How Undertale makes you think hard before killing monsters
"You kill a lot of random monsters (sometimes even humans) in every RPG and the consequences for this are never addressed. What if they were?"
The monsters in Toby Fox's
Undertale are an unassuming lot. Some of them want you to eat your veggies. Some of them want to know what you think of their hat. Some of them just want to be petted.
They're not exactly a fearsome bunch, but neither was that grinning slime many of us saw during our first few minutes with
Dragon Quest decades ago. That didn't stop us from splattering it into smears of jelly for the miniscule amounts of EXP and gold it was carrying, beginning a streak of violence that has gone largely unchallenged in RPGs since their inception.
Fox asks us to question ourselves and the violence we commit in RPGs with
Undertale. He does so by making the violence completely optional, asking that the player make a conscious choice to do harm.
Unlike the various slimes and goblins you HAVE to fight in many other games, it's entirely possible for the player to make their way through
Undertale without harming a soul.
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