Video games are great.
If Leonardi Da Vinci were still around, we wouldn't even know about him, 'cause he'd
be sitting on his ass all day playing video games . And of course, I mean that in the
best way.
Video games are great!
Sure, there are plenty of arguments for improved hand-eye coordination, better tactical thinking,
and the only truly safe environment for tea bagging people, but the biggest thing video
games have going for them is their ability to put the user into a first person perspective
story.
Whether it's a story as simple as running around shooting each other or a story as complex
as the likes of Final Fantasy, the person gets to experience the world from a far more
integrated point of view than any other form of media.
Now, there are some games that suck at this.
Plenty, actually, and I'm willing to bet that you know some.
Games where you have no say in what actually happens in the story, where the plot has more
holes than Tommy Wiseau's magnum opus, and often, where you're supposed to be doing something
and you don't even know what the fuck you're looking at.
And then there are great games.
Chrono Trigger, Portal, and Mass Effect 2, to name a few.
Even if the story isn't too complex, if you really feel like you're part of it, immersed
in the experience, then you're probably playing a pretty solid game.
But these great games often go well beyond simply bringing you into the story.
They break the walls of your world view, and expand your mind.
And I'm not just talking about mind-bending, drug-fueled games like Hotline Miami (though
that is a great game).
Beyond quantitative measures of graphics and gameplay, some games just stand out above
the rest.
Some are just... perfect.
Just...real.
I mean Undertale's not perfect...but it's close!
Join me as I venture into the heart of Undertale and pull out the ways it pokes at your brain
so you'll never forget it.
So it feels real.
It really is remarkable.
HIT IT.
To start, great games often have at least one thing in common: choice.
For some, this is as simple as picking which gun is better (and even that's not as simple
as you might think, as Borderlands has shown us over and over again).
But for the good games.
The really great ones: they make you make choices.
And you know how to tell when the choices you're making in a game really matter?
When the choices you make really hit hard, they wear you out.
They leave you wondering "what if," and "if only…," down to the point where
you're not even sure of yourself anymore.
Sometimes, you're not even sure you're strong enough to keep making choices like
that.
In short, you run into a little thing psychologists call "ego depletion".
While it sounds like a colloquialism for what happens after an hour of online dating, it's
actually a scientific term, meaning that the choices we make are limited by our ability
to consciously make a certain amount of choices within a given period of time.
It's a term in psychology that basically means that the more choices you have to make in,
say, a single day, the more psychologically "worn out" a person becomes.
Now, it's been proven to not be totally decisive, that is, you can actually change your ability
to make more or fewer decisions, but the concept itself is still there.
To combat it, you'll see a lot of highly successful people that simply don't make a lot of the
same choices that many people consider important.
Take, for example, our master Facebook overlord Mark Zuckerberg.
He's the CEO of Facebook and tends to wear... the same thing… a lot.
Kinda weird, isn't it?
I mean who else does that?
Oh.
But it makes sense.
Our boy Mark has to make a lot of decisions, and having to choose different outfits every
day would just be more work.
Any decision he makes could cost the company billions, or drive an economy into the ground...so
why clutter life up with choices as basic as "what should I wear" or as trivial
as asking which Spice Girl is your favorite (spoiler alert: nobody cares).
So what?
What the hell does Mark Zuckerberg and ego depletion have to do with Undertale's ability
to make you feel things?
Well, that's the cool part.
In Undertale, it's a TEST.
You don't just choose from the beginning of the game that you'll be a "good" or "bad"
character.
You THINK you do, as the player, but you're not just making that choice up front.
You have to make that choice constantly.
Even when it's grueling.
When you're playing through the story, you have to choose, for every single battle, how
things will play out.
You'll be tested, to choose how you want to fight.
Will you be a pacifist to a random monster?
What about a monster trying to kill you?
What about a monster with a family, and children?
What about a monster that's done horrible things, even to other monsters?
How tightly do you hold on to your own principles?
You must decide for yourself over, and over and over again.
Undertale gives one of the best stories in video games by essentially sacrificing the
usual play style for...willpower: being able to sacrifice one's pleasures or vices in exchange
for a greater purpose.
Undertale's first step into creating a truly immersive experience is subverting the usual
play style of "kill or be killed" into a moment-by-moment journey in crafting your
identity.
From the very start of the game, and persisting throughout it, you act out, and even find
out, your own principles and limits as a player.
As a person.
Undertale also includes various aspects of modern life that most games just don't cover
at least...don't cover well.
Let's face it, this whole game is about minority characters.
It takes place in a literal underworld of monsters, where, as we find out, they're
people as much as anyone else.
From the start of the game, every character you meet is disadvantaged, tucked away from
the outer world, and even considered downright evil by most of the humans.
We don't really see much in the way of romance in Undertale, but without a doubt, the most
noteworthy romantic relationship is that of Alphys and Undyne: two characters who are
both women, meaning that we are going multiple layers deep into the oppression points game.
And yet, nothing about this is explicitly addressed within the story.
It doesn't devolve into an SJW shitshow!
They're just two people in love, while in the human world, we would be able to point
out obvious prejudices about such a romance or (on the opposite side of things) we might
hear how beautiful and incredible and amazing and powerful and it is.
Undertale has multiple layers of social commentary, all rolled into a storyline thread that isn't
critical to the game's "mission," but is vital to immersing the player into a world
that constantly requires reevaluation, just as our own world does to each of us.
Undertale doesn't beat you over the head with a message, yet it's left us with a
deep admiration of the characters regardless of who they are or what they're into.
And if that isn't a major step into immediately developing a world of characters that go beyond
a single dimension, it's hard to say what is.
Maybe it's Papyrus going for the threesome?
Ya miss 100% of the shots you don't take!
And if you're thinking "well, that's just, like, your opinion, man," sorry, but it's
not just my opinion.
Not the threesome bit…
I'm talking about multi-dimensional characters!
Check around for Undertale fanfics and fan art, and you'll find plenty of… well, probably
more than what you bargained for…
Point is, people are WAY more interested in the characters of Undertale than the ones
in most video games.
We've talked about this in previous videos.
After all, how many games are out there where you can recognize the little characters off
to the side.
You remember the little Monster Kid?
The one that thinks that Undyne is the greatest thing since whatever the monsters use for
sliced bread?
Sure you do.
But tell me, what does he actually do?
The kid doesn't have a big part in the story at all.
In fact, it's partly because of his simplicity that people remember him.
How many games can include a little kid idolizing one of your antagonists and still pull your
heartstrings?
Or what about Greater Dog?
You know, the giant knight that is, as far we know, literally a dog.
What other games include such trivial characters?
And harder still, how many games set the tone just right, and get the dialogue just perfect,
to make you really care about those characters?
Lastly, the little things about Undertale are probably what best highlight the concepts
of choice and morality to the player.
Most modern games are all graphics, graphics, graphics.
Take Breath of the Wild, for example.
Another great game, but with a very different emphasis.
Yes, I get it!
Everyone wants to bang Link.
And who wouldn't?
He's gorgeous!
Everything about the game is gorgeous!
And that's part of the game's charm.
It's just beautiful.
And the same goes for a host of others.
From Skyrim to Bioshock 3, many modern titles are just so appealing to look at, and they
emphasize it.
Breath of the Wild and the modern Fallout games, and likely many more, have a hook for
the player built into the game, where they build up some of the basic mechanics, and
then at some point, early on, they cut from a familiar "starting zone" to a wide open
world, showing the vast openness of the game.
It's a brilliant way to open a sandbox game.
And that's great, for those games.
But Undertale doesn't go that route.
Far from it.
It's a beautiful game, for sure, but its beauty is on the inside.
Everything, from the sets, to the color schemes, to the character designs, in and out of battle,
are deliberate.
Even the little easter eggs, like the one where an amorphous blob tucks our main character
into bed, are all made in such a way that it forces the player to really evaluate their
goals, choices, and how they're playing the game.
In fact, most of the little, beautiful moments are the ones you have to go and search for.
You actually have to put the time in to investigate the relationships of the characters.
Did you know that Sans and Goat Mom [Toriel] know each other?
Did you know that sometimes they hang out together, separated by a wall, with just enough
space to tell bad puns to each other, and, in a dark underworld of sealed away monsters,
are still able to stop and laugh at their own bad jokes?
That's freakin' beautiful, man.
Undertale makes the player not only CHOOSE, but also emphasize WHY they're choosing, the
impact their choices have, and this helps the player focus on this instead of tropes
used throughout most modern video game.
And yes, the combat requires careful precision, and acting in the moment, but it stops every
round, and even at the start of every battle, lets the character decide how they want to
approach the situation.
Let's compare to another game that some of the more ardent fans will remember.
Are you familiar with a game called Chrono Trigger?
Almost universally considered one of the best games in existence (and probably older than
many of the viewers of this channel), it had everything.
Character development, side quests galore, massive orgies (whoops, had another tab open…),
and of, course, a frickin' flying time machine.
Even as the impact of its graphics faded over the decades (well, sort of.
It was designed by Akira Toriyama, after all.
Hence, why everyone looks like a Dragonball character...), the story, and the way the
game plays out, have held up surprisingly well over time.
And just like Undertale, you have to make choices in that game.
And these choices have impact.
If you open a chest in the past, that chest's contents are lost to you in the future.
If you are generous to a family in the past, you can be friendly with their descendants,
centuries later.
If you start to grow a forest in the past, you can change an entire continent.
And if you beat the final boss during different points in the story, you change the course
of history itself.
That's right.
If you didn't catch that, and if you're not familiar with the story, one choice stands
out above the rest: the choice to end the game itself.
I mean actually fighting the final boss.
In Chrono Trigger, you can fight the main boss almost at the start of the game.
Seriously!
And even throughout the rest of it, you can fight the main boss whenever you wish to.
You'll get your ass handed to you harder than Bill Gates fighting Mike Tyson in his prime,
but it is your choice to do so if you wish.
The main takeaway is that this game, Chrono Trigger, this wonderful classic, emphasizes
choice, even over the progression of a pre-written format.
YOU are the one who chooses, and deals with the consequences.
And oh, are there consequences… but that's a video for another day.
In Undertale, the game cuts out all of the fluff that other titles rely on to draw you
in.
Undertale makes the player focus on the characters, their interactions, and what the protagonist's
action mean to the world of Undertale.
You don't need cutting-edge graphics to make a great game.
You just need the right graphics to make a great game.
And you don't need a grandiose story about saving the world, or about fighting an alien
race, or traveling through time.
You need the right story for the game.
One of the most famous quotes in the modern era, that "with great power… comes great
responsibility," didn't come from a famous philosopher.
It came from a seemingly trivial comic book character, that didn't even make it far
into the story.
And yet it influences us all the same.
A great game has a great story, but it doesn't need to be epic, and it's crucial to point
out this difference.
A great story has meaning, and it provides a learning experience.
It has to make you question something.
Something important.
It doesn't just tell a story to move the plot forward.
It tells a story that changes you, as a person.
A great game makes you a better person.
Undertale makes you challenge your own beliefs by throwing the decision to keep being a genocidal
maniac or touchy-feeling pacifist over and over and over again as terrible things unfold
before your eyes.
It makes you question your values, and ask what's really important.
Does it really matter if you have the best weapons, or the strongest armor?
Does it matter if you beat the game in under 3 hours, if you end up missing out on most
of the story?
For all the speed-running and loot-collecting games out there, if you were to treat Undertale
like that, you'd be missing out on the real experience of it.
And when it's all over, years from now, are you going to remember what weapons and
armor you had?
I won't.
But I'll always remember the characters and the story.
Even many of the little details, like the outrageous font of Papyrus.
How do I know I'll remember such a trivial detail?
Well, let's just say I've seen something like that before…
Undertale gets you invested.
When it's over, you're probably going to remember how you chose to play the game,
just based on the memory of what the game was like.
Was it a brutal, sadistic conquest?
Was it a peaceful trek that brought together humans and monsters?
Or was it all just about a kid trying to get home in a world full of monsters?
It's your choice, you know.
And with such rich, interesting characters, are you going to remember a couple of skeletons
and a fish-person trying to kill you, or are you going to look back and remember a flamboyant
brother and his lazy counterpart who are friends with a hardened she-fish monster knight with
a heart of gold?
I mean, so many games with monsters have skeletons, and warrior monsters, there must be something
really special to make these ones stand out.
What that something is, is a well-crafted journey, down to the smallest details that
weaves everything together so that by the end of it, it isn't just a game anymore.
It's an experience.
Wrap it all up, and you've got a title that takes everything you thought you knew about
video games, about life, and it puts it to the test.
Hard.
One.
Choice.
At.
A. Time.
And that... is why Undertale… is a perfect game.
Because it keeps it REAL!
That's what I think!
Do you agree that Undertale is damn near perfect in how it makes you choose your own path every
step of the way like real life?
In how it gives us a plethora of minority characters without turning into an SJW shitshow?
Let me know what you think Undertale did right or what you hated about it.
Don't hold back.
If you don't wanna comment about that...then tell me what games you'd like us to cover
next!
Any upcoming titles you're dying to see covered?
Maybe old titles even!
Let us know down below and we'll take your considerations to heart.
I'm Grant and I'll see you beautiful people in a few days.
Bye everyone!
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét