Undertale Yellow is that very rare breed of fan-game, in that it not only serves as a more than worthy successor to the game it's based on, but arguably even improves on it in several areas. It really hit me just how much of a godsend the run button really is in this game, as there were several moments in Undertale where I feel like I was just moving too damn slow, and it made the world tedious to navigate at times. I also think the game is improved by not having you play it twice to get the pacifist ending, which struck me as rather unnecessary in the original.

But on top of the things this game gets better than the original Undertale, this game also has a couple of qualities that are just as good as the genuine Toby Fox article. The writing is clever and funny, the characters are extremely memorable and well-realized, the combat encounters are just as memorable and shake up the core gameplay in all the right ways, and the emotional moments hit home. The characters of Starlo and Ceroba, especially, live rent-free in my head, and manage to actually outdo a fair chunk of the actual characters Toby Fox has constructed.

For want of criticism, there are a few very frustrating moments that probably should have been tested better, such as the fight with El Bailador, the Axis chase, and the final Pacifist boss, but they put out a patch to fix all those complaints, so bringing them up now doesn't mean much. I also feel like Undertale was just a bit more ambitious with the story it wanted to tell, what with it being a meta-narrative and everything, whereas this simply feels like a side story. An amazingly well-written side story, but still a side story, that doesn't really go as far with its themes as the original. But overall, this game is miraculously good, and the entire development team should be celebrated for managing to craft an experience that could be reasonably mistaken for Toby Fox's own handiwork. Normally, when a game has a very publicized long development time, it's a bad omen for the project, as with Duke Nukem Forever, but here, I really do get the sense that the developers made the most of the seven years they spent on this game. A must-play if you're a fan of Toby Fox's work.