Greetings.I am Rtwo.The music for this section is
a single, high chord with the occasional heartbeat-like thump.
Thank you.Your power awakened me from death.My "human soul." My "determination." They were not mine, but YOURS.At first, I was so confused. Our plan had failed, hadn't it? Why was I brought back to life?...You. With your guidance, I realized the purpose of my reincarnation.Power.Together, we eradicated the enemy and became strong. HP. ATK. DEF. GOLD. EXP. LV. Every time a number increases, that feeling... That's me. "Rtwo."Now. Now, we have reached the absolute. There is nothing left for us here.Let us erase this pointless world, and move on to the next.So, let's talk about some history.
RPGs ask the player to do a lot of killing. I mean, a
lot of killing.
Even the ones without Suikoden-style mass army battles or anything have a lot of padded-out random encounters with creatures that exist only to be killed. They have no plot significance, and often don't exist until the screen gets all blurry and you find yourself in another fight. If you want those sweet experience points and whatever the game you're playing calls skill points, you're going to have to drop some HP down past zero.
Once in a while you get a game where monsters aren't explicitly killed -- Earthbound has monsters "become tame", "stop moving", or "surrender", for example -- or a game that gives you some other option to end the fight -- Shin Megami Tensei's well-known dialogue options -- but even in those games you're fighting for your life throughout. Ultima 4 sees the player ascending to avatarhood by adherence to saintly virtues... but sure enough, those virtues affect who and how you fight as much as not.
This goes way back to the basis of the genre. Dragon Quest is ultimately about managing money (since that's all you lose when you die) and your initial gift of 120 pieces of gold isn't enough to afford the equipment in town you'll need to start your quest. The difference between your starting gold and the Copper Sword, Leather Armor, and Leather Shield available for initial purchase can be measured in the number of Slimes you have to kill to raise that kind of dosh. That number is one hundred and ten. If you buy a Club and Clothes as a stopgap? You'll have to kill another forty to make up for it. And that's just to get started.
Once in a while a game will go to some lengths to point out that the monsters you're killing aren't part of any natural ecosystem or anything. They're discarded science experiments, or aliens from the moon, or risen from the soul-stuff that remains when living things die (to use examples from Final Fantasy alone). But that doesn't excuse the dozens-to-hundreds of human (or whatever other sapient race) enemies you also kill, or games including Dragon Quest or Shin Megami Tensei where monsters are shown to have their own sapience, place in nature, or even villages and societies.
Undertale isn't the first game to point out "Hey, that's kind of fucked up, isn't it?" but uh, hey. That's kind of fucked up, isn't it?
So here we meet the ultimate villain of the game. It's not Asgore the king, reaper and collector of human souls. It's not Undyne, murderous and vindictive. It's not even Flowey, the soulless manipulator of events.
It's the player's own drive to grind, to see numbers go up, to end the lives of others in order to amass an abstracted level of increased power and skill by the collection of abstracted practice-as-experience-points. The canon name for this character is "Chara", but when prompted for clarification Toby Fox has Tweeted that the player is intended to use their own name. I mean, "Chara" is just a placeholder, the first half of the blank slate label "character".
Chara-cum-Rtwo has always been there, from the beginning of the very first run, acting as narrator. They are the little voice in the back of Frisk's head, filling in information on the underground that the human couldn't possibly know. It's Chara who points out "Despite everything, it's still you" when Frisk looks in the mirror. It's Chara who provides the cruel or nasty Act commands, like heckling Snowdrake's attempts at humor. It's Chara who recognizes Asriel's form as the God of Hyperdeath, probably snickering from the back of Frisk's mind at Asriel turning into his own childhood Original Character Do Not Steal.
In any but the genocide run, Chara remains a background element. Only when sated by very deliberately grinding out Experien-- pardon me --
Execution Points do they wake up and take control. And now, with everything in the underground dead, with my LV and HP as high as it will go, the elemental embodiment of level-grinding thinks it's time to put a wrap on it and move on to the next game.
I'm not so sure. I'm not done with Undertale quite yet.
And then the game crashes.
The game's explored just about every other sort of horror short of an animatronic chicken in a bib popping up and biting at the screen,
I stand corrected.