that we remind her of someone she used to train with. Does she mean Asgore? Papyrus? Maybe even Gerson? Or perhaps even Asriel? Who knows? But forget about that since we're about to meet my now favourite character Alphys, whose lookalike we got to meet earlier in the librarby, and her robot Mettaton. While translating everything, I also came up with voices for the characters, which became something I find great joy in. Alphys got a voice that was, and still is very fun to do, and since she calls, and posts so much, it only helped me getting to like her. I also was very oblivious to her telling us all the answers for the MTT quizz, and her and MTT faking everything. I actually find it quite fascinating, in TV series or movies, whenever a character is obviously putting on an act the audience always knows it and maybe even questions why nobody of the other characters does, but we as people don't automatically assume people lie, so to me she was pretty convincing. And since I didn't know she was lying, I also had no idea that Mettaton would give her so many compliments. I thought Mettaton would be a generic robot who will just say 'MUST DESTROY HUMAN' or something like that all the time. But no, my expectations were subverted for the better, turns out MTT makes Alphys a bunch of compliments, and is a blast of a character. (In an oral exam, I actually tried to imitate the way Mettaton talks, full of confidence and always like he is on TV, which resulted in me getting an A+ with zero mistakes. All thanks to Undertale) Now we're in Hotland, which brings us the first backgroundmusic I didn't need to grow into, but enjoyed very quickly, another pretty hard bossfight in Muffet, which was also very fun, as well as a bunch of fun puzzles and little interactions, but hotland also got me a new addition to the feelings I get from Undertale. This background of nothingness, it gives me this feeling of the longing for infinity, just looking at the sky and imagining what could be out there, what worlds lie beyond. And what lies beyond hotland? the core of course! which is were we met up with Sans again. As basically everyone, I was pretty scared when Sans suddenly turned serious mode, but what I find funny is that even though I had never heard of Deltarune before, not to mention that the fangame Deltatraveler didn't even exist yet, but when Sans talked about a door he practiced knock knock jokes on, I imagined a grey door on a hill full of snow somewhere, but the grey door is just a door and a doorframe, no buildings anywhere. And since I was under the assumption that Toriel's a janitor, I had no idea that Sans was talking about her.

[@Ammiteur9]

The core was a very fun maze to navigate through but the best thing is that it has the best bossfight of the whole game. When we arrived, we knew that we're probably close to the ending, but I had seen this one robot human of ambiguous gender in a Pokémon video before and was sure that he's from undertale, so where was he? Biggest twist of all, he's Mettaton EX (and his gender was no longer something I was unsure about), and his bossfight was so much fun! My sister and I again figured out who is best with which bullet pattern and took turns. We made a whole strategy how to beat him and when to use items. We also didn't know for the first 5 rounds or so that we had to shoot the disco ball to dodge the lights. And since it took us so many tries, we came up with a bunch of stupid things to write into the essay, one of which was a keyword response by Mettaton to the word "personality" and we didn't even know that was possible. When we finally beat Mettaton I was so scared that Alphys would attack us or something, but she never did. We're almost at the castle and now the emotional Undertale gets told to us, as well as the shocking explanation of LOVE during Sans's judgement. What was most memorable to me was that many people find the most emotional weight in the "despite everything, it's still you" line, and with good reason, but to me it was when the monsters asked "Aren't you excited? Aren't you happy? You're going to be free" It sounds to me like they see me as one of them, someone who is going to be free soon, but at the same time it sounds like I'm going to be free, because I will be killed by Asgore, granting the monsters their freedom. For me that was the moment with the most emotional wight during the song Undertale. Asgore of course was pretty hard. I actually just found it mean that he seemingly already had a coffin prepared for us instead of being scared. I also did not expect him to be so friendly and harmless looking. And I think his battle sprite is designed geniously, his hair covers his eyes because he looks down in shame and lag of power to look you in the eyes, but it also looks like a wicked smile. Speaking of wicked smile, I don't have anything special to say about flowey. I think I share the experience of "what the hell is that?!" with most players. We got the snowman ending, as well as the pacifist neutral ending. While I insisted of not killing anyone, (which my sister was thankful for since she didn't know if she should explain that this is not like Pokémon) my sister insisted of keeping the snowmanpiece with us at all times because she wanted that ending. But when we were finished my sister said that she thinks we did something wrong, that there is something that's missing. So we decided to turn the game on again, Flowey tells us what to do, and everything is right in the world again. The Alphys date was very funny and the true lab pretty scary, I don't have much to say, just that despite everything, I never really viewed Alphys as this horrible person, not even in the true lab. I love, I guess the climax of Undertale when we battle against Asriel, though after all this time I still don't know what he's talking about at the beginning of the battle. The only strong memory I have about this is that we took a break during this battle I think, and I thought about how much I loved this game, while sitting in the dark watching the stars. After we learned thet "Dieda" isn't actually the child we control, but that they have the unexpected name "Frisk" we hugged Ralsei, set everyone free, everyone calls us by our actual name now, we go after Asriel again who tells us that "Dieda" hated humanity, which I don't question at all since humans can be garabage sometimes, and the rest is a pretty universal good time like the majority of players had. Like Andrew we, never really touched that savefile on which we played this first time, we did however have the advantage of playing Undertale on the switch, so we just played again on another user account. *Chapter 3, what we did after we played Undertale,* ~I don't know, just skip anything, it is pretty long already after all. My sister and I made our first partner project, both of us drew Frisk, and later we drew the MTT EX fight together. When I look back, I find it fascinating how I drew Frisk, their eyes were open, and they were sitting in the snow somewhere. I not only drew them the way how I experienced the game, but I also tried to capture the feelings I felt, through the environment. This just shows me how good Undertale is in making the player part of it's world. We also, seperatly sadly, watched Undertale the musical, it is fun talking about it with my sister. One day she told me about a character named Gaster that scared her, and I wanted to learn more about him, to get her fear away, which slowly got me into the fandom through seeing comic videos on youtube, that and my want for more Undertale of course. Undertale also got me to appreciate games in a completely new way. I never actvely thought of them as art, but now I do. I also think a bit more about how games work e.g. in terms of programming, and the Undertale fandom is an awesome place for theories which I loved already, so this is also what changed a bit in my life, I now have something to theorize about. (By the way so much of Undertales fancontent is amazing as well, be it theories, voice acting, animation or fanart, I never experienced anything like this in other fandoms I was part of before) Me and my sister of course played the game more, I got to better my non existend voice acting skills, and we tried and failed a genocide run, though it was very cool to see an ending like this in retrospect. We also succeded in a genocide run, and while I nowadays admit that maybe Sans is a bit harder, I think the Undyne fight is the better one, or at least I prefer it. My sister sadly felt pretty bad during the route, not just because we killed everyone, but also because she felt like she wasn't skilld enough for it. And then one day came the day I decided to make fan content as well, but that's not that important right now. TLDR: My Undertale experience is basically the friends we made along the way. I got closer to my sister through it, while having a ton of fun and discovering new things about myself. I also discovered a place of creativity I had not known before. I now have so many precious memorys about that time when my sister and I played Undertale, the aftermath isn't really that important to my game experience, especially since it drifts into it's completely new experience right now, which has precious memories for it's own. In the summer holidays me and my sister now always do a pacifist run, it's our rule that we only can play Undertale together.

[@yellowsnake7300]

@@Ammiteur9 The TLDR section is appreciated, but how can you put a glorious three comment long novella in front of me and expect me NOT to read the whole thing? I’m happy you and your sister had so much fun with it, and I had fun reading about your journey of love and misunderstandings. It’s like watching a let’s play, but in book form and with a before and after section! Thank you so much for sharing, I hope you rested your fingers after.

[@Ammiteur9]

@@yellowsnake7300 Wait, seriously? Thank you so much! I thought anyone who reads this is just going to sigh of exhaustion or something. And I went straight to bed after writing this actually. I'm planning to make some corrections today (looking if I misspelled anything and stuff like that). Thank you again for your kind words!

[@limeperson4675]

only true undertale fans have an "I_EXERT_DOMINANCE_OVER_TOBY_FOX_" shortcut in their files

[@casino-lights]

no I absolutely had the same experience, running through a pacifist playthrough and then feeling unable to start again. the descent into awe and this very specific madness you mentioned started right at the beginning of my playthrough, when I fought toriel at the exit of the ruins. aiming for a pacifist run because I knew just enough about undertale to know that route existed, I tried to whittle her health down until she'd let me spare her because the game had just told me minutes earlier that some monsters couldn't be spared immediately and choosing "mercy" on toriel didn't seem to do anything. when she faded into dust, I felt like an absolute demon and so I looked up if there was an alternate way to do this. when I found out there was, I reloaded it. and then flowey laughed at me and said he knew what I had done. I had to walk away from the game for a few hours after that. it's been loaded on my PC since the day I bought it. every time I think I want to replay it, something holds me back. I'm still not sure what it is, but honestly, it's the most creative and incredible feeling any game has ever given me.

[@alexisarruda1629]

this is definitely the best undertale thinkpiece i've ever come across (probably due in no small part to the fact that you're obviously an MSPA fan)... i sympathize pretty heavily with that feeling of absolute devastation after finishing the game, or really any other piece of media that packs as much of a punch as UT. somehow both euphoric and completely distressing... the way fiction can fuck with the bounds of reality as you define them is crazy! a lot of people talk about wanting to relive undertale for the first time, without having played it ever before. in a way this essay fulfilled some of that desire for me, considering it helped me truly understand and actualize so many of the feelings i experienced when i first played the game- this way of talking about undertale and its meta narrative took me right back to fall 2015, and anything that is able to do that has a very special place in my heart haha definitely checking out your other content! wonderful piece!

[@rayman-kx3ig]

To me undertale kinda came in a tough time of my life and introduced me to non multiplayer fps gaming. Also sans is cool, so cool that i thought to write a long post on why he is a perfect fictional character. Iam glad my self-consciousness won that time.

[@jackofroge]

Thing is, his popularity proves you right. But this is the internet we're talking about, we can't have nice things.

[@whateveridoyouwillgetpisse9846]

Sans is pretty cool, I don't think anything is "overpopular". There is be a big reason hundreds of people find him intriguing, for me he is too relatable, and hits close to home. There is hundreds of reasons why people think he is awesome. I wish to know why people like sans a skele-ton.

[@jackofroge]

@@whateveridoyouwillgetpisse9846 Oh I'm not talking about the "overpopularity" DIRECTLY.... It's just... There's a reason Sans won that tumblr award...

[@szkraft220]

(I put an EDIT at the end of this somment documenting my experience with the game, I think it's really interesting actually!) I love these essays, they make me feel a lot and they remind me of my thoughts when i first saw the things discussed. They just feel so... good I THINK this for this one in perticular is in part because of me appreciating the game so much for the same reasons and thinking of these exact reasons before, but i never tried to put it into words so elegantly. It always ended at " i really like how resetting is an ingame thing" BUT I HAVE thought about the player becoming numb to killing, like in any other game. JUST. LIKE. WHAT LOVE IS. It is so wild to me that Level Of Violence ESPECIALLY in geno playthroughs works on the players brain like it does mechanically. Sans explains that it becomes easier to kill the more LOVE you have and HE LITEARLY TALKS ABOUT HOW YOU DISTANCE YOURSELF how is the writing so genius oh my sog?? Anyway... thats why I like these videos. They manage to feel to honest and passionate about this wierd thing we all are obsessed with. Man. As always the editing is spectacular and dare i say better than ever. Same for the music choice!! Reconciliation was a great pick for that "delving inti insanity" portion, mwah. EDIT: I now have decided to add onto this comment to talk about my experience with discovering UNDERTALE, because I feel it's interesting! I've heard about it before 2019, even watched Sans meme compilations, but never found out much about the actual character (or characterS) before summer 2019. It was then when... somehow my first major exposure to it... was a 4-part series of documenting secrets in DELTARUNE by Two Left Thumbs. So the next thing for me was... Actually I don't remember exactly. There were 3 things I was watching at the same time I think, which ended up confusing me for 2 months about what was canon and what was not. These things were: Jackscepticeye's Undertale playthroguh (a really good one I'd say), FOR SOME REASON Merg's Dusttale fangame playthrough (I know I watched this one before some of Jack's UT episodes, because I remember seeing Muffet's lair in that fangame FIRST, before Undertale itself, haha!) AND Glitchtale, at least the first season (I still quite like it! Even with its oh so visible issues its just a nice fanproject with a lot of love put into it still i think...). So yeah. I was watching these interchangebily, probably a bad idea, but that did NOT stir me away! I had a blast with the UT playthrough and ended up being SERIOUSLY impressed with the fact that meta elements were part of the world and none of the characters even once said that they know theyre in a game. It reminded me a lot of Oneshot, really... I had a very emotional experience with both that and this, despite my first experience on both being playthroughs. (Oneshot Soltice actually scarred me enough to be scared of if iI was real for a long while... no other media made me feel that way before...) After a while of consuming UT fanworks and for example being in AWE of UNDERVERSE (which I took a big liking to, because I found the fact that 1. there is such a dedicated fandom to make a lot of AUs like that and 2. there was someone out there who wanted to animate it all so beautifully) and being really scarred and amazed by the quality of Handplates and Starbot's dub of it... I decided that with my dwindling Hollow Knight fandomhood (I loved the game but I wasnt enjoying the discord that much anymore) I'd look for an Undertale server to join. My first was one focused around Asriel, I wasnt active there for long but it made me realise that i shouldnt be scared of entering somehting new like that. After that was Undertale Don't Forget, I met a lot of friends through it that I still sometimes talk to! The community can be pretty wacko, but I enjoy the people who are part of the project for the most part, I'm actually a contributor to it! And then... Inverted Fate server. That's where I've stayed active the longest. I loved everyone's love for details in the game and the discussion of them, it was rly cool to see more niche fanworks get appreciated there instead of another take on a Judgement Hall battle (I dont think theres anything wrong with those but theres definately an oversaturation, I actually was on the Last Breath team for a while, but drama happened, long story) That's where I am today, pretty wild ride I'd say and my appreciation of the game has only and only grown throughout it. This is a game that will probably never entirely leave my head, Im really fixated on it right now, haha, same for Deltarune! I just thought I'd type this all out since the beggining especially was BUMPY. I mean... I went from MOSTLY consuming repetetive content on youtube that was just sans over and over to freaking out over a single line of dialogue and wondering about its implications I DID NOT PROOF READ THIS, IM SORRY, IM TOO NERVOUS TO DO SO, i just hope its readable... also im at a point where I can quote a lot of the game roughly and despite that I still havent finished it ever, i attempted it twice but both times stopped at undyne (my old save was left behind on my old computer and deleted) , now im just waititng for that SPECIAL MOMENT when im gonna actually play it

[@bugdracula1662]

the Reconciliation bit is the first part of a video essay that I have sought out and re watched, without watching the entire essay in full, and it's been about a day.

[@szkraft220]

​@@bugdracula1662 i dont know HOW he TIMED words in the essay to the music's drops, but I was impressed. AND THE PART WITH "It had taken the act of interacting with it in the external world... and MOVED IT o the internal mode" LIKE I JUST REWATCHED THAT PART AND STILL GOT CHILLS THIS IS AN ESSAY VIDEO. HELLO?? PLUS when (everhood spoilers btw, play it its a great game) Universe would appear in the original battle he put the endless spinning sanses floweys and tobys and that just... ouuuughhh goodness

[@starwars90001]

Funny you should mention azathoth. If you think abut the players relationship to the world of Undertale and how its shape by our minds then Undertale itself becomes a piece of Lovecraftian horror media. The player is cosmic entity breaking and restoring the world of undertale for their amusement, no different than azathoth.

[@andrew_cunningham]

Azathoth is just when Jerma plays it.

[@lambaman]

Deltarune is exactly like this, only that the characters are also players on games that operate like videogames. Also, spamton sweepstakes made me think about something: maybe deltarune tackles the theme of an intruder (player) in a different world, as the player is someone from an outer world, that controls someone in the light world, that creates darkworlds(fictions) that they play a role, yet those fictional characters want the power of the real player, the power to be free and choose. This will be a hell of a game

[@FloridusMan]

Although I initially rejected Undertale I have come to love it with Deltarune. I think about it a lot but its mostly around the situation around it's creation. All the result of a single dream Toby had when he was sick and UT being made after he got bored and went on wikipedia one day. All of this leading to a massive butterfly effect to the media and even appearing in Smash. This one singular game and its impact is merely the product of a dream and a circumstance on its creator. I may be looking too deep into this but the impact this game managed to make in such a short amount of time and literally only being made from a single dream Toby had at college is impressive.

[@8is]

Why is this so goddamn good? 25:28 like holy shit, that's so well put and visually conveyed :O.

[@erinravenseeker413]

Something else I think about a lot recently but have never seen discussed, relating to how saving and resetting is canonical (as discussed in sans' speech), is that if you do a perfect run of the game without ever reloading, then "timelines stopping and starting until everything ends" can't be true. UNLESS everyone ELSE'S games are canonical - all the runs of everyone who has ever or will ever play the game. That means the entire premise of the game lives and dies on the community existing/having existed, and that you are in a sense contributing to the meta-narrative of not just your own game, but the games of everyone else who will ever play it.

[@houndoomdude2]

What this video really got to sink in for me is the brilliance in the fact that the people who are really are immune to the logic of Undertale’s fiction are the people who aren’t particularly invested in its world. In other words, the people who are NOT going to be inclined to ever re-play the game. By trying to beat Undertale at its own game, by going through that mental exercise of trying to reconcile replaying the game while refusing its in-universe logic about saving and loading, Undertale has already beaten you. You’ve already demonstrated a level of investment in the fiction. This is why I enjoyed so many elements of the metacommentary on player behavior in the genocide run. It really diagnoses the way the player must necessarily be trading some of their investment in the game’s characters for curiosity about seeing the game’s content-and that trade off necessarily means losing investment in the fiction, because seeing all the game’s “content” is entirely an interaction with the game as a product rather than with the game as a fictional world.

[@larhyperhair]

I remember once I tried to do a genocide run, but got stuck on undyne, so I quit there and made up an incredibly long headcanon story about a world where undyne just, got to win, she's the true hero of my own failed story

[@annguerrero9988]

After watching this video, all I can say is "is there a way to give oneself amnesia?" Id give anything to forget everything undertale related and relive it again I can't believe everything I've ever felt after finishing the game was FINALLY put into words...

[@xanam4913]

The segment showing players slowly become detached over the course of the genocide route was genius, and I'm SO glad to see such a good deep-dive on flowey, he's one of my favourite characters of all time and i think you covered everything about him (and how the game drags us in so deeply) so well. Admittedly I've lost track of the amount of times I've played undertale, but i didn't finish the genocide route until last year - even then, i couldn't bring myself to kill flowey though, and turned the game off when he asked me not to kill him. When i did my first true reset, i backed up the save file on a USB stick first so that I'll always have it, and so the very first iteration of my experience can one day be restored, hopefully.

[@capdat5876]

i never played the game, but all the media, the memes, fan made comics, music videos, headcannons, i lived my life and as reprieve looked at all of that, and undertale sucked me in, i never cared for the people but the story and the eventual creations or continuations of said story......undertale was my escape from reality, to a kid who grew up on games and lost his ability to suspend my disbelief, i had lost my ability to immerse myself in fiction alwase looking at it through the lens of reality, but undertale was able to pull me in and only now after 8 years i realise my ability to enjoy fiction, and in some part my ability to feel as a whole had been sparked and the longer i stayed around undertale the stronger it got, it was my first and only reprieve from reality......for a kid who had nothing else, it was everything, this video made me cry so much.......its a rare gift to be given tears for me but welcomed none the less thank you

[@James-gp3nf]

it's always fun to listen to what people are passionate about, even more so when it's done as eloquently as you did; the way you explained what drew you to the game and how you edited everything was superbly done. this was a really cool video.

[@baitornot4697]

I stopped being obsessed with Undertale at a certain point in middle school. Then later on deltarune comes out, and I don't even check it out for a while, thinking, eh im over undertale stuff. Then I check it out and imediatly get obsessed with deltarune in the same exact way as in middle school. Then I get over deltarune chapter 1, then near my end of highschool chapter 2 comes out, and same situation of, eh im over deltarune, wasnt even that great, then I check out chapter 2 and same obsession. Now I am an adult, but I feel like when the next deltarune chapter comes out, I will have the same child like obsession all over again.

[@emperorbooglitch8540]

Huh, I knew why Undertale was great after watching every single video essay on it, though I still like more opinions from different people. So far, smiles are made and minds are being boggled. Would you believe me if I told you that Undertale of all games gave me the possibility of accepting that life itself is nothing but a game. Me going into the store, me doing my work, me commenting out this comment, me talking to my friends and family. That there's rules and logic behind each aspect of this massive game, and I routinely suspend my disbelief and play this game forever? I can suspend my disbelief just enough so that I won't go crazy, while still coming pretty close every once in a while.

[@RubyBlack1416]

It took alot for me to do a genocide after the pacifist, and I felt sad the whole time. But I was so curious so I kept going, eventually becoming numb to it, as the grinding and undyne killing me for weeks on end wore me down. Then came the sans fight, and after a month of on again off again trying to kill him, I got farther into the battle then I ever had before, and was greatly suprised when all of a sudden, he spared me. I just started at the screen for a long time, and even though I knew I had to continue, that if I gave up all the work I did would have been for nothing... I just couldn't bring myself to do it. That spare, something I hadn't done in so long, remined me of the first time I played and how much mery ment to me, and it really humbled me. So I spared him, my favorite character, and even though I kinda saw that trap coming, I was happy to accept that death. I didn't come back to the game for a long time after that, like sans asked, until about a years later, where I reset and finally gave him the ending they all deserved, and didn't dare take that away from them again

[@Splitboltxful]

My funny/deranged take you requested is i’m one of those “huge undertale fans excited to play it” I never played it and still called it one of my favorite games. Then I tried to show it to my brother and he rage quit at papyrus of all bosses lmao So i actually went back and played it proper and now it’s my absolute favorite game. Bingo gottem Worth noting that the genocide gutpunch still hits hard because even a player just WATCHING it on youtube still gets called out by flowey. What the fuck toby lol Banger video dude, your best yet. Tempted to show my undertale goblin power level and send this to some friends

[@cameron670]

Undertale came out when I was in school and when it came out me and a couple of friends played it together while not thinking much of it at first, but as we kept on going we ended up all getting immersed in the game together. Come the ending we were all crying in the back of the class like the losers we were. I personally don't particularly care about any philosophical stuff about the game or the fact that Toby Fox is a god that can change the writing of video games for ever, I just remember undertale as the fun RPG that my friends and I sent hours on trying to 100 present while we jokes about if Sans was into anal, the game will always just be a memorable nostalgic experience for me. I did like seeing a new perspective on it though and this video will defiantly make me look at this game in a new way in some form.

[@mrbread3991]

i literally cant do a genocide. No matter how many times i try i am always emotionally breaking down before i can even reach sans. The furthest i have got into a genocide was undyne, but still hearing her determined monologue made me give up the route. Undertale made me, you and everyone who has played it love the characters.

[@kassandraunknown]

My deranged undertale experience, not that it’s super deranged..: I always have to play undertale if I got a new device or something. Makes me feel a little less guilty that I didn’t reset the world I’m just helping the next one.

[@TheLetterbomber]

I knew this video would be enjoyable but I didn't especially the essay to be SO well written, and the editing to go as HARD as it does-seriously well done, surely this is your best work yet. Loved your perspective here 💛

[@NPCarlsson]

I've been scrolling past this video in my recommended for the past few days, not really giving it much of a thought and then today, I just thought why not? I can't find anything else that looks decent enough to watch while eating lunch. And now, having watched it, I think this might be the best analysis of why Undertale works so well that I've ever seen. I've seen other videos come close to explaining it, but this one actually got through to me. This is the only one that feels like you actually nailed down the point, knew exactly what you wanted to say about Undertale and communicated it clearly to the audience instead of mildly alluding to some philosophical message about morality or 4th wall breaks. You knocked it out of the park and the editing is stellar! That last 5 or 6 minutes almost gave me chills and I couldn't look away. Great work!

[@winstonthecatwizard7868]

One of my favorite parts abouts Undertale's fiction is how even quiting the game mid-playthrough can have interesting narrative weight, basically I went throught the classic Undertale route cycle did neutral, did true pacifist and after a bit decided i wanted to do genocide, but once I hit undyne the undying I quite and havent gone back to the game in years, and that in itself made a story of undyne the heroine of the underground managing to beat an unbeatable foe with the power of friendship which is very cool.

[@hyper_lynx]

Likewise for me, Sans did his job and protected me from myself. I've never beaten him (not for lack of trying). My determination ran out, and that was that. Come to think of it I have no clue what status my save file's in right now

[@evanvalance904]

Award winning editing. Really does well to illustrate your points visually and capture the insanity of thinking in this many dimensions causes. Fantastic video.