Undertale tells a story about humans and monsters. An emotional and interactive story that has you go across unique well designed worlds. One of the greatest soundtracks of all time. God, the music is so good it deserves to be famous on its own. The characters are all so well written and they feel like real people, with believable motives and personalities. The amount of charm and humor throughout the entire game is insane. The art is so well done and so charming in its simplicity. The battle mechanics are really fun, a good way to stand out as an rpg and keep the gameplay exciting and fresh, never knowing what’s coming next. It’s really fun. Undertale does everything right. Even if it didn’t have multiple routes, this game still would’ve been top tier.
However there is another element to the story, a recurring theme throughout the whole game, existing as a looming feeling. It’s not hard to find out this game is a sort of choose your own adventure, one where your actions have consequences. It’s not hard to see that you can spare any enemy, and that the monsters are real people and killing them has real consequences. But everytime you think you have this game figured out, it’s always one step ahead of you.
This game could not have existed as a movie or a book, it's something that could only exist as a game. It has a relationship with the player unlike any other game. Every different way you could play it is addressed by the game, and it becomes a story about you. The amount of times I've played it over and over again just seeing everything I could do. By doing that, I'm the same as flowey. It doesn't just have consequences for every action you do, it talks to you about it. When you play Undertale, you are a character, and you interact with it in a unique way from any other game. Your experience doesn't end when you beat the game. Even more than the amount of routes, every player's experience is different, the game will address you uniquely based on however you play.
When my girlfriend played this game with me, she hadn't played very many other rpgs before. She understood the world's rules more naturally, not having as much of a status quo to break from in the first place. Without ever telling her about the multiple endings, she chose not to kill anyone, at times begging me to tell her how to do the battle without pressing attack. She completed the pacifist run, and then never touched the game again, or looked at anything online. Her experience was only the pacifist run and nothing else. And she left the game satisfied and happy. I was confused, and I kinda wanted her to play it again so I could see how she handled the genocide run. I was curious about it when I first played and I didn't understand how she could just stop before she had seen everything. But that's not the right way to think about it, why would she want to go back and play the whole game again just to murder all the friends she had gotten so close to, only to soil the good feeling from the first ending, knowing of the genocide run, it makes it more artificial, it sacrafices the emotional value and turns it into more of a "game" of just being curious and trying everything. Not being able to accept the good ending it gave you, just digging for more and more gameplay at any cost. That's exactly what flowey did, and most players left this game just as corrupted as him. Not my girlfriend, she left with a happy ending, and only a good perception of the world and characters. I think this is a rare way to play this game, but it just goes to show how this game is so different to so many different people. The game is partially what is put there, but mostly how you choose to interact with it. It tells you an amazing emotional story about monsters and humans and love and hatred, but more than that, it tells a story about you.