After 7 years of being one of my favourite games, I think I finally found a thesis for my thoughts on Undertale. Since I don't really feel like writing a full essay or anything, and don't have much to say on level design or artwork or boss design, I'll summarise it here:

Undertale is an examination of LOVE - although on a broader scale, I think the game focuses on 'empathy' itself. Not just in terms of endearing players to its lovable characters, and asking them to forgive the unforgivable so that the world can move past vicious cycles; those themes are primarily relegated to the Pacifist, which I still adore for its passionate spirit, wonderful humour and touching story about "Determination". No, Undertale is fundamentally criticising the way its audience's empathy can become divorced from the way they play games. In most Neutral routes, the game calls uncomfortable attention to the accumulating impact of taking a life - producing unique interactions with Flowey, and culminating in the many variations of the player's call with Sans.

In the Genocide route, generally taken as the player's final route for completion sake, Toby Fox reveals his entire metatextual hand with a superb flourish. Encounters become a chore, the game's mechanics and characters resisting your impossible determination to butcher Toby's story, and in the final moments the player loses control of their character as they disregard, and murder, every element of the world. As the game repeats in the Genocide route (e.g. Snowman), everything has become useless to you. It's a haunting challenge to the idea of completionism, made even more potent by this route's recontextualisation of Flowey, the hateful villain of Undertale, as a literal mirror of what the player has become. Uncaring about the story, and devoid of 'empathy' or LOVE.

homo groundhog day gave me a headache

For a full hour after I finished this game, I looked through my game collection and my backloggery (my entries on this website are incomplete as of the time of writing). I have never played a game that I've felt this divided on. Throughout playing the game, I entered different ratings on here to gauge how I felt, and they went from 5 stars to half a star. In Stars and Time has some truly dreadful ideas that would tank any other game, ideas so bad that you question how the hell nobody during the lengthy development of this game didn't point out how bad they were. The first line of this review isn't a joke, I have a pounding headache after finishing this game.

With all of that typed out, you gotta understand how good the writing and characters are in this game. I adore the entire main cast unconditionally. In terms of my favorite party members in a RPG, they're all probably in the top ten. The game starts at the end of a long journey, there's character interactions and development that we clearly missed, and yet the characters were written well enough that I had a deep connection to everyone and would look forward to seeing new bits of dialogue around the main dungeon. I'm not generous towards this game at all, and I tried to look for specific lines or scenes that might not have sat well, and I couldn't find anything.

The presentation of the game is, again, way too good for how bad of an idea this game ended up being. Despite being in (mostly) black and white, I never had any visual confusion towards what I was looking at. The key pieces of art during specific cut-scenes were a highlight, and somehow augmented the already stellar dialogue. The music and its permutations, even if those permutations were bad, was fitting for each of the scenes. A ton of talent went into the AV sections of the game, time well spent.

It's a shame the game itself is such an awful waste of this talent. Waste might be going too far, because what we got was still fine, but the entire time I was playing this game, I just wished I was playing the previous 45 hours of this JRPG that we're never going to get. The time looping elements of the gameplay compare poorly to other games with time travel elements. The main dungeon gets monotonous by the second time you've played through all of the floors. The final boss fight is really fun and engaging the first time you go through it, and feels like a chore the 12th time. The game has limited ways of alleviating looping frustrations for the player, like being able to warp to higher up floors or having reminders of where items are, but they come off more as band-aid solutions for an underlying system that isn't fun to play through. Why do I have to grind random fights just to warp to higher up floors? There are times in the game where the only new piece of dialogue requires that you know exactly where to go in the dungeon, and that requires either playing through 20 min of content you've seen a hundred times already, or paying this limited currency to skip that monotony for two minutes of dialogue, after which you'll speedrun killing yourself.

That frustration's supposed to be the point, right? The player is supposed to feel the frustration that Siffrin has to deal with, going through the same events over and over. Mission accomplished, when I had to go through the semi-randomized version of the dungeon at the end of the game, I was not having a good time at all. There's reviews on this website that mention how much they like elements of the game, but dropped the game because it was too repetitive. If you set out to make a bad game, and succeed, you still made a bad game.

If the game itself was just kinda butt, and the rest of the narrative was a 10/10 I'd give this game a perfect score and move on with life. There are specific narrative directions that drove me up a wall. The king being irredeemably bad was such a missed opportunity. There's an attempt midway through the game to talk to and empathize with the main antagonist, and initially I thought this was going to go in the direction of "even if you try to choose peace, the main character is still trapped in this time loop for reasons that'll be explained later". A real gut punch that fits with the tone of the game. Instead, he'll backstab the party and crush a child in his bare hands, something that doesn't fit the vibe of the game and makes the character less interesting. I didn't give a single shit about the king after that scene, he was just a monster that had to be dealt with.

The endgame also left a sour taste in my mouth, to the point I almost dropped the game. There isn't a gradual degradation of Siffrin's mental state, after hitting a specific dead end they just snap and attempt to destroy all of the relationships the game had lovingly built up to that point. I think that the way he went about this was out of character and poorly done, flat out. I hated having to sit through each of the scenes. The final permutation of the dungeon and the character's inner battle didn't work for me at all, and again, even if that's the point, it's a stupid point. Act 5 is the nadir of the game. It feels like this otherwise touching, wonderful game got its shirt stuck on the "what if we made an earthbound like game but secretly it was really fucked up" current that needs to die and never come back. We've had enough of that trope for a lifetime. I thought whatever comment the game was trying to make on mental illness was flaccid and incoherent. This game was a 1/10 for me at this point.

My frustrations with this game have been made very clear, but how I feel about the main cast may not have been. They are all still some of my favorite characters I've seen in a video game in years. How they react to Siffrin at the end, and their not-parting dialogue made it worth it. In Stars and Time, despite being critically flawed, makes you feel every emotional beat that it wants you to. This game will play you like a damn fiddle, in ways that nothing else that came out this year can. Despite the game's many issues, In Stars and Time stuck the landing. It won.