Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27174095-20160220043136

So I just finished all endings of Undertale and I can safely say I absolutely loved the game! A solid 8 to 8.5/10 for me in both a personal subjective and professional objective point of view.

So naturally I went online to see other people’s thoughts on the game…

If someone so much as said a SINGLE bad thing about the game, even if the review was very positive, the fans in the comments would FLIP OUT!! I don’t mean to generalise all Undertale fans (I am one after all) but some many would immediately and constantly deny it was a bad thing and go as far as to call the review “biased” and “entitled” (even if the review highly praised the game) because of it.

It’s like they have such a perfect personal view of the game that it isn’t allowed to not be perfect. The game HAS to be perfect and can’t be criticised for them. But even I can name bad things about my favourite games (all of them, no exceptions) because I know that even if they are perfect to me on a personal level, in a more broad and professional sense there will always be objective downsides. Nothing is ever truly perfect.

To show how I can’t ever bring myself to call this a perfect game, here’s an example of things I didn’t like about the game (note that some are simple inconveniences or have to do with outside occurrences):



- The Puzzles. I just found the puzzles to be unimpressive most of the time. Some I get were meant to be that way since they were made by Papyrus, but even the ones later on in the game could be pretty “meh” too. This was important as puzzles were the only degree of challenge the game had other than the fights.

- The message in the Genocide route. Killing all the enemies in one area and having the game pop out that message of “but no one came” every two steps I took could get annoying. Once it happened once and the music changed I got the jist, no need to repeat it.

- Genocide route difficulty. Most enemies were very easy with two very difficult bosses. This created a huge imbalance with the difficulty in the genocide route.

- Walking speed. Most of the time I wouldn’t notice, but when I was encouraged to backtrack, the walking speed would feel slow. I know there’s fast travel options (elevators, ferryman), but I wouldn’t always have that choice and having to slowly walk back in the game’s linear level structure was a time waster. Getting a way to fast track at any time towards the end of the game would have been helpful. It was especially annoying when getting through that puzzle where the lights go out in waterfall and in the genocide route in Snowdin where the enemies are in very specific parts. It would cause me to waste too much time wandering around back and forth

- Sparing mechanic at the beginning. Maybe it’s just me but at the beginning of the game, the sparing mechanic seemed at its most complicated, but as I progressed it seemed to get simpler to figure out (this was true even when I replayed the game). This created an awkward first part of the game where the most convoluted ways of sparing enemies was at the beginning rather than the other way round (the end of the game being the hardest).



- The Hype. (This has more to do with what people do than the game itself so it shouldn’t really be included but I will talk about it anyway)

Basically fans hyped this game up for me so much that a lot of things didn’t meet expectations. Most did, but some of the things I was looking forward the most didn’t. Namely the originality of the “spare” mechanic and the story of the game.

The “spare” mechanic was awesome and was tied to the game very well but it’s technically been done before in other video games. Being able to kill or sparing your enemies and having it effect the game has been done by countless games before so it’s not “revolutionary” or “genius” like so many people told me. Still a great mechanic though. The story was also great. I found myself being invested, liking the characters, laughing and tearing up (about twice). But it wasn’t “laugh out loud hilarious” and I didn’t “bawl my eyes out” like so many people promised me. I was expecting something downright Shakespearean with the way people talked about the story but I found the characters weren’t highly detailed enough to have huge depth or be subtle enough to be… well, subtle. Still a great story though.

This is just to show that people taking something as unquestionably perfect can negatively affect someone else’s experience and enjoyment of that thing, resulting in it not being “perfect” for them.

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<p class="MsoNormal">Thoughts? <ac_metadata title="Can the Undertale fandom not take criticism?" related_topics="Undertale"> </ac_metadata>