We've talked a lot about how Undertale's encounter model works to subvert traditional ideas of combat within RPG-- but what do the actual mechanics of the encounters have to say about this?
Within a standard encounter, each round has two phases: the player's turn and the enemy's turn. On the player's turn, the options of FIGHT, ACT, ITEM, and MERCY are presented, and the player is required to pick a category. In the case of ACT, ITEM, and MERCY, the player is asked to select an additional sub-option (and sometimes a target), but that's it-- the turn ends there without requiring anything other than a couple button presses.
If the player selects the FIGHT option, however, things are a little more complicated: after selecting their target, a strange striped ellipse appears on the screen with a white bar sliding across. If the player hits the interaction button (Z) before the bar fully crosses the ellipse, the player's character attacks the target; and the closer the player is to the center of the meter, the more damage the attack deals.
This isn't a particularly complicated model for fighting, but it's one that is never explained to the player-- while the player's initial interaction with Toriel includes hints at how to navigate non-violent encounters, at no point does a character reveal any information regarding how violent encounters work. Additionally, though a single Quick-Time Event (QTE) isn't necessarily "difficult", it is still more difficult to do successfully than the non-violent menu selection, which is impossible to fail at. Furthermore, while each encounter has a non-violent solution that can always be achieved in a fixed (usually small) number of rounds, a player who is not good at QTEs could be stuck in a violent encounter for much longer. And the longer a violent encounter drags on, the more rounds of bullet hell the player has to survive, and the higher the chance of failure (that is, a player running out of HP).
If we also look at the enemy's turn, we see that the "bullet hell"-style attacks can change as combat progresses, but in a common way across most monsters: if the player is engaging in a violent encounter, monsters will continue to attack each turn, but if the player opts for a non-violent solution, many monsters will use more easily dodged attacks or cease to attack entirely. So, in addition to having to survive fewer rounds of attacks, non-violent encounters result in fewer attacks to dodge within each round.
From this, we can see that, at least in the sense of mechanical difficulty, non-violence in Undertale is much easier than violence; yet this fact is never explicitly revealed by the game. Given that Undertale prides itself on the fact that it's an RPG where you don't have to kill anyone, it's no surprise that it would make non-violence easier than violence; yet by making one route mechanically easier than the other, it is likely to influence players who are otherwise apathetic about the question of violence & non-violence to opt for non-violence. It's a clever model that allows the game to show off what makes it special-- yet it feels like a bit of a cop-out that the game is content to silently guide the player towards the non-violent route, rather than forcing the player to be aware of the choice they're making and why they're making it.
Comments