#Undertale hidden flowers series

It was silly, until the last flower repeated: “Sorry, it’s just funny… That’s my wish too.”Įxperiencing the depth of the monsters’ hopes and dreams is crucial to Undertale’s exploration of morality, personhood, and conflict. A monster didn’t want to share her greatest wish - that one day she would climb the mountain that traps all the monsters underground and look out at the world - for fear of being laughed at, and although her friend promised they wouldn’t, the friend ended up laughing anyway.

#Undertale hidden flowers series

A favorite was a series of “echo flowers” in a beautiful, ethereal hallway that repeated snippets of an overhead conversation. Small, semi-hidden notes and dialogue enrich the world and build on an already compelling story of humanity and morality. Undertale’s writing is consistently funny, but it can also be touching. I spammed Z until she burst into flames, and the Thundersnail organizer told me that “all that pressure to succeed really got to her.” It was, like many of Undertale’s one-off jokes, extremely relatable - and knowing and predicting its audience is one of Undertale’s biggest strengths. I entered a snail race (called Thundersnail) and was told to press Z repeatedly to encourage my snail to win. I especially love Undertale’s humor when it has something to say, however subtle. An anime-loving character’s “selfie,” for example, is actually a picture of a garbage can with pink sparkle filters over it (and speaking from experience, this is very accurate). There are tons of jokes that appeal to internet nerds, and I often felt like Undertale was talking directly to me, like it knew what I was thinking. Undertale has to be a game, and that's the key to its brilliance.

In order to spare a monster that wanted to flirt but didn’t want to admit it, I had to “get close but not too close.” That option changed the rules of combat so that I had to narrowly dodge incoming projectiles… until the monster blushed so much that it stopped fighting. In my pacifist run I ended up talking to a lot of monsters, giving out hugs, and even (and especially) flirting with them to avoid killing them. Every enemy has a unique personality expressed both through combat and non-combative options. Boss battles consistently subverted my expectations, even after I thought I’d figured everything out, but even run-of-the-mill random encounters are closely intertwined with storytelling and worldbuilding.

Its dodging-based combat minigames especially rely on that concept. Undertale has to be a game, and that’s the key to its brilliance. That clever manipulation of gameplay mechanics adds weight to a story that couldn’t have been told in any other way or medium. That first berating from Flowey shaped the rest of my experience - I learned I couldn’t bank on a soft reset, so I had to tread carefully. Undertale expected me to have played RPGs before and played with those conventions in unexpected ways. Then Flowey, Undertale’s chaotic evil, fourth wall-breaking flower, tore into me for having the gall to abuse the power of the save state. Dialogue had changed to reflect that I’d seen her die. So I restarted without saving, as I would in any other game when I needed a do-over. But I made a mistake: I accidentally killed a monster in the beginning. For my first playthrough I took a pacifist approach, being as kind and merciful as possible as I searched for a way back to the surface. As a lone human fallen into an underground world that serves as a prison for monsters, I had my journey laid out for me, as most RPG protagonists do.