Undertale

Undertale
Popularity is seldom attributed to originality.
Developer(s)	Ape HAL Laboratory
Publisher(s)	Nintendo
Release date	9 years ago (Wait, really?)
Platform(s)	Super NES Game Boy Advance

Whoops! Maybe you were looking for under her tail?

“If you are the Toriel cosplayer who gave me a blowjob at Dragoncon, PLEASE inbox me. I think you took my wallet – it looks like an NES.”

~ slowbeef

UNDERTALE is a fandom that includes a video game at no extra charge. UNDERTALE is about a child murdering subterranean monsters who attempt to kill you at every turn, but the monsters are the good guys because of course they are and you should feel ashamed of yourself for even thinking of killing one, you monster. It's called UNDERTALE because CAVERNFABLE, GROTTOYARN, SUBTERRANEANDIEGESIS, and Cave Story were taken. You play a silent protagonist who finds themself in a mysterious cave system haunted by flowers modified by a mad scientist, and no these flowers are golden and not red so you can't sue. Instead of flying with boosters and shooting bars of soap, you dodge many different objects the obvious good guys throw at you.

The game has an inventive story which touches on meta-narratives, choice and the consequences of violence in interactive entertainment, which means it attracts the Thomas Was Alone crowd who believe that videogames were all murder simulators and Tetris before they started blogging about it. The game has a colorful cast of anthropomorphized animals with shoehorned character tics, which appeals to the My Little Pony fans and their ilk, who don't see the shame in fapping to pictures of blue glowing skeleton boners. Add the two together and somehow you get the biggest indie game of 2015.

Gameplay

Like many RPGs, the world of the game is essentially a long hallway, or one of those rides where a little train takes you through a dark room with animatronics and decorations on the side, except the animatronics are NPCs and the decorations are boring puzzles. As it would take only about three minutes to walk from one end of the game to the other, the player moves very slow and is constantly interrupted by random encounters. The player can choose to talk to NPCs, slowing down the game further, who mostly quote ~zany~ tweets.

In battles, you have to dodge aforesaid monster-themed objects. Like, a lot. You can attack monsters and kill them, but obviously won't, since sparing them is how you get to play the feel-good Pacifist route, the only one that matters. God knows you won't spare them otherwise, since they'll be walking all-invisible like getting ready to pounce on you even after you've spared them for the fifth goddamn time. You can also FLIRT with monsters, a game mechanic created solely to inspire smut art and incessant shipping wars.

Development

More than being a game, UNDERTALE was an experiment into the artificial insemination of a fandom. Toby Fox, the game's developer, took everything he knew from making Earthbound hacks and being trapped in the Homestuck guy's basement for a few years and made the most pandering game he could. Each aspect of the game was designed specifically to appeal to depressed and media-obsessed gay young adults, including mediocre pixel art, catchy music, furry characters with obvious and easily-imitable character tics, Twitter shitpost humor, and pretentious meta-narrative wanking to make a game that's pretty good. A pretty good game that the kids were guaranteed to go gaga over.

The game began development while Toby was trapped in Andrew Hussie (aforementioned Homestuck Guy)'s basement, and the only game making tool he had was a Playstation Portable with RPG Maker. This was suitable enough that the entire game was made on it. The music was composed on a MIDI keyboard nicked from Hussie's home during his escape. Toby Fox is often solely credited for UNDERTALE, but this is misleading. Temmie Chang did all the graphics, Everdraed wrote the iconic courtroom trial scene, and much of the programming was done by Toby's pet dog, Lesser Fox. Since dog programmers are prone to making errors when distracted by an imaginary passing car or shadow, the code had to be cleaned up by Satoru Iwata, whose dying wish was for his fursona "So Sorry" to be included as a boss.

UNDERTALE took nineteen months to develop, with thirteen months devoted to browsing Twitter for joke ideas and another four months devoted to the music.

Fandom

You'd fuck each and every one of them.

So Undertale obviously has a lot of fans, but what do they do? Like everything else, there's a lot of porn and other sins-that-crawl-up-your-back fan art by failed artists who want a new career, musicians who remake Megalovania in every conceivable style and on every instrument, and a lot of lonely young weird kids just there to take it all in.

There's so much fandom energy for Undertale that entire new Undertales, called Alternate Undertales (AUs), have been created to keep up with demand. Each AU has dumb changes like making everyone evil or whatever. This wouldn't be that notable, except these AUs also have fanart, cosplay and porn out the wazoo. This is why Undertale has won the award for worst fandom ever in 2015 and 2016. It got even worse with Deltarune.

Characters

Frisk: The main protagonist of UNDERTALE and holy figure of the Agender faith is a blind and genderless child named Frisk. The game leads you to believe the kid is <insert name here>, but this name is actually used for an unrelated minor character way later, as one of Toby's many ~wacky subversions~.

One of these is not like the others.

The story of Frisk begins after their over-exposure to the marketing campaign of the Minions movie. The character attempts to take their own life by jumping off a cliff, but unfortunately survives the fall only to become a talking flower's bitch. At this point, Frisk knew they fucked up. Frisk would be saved from the talking flower with the help of Toriel "the Goat Mom", who then attempts to adopt the fallen child as one of her own children. For the next ten to twenty minutes Toriel would teach Frisk the ways of peace, love, and friendship while at the same time serving the fallen child butterscotch pie.

Outcome 1: Frisk, after three or four "fights" of sparing random people in the streets, suddenly becomes a skilled ambassador, and through some Back to the Future bullshit they manage to travel back to the past and fend off intergalactic beasts such as Omega Flowey, a superplant with willpower, Asriel Dreemurr, ze Goat of Hyperdeath, and eventually Shaggy himself.

Outcome 2: Regardless of Toriel's best attempts to civilize the child, Frisk would soon discover Toriel's MAC-10 and proceed to kill everyone, only to eventually fall into an endless loop of getting dunked on by a skeleton. If they kill this skeleton, they meet the Devil who deletes everything if you don't sell your soul to them.

Of course, you even have the choice to kill some characters but not become a full-on rage-fueled apocalypse child, but that results in the lamest ending, where you receive a text from Sans:

"Congratulation. This Story is Fake End."

Flowey/Asriel Dreemurr: The true main antagonist of UNDERTALE. He is a very short and angry man who basically looks cute but wants to murder absolutely everything, because under it all he's really just an angsty teenager. Depending on the route the player chooses, he may become a fucked up giant monster television machine or magically age up into his God form, a typical DeviantArt fursona. This form was suggested by beta testers, who wanted a version of Asriel they could masturbate to without feeling guilty.

Toriel: A kind goat MILF who acts as a protective mother for Frisk. She appears at the very beginning of the game and at the end, unless you kill her, which many first time players do on accident. She's the main objective of 45% of the fandom, which Sigmund Freud reportedly found "very, very interesting". She lives in a house that is just a non-gray version of her ex-husband's, which is fucking weird.

Sans: The breakout meme character of the game and the main objective of the other 55%, Sans delivers puns in Comic Sans (hence the VERY WITTY AND CLEVER name) and spends the whole game being the lazy hedonist you wish you could get away with being. He also serves as one of the two real boss fights in the entire Genocide Run of UNDERTALE. (The one Toby Fox added only to repeatedly say not to do it, and yet here we are.)

Wow, another character trait? That's a lot of thought put into one character!

His hidden power attracts the type of nerds who like to argue who Goku could and could not defeat in a fight, and his mysterious nature has spawned dozens – if not thousands – of "theories", fanfictions and even worse, fangirls. Early scientists theorized that Sans has a blue dick, which seemed impossible, as he is a skeleton.

It was later discovered by dataminers that Sans is not a skeleton at all but merely a bald albino who pretends to be one for easy skeleton-based puns. His battle theme, Megalovania, is currently the most beloved song in all of the internet, despite being overlooked the other two times it was shoved into something by its creator. But oh well.

PAPYRUS: Sans's brother who is also named after a font. He is loud and enthusiastic about everything, particularly spaghetti and puzzles. This enthusiasm, along with his sensitivity, lacking social skills, and special interests make him popular among the autism and ADHD crowd. His only purpose in the Genocide Run is to attempt to make you feel guilty for killing him and quote Shakespeare. His role in the Pacifist route is more involved, as he rejects going on a date with you and joins the Royal Guard, then quits and joins the Los Angeles Lakers. From then on, the player receives phone calls from Papyrus giving them betting advice based on whether Papyrus expects to win his next game.

Undyne: An anthropomorphic fish who has magic laser spears designed to appeal to lesbians. In the Pacifist-and-also-totally-the-best™ Route, she tries to kill Frisk and somehow befriends them due to Papyrus's tricking her. Later in the game, she gives them a totally non-filler mission to deliver a love letter to Alphys, which unfolds into a PG love story in which she and Alphys realize their mutual affection for each other. In the Genocide Route, she saves a random kid from Frisk and becomes a slightly more threatening fish who has determination and hosts a more difficult DDR minigame.

Alphys: A female, yellow reptilian who lives in the lab in western Holland. She is the Royal Scientist, a position she was awarded by Asgore after the very convenient disappearance of her predecessor. She's a huge otaku who turned a bunch of sick monsters into molten Frankenstein-like horrors by accident and lied to their families about it, and spends much of the game manipulating a child to feel cool. She is in Lesbos with Undyne and friends with the Mr. Saturns, a bizarre yet friendly species of alien.

Mettaton: This gay robot is a showman with one of the most annoying voices in the history of games. Introduced in the form of a Cardboard Box, he is put into a sexy new body halfway through (or at the end of) his character arc, making him even more egotistical. Mettaton is the host of the highly popular podcast The Joe Mettaton Experience, and in every episode he verbally abuses Burgerpants, a loser who stands in for the player.

Asgore Dreemurr: The king of the monsters. His name is shown in all caps, plus he uses Satanic imagery, to make him look like the main villain up until the second half of the game, after which he is revealed to be ANOTHER anthropomorphic goat who is tortured by a guilty conscience. His character is a divorcee, but the type who's so pathetic you can't hate him. He declared war on humans, which immediately caused the divorce, his son's becoming a flower, his adopted child's becoming a more straightforward Devil, and everyone in his kingdom getting owned. He enjoys creeping up on random strangers and starting to chat with them.

Napstablook: A depressed ghost added only to justify putting in some new soundtrack and pander to depressed millennials. They are, in fact, depressed, for it is their only character trait and we'll just overlook it.

Muffet: A one-scene midboss like Napstablook, Muffet is A FULLY LEGAL, ABOVE THE AGE OF CONSENT MONSTER WHO JUST HAPPENS TO LOOK LIKE A CHILD. She is born with five eyes and six arms, which was too many to call herself human but not enough to call herself fully spider. Her fight is so long and annoying you can pay a microtransaction to remove it from the game, which has divided players. Players who don't pay the fee insist it's really not that bad and that her theme music is pretty bumpin', but to others it's merely a nightcore punk-ska cover of Napstablook's theme.

Gaster: A character who (usually) isn't even in the game. Despite this, he gets just as much crappy dubs and fanart as the other characters.

Legacy

Holy fuck it's him you guys!

UNDERTALE was instantly a hit, spawning the fandom we know and try to ignore. However, few of the fans have bothered to play the game, since it's a slog, so it didn't sell very well. It still easily made back its budget of zero dollars, and the merchandise sold better than spider donuts at a charity bake sale. Fans will spend money on literally any crap Fangamer® puts out with an UNDERTALE logo on it, including T-shirts, dolls, body pillows, pogs, and novelty mugs. As of 2020 sales of the actual game have increased after the release of a Game Boy Advance port, which The Pope declared his favorite game of all time.

Many indie games have tried to become The Next Undertale and failed, which has made the fandom even more gluttonous for a sequel. Originally intending to retire and sell plush skeletons for the rest of his natural days, Toby Fox was pulled back to game development when he thought of a funny joke that just had to be said by Sans in a game. A sequel except-not-really called DELTARUNE is currently being worked on by Toby and Lesser Fox, while spinoff titles are handled by other teams, such as RENTALDUE, a Cooking Mama inspired game where Toriel struggles to pay rent, UNALTERED, a remixed version of Undertale with swapped characters and redesigned locations, and UNRELATED, a fishing sim better known by its Japanese name Jimmy & The Pulsating Mass.

Also, Sans has been added to fucking Smash Bros and had a career in indie wrestling under the name of Kenny Omega.