Okay, yes I’m bored and have no life. Besides for stressing and spending my whole week doing school work, in the time I’ve had for myself, I’ve been playing a lot of games I missed or haven’t played in a while. And also of course, keeping up with Homestuck^2. That new 413 update was beautiful!

But this isn’t about Homestuck. This is about a game that went viral for being the first of its kind. This game was huge and everywhere you looked online it’s all you would see. Even to this day it is still a big deal. But of course, you know how when everyone loves something, everyone else will start to hate it. Because hating popular things totally makes you super cool and unique. Another example of this is how everyone started hating Minecraft and loving Fortnite. And now since Fortnite was so big, people started praising Minecraft again. It’s a vicious cycle. But back on topic, I never played this game until January of this year, mainly because I had no computer that could run it. My only computer was so old it couldn’t even run Cool math. But the game came to the Switch, I had money, so I decided to play Undertale for the first time.

The game is an RPG (role playing game) kinda in the same vein of the older Pokemon titles. Except instead of catching monsters to fight, you fight by yourself and the fate of the monsters’ lives is in your hands. Undertale is made unique by three things: its characters, its writing, and its music.

Each character is very different from one another yet they build a unique cast of hilarious and amazing characters. After playing for like an hour, you’ll love these characters. My personal favorite part is the writing. It is so brilliant. Everything matters, any choice you make will affect the outcome of what happens. And it’s so brilliantly done, Toby Fox (the game’s creator, more on him later) used to work on Homestuck before this game and it really shows in the jokes and the genius storytelling. this man also did a lot of the music in Homestuck, so you know the Undertale songs are all amazing. There is not like a single bad track in the game, they ‘re all so good.

But I haven’t even mentioned Undertale’s main gimmick yet. It is known as “The RPG where no one has to die” for a good reason. In a fight you have several options on your turn: fighting, acting, using an item, and having mercy. There are three ways to play this game, the pacifist route, the neutral route, and the genocide route. Neutral is your first playthrough, where you most likely will kill some characters and bosses but not all, you make it to the end and fight Omega Flowey as the final boss. Pacifist is the best route from a story perspective. It’s what it sounds like, you kill no one. I won’t spoil the ending or the final boss but it is easily one of the best things I have ever played through in a video game. And genocide is what it sounds like. You farm the random monsters that pop up and you kill everyone. This run has three super hard bosses and it is very dark. I kinda gave up on playing it since it’s so frustrating.

But the reason I’m talking about Undertale in the year 2020 is tot ell the story of one man, named Toby “Radiation” Fox. Toby made music and coded small things in the past, like mods for his favorite games. He was hired by his friend, Andrew Hussie, to work on a small webcomic (at the time) known as Homestuck. his music and humor connected with so many people and really fit in Homestuck. After a while, he started to work on his game with a few friends, which became Undertale. His game instantly made it big with fans of Homestuck and on Youtube. Big youtubers were playing his game in videos, and everyone fell in love with his game. It instantly jumped into meme culture, and became even bigger. In Homestuck’s climatic video, Collide, there was even a cool reference to this game. But someone else took notice of Undertale, Mashiro Sakurai, the man behind Super Smash Bros. He got his character, Sans, into the game as a mii costume along with a new remix of Megalovania (a popular meme song from the game). After that he even got a song in the brand new, Pokemon Sword and shield. Then he worked with the creators of Pokemon, side by side, on their new side project. Now the man is working on his next game, it has the same style, writing, and acting, as Undertale. It is so good, even though only the first chapter has been released. Toby’s story is so inspiring, he started as a fan of video games and then became a piece of video game history.

Wow, I didn’t know I could write this much on Undertale- wow. It is not an exaggeration that Undertale is one of the most important games of all time. It is smart, hilarious, emotional, and genius. I can’t wait to see what Toby has next (besides for Deltarune and helping on Homestuck^2).