Why do I talk to everyone in Undertale?

We talked a lot about Undertale's combat system in Thursday's class and I don't want to beat a dead horse but I had a couple of thoughts on it after class when I was replaying some of the game:

Plenty of canonical role playing games have narratives dependent on player choice, and having endings put moral weight into those choices is not a new feature in Undertale. Undertale's big change to the system regarding those endings is that random encounters in combat count as a choice, which is surprising and new because the language of your standard role playing game dictates that combat is an opportunity to gain or ability strength separately from the narrative. I also wanted to consider that the humor in the game functions in a similar way, especially through the exploration of the map and dialogue with nameless monsters.

If we want to think about the way Undertale challenges the language of RPG's, it's interesting to consider how nameless characters typically work as a middle ground between random combat encounters and main story line characters in these types of games. They certainly can be used to progress the narrative and give direction to the player in the story, but often times they do not, giving items or commentary that just seems to act as an a acknowledgement that these characters represent people with thoughts. Ultimately, they become almost collectable - a resource to be mined, to collect items for combat or helpful tips. We 'collect' these encounters in the same way we collect items, often even in the same spaces, like houses in pokemon where you check both the residents and the trash cans for items, or The Legend of Zelda where you might find useful items in the village through dialogue or through cracking pots.

Undertale's humor in those character's dialog, then, is cool to think about. Retrospectively I can't think of a single encounter that gave me items or things useful for progressing in the world, but the witty lines never rang bells telling me these encounter should not be treated in in the same way I treat encounters in more typical role playing games, even though objectively the content was different. I think this is proof of how Undertale makes its own commentary collectable in the way items or experience are in the archetype of this format - it becomes something to "collect them all".