The coolest thing about Undertale imo is that it’s not done with realistic graphics and so much of it is charming to your imagination and your sense of whimsy. You have to interpret and minds-eye a lot of the stuff in the game. The sprites themselves are of course, well made and adorable, but that you have to extrapolate the visuals yourself engages you in a creative and emotional way.
You do get emotive visuals, like the Toriel hug, the angryface mannequin hopping around, but there’s a lot you get drawn into… conceptually, not because you’re seeing a literal tangible sadness. The shadowed statue being dripped on, and you can give it an umbrella. Blooky calling Mettaton’s show on the air because there’s no other way to reach him. The patch of yellow flowers near the garbage dump. Papyrus’s home-made rickety sentry station. “Sn… o… wy?”
The environments are so clean and the characters so simply drawn, it makes all of this emotional charge so obvious.
This’s so, so well done through the fights. You’re just a heart in a box, but you’re creating an entire scene in your head according to how the attacks are drawn. You can sense the idea of Undyne whipping a spear at you forcing you to duck, or Sans throwing you bodily around the room as you jump back to evade a wall of bones shattering your body, or Mettaton dancing so fast his legs nearly hit you, or the inversion of Papyrus’s gravity magic where you leap over an immense bone at the end, the reality-defying height of the jump communicated through the UI having to change around you.
Realistic fanart of Undertale’s fights is one of my fave things because of the realisation of the merely implied action we all saw and collectively dreamed a movie out of.
Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.
This is the best representation of something I have been trying to explain to people for years!!!! Saving this to my phone so I can routinely pull it out when I need.
