I played Undertale Yellow

[Finished December 27th, 2023. Rating: 3/10]

One of the most enduring and oft-repeated lessons of life is that ‘the journey is more important than the destination’.

Undertale Yellow was a game I spent seven years of my life waiting for the release of. I was extremely emotionally invested and excited, and its fan community enriched my life in too many ways to count. The clearly absurd amount of passion that went into it was an incredible inspiration to me in my dream of creating engaging games of my own. And, of course, it was only natural that I’d be this excited for a fan prequel to what was already one of the most impactful stories I’d experienced in my life.

As you can see, I ended up not caring for the final product.

You see, Undertale Yellow didn’t end up betraying my expectations, at least not in the sense that any part of it I was initially excited for didn’t turn out fantastic in the end. It still has tons of effort poured into the graphics, the gameplay, the worldbuilding — even the tiny idiosyncrasies of the writing style feel uncannily identical to Toby Fox’s. In essentially every sense, this is a fan project that understands everything that made Undertale what it is… except, in my opinion, for the spirit and purpose behind its story.

There’s a reason I think the original Undertale stands the test of time despite my tastes changing so dramatically over the course of the eight years since its release. Yes, its presentation and design are clearly excellent, and I’m sure that’s a crucial part of what made it so popular. But behind every decision the game makes, there is depth — a lot of it, in fact. I could talk for hours about how everything in Undertale is designed to deconstruct a core perspective on morality, redemption, violence, etc; how it uses an abuse victim’s moral framework as the centerpiece of the player’s interaction with the narrative, and designs its writing around that character as a result (while still lending depth to others in related ways). It’s a short game, but it makes maximum use of its length by being as cohesive as possible in the topics it addresses, not wasting a single second in building upon those ideas.

By contrast, Undertale Yellow is noticeably worse at this. That’s not to say it doesn’t try, but there’s an abundance of its cast seemingly either without a perspective on the narrative’s core focus, or with one so minimal that it basically doesn’t register anyways. Characters like Axis are only ‘relevant’ to the story of UTY in the most literal sense, being objectively related to plot events while having essentially no personal relation to the central ideas of the game. Others, like Martlet, offer perspectives on the themes that come off as totally shallow considering their total lack of meaningful individual characterization and beliefs. There are four characters I think have significant perspectives on UTY’s themes, and one of them is the silent protagonist, so it’s basically just three.

So, what are Undertale Yellow’s themes? The most reasonable interpretation to me is that this is a game about ‘justice’. More particularly, its cast is unified by a shared negative perspective on the ideas of UT. They uphold a transactional and destructive system of morality where decisions necessitate justification based on the past, and individual happiness is meaningless in favor of constant greater-scope appeals to the nebulous ‘right thing’. Honestly? This is a great direction for a prequel fangame to Undertale. Constructing a cast based on the principles Undertale warns against is a clever concept, even with comparatively few characters who get to meaningfully demonstrate those principles.

However, that leads us to another problem: that shared negative perspective is too often both the beginning and end of UTY’s thematic exploration. I mentioned that Clover’s silent protagonism prevents them from having a very meaningful perspective on the themes, but that’s not entirely the truth — they take independent action several times. It’s just that their actions are always the most banal possible portrayal of their ideology, where they make bad decisions that straightforwardly communicate their warped perspective on justice, and the game doesn’t elaborate on this in any more detailed or personal way. Flowey ends up having a similar issue. I was actually fairly excited for Flowey’s presence in this game, as he’s the beating heart of Undertale and would obviously be integral to this kind of prequel. His involvement, though, ended up being exactly as banal of a narrative force. Undertale Yellow prioritizes the ends of his character far above the means; while the context of his ‘kill or be killed’ philosophy in the original was crucially important to understanding him, UTY does away with that understanding in favor of simply making that philosophy all there is to him thematically. I get that it would be redundant to simply re-explore the same character beats he got in UT, but by not writing any new facets to him, the game basically falls victim to that kind of repetition anyways within an even more simplistic scope.

That leaves me with two main characters who I think provide any substance to the ideas Undertale Yellow is trying to explore, those being North Star and Ceroba Ketsukane. I’m not even hesitant to say these two are solidly good characters, who easily meet my standards of characters whose perspectives on the themes clearly affect them in multilayered personal ways. Star is a very emotionally powerful depiction of someone genuinely empathetic with a tendency to nonetheless take advantage of others’ tragedies for his own gain, and Ceroba is a pretty nuanced character who uses her sympathetic history to justify horrible and disproportionate acts against others, resulting in her own self-hatred. If one were to play the game for any reason, I’d recommend they play it for these two. Nonetheless, they certainly fail to carry the game in quality all on its own.

In the end, I think Undertale Yellow is much more concerned with replicating what was surface-level fun about its predecessor than it is with telling its own realized story. The best example of this is probably the Genocide route, which not only relegates its characters’ involvement essentially just to being one-dimensionally tortured, it’s also the only route in the game with a final boss that lacks dialogue for the vast majority of the battle. But it’s all over the game. Major bosses with no contribution to the narrative beyond existing for climactic fights. Major areas with nothing of overarching significance taking place. It’s fine to have segments that are just there for entertainment, but while Undertale placed those sparingly throughout the experience, Undertale Yellow makes them by far the most of what it has to offer. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that — I greatly respect the effort and skill involved with this undertaking — but it’s certainly not what I’d have hoped for in a true successor to its source material.