Imaginary Worlds - Undertale

Episode Date: June 29, 2016

Digital technology has come so far that independent video game designers can create and distribute their work online, and make their games about whatever they want. Some indie games have become mainstream hits, but Toby Fox's Undertale is a phenomenon. Fans have even hailed it as the "best game ever." Julian Feeld of Existential Gamer and Nathan Grayson of Kotaku explain how Undertale deconstructs and questions the fundamentals of video games -- while at the same time being really fun to play, with unforgettable characters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malensky. Back in 2012, I reported a story for public radio about independent video games, which are really coming into their own. Now, if you're not a gamer and you have no idea what an independent video game means, think about how games started. Pac-Man, for example. Very simple design. But in the early 1980s, you had to drive to an arcade to play it on a cabinet machine or buy an Atari system. We need to get off this ship.

Now games are so much more sophisticated. Halo and Bioshock have hyper-realistic graphics. You can move your character around 360 degrees. And the stories last 20 hours or more. But that also means that today, a single programmer can create a game with the sophistication of Super Mario Brothers that you can play on your browser with a keyboard and a mouse. And since these games are not distributed by major corporations, game designers can make them about whatever they want. Some of them are very quirky, very personal, and even very political.

Now recently, one of my listeners wrote me and said I should really check out this new indie game called Undertale, which has gotten huge critical acclaim. Now I actually hadn't played indie games for a while, so I went online to download the game, and I was stunned by how much the world of indie video games has grown since I reported that story. Julian Field is the editor of a site that reviews games called Existential Gamer. Video games growing up were my safe space. They were the place I went to where there was no social anxiety, no human interaction that I would have to decipher and navigate.

I asked him to help me decipher and navigate through this world. And he says in the last few years, indie games have become more like indie film in that they're not really all that indie anymore. Yes, many of them may be the vision of a single programmer, but now those people are running small companies. It's the difference between a P.T. Anderson film and a Marvel film, you know? P.T. Anderson could still be seen as indie cinema, but it's big, like it's being released everywhere

and people are talking about it. But Undertale was made by one guy, Toby Fox. The only outside help he got was from an illustrator who created art for the prologue. Otherwise, every single nuance of this game is infused with his quirky personality. He even made the music. You know, usually what you have as a result of that is someone who's either bitten off more than they can chew and created a game that's very ambitious but deeply flawed, or a game that just kind of is small. Like it just kind of doesn't have narrative breadth or impact. I think Undertale is the full package.

And here's the other important thing about Undertale. There's been a schism in the game world since indie games came about. Traditional gamers have been complaining that journalists keep lavishing praise on these indie games that have socially conscious messages, but are not actually challenging to play. But Undertale is beloved by critics and traditional gamers. And Undertale isn't just a hit. It has spawned a subculture of fandom and merchandise. There's even an album of jazz covers of the music in the game.

The music in this game, by the way, is really good. I'm going to play it throughout this episode. So what is Undertale about? Why are so many people crazy about it? That is after the break. All right, so first I had to get an interview with Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale. That was not going to be easy. Now, Toby is a young guy. Most of the time he spent making the game, he was in college. But he's not the stereotypical millennial who was blogging, tweeting, and Instagramming all the time.

He doesn't like to do phone or Skype interviews. And when journalists send him questions to answer, he often responds with the word pass. He would rather put this thing out in the world and let people come to their own conclusions. So I was going to treat him like the Great Gatsby, watching while everybody else has a great time at his party. And then I thought, well, Toby Fox did make a Kickstarter video to fund the game. How did he introduce himself there? Hi, I'm Toby Fox, creator of Undertale. He appeared as a little white video game dog. If you haven't played it yet, I'd love it if you'd check out the demo below for Windows and Macintosh. You'll be sure to have a ball!

And that's when I had the idea of giving him the option of answering my questions over email, but I would turn it into audio using text-to-speech software. I didn't know if he'd go for it. I really rarely do interviews and dislike commenting on why things are popular slash critically acclaimed, but I think the robot voice idea is hilarious. And that is what he's going to sound like when he chimes in, which is not going to be much. As I expected, most of his answers were just yes or no. Okay, so first, I want to give you a sense of what his game looks like.

The design is retro, intentionally pixelated, like a game from the 1990s. Undertale was created based on this game, Mother and Mother 2. And these games were created by a Japanese creative director who was trying to show his take on American pop culture, which is obviously deformed and made into this bizarro and interesting version of itself. And there was a certain sensibility that went into that game that then got translated into Undertale, which is essentially an American giving his take on a Japanese game that was giving its take of an American game. When a character speaks, the sound of their voice is pure gibberish.

And a box appears and their dialogue types out. But the typeface and the pitch of their voices have a surprising amount of personality. Like here is Toriel, this motherly figure who's a goat wearing robes. She sounds very different from Sans, who's a goat wearing robes. She sounds very different from Sans, who's a goofy little skeleton. He sounds very different from his brother Papyrus,

a tall, flamboyant skeleton wearing boots and a cape. wearing boots and a cape. And here's the nerdy professor Dr. Alphys. She looks like a mini Jerry Lewis dinosaur in a lab coat. The character you control is a child with no clear gender. You can name him or her whatever you want. In the prologue, you learn that there was a war between humans and monsters. The monsters were banished underground.

Your character, this child, accidentally fell down there. Your goal is to return to the surface. I asked Toby what was the inspiration for the story. I wanted monsters, so I put them in a hole. He's being pretty coy, because there's actually a lot more depth to it. Now, towards the beginning, you find your character in a very comfy underground home being taken care of by Toriel,

the motherly goat figure. She gives you a cell phone, and as you go and explore this world, she keeps calling to check in on you. Now, I grew up before cell phones, and I got really annoyed the more she called me. And I started to wonder, is this Toby's commentary on what it was like for millennials to grow up? No. Yeah, I totally missed the point. Nathan Grayson writes for the gaming review site Kotaku,

and he says the character's name, Toriel, is a playoff of Tutorial, because every video game starts with a tutorial. And so the tutorial thing is this idea of, like, tutorials being like an overly worried mom, because they never stop poking you. They're like, hey, do you know how to do this? Hey, do you know how to do that?

Hey, okay, now you're going to learn that. The metaphor is very clear. It's like a mom who won't stop calling you. And it's like, I'm fine, mom, geez. That is not the first time Undertale comments on the language of video games and flips your expectations. Like when you're ready to leave Toriel's home.

She tries to convince you to stay with her because the world beyond where you are is dangerous and full of all sorts of terrible stuff. And so when you decide that you want to leave, she tries to stop you and you end up having a combat encounter with her. When you fight a monster in Undertale, the color version of the game disappears and you see a black and white box with a little red heart which represents your character. The monsters will attack your heart with missiles, swords, bones, whatever icon represents them best. You can fight back, and even kill them. Or, you can select the options to flirt with them, flex your muscles, wiggle, sing, lots

of other really silly stuff until they give up fighting. And so what I didn't realize is that there is a nonviolent way out of it. I thought that ultimately, like once she stopped responding to any of my kind of other approaches that I just had to, you know, kill her. And so I did. And it was really it was heartbreaking because i mean she was this character who only wanted the best for you and like when you do finish her off you get this little scene of like the the way the game portrays like your health and your life is a little heart

and so it shows shows her little heart and then it like breaks in half and it's like just the right amount of heavy-handed for what the scene was admittedly i did a restart after that because i wanted to do the actual pacifist playthrough and if you do it that way then that blocks you off from it so that's interesting so at that moment you started the game over again yeah but here's the crazy thing yeah Yeah? The game still remembered that I did that stuff. So even though I had not completed a playthrough, when I started back on my next one, the game started making references for what I'd done previously.

When I fought Toriel again, one of the options I got was essentially that I could tell her that I had seen her die. Oh my god. that I could tell her that I had seen her die. Oh my God. And yeah, it was just like so weird and so unsettling. And so groundbreaking for a video game. You can make it to the end without killing a single character.

The fans call it the pacifist route. If you go the other way, what they call the genocide route, killing all those monsters will take a toll on you. Julian Field took that path, killing all the monsters he came across, because he thought that's what you're supposed to do in a video game. But by the end, Undertale had become a ghost town. He was the monster everyone was afraid of. I think Undertale speaks to the fact that people are turning to video games

with higher expectations than they've they ever have before. They're questioning the basic models that go into creating video games. Why are we killing everything? You know, that's a good question. Most games don't even pose that question at all. I asked Toby if he ever had like an aha moment when he was playing a particular game and he had to kill a monster to move on to the next level, but he hated doing it because he really liked that monster. That's every game, Eric. But Toby doesn't make it easy.

Some of the monsters really taunt you. He sets up character interactions in which you're basically being told that, oh, how about now? Oh, you still don't want to fight me? Well, how about now? How about after I say this? Or how about after I hit you? So, you know, I think he knows what he's doing there. I had a similar experience, but halfway through. I came across Undyne, a female creature from the

Black Lagoon with a red ponytail, wearing an eyepatch, and knight's armor. She told me that she wanted to kill me because I had killed this dog character a few levels back. And I felt terrible because that dog was not much of a threat. He was kind of cute, but he was carrying a sword. I was just impatient and I wanted to get moving through the game, so I just killed him. Nathan says all I had to do was use the option to pet him. But if you keep petting him, his neck gets longer and longer and he gets more and more excited until it becomes this ridiculous thing like his neck is through the screen and so after that he ends up like tearing through the rest of the area and like builds all these crazy snowmen

whereas if you don't do it that way you later encounter him staring at a lump of snow and it says something like this dog is sitting here staring at this snow, waiting for it to turn into art. If you do take the pacifist route, most of the monsters will give up trying to fight you and reveal their messed up personal issues. But even when you make friends with these monsters, they can still be annoying. They'll keep calling you during the game, sending you pointless text messages, telling you jokes that aren't funny. In a previous interview I read, Toby said that the game is really about whether you want to make friends with these characters or go it alone. I asked if he ever feels that way. I constantly wish I could be friends with a skeleton instead of being alone.

Video games are all about making choices. That's what separates them from more passive types of entertainment. You know, I might argue that a majority of video games only craft the illusion of choice, that a more discerning mind might look to a game like Undertale to find true choice, as in a completely different ending based on that choice. Whereas, you know, other games might give you the illusion of answering in different ways,

but the end result is that those branches of story all kind of reunite and you're going to get the same ending no matter what. I haven't finished the game yet because I'm really slow at playing video games. I mean, I'm actually kind of embarrassed to admit this, but it takes me really, really long time to find all the secret clues and the hidden doors, and I don't have a lot of spare time. So knowing that I'm probably going to get the morally neutral ending because I killed a few characters along the way before I decided to take the pacifist route, I decided to go onto YouTube where somebody had posted the pacifist ending and just watch it. And I won't go into great detail, but here are some spoilers.

It's long, like 40 minutes, but it's also really moving. All of those monsters that you were fighting rally around you and help you finish your quest. And when you finally make it to the surface, the characters watch the sunrise with you. And then one by one, they each say goodbye. Nathan wrote an article about how that ending helped him through a personal crisis. Right around the time he started playing the game, he'd become something of a recluse. When I was going through this, the few friends I had left, I was like, well, I don't want to burden them with too many

of my problems, but I am having problems. But because I don't want to burden them that way, I kind of resent them a little bit for not helping, even though they don't know that I need help because I'm not telling them. Yeah, you know, that's funny. That to me is in many ways the message that you get if you play the pacifist ending. And really the ending I think that you're intended to play is you are not alone. That there's something so comforting and powerful about that. Yeah. And the thing about it is it's not like this revolutionary message, you know, like there

are plenty of other works that have expressed that. But I think what Undertale does really well is it expresses it in this way that's not this kind of canned sequence of events that occur in like a Disney or Pixar movie or whatever. Instead, it's a series of choices that you made with, I think by the time you reached the end of the game, an awareness of what the other side of things could have been. That you could have made the choice to reject all of these characters, that you could have run rampant through this world and ruined it, that you could have done any number of things, but instead you did the thing

that made all of these people care about you and want to support you. And one of the people he decided to reconnect with after he finished Undertale was his sister. You know, our relationship was straight apart because she is on the Asperger's spectrum. And so she's always been a little bit awkward to communicate with. And so with my sister, we'll be talking about one thing and then suddenly she will go off on a tangent about something completely unrelated like it'll come out of nowhere or like she'll interrupt when i'm talking with someone else with something like that and it's like ah but they're and undertale is the type of game where it presents you with situations like that not literally like that but similar to it and, okay, take a step back and understand what's going on for this person and the way that they approach the world.

Playing Undertale brought me back to the age of Toby Fox, my 20s, when I realized that I was finally an adult. And I looked back on the journey that had brought me there, on all those kids that I couldn't stand, the adults that seemed so weird or confusing to me, and suddenly I understood that they were three-dimensional human beings. I felt that I had gained a new sense of empathy and patience that I didn't have as a teenager. In the game of life, I had made it to the next level. All of my hit points were restored. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Toby Fox. Maybe you shouldn't use my answers. They're not very good.

Nah. Also thanks to Chris Robinson, Julian Field, and Nathan Grayson, who says playing video games and writing about them all the time has changed the way his brain works. Because when you play a lot of games and you critique a lot of games, I mean, you realize that the game making process is very deliberate. Every last thing is in place for a reason. And so, yeah, if I walk into a room and notice something that is like out of place or annoying or whatever, it's like, why did they do that? So that's that'll be my upcoming book, Nathan's Approach to Rooms. Feng Shui, damn it. It's an even better title. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook.

I tweeted E. Malinsky. And I'll put screenshots of Undertale on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.