Design Journal #6 – Story Conflict & the Dramatic Arc

    Since this game and its in-progress somethingquel Deltarune have returned to their rent-free living space in my head this year, I'm going to write about Undertale for this one.

     Undertale is an interesting game to talk about with respect to narrative structure and dramatic arc, because there are sort of layers to it. There's what's going on with the player character and other characters in the Underground, of course, but, unlike many story-focused games, you, the real-life human being playing the game, are also a character in the story. That said, I think the game actually incorporates multiple types of conflict depending on which path through the story is being assessed.

    For the player character, I think the game at least starts out on the foot of what I think slots best into a sort of "Man vs. Society" framework; the protagonist has fallen into the Underground, a cavern beneath a mountain sealed off from the outside world, to which they seek to return. However, their soul is the last resource the monsters living in the underground need in order to break the seal keeping them there, and thus the main character is hunted for that soul. Is that "Man vs. Society", or "Man vs. Man"? I'm not really sure which side of the boundary it falls on.

    In the most direct sense, the finales of the two most polar extreme endings sort of devolve into Man vs. Man, but in a broader thematic sense, I'd say they diverge a bit. The good ending—dubbed the "True Pacifist" ending by the player base—takes on sort of a Man vs. Fate bit, with the player more so than the in-game protagonist in the position of "Man", being predicated on the idea that you, the player, do not accept the destiny prescribed to the game's cast by the neutral ending and seek a better outcome.

    Conversely, the "evil ending", given the macabre but not inaccurate moniker of "Genocide" by fans, becomes a Man vs. God conflict with the player in the role of god rather than man. You are, after all, a real human being, and the cast of Undertale are all just video game characters. They can send you to the game over screen if you fall to their attacks, but they can't actually determine your fate in the way you can determine theirs. You get as many tries at every challenge as you may choose to pursue; they only get as many tries as you decide to give them. "Evil only has to win once", as TV Tropes puts it, and in the Genocide route, you are "evil".

     What type of conflict the game is, I think, is not quite as interesting as the fact that Undertale is a game about its central conflict in a way I haven't experienced hardly anywhere else. That is, more than just informing the story, the very nature of that central conflict and how you choose to engage with it lies at the heart of the game's most defining mechanical characteristic: nobody has to die, but nearly anyone can.

    Unlike many other RPGs, in Undertale, a character's HP reaching zero means, without exception, that they are capital-D Dead. It doesn't matter if they're a major story character or a minor random encounter; if you exhaust an opponent's HP in battle, you kill that character, and there's no way to bring them back besides loading a save from before you killed them or restarting your playthrough, both things the game acknowledges and that exist as factors within its fiction.

    Obviously, you can just follow the dramatic arc on its most basic, surface level and make it to the end of the game. The story begins in the Ruins of the old monster capital city, which the protagonist escapes after either killing the matronly hermit Toriel or convincing her to let them leave peacefully. From there, the rising action begins as the protagonist ventures towards the new capital city, running into stronger and stronger opposition as they draw closer to it before the final climactic showdown with King Asgore (and another surprise opponent) before the passage leading out of the Underground. That's technically a complete run of the game, and you'll get an ending for it that varies slightly depending on who you did or didn't kill or befriend on your journey, which in turn will be colored by what sort of conflict you project onto the story and how you interpret what is and is not justified from the player character's perspective, or from yours, as the player. This freedom to kill or spare nearly every character in the game, and even go out of your way to befriend some, though, naturally raises the question: What happens if you take that concept to one of its two extremes? What if you kill nobody and befriend everyone you can? What if you kill everybody? Either choice will net you one of the game's two polar endings; the two it's best known for.

    Your first run through the game is meant to get you acquainted with how it works, to familiarize yourself with its world and characters, and get you to care enough to want to see those extremes. It's a game that embraces and celebrates the sort of player who plays a game, extrapolates what might be possible within its parameters, and seeks to see what happens if they actually pursue that, and incorporates that into its story. While it isn't without challenging gameplay in places, Undertale is, at its heart, an interactive narrative experience. In many ways, the mechanics and story are one and the same; the writing gives the gameplay its meaning, and in turn couldn't properly exist without it.