I suppose at some point I should say my thoughts on Undertale. My brother put the game as thus: It's a game about putting up with annoying people.
Jesting aside, it's really good and more importantly a condensed experience.
But like most RPGs it kinda peters out in the last third of the game, In terms of quality.
But it does some things really right. particularly in incorporating drama into the boss fights themselves. It's kinda a small thing to add all those text responses, but it does alot to help sell the characters mid-fight.
At the same time it has a good genuine sense of humor about it, some good tunes, and a
pretty dramatic twist. your first time through.
But not going to lie, even pacifist run has got some really weak parts.
The game really starts to lose steam (Ha) around Hotlands, where you meet up with the jarring Alphys She's a character pulled from similar veins as Otacon, in that she's basically a shut-in who literally causes almost all of the starting problems for our protagonist. The problem is that she is essentially (Tu)Toriel 2.0 who interrupts the game really frequently when you are pretty close to the end.
The ending with Metaton felt pretty satisfying for Metaton, but not as much for Alphys. She's just stuck in a really unsatisfactory place as a character who is both overly helpful and also the most harmful character in this world.
Since we on the topic of characters. Muffet, she has a good design which hits a sweet-spot of creepy and cute. Her boss fight is good. But she has really no bearing on the events of the game whatsoever, and is actually a step-lower in terms of threat escalation compared to Metaton who was introduced earlier. Arguably she is much lower in terms of threat compared to Undyne. Even if she is more heavily armed than Undyne. (Ha)
One of the biggest missed opportunities of the game is the Monster City. It is heavily alluded to in dialogue and in a background in Waterfall and it's a complete non-area, where you just walk up and meet the king Asgore.
Some other minor Pacifist run issues are the fact that you have to call up Papyrus on a specific map screen to befriend Undyne, and you can't befriend alphys until you beat the game. Seems like really bizarre decision to make an item that is pretty much only used for jokes into an essentially thing for flags. Oh well La-Mulana Remake does a similar thing with Xelpud.
Personally I find the gameplay of the Genocide run really lacking.
There really are only 2 new encounters and a lot of trivialized and time consuming nonsense inbetween those. Thematically (how an author thinks about people's behaviors) it's also a big mess. With Chandra,Flowey, and Sans all conveying really different themes.
Flowey conveys that the genocide run is an expression of freedom and power. Being bored with helping people and living in a world without consequences he revels in the murder. Considering the world his plaything and abusing his power.
Sans is kinda all over the place. on one hand playing the hero role trying to prevent the part where "everything ends." He tries to 'convince' you to stop and expresses how burnt out he is with everything. He expresses that he doesn't want anything from you, you simply wants you to stop. He accuses the player of being the kind of nihilistic person calling them "an unhappy Anomaly." who "won't ever be satisfied" and that if you "can do something." "You have to."
On one hand he's trying every trick to prevent you from deleting the world, and on the other hand he's trying to empathize with how burnt out the player might be, and on the other hand he believes that the PC is deeply troubled, and on the other hand he realizes that you have a driving desire to continue, even if you know it will give you nothing, even if you know it's not in your best interests. Hmm we might have too many hands here.
Chandra is really out of nowhere though, with minor hints as to her existence from Flowey and at Waterfall. She circumvents the player's actions and destroys the game world, making the statement that "Atk, Def, Level, this is what we are." perhaps as an allusion to the fact that you had to play the genocide run like an older RPG by grinding mobs. Perhaps an allusion of how some think of RPG characters purely as stats.
It's just really jarring since the stats numbers you have are pretty much irrelevant in this game. And it's completely at odds with the genocide run being an "expression of freedom/the end result of realizing that there is no freedom."
Thinking on it, I'm not a follower of Homestuck, but weren't Pre-adolescents adorned with reality bending super-powers part of it's gig? could be completely off base, but
Chandra
strikes me as something borne from that line of thinking.
I know there is alot of ragg-a-dag nit-picks. Overall I still think it's really good.