Transcript

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Season five of the Gaming Backlog Book club. We just wrapped up season four about Katana Zero and are raring to go for that much anticipated free DLC if it ever truly comes out.

If it keeps stretching on though, might just have to rewind and play it again one day.

So we’ve now had a handful of palate cleanser very short games that we’ve run through in about a week each across a bunch of different genres and are ready to start ramping back up to longer games.

So we’ll be gradually increasing in length at taking it slow. Not necessarily jumping into a hundred hour game quite yet, but more than one week. So we’re very excited to kick off season five and we’re going to be playing Undertale for some background. Undertale was released in 2015 for PC and Mac and then it was ported to Linux in 2016, PlayStation 4 and Vita in 2017. Switch in 2018 and finally Xbox One got it in 2021.

It was developed by Toby Fox, who made it almost entirely solo, with a few exceptions for artwork and character designs by someone named Tammy Chang and a couple other guests. Toby also wrote the script and did all the music for the game.

That’s quite impressive whenever I hear about a dev that makes a wildly successful game almost all on their own.

[00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it’s really impressive. One basically one person, two people really between designer and artist to create, which now a lot of people are considering like one of their like a top game for them.

Just story wise and playthrough wise.

[00:01:33] Speaker A: Yep.

And so the setup of the story is that you play as a child who falls into the underground. Uh oh, I’m getting flashbacks to stray from two seasons ago.

Gotta make sure those Zerks stay away.

[00:01:48] Speaker B: Gotta make sure you shake them all off.

[00:01:50] Speaker A: Get rid of them.

The Underground is a large network of caves and towns under the earth filled with monsters and separated from the surface by some form of magic that keeps things from intermingling. They assume the primary objective, aside from just staying alive, is likely getting back to the above ground and reuniting with whoever it is up there that the kid cares about. Gameplay is set up much like a JRPG of old, but rather than entering commands and watching them play out, in many cases you enter into bullet hell sequences that will test your reflexes and eyesight to come out unscathed.

Outside of that, I’ve heard it’s best to go in as blind as you can, beyond the basic premise and some light guidance towards the three different route options. So we Want to keep that experience intact as much as we can. Outside of that, what do you know about this going in?

[00:02:39] Speaker B: For me, I don’t know too much at all. As with most games that we’re obviously going to be playing here on the podcast, I’m going into this pretty much blind.

I don’t do too much. Again, I know a lot of just like what you said.

I can’t believe that this game actually came out in 2015. That it’s already like 10 years old.

[00:02:58] Speaker A: Indeed.

[00:02:59] Speaker B: It is crazy to me. Yeah. Didn’t know it was like it was that old already.

Another thing I know about it is it’s a very similar art style to Earthbound. I think Earthbound was probably maybe a big influence on the game, I would think. I myself have not played Earthbound. I actually just started it the other night, but I only got about 30 40, so not too far. But I know you’ve played Earthbound.

[00:03:28] Speaker A: Earthbound is an old favorite of mine, so I’ll go into that in just.

[00:03:31] Speaker B: A little bit here.

Okay. Otherwise, yeah, not knowing too much. Know it’s a unique story.

Um, I know that from what I’ve heard is like every choice that you make in undertale really matters. It’s like remembered and it matters at the end. As you said, there are three different ways to play it. There’s the neutral, the pacifist and the.

[00:03:52] Speaker A: Genocide.

[00:03:53] Speaker B: The genocide route. Yes, the three routes. And then yeah, all the like attacks or the boss fights are kind of bullet Bullet Hell style attacks which are gonna be fun.

[00:04:03] Speaker A: See how much do you enjoy experiences from the past if you have my.

[00:04:08] Speaker B: Reflexes were better when I was younger. Now getting older, we’ll see how my reflexes are for these Bullet Hells. But no, it’s a unique style so I’m intrigued to see how it is. But yeah, overall as I said, don’t know much about it. As a lot of people said go into it really not knowing much because it will make you enjoy it more. And I am. I’m excited to get started and play Undertale.

[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So Undertale has been on my backlog since I pretty much since I got a switch around the time that Smash Bros. Ultimate came out. And once I unlocked every character in that I went down the rabbit hole of research and watching tons of reviews of all kinds of games and realizing how great of an indie game console the Switch was. Undertale was one of the first games I came across at that time as being a top must play on the Switch.

I of course also know about Sans, who is a skeleton in the bathrobe, I guess is what it is. And slippers. So just a sight to behold. And I’m sure considering how popular he is as a character, he must be a jolly good fellow and companion to interact with. And the other big thing that has been said is that you can go through, right. You can kill every enemy that you come across, you can show them mercy and kill no one. Or a mixture of the two. All of which provide that different gameplay experience and different endings.

That right there just shows how in depth this game is. Even if it appears simple graphically at a surface level. I would say it’s even more simplistic graphically than Earthbound, which has a lot of color. This doesn’t have so much color in it from the screenshots that I’ve seen.

[00:05:42] Speaker B: No, this is quite. Yeah, quite bare bones, black and white. Yeah, yeah, very bare bones. But some of the.

Yeah, some of the artwork just like the enemies wise looks pretty. I’ve seen like just some stills and more things look a little more detailed and look quite like intriguing and yeah.

[00:06:02] Speaker A: Undertale was your proposal this time around. So what makes it something you’re interested in pulling from the backlog and starting up now?

[00:06:09] Speaker B: It’s another. Another one of those games that I have also I’ve owned. I bought the physical version of Undertale, I don’t know, a few years after this. When did the switch come out? 2017, I think it.

[00:06:23] Speaker A: Yes, I think you’re right. I think it was 2017.

[00:06:25] Speaker B: I’m not sure when this came out on Switch, but whenever it was released on Switch, not long after I actually caught it, I remember I bought the physical, so I said at Best Buy I caught it like on a sale. And it was a game that I had seen long time ago when it first came out, like a video just of people like some of their top Switch games at the time or indie Switch games.

And this was on like a few of the videos. So when I saw it for sale, I was like, you know what? I. I’m gonna buy this. I really wanna play this. And then it just kind of like most backlog games went into my collection and just sat there until now collecting dust.

Collecting dust. And then yes, opened it up. I think we both have the physical version. Opened it up. It is nice that it comes with a really nice manual.

[00:07:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is basically just the story.

[00:07:08] Speaker B: The manual reminds me of setup. Yeah. It reminds me of those golden books that we had when we were kids. It’s really nice.

So I Like that it has a little more detail. It’s always nice these indie. A lot of these indie Switch games like back then had like cool like manuals or came with like little other trinkets or stickers and all that. They put a lot of work and stuff into them.

[00:07:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I’m looking at my physical copy now. It says, it says fan gamer in the corner which does some cool, you know, collectible type things for indie games especially. I don’t know if yours is also a fan gamer copy because he said you got it at a store. But.

[00:07:45] Speaker B: Mine is a fan gamer copy. I do remember it says on the.

[00:07:48] Speaker A: Back produced it then the physical cards.

[00:07:51] Speaker B: I also went onto the Fangamer website and was like looking up undertale and saw they had a collector’s edition.

[00:07:56] Speaker A: I was like, oh no, let’s see.

[00:08:00] Speaker B: I was like let’s play through the game, see how much.

[00:08:03] Speaker A: Yeah, so don’t impulse buy.

[00:08:05] Speaker B: See did I rate it?

[00:08:06] Speaker A: See if you enjoy it.

[00:08:07] Speaker B: See, I enjoy it. But yeah, they had a bunch of undertale mutt merch on the website. So. Which is cool. So it’s obviously a big game, big game of theirs that they popular publisher produce. Yeah.

[00:08:20] Speaker A: Well, let’s see on my end now I’m sure those who have already played them have a better understanding or at least some fan theories floating around. To my understanding, the game deltarune is not. But actually maybe kind of is is a sequel to undertale or at least a spiritual sequel or a side cousin game to undertale made by Toby Fox as well. I know I heard about deltarune when it first released as a free chapter one and then a free chapter two a few years later after that. And now just recently chapters three and four were shadow dropped, I believe or announced it just before release into the full set of four chapters. It was paid.

I mean yes, Toby, you deserve to be paid for your work, dude. And it was released on Switch 2. I think it may be available in other places as well. And so that gave me a renewed interest in finally picking up undertale from the backlog and seeing what it’s all about.

Now what really did it for me is that it gets glowing praise and lots and lots of extremely positive comparisons to Earthbound.

Now if you haven’t listened to our season two about turtles in time, you might not yet know that it actually I did not have a Super Nintendo growing up since I was a Sega Genesis kid.

But I did have the benefit of a friend who showed me the wonders of emulation and ROMs a few years later once the N64 and PS1 era started up and it gave me a way to go back to the pre 3D generation and play SNES games on my computer. There were many, many games that I tried out that way, but Earthbound had to have been my favorite. The 2D fighting game Gundam Wing Endless Waltz was a close second.

I also of course like many others, discovered Ness as a character in Super Smash Bros. For N64 and because of that I played through, I would guess at least half of Earthbound soon after. I don’t think I finished it in that moment, but I did play it in 2018 on the SNES Classic when I went front to back in a very short period of time as a kid and even in my recent replay, I just loved that vibe of the unique Japanese perspective of lifestyle in the us Adapting an RPG so far away from the traditional fantasy characters and settings of pretty much 99% of all turn based JRPGs up until that point and just putting you in the shoes of some kids in a small town, the super quirky details of everything, the fact that you use psychic powers as your magic, the primary weapons of the main characters are things like a baseball bat, a yo yo, a slingshot and then the even wilder part is you’re fighting against hippies and aliens and weird plants. Just everything was so off kilter and that made it incredibly charming and intriguing in that time.

I still would love to play mother 3 but haven’t gotten the English translation mod to work. So who knows, maybe one day Nintendo will actually listen to its fan base and release that thing in English.

Anyway this things coming full circle. While he’s not a playable character per se insofar as having his own move set and all that, the undertale fan favorite character Sans was released as a paid DLC skin for the Mii Fighter character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

So there we are.

I’m stoked.

[00:11:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that that is full circle. I mean so you fully played through Earthbound? As I said, I literally have just started earthbound for my first time ever on my Switch 2 because with the Super Nintendo catalog that we get on there. Yeah started Earthbound as I said, not very far, 45 minutes or so into it if that, but excited.

It seems to be a lot of people, a lot of people who love like retro games grew up the Super Nintendo Earthbound seems to be their top choice if not definitely in the top three right. Usually I do remember from the original Super Smash as you said Ness, I actually really enjoyed playing as Ness in Super Smash Bros. That was one of my favorite characters. With his baseball bat. With his baseball bat. And then him also going like PK Fire. And then you could shoot the thing out and if you wanted to, you could hit yourself in the butt and launch yourself back onto the platform.

[00:12:25] Speaker A: It was PK Thunder. Yeah, it was Fire.

Yeah, it was just like all those weird kind of out of the box things that made him a very different character to play as in that original N64 with very few characters.

[00:12:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. He was definitely one of. I think him and the original one. Him and Link were my top two favorite characters in that game.

[00:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I kind of just mixed it around with all of them because there are so few. You could really just adapt all the time.

That N64 smash bros. Was a really good time. Kind of a revelatory experience back then.

[00:13:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it was.

[00:13:08] Speaker A: So I will be playing Undertale on my Switch 1 since I am saving my limited Switch 2 storage for more graphically or engine intense games and still using my Switch OLED for pixel graphic and other smaller 2D games, especially Indies. I do have the physical copy as mentioned, since I picked it up after off that research spree years ago, so it’ll be nice to finally grab it from the shelf. I presume you’ll be playing on Switch too, Alex.

[00:13:33] Speaker B: I will. Yep. I have the physical copy. As I stated. I’ll be. Yeah, playing that on my switch too.

[00:13:40] Speaker A: Okay, so it seems that Undertale is of a medium length, but your mileage may vary wildly, really, depending on how much you enjoy the story and the encounters, as well as how engrossed you become and your decision to play one, two or all three different routes. Or if you’re an absolute completionist, you can go for all 93 endings that the game has to offer.

I don’t think we’ll be doing that. Apparently most.

[00:14:04] Speaker B: No, we will not. That is a lot of endings.

[00:14:07] Speaker A: The backlog is too long to go through 93 endings of the same game.

[00:14:10] Speaker B: It’s too long to do 93. Yeah.

[00:14:13] Speaker A: Apparently most of those 93 are variations of the neutral route, with four pacifists and four genocide variations, all depending on how you play the game and in what order you get your endings.

For the sake of an interesting discussion as well as just timing reasons, we will play undertale over the next few weeks. We’ll be playing the neutral route as a baseline. Then one of us will play the pacifist route and the other will play the genocide route. We haven’t decided who yet. And we’ll meet back in the middle to fill everyone in on what happens on either side and discuss the most likely what I expect to be wildly different results. To our understanding, the neutral route can be completed in about five to eight hours. So that’s step one.

Today is Thursday and we’ll actually sync back up on Tuesday for a quick chat on our first impressions and to swap tips and tricks for how to tackle whatever obstacles are in our way with no story spoilers. I’m focusing on the first two to three hours or so, then we’ll meet back up a week later to go into full detail on the Neutral Run playthrough and follow it up with the combined Genocide Pacifist playthrough.

If you haven’t had a chance yet to play through undertale and have seen it sit for far too long on your backlog, or you just want to give it a go before firing up Deltarune chapters 14 on Switch 2, then please join us in our playthrough of Undertale and aim to at least start up the game over the weekend and join us for a knowledge share early next week.

Then press on and get through the neutral route by the following episode.

Any final tidbits? Alex?

[00:15:46] Speaker B: Any final tidbits? Let’s see. Yeah, another thing I just heard about undertale before, we start from a lot of people who’ve played it. It seems to be another one of those games that we have on our list and we’re very lucky this that everyone loves the soundtrack and so far I feel that every game that we’ve played so far for this podcast for our backlog, the soundtracks have been phenomenal and it just sounds like it is going to continue with undertale people always. Yeah, I saw.

[00:16:15] Speaker A: Definitely not by the way.

[00:16:19] Speaker B: No it’s not by design at all. But seems like we’re getting very lucky of playing some really good games with really good soundtracks. So yeah, excited to hear all the music.

[00:16:31] Speaker A: So if you, if you connect all the dots, we’re really playing games that are about pizza, about music and potentially falling into holes.

We’ll see what happens next.

[00:16:46] Speaker B: It seems to be. Yeah, we’ll see what happens next.

[00:16:51] Speaker A: Excellent. Let’s get started undertale and talk soon.

[00:16:58] Speaker B: Yep, definitely. Thank you everyone for listening and we’re excited for you hopefully to maybe share this journey with us through undertale. Looking forward to it. So thanks everyone for listening.

If you want to follow along and discuss our playthrough of Nave games on the Gaming Backlog Book Club podcast, please give us a follow on your podcast platform of choice, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Amazon Music or Pocketcasts, as well as our Discord and Instagram under the same name. Thanks.