below is my long thoughts on undertale yellow while i drink alcohol at 1 am on my 24th birthday. cool
SUMMARY: has some amazing art and animation but the storytelling/pacing is very underwhelming and almost nonsensical (and not in the funny undertale way, in the bad writing way).

the cast is where the problems lie the most— the amount of characters that interrupt your adventure to block your path or become important named npcs feels really overbloated and they become more like intrusions than characters i can come to like. undertale’s central cast is pretty small (I would say this is toriel, sans, papyrus, undyne, alphys, and maybe asgore. essentially all the characters onscreen in the true pacifist end) and you spend a good time with each of them, with some optional moments to make even more of a bond with them (dating sidequests) sprinkled over the game. yellow’s cast isn’t nearly as cohesive and they just keep introducing characters back to back that it’s hard to tell who you should be caring about and it gets… frustrating? in snowdin you have nearly back to back introductions for martlet, the ice pops guy, the usps whale, and the cupgame guys, the latter three just popping up right in the middle of your way and disrupting your gameplay almost back to back. compared that to snowdin with sans and papyrus who are the main characters you speak with/have fun moments with until it crescendos into the papyrus fight (there are some bosses but theyre bosses, vs sans and papyrus who appear frequently enough that you know they will be essential characters).

i think what also doesn’t help this lack of cohesion with the cast is lack of cohesion in motive. ex in undertale:
-toriel (does not want to let you go because she is scared about asgore)
- sans/papyrus (papyrus wants to be royal guard. wants to send you to asgore)
- undyne (royal guard. killing you for asgore)
- mettaton (under alphys’s command who serves asgore. killing you (to make alphys look cool but also) to take your soul for asgore)
along the way you also fight various knight characters who you can assume serve undyne/asgore and would take your soul to him/you to him if you lose. on top of enemies with just personal grievances (like muffet for being mean to spiders). they’re all united around the idea that youre a human, you are the seventh soul, you are going to die.
in yellow, i really feel like they forgot clover was a human a LOT and just threw random fights together because it was cool. dalv’s story was vaguely written and as a result not compelling or interesting (you can maybe guess that the human he saw was related to clover?? but he never appears again so it does not fuckin matter), martlet acknowledges you’re a human but they’re bumbling over themself so hard i can’t even tell what their motive is, the rhythm game guy came out of nowhere to do rhythm game things and just left, the people in the wild east sort of acknowledge you’re human but dont make any interesting commentary on how their king wants your soul (from what i remember???).

more spoilery thoughts:

clover’s keyword being “justice” (vs frisk’s “determination”) also feels flawed to me. on paper it’s an interesting idea, especially the idea of a child purposely falling down because other children have gone missing— the opening and item description for the missing child poster makes it seem like clover has the intent to find these children (or in the poster desc., i think the flavor text says “there must be justice” or something). but this motive of clover’s… is never expanded on?? it feels like they forgot about it, that they forgot about the whole ”looking for missing children” motive in favor of gushing about their ocs the whole runtime. really this game’s main issue is it feels like a game where you need to already know the ocs beforehand through lore you read in a google doc from a friend, THEN you play it.

“justice” feels forgotten about with the exception of the genocide route which honestly makes the most sense for me. but this isn’t really good. frisk’s “determination” can go both ways (determination to kill everyone, determination to save everyone. it’s about your mindset). the idea of “justice” feels firmly rooted in a negative kind of emotion for the person who is on the receiving end. i can’t imagine a time where justice was served where both sides of the situation both had positive experiences. especially so because clover is a cowboy— if you think of a cowboy who wants to get justice, you are going to think of a cowboy killing those that have wronged them. wild west style. But it’s an undertale fangame so you don’t WANT your motif to be something so outright negative. but then the motif is in full swing only in the genocide run. this feels very counterproductive.

(clover deliberately falls down to get justice for the five missing children but then in true pacifist comes to the conclusion to willingly give up their soul?? to the society that took the five children’s lives???? where is the “justice” here? and i think this could work if clover got blackpilled on the relations between monsters and humans like, if they went throughs some truly harrowing shit and found out it was all the humans’ fault, and the humans who fell down were evil, so then they give up their soul to aid the monsters as “justice” on the side of the monsters. the true pacifist ending just makes nooooooo sense to me when you try to tie it into anything we know about clover)

flower inclusion is also a bit… weird. his gambit is he wants to get you over to asgore’s asap so he can steal the human souls. i do not get the logistics of this to be honest. in undertale flowey’s choice to wait until six souls are gathered (and to use them to get frisk’s soul, so seven total) seems to be on purpose because that amount of souls will make him the Most Powerful. if flowey wanted power so bad, why would he drag clover all the way to asgore’s… flowey steals the souls offscreen in the undertale true pacifist ending so this implies he can just Do That If He Wants. why wouldn’t he just steal the souls and then smack clover upside the head to get their soul with his newfound power? is any of this making sense? i feel like they just needed a really contrived reason to get flowey to show up so much (compared to frisk being the last human needed (plot relevant) and frisk reminding flowey of chara (character relevant).
flowey talking at every save point is slightly grating because you know that flowey is not actually a good person so you’re waiting for the eventual betrayal reveal and thus all the “gee whiz! you’re the bestest friend ever!” text he has feels pointless to read.

the flowey boss fight w clay is cool. the everything else looks like sonic.exe

i think that’s every thought i had. the art and animation is great i just wish they had as many talented writers as they did talented artists. maybe i just “didn’t get it” but this failed to capture what made undertale’s story so great.

Easily the best Undertale fangame ever made, stands up well as its own game and doesn't rely heavily on referencing Undertale to be successful! Definitely deserves to have a console port so more people can enjoy this masterpiece!

I honestly prefer the soundtrack of this game to the original, the composers did an amazing job with the music!!

My only gripes with this fangame is that there isn't quite as much to explore and discover as in Undertale, and the final boss of the genocide route isn't balanced well.

one of my most defining traits as a human being is my obsession with Undertale/Deltarune. i grew up loving EarthBound, had unregulated internet access WAY too young and would browse the starmen.net forums never knowing how to post (which was a good thing!), and the ways both Undertale and Deltarune have shaped my life can't be overstated. i don't know if there's any single artist whose work has impacted me like Toby Fox's. this is all to say that i went into Undertale Yellow excited, i had heard a lot of great things, but i felt a lil cautious to see if it really had that sauce.

and Undertale Yellow does not have the sauce.

i think one of the most interesting aspects of Toby's design is how tight the pacing in his games are, Chapter 2 of Deltarune in particular being absolutely perfect. the way it builds and escalates its bits, the constant forward yet fulfilling momentum, the delicate balance of exploration to scripted events, and the way (aside from the music robots) every character is introduced and explored are my favourite in any game. you never forget walking past a dumpster and having some weird little fucker pop out at you, you can't not laugh at Berdly and Queen - two of the funniest characters ever to be coded into Gamer's History.

it's impossible for me not to compare that to Undertale Yellow. Yellow's nearly decade-long time spent in the oven shows, with its first half feeling extremely sloppy. there's not much in terms of interesting characters, story hooks, level designs, or setpieces. it gets more exciting as it goes to more original places (ie not the ruins or Snowdin) but the pacing only improves towards the end. i really like the concepts at play with the Wild East but it's a SLOG. reminiscent of the wrestling part in Thousand Year Door where you just hang around doing a half a dozen lame fights/mini-games. it feels like you spend half of the game in that town. everyone talks too much. dialogue isn't as punchy as it should be, conversations and scripted sequences tend to drag on. there's not much humour in it either.

Undertale Yellow's characters and story never come together in a satisfying way. Asriel Dreemurr made me cry and feel funny when i was 13, but the way everything ties into him and leads up to that final confrontation in Undertale is one of the greatest emotional payoffs in any game. Clover is more of a character than Frisk, they're not a kid who simply wandered into the underground - they came here for Justice. to save the souls of those other kids who died! i think this isn't very good? it never feels like a goal of the game, it never has any relevance outside of the genocide route. Flowey's aware of it but he feels like an afterthought in this (unrelated but Asgore is esp OOC and it bothered me). the real central story of the game is Ceroba's backstory, it's just that she only starts to get built up in the game's last 40%. it's not as focused as it should be, much of its time is wasted on disparate characters and segments that never satisfyingly connect or resonate with the player.

one of the only areas that Yellow gets close to Undertale in is its combat. there's some fun bullet patterns, great boss gimmicks, and the neutral/pacifist routes are pretty reasonably balanced (maybe a little too easy?). i gotta commend the unique content in its main three routes, especially the clay parts of Flowey boss fight in neutral (the parts where it looks like it came from newgrounds suck tho). genocide route also slightly makes me feel better about Martlet.

Martlet is the stand-in for Papyrus, a wannabe royal guard captain stationed outside Snowdin who's never met a human before. her first section is rough. Sans/Papyrus are possibly the most beloved characters in any indie game, it's easy to see why when you look at how well-paced their section is. they're introduced in exciting ways, have an escalating set of setpieces/mini-games, and have great designs. i can't say any of that for Martlet - who only makes an impact after her section is over, mostly in the genocide route for me. all you see of her before her fight are a couple scenes where she sets up a lame puzzle that, unlike Papyrus', are not jokes. it never builds to anything, instead it wastes time introducing the fuckass cuphead guys and the "made before Spamton but is a scummy salesman so i'm gonna think of Spamton" guy. Martlet is just Papyrus if he was a wholesome, boring furry woman without autism.

i am going to talk about Dalv now.

i don't think every character Toby cracks out is a total winner. Cap'n Cakes aren't very thrilling, Chapter 1's King is mostly there to be an evil guy you need to fight, and Alphys' dialogue in hotland can go on a bit too long (tho i do love her). they're all, at worst, a little boring but either don't have much of a major role or are merely slightly flawed. Dalv, Undertale Yellow's first major original character, does not have any redeeming factors. i straight up hate him. his design? looks like an Adventure Time OC a 16 yr old boy would self-ship with Marceline. his dialogue? boring as hell. the way he's supposed to be Yellow's Toriel stand-in? absolutely shameful. the way he's just a lame human-looking vampire and doesn't fit in? the way his only relevance to the rest of the game is that he used to hang out with little girls? the way he just has lightning powers for some reason? i had seen almost every major character in the game online in fan art at some point prior to playing EXCEPT for Dalv and i see why. despite being the game's first important new character he never shows up again or has any relevance to the game so he doesn't fuckin matter, he sucks ass bad and i hate him.

Ceroba's sorta neat, though. she's easily the strongest character in the game, her story plays off a few aspects of lore from Undertale that are fun to see explored - her having a daughter who ended up as one of the Amalgamates in the True Lab is great drama. she's also the most Toriel-like on the surface, having lost her husband and child through tragedy. she's very un-Toriel like in how she actually still loves her late husband, the ways in which she still clings to his memory and (undeserved) dignity in death is relatable. if my wife died, i'd be gassing her up constantly. her section is the stand-out portion of Yellow as well, the Steamworks have the best momentum and variety of gimmicks. i gotta ask tho - why is she japanese? how does she know what japanese culture is? monsters have been stuck underground for a millennia, she and her dead husband should not know what a kotatsu is. the game is defo too happy to reiterate her backstory but she's the sole character who has an actual motivation to fight you, which is nice. still feels horribly unearned when her boss fight theme starts incorporating aspects of Hopes and Dreams though. like you are NOT him.

that unearned feeling captures how i feel about it as a fan follow-up to Undertale. i don't think Yellow has enough ideas of its own to stand apart from Undertale, it spends 3/4 of its major areas retreading Undertale and most of its characters feel like lesser copies of Undertale's. mechanically, it harms itself by adhering too close to its inspiration. its design isn't ambitious or experimental enough. there's not many moments where i found myself surprised, feeling like i haven't already played this before. it doesn't have enough of its own identity and i found a lot of its original aspects to be really weak. it's like the Blue Shift of Undertale.

i think Undertale Yellow is okay. it's a remarkably professional feeling game. it seems like teenagers online really like it, tho it has been nearly three years since Chapter 2 dropped and UT/DR fans are starving. it's well-made but it's not cohesive or compelling, it feels more thrown together than particularly inspired. makes me appreciate Deltarune as a follow-up even more than i already did. if you're an Undertale fan and you haven't played thru some of its inspirations (ESPECIALLY MOON!!!!!! PLAY IT!!!!!!) i'd recommend you just do that over this. Undertale's writing is maybe its most important aspect and Yellow's writing simply isn't very good, there's no glue holding it together.

plus i don't remember any of its music and there was a really bad fnaf at freddy reference