Undertale: Looking for LOVE in all the wrong places

Undertale is a great game, and worth playing.  It has some of the funniest, most inventive and most heartwarming moments you'll experience in a game this year.  The mechanics are fairly solid to boot, especially given that the game was largely a one-dev operation.  You can read more detailed reviews elsewhere, but needless to say, this game is well worth all the praise it's received from every corner of the internet.

But on reflection, I have a problem with Undertale.  It's a rather serious problem.  I almost hate to bring it up given how much people seem to love this game to death, but it's something that needs to be talked about.  It has to do with the moral choice system at the core of the game.  Simply put...I don't think it communicates quite what it's trying to communicate.

I'll try to keep this post relatively free of spoilers, but there will be some.  I recommend experiencing the game for yourself, first.  It's pretty cheap on Steam.

Okay, so one of the core mechanics of Undertale is that you can either kill or "spare" any monster you encounter.  In order to spare a monster, you spend your turn selecting non-violent actions until you hit on the action or combination of actions that makes the monster willing to accept your "mercy."  Then you spare them and they disappear from the battle, leaving you gold but no EXP.  Every monster in the game can be spared, though some are more difficult than others, and likewise any monster can be killed.  This forms the central moral choice system of the game.  Will you play the game as a standard RPG murdertank or will you take a more thoughtful approach and do your best to befriend every monster in the underworld?

From the very beginning of the game, though, something bugged me about this dynamic.  It was hard for me to put my finger on exactly, but something about it felt...off.  At first I thought it was just the harshness of the way the game treats your decisions.  I accidentally killed a couple monster early on in the game, trying to weaken them (as the game explains that some monsters need to be at low health to accept being spared.)  At every turn, the game never let me forget it, bringing up time after time that yes, I had blood on my hands.  While it felt harsh, I also understood what the game was going for.  A life is a life, after all, from the lowliest frog monster to the scariest boss.

For spoilers' sake, I won't explain the exact moment that tipped me over to understanding why I had a problem with this system.  If you've played the game, it's probably not any of the moments you expect.  Rather, it was a non-combat exchange that made me reflect on how the game had handled combat up to that point.  So, I'll skip right to the revelation that made me realize this moral system doesn't quite work.

The monsters are still jumping, hurting and killing you.  You're judged for killing them, but they're never judged for killing you, or even causing you pain.

These monsters mistreat you.  They burn you, crush you, stab you and...airplane you, but you're repeatedly told that the way to be a good person is not to fight back and defend yourself, but to reason with the monsters and become their friends.  There's a nobility to the idea, but the harshness with which the game reacts to you taking just one life even though you've been killed countless times trying to talk monsters down eventually takes on a grim subtext.

In talking about this on Twitter, I felt a bit harsh when I described Undertale as "Nerd Social Fallacy: The Game," but hours later I can't think of a better summary of my problem with the game's moral choice system.  Your only goal (as a "good" person) is to befriend people.  No matter how much they hurt or mistreat you, no matter how much they lie to you or humiliate you or extort money from you, just be the bigger person, reason with them and become their friend.  Endure it all for their sake, even if it means you literally die in the process.  Repeatedly.

Here's an example.

Trying hard to avoid spoilers, there was a boss about midway through the game that I just couldn't figure out how to spare.  I tried all the dialogue options.  I tried whittling its health down.  I tried just standing still and spamming "Spare."  Every time, the boss seemed on the verge of giving up, but never quite did it.  The battles would go on for upwards of fifteen minutes, just dodging and enduring the boss's attacks as long as I could, trying everything I could think of to keep from resorting to murder.  Once, I even walked all the way back to town and spent money on more healing items, just so I could endure more attacks and find a way to get into this creature's heart.

But I couldn't.  In the end, I killed the boss.  I felt horrible about it, and the game was quick to make me feel even more horrible about it afterwards.

However, once I really thought about the moral choice system in the game, I thought back on that fight.  Why did I go through all that?  Why did I try so hard to show mercy to someone who didn't show an inch of mercy to me?  Someone who, despite all my pleading and refusing to fight, continued heartily shoving sharp bits through my body until I died?  Why did I want to be this person's friend?

Because the game told me that's what a good person does.

Okay...

Those of you who know me know that I'm not really the type to complain about my personal problems.  So...what I'm about to say might come as a surprise to some of you, but...what really soured me on this system was realizing that boss fight was a perfect metaphor for a number of relationships I've had over the course of my life, especially recent ones.  I do everything in my power to be the good guy and be people's friend no matter how many times they hurt me.  I make sacrifices for them when they won't lift a finger for me.  I endure their attacks with a smile and try my hardest to calm them down.  When I get hurt, I think it's my fault for not choosing the correct option, or not choosing it in time.  And when the time comes to fight back, to "Attack," I always feel terrible afterwards.  No matter how many times they hurt me, hurting them once sticks with me.

It's not great, is what I'm saying.

When I look at what's signposted as the "moral" path in Undertale, I instead see the worst part of myself.  It's the side that endures, placates and tries to be everybody's friend.  It's the side of me that doesn't care what happens to myself as long as everyone else is happy.  It's the side of me that stays up nights after I've kicked an actively abusive person out of my life, wondering if they're okay.  It's the side of me I've had to try actively over the past year to shake myself of.

It's the kind of morality that only adds up if you have no sense of personal value.  That's the core of "Nerd Social Fallacies."  You put the virtue of ~HAVING FRIENDS~ above basic self-care.

And in the typical fashion of hurtful people, every boss and most of the monsters comes with a baked-in excuse for why they have to make you bleed.  Some claim it isn't their fault, some claim it's for the greater good and some bosses even make you sit through whole monologues about why they have to kill you...as they kill you.  And when the battle ends, if you did fight back, the game will likely waste no time telling you why this makes you the bad guy.

Think about it.  When you die in Undertale, do you blame the monster or do you blame yourself?

I could go on with more spoilery specifics, but that's basically my point.  Despite all I've said, I still like Undertale a great deal, and I absolutely don't think the creator (who's pretty rad) intended any of this.  In fact, I like the idea of a kill/spare mechanic as the central moral choice in an RPG, but I would have liked to see it handled with a bit more nuance.

Or hey, maybe this was the intended reading and this was all an elaborate (if, anecdotally, failed) attempt to get nerds to self-reflect on this kind of all-too-common behavior.

I'm going to do a new playthrough of Undertale, and this time if anyone takes a swing at me, I'm swingin' back.