I Still Don't Like Undertale.
I still don't like undertale, but I played into the waterfall, posibly through it and I think I can better articulate what I don't like about it. This isn't going to change the score, mind but maybe someone else who doesn't like the game needs to feel less alone. I know that's the case for me.
Expectation v. Reality
The fans got to me before the game. This lead me to believe that the game had some deep emotional narrative and all kinds of symbolisim and meaning. Having heard that for months before playing it was firmly planted in my head. It wasn't there. I was told by people who like the game that it wasn't there but you can't un-do months of subliminal programming in a few hours. Like food, it takes time to digest.
The other thing which I forgot is that humor is subjective. A lot of people seem to forget that and selling a game as being "funny" is a bad choice because not everyone has the same idea of what is or isn't funny. I'm very much into more-- as it's called now-- "alternative" humor. Growing up it was just called humor and it is only retroactively that I can admit maybe it isn't really what you'd see on display for a general audience.
Snail Pie, Less than the Sum of its Parts
The game moves terribly slow. I feel like each screen has a cut scene. I think I would enjoy this as a film but as a game I'm just not sold on it. It feels too slow. I don't care about the "delightful" humor for the most part. I did actually laugh when Papyrus declared that he raised the height of his sink, as though that was a useful thing to do, though that humor still seems few and far between coated in corgis and "quirkiness".
And, indeed the game itself has many parts. There's the RPG-esque overgame then the action/arcade dodging segments in battle, times where you have to stop to solve a puzzle. The game feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be and the parts never felt like they belonged together for me. You could argue that it's an "artistic choice" but that doesn't translate to a fun game that people actually want to play.
A bit more Likeable....
The other thing... the game seems to aggressively want me to like Sans and Papyrus, which is difficult with how much their banter slows down the game. I can almost get behind them but sans feels too ostentatious and I feel like I'm supposed to find him endearing, but I can't. Together they remind me of a comedy duo where Sans acts out and Papyrus plays the straight man too rigidly and is the victim (for lack of a better word) of Sans' antics. It reminds me of A Bit of Fry and Laurie-- which reminds me that I could be watching that on Hulu instead of playing this game.
And in the end...
I feel like the game aggresively wants me to be a player I'll never be. It's like being in a relationship with someone you care for but you'll never be the person they really need.
In the end it isn't really a bad game and I never really thought it was. I did still give it a C-, which basically means "pasable but I didn't like it". The music's alright, though, once I got the game to actually play it. Oh, and don't play with a controller.
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