It is amusing that the RPG with perhaps the most significant online impact in the last decade is a single-player indie homage to an old Nintendo game. Toby Fox’s Undertale has surpassed the source of its initial homage and become a phenomenon because it is connected with a very online audience.
Every standout RPG, nay game, brings something unique to the table regarding its cultural impact. Some, as we covered with Dragon Quest, are less obvious, but their importance is understood all the same. In contrast, others are the tentpoles of video gaming’s emergence as a juggernaut media form.
The online age has had many games that transcended their medium thanks to the growth of memes, but that’s somewhat reductive. Sometimes, a game in the internet age would find roots beyond its original form, but in the manner of and to the extent that Undertale did? Not quite.
Undertale arrived at a time when social media was at its peak. More people to share more things beyond the nooks and crannies of fandom. The joy of sharing discovery and creation was in its pomp, and Undertale, partly because of that, crept into all corners of the internet. But it wasn’t just some flash-in-the-pan memeable flavor of the month (it had that moment, too, to be fair). Nearly a decade after its release, you know what Undertale has brought to the RPG genre and wider culture.
As far as opening hooks go, Undertale made a statement out of its own. Playing as a human child, you stumble into an underground world where RPG norms are twisted at every turn, and every character is endearingly batshit. An initial coziness gives way to a sinister encounter with a seemingly friendly flower, and from there begins a surreal, sublime adventure where your decisions hold more weight than you initially realize, and the fourth wall is regularly being hit with a sledgehammer.
The Underdog Undertale
Infamously, Undertale can be played as a pacifist. Talk your way out of trouble, survive bullet hell-infused minigames, and endure judgy commentary in order to make it through with your integrity intact. Smartly, going down this route is playing the game in hard mode, a great commentary on violence and aggression being the easy, ugly way to solve problems. And boy, does the game let you know that.
The game’s narrative and metatextual depths resonated with players and, of course, left them wanting more. So we got music, writing, art, video essays, merchandise, and more from a fanbase that found themselves in the story and its characters.
Again, plenty of games have had that in the years before Undertale, but the trail of art that followed the game fed its popularity in an unprecedented manner. Many a weary old hand of the industry will get that glint in their eye when recalling how Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII, or Shenmue blew their mind and made them love video games.
In each case, there are a lot of surrounding memories that are quite physical and personal. In the internet age and especially the social media age, your discovery of a mind-blowing entry point could be a collective digital and physical one—a reinforcement of your love of something that encourages a broader pool of creativity to emerge from it.
In that sense, Undertale’s legacy is one of video game culture’s more positive modern success stories. It was an organic phenomenon devoid of cynical social media manipulation. Sure, there have been games that have tried hard to bottle its lightning since, but much of what was born from Undertale has been fans wanting to share their love for it.
