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chuckro"Long ago, two races ruled over the Earth: HUMANS and MONSTERS. One day, war broke out between the two races. After a long battle, the humans were victorious. They sealed the monsters underground with a magic spell. Many years later... Legends say that those who climb the mountain never return."
I did my best to avoid spoilers beyond, "You can choose not to fight anything" and I think that was a smart move. If you plan to play this, I suggest doing the same and not reading further.
I had heard from many, many sources that, as a fan of Earthbound, I would like this game. The game's Mother/Earthbound roots are very clear, both from the graphical style and the fully-applicable tagline, "Weird. Funny. Heartrending." The big gimmick to the battle system, besides your ability to talk to foes rather than fight them, is that defense is a matter of actively dodging by moving your "heart" around a little box and avoiding attacks. (If you fight, which I barely did, you also enter action commands to successfully hit things.)
Most of the noteworthy NPCs are female, and your character (similar to Anodyne) is never given a gender. Given the romantic implications of various interactions, you kind of need to interpret the character as either a straight male or a queer female; and I think that’s just fine. (I suspect I’d read the character as more male if I was actually killing things. The totally pacifist approach reads more female to me. Because I’m brainwashed by the patriarchy or something.)
I did a fully pacifist run, which meant not getting any experience at all. While I thought the game was reasonably well-balanced for that, I did end up needing to arbitrage for about half an hour to buy better armor when I couldn’t get past the Undyne battle. (Turns out, not only will Temmie buy everything, but she’ll pay more for ClodGlass than the other store sells them for; and the price of the TemArmor decreases every time you die. If you keep the Dog Residue—which I didn’t—you can use that to make infinitely more Dog Residue to sell to Temmie.)
The “final” battle against Photoshop Flowey is utterly insane, and appropriate, and I loved it. The “world” of the game breaks. The Fight and Act buttons go everywhere. The sequence becomes bullet hell, but with just enough healing (if you’re careful) to get through. Flowey uses save states against you!
For that matter, apparently the game remembers a lot more than just what you save—if you do things but then restart without saving them, or if you start a new game, the characters will make comments about the version of history you avoided. The fourth wall barely exists, especially where the most powerful characters are involved.
It didn’t quite realize this until very late in my True Pacifist ending, but the fact that you’re not naming your character (you’re naming the original child who fell into the underground years earlier and kicked off the plot) is a cute little twist. I’d have to double-check, but I think Flowey is the only one who refers to you by that name. I was very confused by the tapes in the True Laboratory using the name that I thought belonged to my character to refer to the child Asgore and Toriel had raised, until the ending revealed that I was playing “Frisk” all along.
I didn’t actually want to do a genocide run, so I looked up the details of what happens, and good god. Basically, playing this like a standard rpg and killing everything you meet (including grinding for more things to kill) turns you into a soulless monster and everyone treats you as such, and then the world is destroyed in a way that permanently alters your copy of the game, so that you can’t get the best ending in any subsequent playthroughs.
Overall: I’ve seen a number of sources touting this as one of the best games of 2015, and I understand why. For a short game (~6 hours for an average playthrough), it has a lot of material, an innovative combat system, a clever story and fantastic characters. And on the meta level, it’s a deconstruction of the jrpg genre as a whole. And there are tons of layers, little secrets and extra bits of character and story depth. And I don’t think there’s been a game since Ultima IV that was this revolutionary about the importance of morals in rpgs.
I did my best to avoid spoilers beyond, "You can choose not to fight anything" and I think that was a smart move. If you plan to play this, I suggest doing the same and not reading further.
I had heard from many, many sources that, as a fan of Earthbound, I would like this game. The game's Mother/Earthbound roots are very clear, both from the graphical style and the fully-applicable tagline, "Weird. Funny. Heartrending." The big gimmick to the battle system, besides your ability to talk to foes rather than fight them, is that defense is a matter of actively dodging by moving your "heart" around a little box and avoiding attacks. (If you fight, which I barely did, you also enter action commands to successfully hit things.)
Most of the noteworthy NPCs are female, and your character (similar to Anodyne) is never given a gender. Given the romantic implications of various interactions, you kind of need to interpret the character as either a straight male or a queer female; and I think that’s just fine. (I suspect I’d read the character as more male if I was actually killing things. The totally pacifist approach reads more female to me. Because I’m brainwashed by the patriarchy or something.)
I did a fully pacifist run, which meant not getting any experience at all. While I thought the game was reasonably well-balanced for that, I did end up needing to arbitrage for about half an hour to buy better armor when I couldn’t get past the Undyne battle. (Turns out, not only will Temmie buy everything, but she’ll pay more for ClodGlass than the other store sells them for; and the price of the TemArmor decreases every time you die. If you keep the Dog Residue—which I didn’t—you can use that to make infinitely more Dog Residue to sell to Temmie.)
The “final” battle against Photoshop Flowey is utterly insane, and appropriate, and I loved it. The “world” of the game breaks. The Fight and Act buttons go everywhere. The sequence becomes bullet hell, but with just enough healing (if you’re careful) to get through. Flowey uses save states against you!
For that matter, apparently the game remembers a lot more than just what you save—if you do things but then restart without saving them, or if you start a new game, the characters will make comments about the version of history you avoided. The fourth wall barely exists, especially where the most powerful characters are involved.
It didn’t quite realize this until very late in my True Pacifist ending, but the fact that you’re not naming your character (you’re naming the original child who fell into the underground years earlier and kicked off the plot) is a cute little twist. I’d have to double-check, but I think Flowey is the only one who refers to you by that name. I was very confused by the tapes in the True Laboratory using the name that I thought belonged to my character to refer to the child Asgore and Toriel had raised, until the ending revealed that I was playing “Frisk” all along.
I didn’t actually want to do a genocide run, so I looked up the details of what happens, and good god. Basically, playing this like a standard rpg and killing everything you meet (including grinding for more things to kill) turns you into a soulless monster and everyone treats you as such, and then the world is destroyed in a way that permanently alters your copy of the game, so that you can’t get the best ending in any subsequent playthroughs.
Overall: I’ve seen a number of sources touting this as one of the best games of 2015, and I understand why. For a short game (~6 hours for an average playthrough), it has a lot of material, an innovative combat system, a clever story and fantastic characters. And on the meta level, it’s a deconstruction of the jrpg genre as a whole. And there are tons of layers, little secrets and extra bits of character and story depth. And I don’t think there’s been a game since Ultima IV that was this revolutionary about the importance of morals in rpgs.
