Undertale is a game that I am sure many of you are familiar with. If you are not, for my purposes, the relevant facts is that there are 3 different routes to the game: Neutral, Pacifist, and Genocide. The neutral route is purposefully left untouched by many of Undertale’s more interesting topics as the game tries to get you to play through Pacifist routes (with a character explicitly telling you how to do so). Therefore, I will only discuss Pacifist and Genocide in their exemplary use of difficulty.
Pacifist starts off the same as a Neutral route, but with the twist that you cannot gain EXP and therefore Stats and HP. This has the effect of turning the relatively easy Neutral route into a significantly harder journey. Bosses are much tougher because you have less stats to work with. However, this is very deliberate. One of the main repeated words throughout the game is Determination. While the bosses serve as harder obstacles, you also become more determined to overcome them over time. Furthermore, you can even exploit some character traits in the bosses to make them easier. You can eat a spider pastry from the Ruins in the Muffet fight to skip it entirely. You can eat the Pie from Toriel to lower Asgore’s stats. And in the end, you are rewarded for this effort. Not only do you get the happy ending, but it is impossible to die in the final boss fight of pacifist because the determination you’ve built to this point literally won’t let you. The difficulty you as the player have faced becomes the foundation for beating the final boss.
Genocide works as an almost inversion of Pacifist. For most of the time, it isn’t hard, but rather very easy and tedious. You slaughter everyone you encounter and your stats soar. Nothing can stand up to you. Most bosses are one shot. However, this also works against you. Basically no fight is meaningful, but in order to finish the Genocide route, you have to seek out every possible foe and kill them. Therefore, most Genocide gameplay is a lot of easy, meaningless grinding. You dont have fun. You want to quit the route. And this ease is to make you bored. The game actively wants you to stop playing this route. Much like Braid, it shoves warning signs in front of you. But whereas Braid did this with visual elements, Undertale does it with difficulty.
And then, there are the two infamous bosses, Undyne the Undying and Sans. Both are both drastically harder than even the hardest pacifist boss. Their attacks are fast and hit hard. Sans even cheats by attacking you during the menu options in battle. These are difficult, but also can make one bored. Dying over and over again to the same boss can make one get disinterested. Sans even tells the player that he is trying to do this during this boss fight!
And his final move? Waiting for the player to quit out of boredom.
I find it incredibly interesting how in one route, difficulty is almost training you for the final showdown. The bosses steadily get tougher and you adapt. But in the other route, almost everything is handed to you, until its ripped away. I find it incredibly fascinating how deliberate difficulty is handled in Undertale. It is almost as if the game itself is steering you away from Genocide and into Pacifist, which makes the completionist fandom of Genocide all that much more intersting.
Yeah, I think the way Undertale handles storytelling through difficulty is really good, and especially with Undyne—in a neutral run, if you kill her, she holds on and doesn’t die despite multiple killing blows, her body gradually fading more and more into dust, and even that isn’t enough to kill her; she reforms herself and only dies a few moments later when she begins to melt from the Determination. The difficulty of the fight gets easier and easier throughout this process because she is barely holding onto life, and that’s reflected in the projectiles getting slower and slower. Yet at the same time, it’s physically impossible to end the battle at this point—the game forces you to live with these consequences and the guilt, pushing you towards the desire to reset and play like a pacifist.
From a design perspective, I think this is also a really good decision because so many people get stuck on the Undyne fight because they don’t know they can flee and run away—it makes it abundantly clear that killing her is not the “right choice”.
Awesome post! As someone who cried over both the mechanical and affective difficulty of Undertale as a middle schooler, this game holds a special place in my heart and your discussion on the different routes reminded of just how much the game almost seems to play you at a certain point.