I mean, you don't really need me to say anything, do you?
I was lucky enough to play UNDERTALE pretty early on. I hadn't heard about it during the Kickstarter phase or anything, but I remember it very suddenly exploding in popularity, and suddenly seeing sans everywhere. A buddy of mine gifted me the game and urged me to play through it, so I did, with the only real bit of knowledge towards it that you weren't supposed to fight people, and that this hoodie skeleton would be a fight at one point.
I think I had the same general experience a lot of people had out the gate: misunderstood what precisely I was supposed to do and hurt someone I didn't have to hurt, reloaded a save to do better, and got called out on it. The game had me from there.
I don't think there's a lot of new ground for me to cover, but one thing I want to say is that Toby Fox knew precisely what he had. I dunno if it's an artifact of his time with Homestuck and knowing what would trend, or just being a product of the internet, or what, but the sheer amount of shots he successfully called, with the exception of the scope of his fandom and just how impossibly high his career would launch, staggers the mind. You look at things like him leaving a polite request in the directory asking people not to upload stuff right away to Spriters Resource, or that specific scenario requiring so much careful engineering and understanding of player behavior to pull off. This is of course to say nothing of all the minute modular playthrough details that the game has to account for, and the sheer amount of commitment UNDERTALE has to its own themes, even to what would be a detriment in any other game in the case of its myriad endings.
I do bemoan how difficult it is to have a genuine experience of the game these days. Because UNDERTALE so thoroughly changed the world, I can understand how hard it must be to experience the game without doing so as some sort of commentary on some sort of level. I think a lot about Super Eyepatch Wolf's thesis statement in his study of UNDERTALE as a phenomenon, about the accidentally metatextual narrative of the line, "Despite everything, it's still you." I absolutely think that's the case. No matter what everyone makes of UNDERTALE, it is still the same incredible game it was on launch.
And, like... I also think a lot about that inscription in the song book, with Toby Fox commenting that he would play "Hopes and Dreams" every day on the piano, wondering if his game would become something, if anyone would ever get to hear it. I think every creative feels that.
I was lucky enough to play UNDERTALE pretty early on. I hadn't heard about it during the Kickstarter phase or anything, but I remember it very suddenly exploding in popularity, and suddenly seeing sans everywhere. A buddy of mine gifted me the game and urged me to play through it, so I did, with the only real bit of knowledge towards it that you weren't supposed to fight people, and that this hoodie skeleton would be a fight at one point.
I think I had the same general experience a lot of people had out the gate: misunderstood what precisely I was supposed to do and hurt someone I didn't have to hurt, reloaded a save to do better, and got called out on it. The game had me from there.
I don't think there's a lot of new ground for me to cover, but one thing I want to say is that Toby Fox knew precisely what he had. I dunno if it's an artifact of his time with Homestuck and knowing what would trend, or just being a product of the internet, or what, but the sheer amount of shots he successfully called, with the exception of the scope of his fandom and just how impossibly high his career would launch, staggers the mind. You look at things like him leaving a polite request in the directory asking people not to upload stuff right away to Spriters Resource, or that specific scenario requiring so much careful engineering and understanding of player behavior to pull off. This is of course to say nothing of all the minute modular playthrough details that the game has to account for, and the sheer amount of commitment UNDERTALE has to its own themes, even to what would be a detriment in any other game in the case of its myriad endings.
I do bemoan how difficult it is to have a genuine experience of the game these days. Because UNDERTALE so thoroughly changed the world, I can understand how hard it must be to experience the game without doing so as some sort of commentary on some sort of level. I think a lot about Super Eyepatch Wolf's thesis statement in his study of UNDERTALE as a phenomenon, about the accidentally metatextual narrative of the line, "Despite everything, it's still you." I absolutely think that's the case. No matter what everyone makes of UNDERTALE, it is still the same incredible game it was on launch.
And, like... I also think a lot about that inscription in the song book, with Toby Fox commenting that he would play "Hopes and Dreams" every day on the piano, wondering if his game would become something, if anyone would ever get to hear it. I think every creative feels that.