They’ve got the sauce!

It’s not enough of the sauce, and it takes a little while before they actually start doling the sauce out, but by God, they’ve got the sauce! Undertale Yellow actually gets it, and what a triumph that is. It manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls which plague fangames and have resulted in them getting such a broadly negative perception as being lesser forms of media, and it does so with an impressive amount of finesse. There are more than a couple of misfires here, and it can’t manage to be something that meets nor succeeds the original Undertale, but they’ve got the sauce. It’s a very big swing to take, and just about as big a hit.

What I appreciate most about Undertale Yellow is the sheer amount of restraint that the developers showcase. You only see Toriel for a grand total of about two minutes before she’s out of the game for good, and Mettaton, Alphys, and Asgore are mentioned a few times; apart from that, the only returning character who actually sticks around for most of the runtime is Flowey, and he acts differently enough that a large part of the narrative is trying to figure out what angle he’s playing at. There’s no Sans. He doesn’t even get namedropped! What? Can you imagine releasing an Undertale fangame and not bringing up Sans? When I got to the Snowdin Town bridge and released that Sans wasn’t going to show his face, I got pumped. It’s brave. A group far less confident in themselves would have just made this a second lap through the extant Underground, going on a little adventure to essentially experience Undertale all over again in a world where you could just play Undertale again if that was what you wanted to do.

The first impressions when the game starts branching off of Undertale aren’t especially strong. The first original NPC that you meet in the Ruins — Darv or Darm or Darl, whatever his name is — very much looks like someone’s Adventure Time self-insert that they drew to be Marceline the Vampire Queen’s boyfriend. Picture me retching as I type this. His character isn’t particularly good, mostly just muttering about some betrayal from long past and talking about how he wants to be left alone, and the game seems to agree with me in this respect; he drops off the face of the earth for the remainder of the runtime, only showing up again at the very end to make sure that the player hasn’t forgotten about him. The other new characters are significantly better: Martlet is a strong and obvious standout among the rest of the cast, North Star and his posse aren’t as consistent in their designs nor personalities but are still good, and Ceroba seems a lot like someone’s fursona but not in an especially bad way. I ended up liking more of the principle cast than I didn’t, so they’re definitely doing something right on the design and writing front.

The average enemy encounter is fine; there’s nothing especially interesting about most of them, though some do offer a couple of interesting gimmicks. Making the “floor slippery” so that the soul glides around or the music enemies blasting you with waveforms that you need to dodge are cute. Most of the boss fights don’t offer anything especially interesting, though. While Pacifist Ceroba does manage to get a few interesting gimmicks going in the form of giving the player the Big Shot, the overwhelming majority of the boss fights are just clicking Spare over and over and over again; your ACT commands often do nothing besides give the same line of flavor text every time you select them, which is a fairly boring way to handle these big encounters. I found the Guardener to be the best fight simply because it required you to hack away at vines blocking your options which then led into an ACT chain, giving you some freedom in the form of selecting which of your options you want to be available to you first. El Bailador is fine, turning the game into a rhythm section for a few minutes, but it doesn’t do much for me. So many of these fights are just about dodging bullets and slamming Mercy over and over again, and that’s never really been the draw of Undertale.

Similarly ranging from alright to forgettable are the music tracks. There’s nothing truly offensive here, and there are a couple that I like, but it's important for us to remember that Toby Fox was a composer long before he was a game designer. I can still hum the melodies to just about every track from Undertale, but I don’t think I could do the same for a single song from Undertale Yellow — at least, not from the ones that don’t lift one of Toby’s leitmotifs. While I do admire the developers’ willingness to get out from under the Undertale narrative trappings of returning characters walking in like sitcom guest stars for the audience to whoop and applaud to, I can’t extend the same praise to their composing. Ceroba’s fight plays a remix of Hopes and Dreams that the game absolutely hasn’t earned, and it took me right out of a battle that I was digging up until then. There are quite a few instances of obvious musical recycling in places where they don’t belong, and the songs that are wholly original don’t interest me much. They're far from anything terrible, but they feel a bit lazy in a game where there isn’t much else that does.

Undertale Yellow is ultimately a good fangame, and that is perhaps deserving of more celebration than anything else. It is very clearly made by a team of passionate and creative people, and I don’t think that their time spent on this would have been better spent on an original IP, instead. With that said, I would prefer for the next thing that this team releases to be something entirely of their own design; with all of the eyes that they’ve got on them now, I’m sure they’ve cultivated an audience that would be glad to see more.

And the sprites look too good. It’s all wrong. Part of the appeal of Undertale is that it looks like hot shit.

At one point, I called this the worst game I had ever played in my entire life. I hated it's structure, I hated it's visuals, I hated it's story, and the list goes on and on being filled with the usual complains that every single Youtuber has made about this game applied to me. I specifically remember when I first finished the Gamecube version of this game in a voice chat with friends, I specifically stated that I would never want to play it ever again...but then something funny began to happen.

It started when I played the Reloaded mod last year, back then it didn't have it's own dedicated page on the site, and although I still gave the game a half star review here, and proclaimed those same words, I felt like I was lying to myself, because, for as much as I wanted to deny it back then, I was actually having...fun. After that, things slowly began to turn in the game's favor, from re-thinking my perspective on the story and looking at it from a deeper level, to realizing that a lot of the missions are not as bad as they initially seem, my opinion began shifting more and more.

But I was still in denial, saying things like "Ok, maybe I like everything else about this game, but surely, SURELY the gameplay must be the kiss of death for it"...and then, I replayed it. No mods, worst version that I could have possibly gone for, streched widescreen, I had intentionally set this up on the worst odds I possibly could have, to see if it could pull through it all...and to my complete and utter shock, my inconceivable amazement, and as a massive blow to my ego...it did.

Shadow the Hedgehog is fucking awesome, and I don't just mean that in the ironic sense of seeing a hedgehog with twin glickies, I genuinely think this game is fucking amazing.

It's story is a deep analysis on every facet of Shadow's character being taken to some really unexpected places thanks to him essentially serving as blank slate for him to be influenced by others, only for him to say "Fuck that" and decide what he wants to be, putting his past with Maria and the Professor behind and choosing to protect Earth not out of a promise made to someone long gone, but out of his own volition.

The presentation of this game aiming for a darker yet still light hearted mood is nailed spectacularly, never going to far in it's own edginess visuals wise, and yet still making itself feel darker from other Sonic games, it essentially takes what SA2 was doing and expands it, which while drastic coming off the heels of the more light-hearted Heroes, fits the style this game is aiming for perfectly.

The music is stellar (except for Almost Dead that song is stinky), and once again, feels like a natural evolution coming from the Adventure games' musical influence, with the vocal tracks being all so catchy and memorable that they stick out as some of the best in the entire Sonic series.

And, to my utter amusement, the gameplay here is fun. Like, really, really fun. To be fair, Team Chaotix is my favorite campaign in Sonic Heroes so that might play a part as to why I ended up liking this game as much as I did in this department, but the way that most stages are designed really doesn't make the objectives as cumbersome as people make them out to be, plus with the Chaos powers giving you infinite ammunition and two very useful abilities (Blast more so than Control), it becomes a much easier task.

Plus, since the ranking system is mostly dependent on your time, it encourages quick play and skill via the score not saving in checkpoints, creating what I'd honestly call the best ranking system in the series next to SA2. Of course, that doesn't mean that some of these missions don't suck balls, Lost Impact and Central City can both go eat a dick for all I care, but I still found myself enjoying most of the missions in this game, which is something I did not see myself saying in a million years when I first played it.

This game goes to show how replaying Sonic games can be so fundamentally important in forming a full opinion on them for me, because I will never forget my first experience with Shadow, but now, 30 something routes later across 3 different versions of the game, I can confidently and unironically say that this game is fucking great.