Everything that Sucks About Undertale - Negatives - Rerez
Undertale is a massively popular game with tons of people playing it all over. When it came out a whole bunch of online review outlets and other YouTubers were giving this game a near-perfect score. Which is pretty incredible. But is it perfect? Let's find the negatives.
Undertale is an RPG that is stylized like an old DOS or very old NES game. That's kind of interesting because the way it looks and plays doesn't really feel like any other RPG I've ever played. But it has elements of these other RPGs kind of bundled into it. For instance one of the things I really like about this game is its fighting gameplay. In most RPGs the way that they do fighting is just this attack and wait kind of thing and I've never really enjoyed that. But what they've done in this is they've implemented a bullet hell, dodging attack thing that looks amazing and it plays really well. It completely subverts your expectations when getting into the game and makes the gameplay a heck of a lot more fun. On top of that the fighting mechanics can also be done in such a way where it's not really fighting. In some instances you can just go through the entire game without attacking anyone and completely being passive which I really enjoy. Other games like Deus Ex and Dishonored have a sort of similar mechanic but I think Undertale does it better than any other game I've ever played. It's really phenomenal and honestly when those things happen in the game and you have to avoid attacking somebody it might involve the story in some way. Hint hint. And it makes it a lot more enjoyable and gives it a more deeper impact. The music in Undertale is also a highlight. It’s really well composed and really fun to listen to and it fits the settings and scenes really well. Which really is impressive for a really small indie game. Undertale was largely created by one guy named Toby Fox. He published it, he developed it, he wrote it, he even composed the music and a lot of the art assets in the game are also by him. This game feels like more time and knowledge went into it than some of the big published games I've seen come out from huge companies. Toby did a fantastic job and it's really incredible. All that being said though we're still going to look at some negative points.
The art style in this game has been up for a lot of debate and to be honest it's not one of my favorite parts of the game. The art style seems a little bit too basic at points. Sometimes it's really complex and other times it's not and it just kind of mixes it styles too much. One scene looks bright and colorful and vibrant with a lot of detail and then another scene looks really poor like no time was put into it. I can understand that this is an indie game but honestly that's one of the big problems I had with it. The art style, the character designs, all that stuff I just felt didn't really work that well. And really I think a lot of people can agree with me on that. So the first negative is that this game doesn't have the greatest of art styles. When I first started Undertale it really didn't have a big impact on me. There's all these little puzzle pieces that were being played out which didn't really interest me too much. There's these little character interactions and combat scenes that just felt really slow. I understand the game was kind of trying to throw me into the mix of things and teach me the game world but I was getting really bored. The first two hours of this game I think are some of the worst aspects of this game because just nothing's really happening. They're throwing lots of ideas at you, lots of characters and nothing for me really stuck because of its slow start. I think a lot of people that pick up the game for the first time kind of shy away from it after a bit because it just doesn't really get warm until a couple of hours into the game. When one character shows up specifically it starts to be a little bit more interesting, a little bit more vibrant and honestly starts to become a lot more fun but only when that character shows up. Everything before that is kind of depressing, creepy, awkward, strange and slow-moving. So the second negative is that this game moves very slowly.
I said earlier on that I really like the attacks in this game because of the way that you could actually go between attacking somebody and being passive and not hurting them. But that doesn't mean I like every aspect of the attacking in this game. One thing I found that was really annoying which is probably common for a lot of RPGs is that when you get into a mode where you're attacking somebody the game gets well-padded out. Between all the attacking, avoiding attacks and all these little mini games it really pads out the gameplay. When I'm walking through a hall I don't want to be attacked 20 times because if you get attacked even once it's like adding another 5 or 6 minutes of gameplay which is completely unneeded. That kind of gameplay has always irritated me in a lot of RPGs and Undertale is a very modern game which probably should have learned from those things and made those attacks a little bit shorter and possibly a lot easier to get through. And while not every attack is really long and drawn out there's enough of them that it irritates me. So the third negative is that this game has some pretty long attack sequences.
Pretty much every video game that's made nowadays is built upon a video game engine. For example the Creation Engine for Fallout 4 or RAGE for Grand Theft Auto 5. Some of these engines are internal and don't get used in public but some of them are public and anyone can use them and the one that Undertale used is GameMaker Studio. GameMaker Studio is a really cool engine with a lot of really good features for people to make games on but one problem I've had with this engine at least with Undertale is that it keeps crashing on me. Within the first couple of hours the game crashed on me four times and that really sucked. I don't know why it did it and I know there's a lot of other people out there that didn't have the issue I had but it really affected the way I played this game. I've played large games, small games, games from independent developers and games from huge publishers that have never crashed on me. But Undertale crashed on me so much that it completely altered my experience of this game and put a sour taste in my mouth. Fallout didn't crash on me nearly as much as this game did and as everybody knows Fallout is a game that crashes a lot because of how crazy and complex it is. When Undertale crashes that much it just kind of sucks. Toby pretty much made everything else for this game I'm surprised he didn't just make his own engine. Probably would have taken a lot more time but the dude could probably do it. So the fourth negative is that this game uses a bad engine.
Undertale is a very unique game that takes elements of Cave Story and EarthBound and kind of blends them together in this really cool way. If you've never played an indie game before you have to give this a shot because it just might enlighten you to go out and play a bunch of other really cool indie games. And if you're a console player from the past and really like retro games you should try this out because it's something modern that feels authentically retro. All this being said I am so excited to see whatever Toby comes up with next because if one guy is capable of doing all this the future is really bright for him.
Sometimes it's right to even present the negatives of a game, being honest!
Thanks for the post
Never had a chance to play it, heard all the hype back in the day and yes, the pace of the game early on made me fall asleep watching a play-through of it. Wayyyyyy too slow, it's like he built the first few hours under the assumption that the player has never touched a single video game before in their lives.
Thanks for this post sharing.... i like his gaming. best of luck dear friend