Hey all, I just stumbled into this thread because I've never heard of Undertale, but it seems like everyone is really enjoying it. Still, I know nothing about it other than what I've gleaned from here and instead of looking it up, I want someone here to sell it to me, and as to why I should want to give them my $10.
Pro-tip: Don't try to tell me it will affect me on an emotional level because that will make me not want to play it. Even if it's the most beautiful emotions in the world; I don't like being manipulated.
There's like at least six dogs for sure (I lost count around the end, maybe up to around 18?). I buy like two games per year tops, and that's legitimately the reason I bought it. The guy had the audacity to advertise the number of dogs as a selling point on the Steam page. That's the kind of person you know you can trust with your money.
If you aren't sold at the concept of having upwards of six dogs in the game (you can pet them too if that matters), this is basically what I think because it's what I believe.
- The game isn't particularly long, the first time I went through and talked to everyone, backtracked through to talk to everyone again right before what I suspected to be the end (they had new dialogue which was kinda neat, but I was mainly just looking for something), then backtracked yet again to talk to everyone in the post game took about 8 hours. I went through again a couple times to try out other endings, and if you skip all that sort of stuff you can get through in around 3 hours.
- The game isn't very hard either (with one notable exception). The bullet dodging thing during the enemy phase is pretty fun, I like it a lot more than just taking damage or some shit, but once you get the hang of it very few monsters will be able to do much against you. Some bosses introduce variants of the mechanic to spice things up and boss fights in general make very good use of the system.
- I think the music's pretty rad.
- The sparing mechanics really don't play out much differently than just hitting attack until the monster dies. You are usually presented with two to four options of what action to take and after you figure out the correct choice/sequence it's only a matter to repeating that again next time you see the monster before sparing it. Some minibosses require a more lengthy series of steps and some monsters have actions involve collecting something during the bullet dodging phase before you can spare them. Only a handful of bosses make much use of the Act menu beyond the initial couple turns so you just wind up hitting Spare over and over like you would choose Attack over and over in most games, stopping to eat some healy food every now and again.
- Thundersnail is the greatest minigame of all time.
- Graphics are okay, it looks like a pixelly game. Some backgrounds look pretty and I liked the weird black/white pixel art they chose for the monsters in battle. Not really anything remarkable in this area.
- The writing is lighthearted and silly for the most part, the characters are quite memorable and there are a skele-ton of shitty puns
. Sometimes the game tries too hard to make you feely and stuff but usually those parts aren't too overdone. Sometimes it's funniest when it's trying to make you feel bad, but that might just be me. At other points it gets pretty meta and breaks the fourth wall and all that, really depends on your tastes if that's good or bad.
- There's only like one cat.
- There's some replayability with the different endings but the neutral/pacifist paths are quite similar up to the end and the variants of the neutral path only change a couple details here and there. You see at least one version of the neutral ending if you play pacifist on your first playthrough so you don't really have to bother playing it through again to see that ending. The genocide path is significantly different from any other style of play and is worth a shot if you feel like playing some more. Haven't completed the game myself that way because it decided to be a bitch and it seems like there's no way I can actually get it to trigger properly, but it's the thought that counts.
- The puzzles are all really easy. They introduce a lot of puzzle elements that only appear once and are never elaborated on or used in conjunction with one another.
- Sometimes you can just feel the Earthbound oozing through your screen. Whether this fills you with determination or not is up to the observer.
- The kid has a stupid haircut.
With all that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and think it was worth the $10.
