Undertale and Discourse

[Golem]

Undertale comments on other games. This is apparent as soon as you hear its tagline: "The friendly RPG where nobody has to die." This calls to mind RPG conventions, and it works best if you get what the term "RPG" implies. You will think of story-heavy games where killing monsters is required to progress. Once you get that, the promise of nobody dying makes sense. And just in case you missed the point, Sans explains that EXP and LV--typical RPG terms--are EXecution Points and Level of Violence.

Undertale also encourages discourse of itself. Its limited save files prevent one player from easily experimenting to find every possible outcome for situations. While not unique to Undertale, it works nicely within the game as a whole.

How else does Undertale take part in or encourage discourse?

[Sky-Fox]

[Golem]

[Sky-Fox]

[Golem]

It just hit me that when we talk about the game's discourse with the player (at the player?), that's .

[Yourself]

[Golem]

[Yourself]

Yup that garbage all happened sans Papyrus and Sans

[Yourself]

To continue from my previous post, it struck me when the game was 2 hours long that it doesn't actually try in any way to be an RPG. There's no party members, no character growth, no exploration, no ammo management, no town/dungeon pacing, really nothing except the graphical perspective to suggest "RPG". Even sticking to Fox's point and limiting scope to JRPGs of a particular vintage, it's really hard to draw any salient comparisons with Undertale. Is it harder than Phantasy Star? More open-ended than Mother? Epicker than Final Fantasy IV? Without relying on presentation, which particular game does Undertale most evoke? What are the shared criteria by which such a comparison could be made?

To give the game the benefit of the doubt and assume it's not just being a liar, I guess we'd have to step the discourse back a level and ask how it fits into throwback neo-retro gaming culture. And if I didn't already have a hard time piecing that together with the pacifism theme, I at least don't care enough about that particular topic to try.