I Returned to Undertale after a Decade to Kill Everyone

I bought Undertale in 2015, and played Undertale in 2015. Charming little game, fun action-ish combat with great characters, setting, music, etc etc you know what Undertale is. Like a large number of Undertale fans, I latched onto a particular interpretation of the various routes you can achieve throughout a playthrough. True Pacifist is the good ending, genocide is the bad ending, and the neutral endings exist mostly to force you to play the game more than once. I won't rehash the argument here. And while I believe more love should be given to the neutral endings, I won't be the one to do it today.

On a lark I wound up replaying Undertale this year. Part of my previously-held beliefs was that resetting after achieving my perfect ending would be a disservice to the game (or more neurotically, a disservice to the characters). But considering that I've changed computers at least twice in the past decade, I didn't even have that 2015 save file. With one minor hesitation overcome, I went on to tackle the rest.

See, Toby "fka fwg" Fox makes good boss fights. Deltarune (also doesn't need introducing) is clear evidence of that. And as much as I wanted to hold out for chapters 3-4 getting an itch release, I wouldn't be able to wait forever. But even if I dove straight into the new chapters and their rumored hard boss fights, there was one I never actually got around to. Which is crazy, because I beat the Halloween Hack (this one might get its own thread in the future. Seriously you're missing out). I'd seen other people fight Mr. Undertale. I even loaded up the bad time simulator once or twice. But that hardly counts. The Sans fight makes two demands; even before you get the challenge it forces you to earn that right.

The genocide route is, in a word, goading. The mandatory grind combined with how easy combat becomes poses a question to the player: do you really want to do this? Your patience is tested more than anything throughout the run all the things that set Undertale apart from a typical RPG slowly bleed out of the world. It's this aspect combined with a certain interpretation of the Sans fight that led to many decrying genocide as a route Toby Fox doesn't want people to take. This begs the question: who designs a game for the sake of not playing it?

Undertale wears its influences proudly, standing on decades of RPGs that came before it. Even how the game starts, with you all by yourself in an underground cave for some unknown reason, takes inspiration from many a computer or 8-bit entry in the genre. But with the love of RPGs comes a pile of scrutiny. Along with everything else it does, Undertale is a criticism of how many RPG tropes have been normalized to the point that many of them have stopped being questioned. Genocide route is built off of one such staple: the 99 level cap. Your average final boss is expecting to pose a challenge to heroes anywhere from the 40s-60s range. Swinging lower than that is more common than requiring more. Yet the game allows you to grind and grind well past the point it would actually benefit you. For the sake of brevity, Toby Fox made a game that could be beaten at level 1, with the cap of 20 existing as a ludicrously overpowered state. But unlike the giants it stands on, Undertale does have a reason for the player to put in this effort: The Undying. Sans too, but seriously Undying is a great fight don't sleep on it.

I went into my journey expecting it to largely suck. Swaths of time doing nothing followed by a ridiculously difficult boss. Yet as I made work of the ruins, I found myself obtaining a sick sense of accomplishment. And maybe even... fun? The genocide route slowly infests Undertale as you adhere to it. Ruins is the same, Snowdin comes with new funny dialogue while you receive help in the form of puzzles being pre-completed for you; mirroring how the combat becomes trivial after a few LVs. But your consequences don't really show up until after you hit the kill requirement. The game is upfront about you being on a dark and unusual path, with ample opportunities to abandon ship. Again, genocide route makes sure that this is something you want.

Interestingly enough, Waterfall is largely the same. At least it felt that way going through it. Most of the NPCs are gone, and the few that remain are either totally oblivious to the nature of your route or Gerson. As reasonable as his disdain for me was, it convinced me to not spend a penny on his wares. And then there's Monster Kid. A kid, just like you! Oh, how quickly I grew tired of them. The delightful characters that make Undertale shine become annoyances when your only goal is to "win." You've already had to kill goat mom and a few dogs in order to get this far. Attacking a kid hardly feels like a moral qualm by this point.

Meanwhile, Hotland is wildly different. Alphys is too smart to even meet you, and most of the map before the core has been locked off. I'll give special mention to Mettaton NEO here, who I believe is an inversion of the player. All of his cool weapons and posturing are a weightless joke. All of the power he gained was for nothing, save the satisfaction of having it.

I realize I completely bypassed Flowey in this. Crazy, given how many words I'm using. Flowey's your best friend, and he really needs you to know that during the genocide route. He's the one beating the puzzles for you so you can focus on the important things. You're feeding into most of his worst traits. And when the finale starts, the point where only a hard reset can veer you off-course, he shows up and starts being vulnerable with you? You've proven yourself to be on his level. As uncaring as Flowey claims to be, he's ecstatic that there's finally somebody who can relate to him. It's enough to make him start questioning his own motives. Loneliness makes people do terrible things, after all. But as I already said, your options have been shaved down to two: quit or continue. How many potential friends are piles of dust by this point?

Sans returns after probably crying about his brother for most of the game. He's an inversion of Undying. He's calm where she's furious. She fights a traditional boss battle instead of pulling every dirty trick the game has yet to try on you, from dodging to poison to hard cuts between attacks. And yet, there's not a lot of difference between a boss needing to be hit 24 times vs a boss that dodges the first 24 hits and dying on the first one that lands. But enough about the fight itself, I want to get into a popular misconception regarding Sans.

Yes, he's more aware of things than most characters. No, his memory doesn't hold between saves or resets. He's got an uncanny ability to read faces, presumably because he's not the soulless monster in the room. But as Sans continues to monologue throughout the fight, one thing stuck with me: what knowledge he does have of saving and timelines hit him with college student levels of existential crises. Sans is calm because he's nihilistic. He's convinced that any good he does will ultimately be meaningless. You can see it in the neutral routes with his judgements, as well as his stint as a lost soul in true pacifist. It's only when something directly threatens not just lives, but existence itself that he can be forced into action. Too little, too late.

We don't have to talk about Asgore, he's even more of a nothingburger than Sans. At least the Sans fight is fun and engaging. Easily worth the grind. But getting this far and not talking about the fallen child would be an injustice. Chara is dead. In death, they have become more and less than themselves to the point where countless arguments have been made regarding who they used to be. I can't confirm anything, but I highly doubt they were talking about absolute power and erasing worlds at the dinner table. As intimidating as Chara postures themselves, they have been hopeless dependent on you for the entirety of the run. Plenty of people talk about Chara possessing Frisk, but the truth is that the player is the only one to take over that other kid. Chara admits their reliance on you. "My 'human soul.' My 'determination.' There were not mine, but YOURS." With Chara taking on the name you enter, there's another angle to it. The character you've built up, finally powerful enough to exist outside of the player. You know how early Final Fantasy games have you just make a party to play as? You get to name them, pick their classes, etc? Almost as if they weren't part of the world before you started the game. There's a bit of that going on. But now they're free, for there is nothing left in Undertale for them to do.

And that's how I felt about completing genocide. It was something I had missed the first time around. I still loved Undertale despite not experiencing the route; but being able to say I've completed the game relieved my itch. I haven't dug into the files myself, and I'm sure there's unique interactions I've missed. Yet I found myself leaving Undertale with the same sense of accomplishment I had crying through the credits ten years ago. The duality of the situation speaks for itself. Goodness knows I've spoken enough for one day.

tl;dr go kill Sans. And everybody else. You're missing out seriously. Oh shit, the title. Right. So like, there's a few things that really felt like genocide route was written with people returning to the game in mind. Flowey is glad to see you "after all those years." The prophecy in Waterfall talks about how the angel will "return" to empty the underground. Sans asks if you remember the fun you had with him before. I'm not making a tl;dr for the tl;dr this is a Homestuck forum.