Undertale

Undertale is a Role-Playing Game by Toby Fox, funded on Kickstarter and released on September 15th, 2015. A demo is available at http://undertale.com/, and a trailer is available here. Is currently available to purchase in several platforms (including Steam), and a port to PlayStation systems (namely PlayStation 4 and Vita), along with an official translation to Japanese, was released in August 2017. A port for the Nintendo Switch has been announced in 2018.

Years ago, Humans and Monsters ruled the earth together. One day, war broke out between the two races and humanity emerged victorious, sealing the monsters underground with a magic spell. In the present day, a small child playing in a cave trips and falls down an enormous hole. They wake up on a bed of flowers in a mysterious place...

Undertale draws heavily from EarthBound and Mother 3, but the core gameplay is very different from typical RPGs. Instead of selecting commands and having the computer calculate hits, each enemy attack brings up a smaller arena where the heart-shaped avatar of your soul must dodge projectiles like in Bullet Hell. In battle, the player can choose to FIGHT an enemy or SPARE them after ACTing in a way that let you do that.

The game has received critical acclaim and a dedicated fanbase has revolved around it, becoming popular among letsplayers. Currently, it is the most well-received video game made on Game Maker.

You can read more about Undertale through the Undertale Wiki, but tread cautiously, as it is chock-full of spoilers.

First, a very special trope:
 * Multiple Endings: There are three major routes in the game, and even mentioning their requirements is a spoiler in and of itself. This tropelist will cover only events found in the Neutral route. This page also includes examples which apply to Undertale in general, not just to any specific route. Tropes which specifically apply to the other routes can be found here:
 * Undertale/Good Route
 * Undertale/Bad Route


 * Abandoned Laboratory: The True Lab, the last main area in a Pacifist run is an old lab of Alphys' that has fallen into disrepair. It isn’t entirely abandoned, but it looks the part, and is filled with all the horrors you’d expect from a place like it.
 * Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: Papyrus's fences, which are built with posts much too far apart to stop you.
 * Acme Products: There are a lot of MTT-brand products in the underground.
 * Action Commands: When attacking, an eye-like meter will appear over the menu, and a bar will run across it. Confirm the attack when the bar is near the middle, and you do more damage. Don't press anything, and you won't attack. Most weapons change this system a bit, such as requiring mashing of the attack button to deal more damage (Tough Glove) or sending multiple bars at once (Ballet Shoes).
 * Adaptation-Induced Plothole: An extremely minor example. Since the PlayStation versions replace all dialogue referring to the F4 key, the "secret fourth frog" Brick Joke during the Playable Epilogue comes off as completely random.
 * Adorkable: Quite a few characters qualify, but this is especially the case for Papyrus and Alphys.
 * Papyrus is a skeleton with aspirations to hunt humans, but despite his choice in career, he comes across as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain..
 * Alphys is a straight-up Otaku who spends way too much time on social media and nerds out over her favorite anime..
 * All Lowercase Letters: Frequent in characters, and used as a shorthand for depression, judging that the characters more prone to it are Napstablook and the self-deprecating Alphys. Sans seems to be the exception, as he is part of the all lowercase speech group, but his Meta Guy qualifications make credible that he is so lazy he just doesn't bother capitalizing things..
 * Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The first phase of the True Final Boss of the Pacifist route has the background as a changing wave of colors while the boss moves around it. The second phase has the boss's wings with moving colors as well.
 * Animal Motif: While Toby Fox never physically appears in the game, his avatar can. Known as the Annoying Dog, he primarily bothers Papyrus and notably absorbs the Legendary Artifact. He can also be found as an Easter Egg after the games credits as a pomeranian sleeping in a room representing his office next to his computer.
 * Apocalyptic Log: Two of them, both in the same hidden location. The True Laboratory has the written logs from Alphys and the audio tapes from before the deaths of Asgore's children.
 * Arc Words: "Determination."
 * "It's kill or be killed."
 * "You're gonna have a bad time."
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: At one point in Snowdin, Papyrus sets up a gauntlet of traps including such dangerous weapons as a cannon, a flamethrower, a spiked ball-and-chain, a spear and... the Annoying Dog dangling from a rope.
 * Ascended Fridge Horror: Toriel at the beginning prepares to destroy the entrance to Snowdin because every child that has fallen into the Ruins goes out, dies, and gets their SOUL harvested by Asgore. Before that, however, they spent enough time with her to outgrow their shoes, win her love, and evolve her into the My Beloved Smother that you encounter.
 * Bad Guy Bar: In Snowdin Town's local restaurant Grillby's, you can find all 5 of the dog mini-bosses you encountered along the way (assuming they're alive, of course). Subverted in that they don't treat you like an enemy anymore and talk to you normally.
 * Be Careful What You Wish For: Burgerpants says this word for word, after admitting that he initially came to Hotland because working with Mettaton was his greatest dream. Now that he does work for Mettaton, he realizes he's a Bad Boss that somehow coasts entirely on Popularity Power despite the MTT Resort being, in Burgerpants's words, "a labyrinth of bad choices."
 * Behind the Black:
 * The "conveniently-shaped lamp" the player hides behind in the first scene with Papyrus only covers the player from the camera's point of view; given that Papyrus was standing to the side, he should have easily been able to spot where the player was standing.
 * There's a crystal formation in waterfall that the protagonist finds particularly beautiful, but it's on the southern wall. The only hint of this formation existing is calling Undyne and Papyrus in the area.
 * This is a core feature in the perspective puzzle in the Ruins, in which coloured switches are hidden from the player by pillars, but would be perfectly visible to the character.
 * Being Evil Sucks: The Genocide route seems designed to make you feel this. It strips away the majority of the charm of the game, having much less in the way of puzzles and character interaction, in return offering only an endless slog of killing every enemy you encounter in only one or two hits, alongside many a self-inflicted Player Punch. The only thing it offers to compensate is the two toughest boss battles in the game.
 * Better Than a Bare Bulb: If there is a JRPG or general video game cliché present in the game, it will be commented on. Either it'll be for a quick gag, or it'll become a major Deconstruction that the game ends up revolving around.
 * Big Bad: Asgore Dreemurr, king of the Underground's monsters. His goal is to gather seven human SOULs and shatter the barrier keeping the monsters locked in Mt. Ebott so they can finally be freed from their imprisonment and exact their vengeance on humanity. . In fact, it seems that.
 * Big Bad Ensemble: Mettaton and Asgore. Asgore is king of the monsters and is the overarching threat of the game, while Mettaton is simply a superstar robot who, however, is responsible for many of the bosses you fought over the game and is revealed to have independent goals from Asgore, appears more than Asgore does and has more presence. It's only after Mettaton's defeat that you fight Asgore finally..
 * Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
 * seems like an innocent, adorable little fellow, but right after meeting them, they try to trick the player into getting seriously hurt..
 * While not a malevolent example, fits the bill. Sure, there were no intentions of ever putting you through real danger, but.
 * Bleak Level:
 * The True Lab. Its only residents are Alphys and a mysterious new class of enemies, the color scheme is dull and dark, and it provides exposition about the Alphys's first experiments, Flowey’s origins, and the past of the Dreemurr family, all of which are… not lighthearted.
 * The entire game becomes progressively bleaker and bleaker on a Genocide run, and it's especially noticeable if you've done a less murderous run earlier. The point when it really begins to show is Snowdin Town; the normal run town is the most populated area in the game, but it's almost entirely abandoned in a Genocide run (apart from Monster Kid), and most of the flavor text has been changed to be much darker.
 * The Blind Leading the Blind: Undyne admits, after giving a violent cooking lesson that leaves her kitchen a mess and her house in flames, that she now understands why Papyrus, her original student, sucks at cooking.
 * Bloodless Carnage: Monsters turn to dust when killed, so no blood is spilled. Subverted (or Averted, depending on player interpretation) once in the Genocide run, as mentioned above. There is some evidence to suggest that monsters shed blood when injured prior to turning to dust, however, as also noted above, but since the only example we see is from a Boss Monster (a very powerful kind of monster with unique biology even by monster standards), nothing can be said for sure.
 * Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: Papyrus and Sans, respectively.
 * Boss Banter: Many bosses are fond of talking to you during their battle (as are regular enemies, for that matter), but the final bosses of each of the routes fit best. The Neutral one gloats about killing you and your friends, while the other bosses sound more like they're ranting on their personal soapboxes than trying to kill you.
 * Buffy Speak: Sans calls Papyrus's fence in Snowdin Forest a "gate thingy".
 * Bullet Hell:
 * Enemies attack with bullets of varying shapes and patterns. Battles with multiple enemies can become hectic.
 * Beware that some of the attacks will come from out of the square your heart is in.
 * Burger Fool: MTT-Brand Burger Emporium, even down to the mandatory slogans. Management is incompetent in several respects and outright sadistic in others, alternatingly micromanaging and operating entirely on whims. The leitmotif is the same pitched-down version of "Shop" you'd hear in other stores during a Genocide run, no matter which end you go for.
 * Cardboard Prison: Papyrus's attempt to use his and Sans's shed as an impromptu prison for the player is quite unimpressive to say the least. His only measure for hindering escape attempts is placing a fence across the room, which has such large gaps between the bars that it can be circumvented by walking out between them, and the door to the shed turns out to be locked from the INSIDE.
 * Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
 * Some bosses can change the color of your SOUL, which changes the way its movement works. Red is the default, and can move freely. Blue subjects your soul to gravity, dragging it to the ground and forcing you to jump to move vertically. Green prevents you from moving, but gives you a shield that you can point in different directions to block incoming attacks. Purple forces you to hop between horizontal lines for vertical movement, but still allows you to move back and forth along those lines. Yellow allows your soul to shoot projectiles. All of these changes disable the FLEE option.
 * Enemy projectiles have colors as well. White projectiles are normal and do damage when touched. Light blue attacks won't hurt you as long as you aren't moving, while orange ones will only hurt you if you're staying still. Green attacks will heal you when you touch them and/or must be touched to spare an enemy. Grey attacks (only so far used by ghosts/objects possessed by ghosts) do nothing at all. They're used to relay messages in a non-harmful manner. Red attacks, similar to grey attacks, are often used as a warning in order to allow you to know when an attack is coming.
 * Context Sensitive Button: The ACT option in battles. When it is selected for an enemy, a set of options unique for them pops up, and you can choose any one of them. The effects they have include doing nothing, changing your stats or the enemy's stats, affecting their next attack, allowing them to be spared or making them leave the battle, and any number of miscellaneous effects depending on the enemy.
 * Continuing Is Painful: Averted for the most part, except during Papyrus' fight. Unlike most battles, where you die and are sent back to the last place you saved, it's completely impossible to die during Papyrus' fight as he captures you, and the battle ends once you hit 1 HP. While this might seem like a good thing, this means that after every fight the healing items you used in the previous fight are still gone, and in subsequent tries, you'll have to waste money to buy more healing items.
 * Convection, Schmonvection: Zigzagged. While Undyne's armor heats up significantly while crossing a bridge over lava, to the point where she passes out, you are perfectly fine in that same area and suffer no heat related issues, even when you make it hotter to appease a monster. Then again, Undyne is a fish monster wearing heavy steel armor. Your character is wearing a simple striped shirt. Also, the Royal Guardsmen apparently have "cooling dirt" on their armor, which you need to polish away in order to get one of them to succumb to the heat and take his armor off as well. Since Undyne is normally stationed in Waterfall, her armor would have no need for such enhancement.
 * Cringe Comedy: The date with Alphys on the Pacifist route. Between Alphys's complete lack of social skills, and the fact that she's obviously pining for Undyne, it's awkward from the word "go". But then you start to roleplay an interaction between Alphys and Undyne, and things get even worse (or better, since that's when the scene goes from amusing to hilarious). And then Undyne overhears you.
 * Cute Monster Girl: This trope is more incidental than anything; the majority of monsters, male or female, are cute to some degree.
 * Deadly Euphemism: Throughout your journey, you'll hear about monsters who have "fallen down". It's revealed through Alphys' entries in the True Lab, and in Snowdin library, that "fallen down" means "comatose and near death".
 * Dem Bones: Sans and Papyrus are an interesting case: they look like human skeletons, yet they are actually a species of monster. There is no mention of them dying in the past, implying that they have always been skeletons. Supported by Papyrus thinking that humans "descended" from skeletons, showing that their skeletons are different.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Undertale is a very clever game, where a lot of dialogue changes depending on player actions, down to some incredibly minor ones.
 * One example: there are over 70 variants of the Neutral ending, wich depends on how many monsters were killed, which and how many bosses were spared, and whether the player keep their original equipment or not.
 * Diagonal Speed Boost: The game doesn't reduce your horizontal or vertical velocity if you move diagonally. While this can be beneficial on the map, it can feel awkward in battle, particularly for players of Shoot Em Ups that are used to this trope being averted. Fortunately, it can be disabled in the options menu.
 * Difficulty Spike: The Pacifist and Genocide routes are markedly harder than playing normally in the Neutral route. In the Pacifist route, you must avoid killing absolutely everything, which means you will not gain any attack power or HP and will have to get really good at dodging. In the Genocide route, you have to kill absolutely everything to get super strong, which means lots of grinding to purge all random encounters. The few bosses that can pose a challenge are absolutely brutal; the game will get really easy as you gain EXP and get stronger, till you can one shot most enemies, including bosses, but two bosses are still capable of giving you a good fight, as they're the toughest in the game.
 * Disc One Nuke: You can get the Temmie Armor before you are even halfway through the game, though this requires an enormous amount of money. Not only does it have the highest defense value of any armor in the game, it also increases your attack, the invincibility frames after getting hit, and restores one point of health every turn in combat.
 * Don't Make Me Destroy You: The final boss of the Genocide route takes this attitude with the player character once they first meet. The boss says "you are really not gonna like what happens next" if you fight them, trying to warn the human not to advance. When the human steps forward anyway, the boss gives a glorified shrug and starts the battle.
 * Double Unlock: The Temmie Armor requires you to pay one thousand gold to get the option to buy it, then a very high amount of gold to actually obtain it.
 * Do Well, But Not Perfect: In Thundersnail, if you win, you earn 9 G, which is less than the entry fee of 10 G! Napstablook explains that they have to make a profit somehow. If you lose by a very narrow margin, Napstablook will instead give you 30 G to avoid disappointing the snail you were cheering on.
 * Down in the Dumps: Partway through Waterfall, you fall into the Trash Zone, which, fittingly, is filled with garbage. And a mini-boss. You return there for Alphys' date.
 * Dreamworks Face: One of the sprites in the game files shows Toriel making this face and is named spr_face_torieldreamworks_0. Papyrus also has a confident expression during the battle with him.
 * Early Installment Weirdness: The Kickstarter videos have some different characterizations from the actual game. Sans is seen closing his mouth to drink lemonade, while he never closes his mouth in the game, sporting a goofy grin at all times. Toriel is also shown manifesting lemonade in thin air, though the only magic she's shown to have in the game is fire magic.
 * Earn Your Happy Ending: If you spared every enemy and got to the final room with no kills, not only did you not increase your LV (meaning you beat the game on the starting 20 HP), you still don't get the good ending unless you've befriended everybody. Then after that, you go through the True Lab, and found out the secrets of the hidden lab, as well as the truth of Flowey's existence, followed by another boss battle.
 * Easter Egg: There are plenty! But they're spoilerly enough to have their own page.
 * Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: To a heavy degree. Standard enemies, while not effortless, can usually be spared either instantly or after a single ACT, with only a few exceptions, and attacking them will bring them down pretty quickly, especially if you've gotten good with weapon timing and have higher LV. Bosses (at least the ones from Papyrus and beyond) are another story: they have high health, they employ Bullet Hell with their attacks, they mix up the dodging system, and sparing them requires either a thoughtful series of actions or dragging the fight out for quite a while (over 20 or more turns for the major bosses; most enemy battles will take 2-4 turns at the most). This is especially true in the Genocide path: you can plow through enemies with ease, but anything that can take more than a hit from you is far harder to beat than anything on other routes.
 * Egopolis: In the Neutral ending where Mettaton becomes the new ruler of the Underground, he turns it into this.
 * Either/Or Prophecy: The Delta Rune in Waterfall tells the prophecy that an Angel will come down from the mountain and "the Underground will go empty." Either the Angel will destroy the barrier and free monsterkind from imprisonment, or the Angel of Death will slaughter everyone.
 * Eldritch Abomination:.
 * Empathic Environment: The save point immediately before the battle with Undyne reads "The wind is howling. You're filled with determination...". If you kill her, the wind stops, and its message changes accordingly.
 * Epiphany Therapy: Subverted with Alphys in the Pacifist run. Although she confesses to Undyne that she feels like a fraud and has lied about anime, and Undyne tells her she loves Alphys Just the Way You Are and enacts Tough Love by making her run with Papyrus, Alphys still doesn't feel great. You find a note before entering the True Lab that reveals she might not come out, which means that by following her, you could potentially interrupt her off-screen suicide because she protects you from the enemies within the True Labs. This is Truth in Television: someone suffering social anxiety and depression won't just get better and may even feel lower after a high of hearing someone cares about them.
 * Eternal Engine: The CORE, a high-tech center that serves as the power source of the Underground. When the player arrives, it’s been taken over by Mettaton, who leaves traps and mercenaries everywhere.
 * Everyone Can See It: During Mettaton's quiz, he asks who Alphys' crush is. If the player responds "Undyne", she blushes, and Mettaton says "I told you it was obvious. Even the human figured it out." Even more so in her date sequence where she attempts to offer you metal polish, scale cream and a spear repair kit. One guess for who those are meant for.
 * Everything Fades: Monsters turn to dust when killed, explaining why they vanish after being fought. This is notably incorporated into monster funerals and comes up a few times in the plot of the game.
 * Evil Is Easy:
 * EXP can only be gained by fighting enemies; sparing them only gives you gold. Of course, this means that if you don't fight anyone, your life bar will never get bigger...
 * Taking the full Genocide route eventually subverts this. The amount of encounters in this route that don't go down in one or two turns can be counted on one hand. But those encounters are the most challenging in any route of the game.
 * Fake Trap: The corridor of spikes can't harm you because the spikes that aren't part of the correct path only act as barriers. You wouldn't realize this at first because Toriel leads you through.
 * Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The setting of Undertale is a place where you can meet a pair of comical skeleton brothers, a genocidal monster flower, a middle-aged pie-baking goat lady, an anime geek dinosaur scientist and a Wrong Genre Savvy Hot-Blooded fish knight.
 * The Ferry Man: The River Person, who, after you reach Waterfall, will allow you to quickly travel between Snowdin, Waterfall and Hotland, the game's three main areas.
 * Flawless Victory: If you dodge all of the names in the special backer credits, you'll gain access to the Developer's Room.
 * Flower Motifs: Golden Flowers, or Buttercups.
 * Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The trope is played with Sans and Papyrus. At first look, you may pin Sans as the Foolish (what with being completely committed to slacker lifestyle) and Papyrus as the Responsible (being the housekeeper, constantly reminding Sans of his responsibilities), but there are details that muddies the issues, like Papyrus' actual personality being actually quite naive and childish, while Sans seems to be the actual breadwinner of the household and is more responsible that he initially seems.
 * Four-Temperament Ensemble: The four monsters you befriend in the Pacifist route. Papyrus (sanguine), Undyne (choleric), Alphys (melancholic) and Sans (phlegmatic).
 * Fragile Speedster: If you keep the Bandage on, you'll have no additional defense whatsoever, but you'll be guaranteed to be able to run from any encounter that gives you the option.
 * The Friend Nobody Likes: Jerry, a deformed, butt-ugly monster who has a random chance of appearing in one of the enemy mobs in Snowdin's outskirts. All he does is act boorishly and annoyingly towards the other monsters, who will celebrate with the player should you choose to ditch him.
 * Frying Pan of Doom: The Burnt Pan weapon, which is even more useful on a Pacifist run since wielding it causes consumable healing items to restore 4 more HP than normal.
 * Furry Confusion:
 * A rabbit lady in Snowdin has a small, non-anthropomorphic rabbit on a leash as her pet. A rabbit guy nearby finds this a little disturbing. The Playable Epilogue reveals that this leash-rabbit is actually her brother.
 * Catty also talks about how she wants to buy a cat at some point despite being a big humanoid cat herself.
 * Furry Female Mane: Gender-inverted with Asgore and Toriel. While Toriel doesn't have feminine hair, and her only Tertiary Sexual Characteristics are eyelashes, Asgore spots a long viking-like blonde hair and a beard to highlight his manliness.
 * G-Rated Drug: Doggo likes to smoke dog treats.
 * Game Over Man: Under certain circumstances, the Game Over Man is different from the usual:
 * Being defeated by the Neutral Final Boss causes him to taunt you during the Game Over screen after Asgore says his usual line.
 * During the Genocide Final Boss, trying to spare the boss at a point will cause him to kill you. The resulting game over screen will have "Dogsong" play instead of the regular Game Over tune while the boss will assert that, after all of your genocidal actions, he refuses to allow the battle to resolve peacefully.
 * Gameplay Roulette: While the game is mostly presented as a JRPG, each enemy you battle in Undertale has at least one unique bullet hell-style attack that you must defend against, and each one has a unique text-based "puzzle" you must solve in order to spare them. In addition to this, the Underground itself is absolutely covered in puzzles that must be solved in order to get from place to place, and the game tends to take on horror-like undertones at the end of each route. There are also short mock-dating sim segments that the player can do with a few of the characters.
 * Genre Roulette: Most routes of the game are primarily an adventure/comedy, but with more than their fair share of tragedy and horror thrown in, often with very little warning. Take the Genocide route, however, and the game becomes so relentless and unapologetic in these latter elements that it's barely recognizable as the same game anymore.
 * Go Look At the Distraction: During a Neutral/Pacifist run battle with Mettaton, Alphys instructs you to turn Mettaton around so you can flip the switch on his back, and you do so by telling him there's a mirror behind him. If you lose to Mettaton and return, you can opt to skip his speech and turn him around straight away by telling him there's "something cool" behind him.
 * Good Feels Good: Whenever the game isn't judging and/or guilt tripping you for being a jerk, it's instead encouraging, supporting and appreciating you for being good, or even just not being bad, and it's very good at making you care about your choices.
 * Half the Man He Used To Be:
 * If you kill Toriel, she will have visible slices on her body and in her face.
 * In the Genocide route, Undyne takes a blow for the Monster Kid that visibly cuts her battle sprite in two, from shoulder to hip. Her upper half begins to slowly fall off... until she reforms herself for the real boss battle.
 * The final boss of the Genocide route has his torso diagonally slit in half all the way from his shoulder to his hip.
 * Hand Wave: Whenever the player is slightly out-of-bounds (when it should be impossible), "magic glass" appears underneath them so they won't be walking on air.
 * Have We Met?:
 * In the True Pacifist route, two characters who had never met in person find each others' voices familiar and realize that they'd been acquainted for quite some time.
 * When you restart the game, any of the main characters that you had befriended in a previous playthrough will vaguely remember you. For example: when Toriel asks what your favorite is between cinnamon and butterscotch, she will instead take a guess, which will be whatever you picked in the last playthrough.
 * Healing Checkpoint: They also serve as save points.
 * Heartbeat Soundtrack:
 * A heartbeat plays in background of the final scene of any Genocide playthrough, where the player has killed every single NPC the game allows.
 * In "But the Earth Refused to Die": if you listen closely, you can hear the hearts of everyone in the world beating as one.
 * Hello, Insert Name Here: As is typical for any game in the JRPG genre, you start a brand new game by naming the character. It then proceeds to subvert the trope, by making every monster in the underground refer to you as "Human" or "Kid" or other various generic terms of endearment (your chosen name still appears in your status and in the battle screen).
 * There is a twist, however: nobody calls you by that name because.
 * Heroic Second Wind: In the Genocide route, Undyne takes a fatal blow to protect an innocent from the player. Before she dies, however, her determination triggers a transformation into the powerful Undyne the Undying.
 * He Who Fights Monsters: A major theme of the game. By continually fighting literal monsters, even to the point of excess, they start becoming actively afraid of you and your capacity for cruelty. Especially apropos because you are fighting creatures called "monsters", yet can possibly end up more horrific than almost anything you encounter if you so will it. It gets even lampshaded by both Sans very early and Asgore very late that the player character can't even be recognized as a human, meaning they visually change into a literal monster as well.
 * Hidden Depths: Every major character has more to them than meets the eye. However, due to the game's extreme level of sensitivity to player choice, it's literally impossible to explore them all in a single run. In particular, going full genocide results in a very strong example of The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best In People, exposing depths that would only be hinted at otherwise. On the flipside, just about everything about Flowey is kept hidden from the player until the end of a True Pacifist run.
 * Hidden Track: Only the first 77 tracks out of 101 of the soundtrack are available for preview on Bandcamp. The rest are hidden due to their spoiler-laden nature, and can only be legally listened to by purchasing the soundtrack.
 * Hold the Line: Some bosses and encounters take longer to finish if you're trying to spare them rather than fight. The player needs to keep hitting SPARE (and/or use ACT) and withstand waves of attacks until the boss is ready to show mercy (or accept it).
 * Holiday Mode: A minor example: if you've gotten the True Pacifist ending, the Joystick Config menu will be different depending on whether it's spring, summer, autumn or winter.
 * Hopeless Boss Fight: There are several in the game (though most are technically minibosses), and every foe that uses this trope also plays with it differently.
 * The first Hopeless Miniboss Fight is . You can attack them if you like, but once their HP falls below 50%, they reveal that.
 * The next Hopeless Miniboss Fight is, and is probably the foe that zig-zags the trope the most.
 * They also can't be hurt because, though unlike the foe above, this one doesn't even pretend to be fazed by your attacks. You can, however, progress the fight by , causing them to become more and more agitated until they.
 * After that, they then pull out their ace-in-the-hole,, they stubbornly refuse to end the fight, content to just keep you trapped in the battle screen forever. Thankfully, swoops down in the nick of time with their . Mad Dummy decides that it's just not worth the trouble, and floats off.
 * Each encounter against Mettaton the entertainer robot ends up being a single-subversion of the Hopeless Boss Fight. Because he is made of metal, his body is immune to attacks (and if you Check this foe each time, the game snarkily points out that this fact has not changed between encounters). However, each encounter ends with Alphys turning the tables on him through different means than simply killing him. Though, you can finally kill him for good sould you choose.
 * Finally, there's the Neutral route's final boss.
 * Horrible Judge of Character: Several monsters who assumed you were evil and attempted to kill you in a Neutral or Pacifist run will, in a Genocide run, when the character is genuinely evil, instead be incredibly trusting of them and simply offer to let them go without a fight, only to be murdered in cold blood. Justified in that if you have been sparing everyone, you will continue to look like a human, but if you have been killing everyone, you slowly start to look monstrous. Humans, as per the narrative, are the enemies of the monsters.
 * Humans Are Special: Humans, unlike monsters, are mostly physical matter, making a human much stronger than an equivalent monster. Additionally, human SOULs linger after death; this allows monsters to steal their SOULs and use them as a power source, making the monster incredibly powerful. Most importantly of all, human SOULs possess a natural abundance of Determination, which is absolutely essential for your quest to empty out the underground, however you choose to do so.
 * Humans Are Warriors: If you call her outside Gerson's shop, Undyne hints that the war between humans and monsters was a Curb Stomp Battle thanks to this. It's easy to believe when you remember a single human child is capable of taking down the monster world's greatest warriors by themselves.
 * Hyperactive Sprite: In battles, most enemies have a simple animation they repeat on loop, with only a few (most noticeably Toriel and Papyrus) that don't animate. It's lampshaded in a Pacifist victory against the Royal Guards, where 01 tells 02 how much he loves "bouncing and waving [their] weapons in sync", which, indeed, is what they do during the battle. It becomes downright surreal with Temmie, whose sprite constantly vibrates with excitement and whose face will eventually vibrate free off her body, and the closer Mettaton gets to attacking with his core for the second time in the main phase of his last boss fight, the faster he starts dancing, to the point of changing poses on every half beat of his theme.
 * Hypocritical Humor: If Mettaton catches you swearing in your essay answer, he delivers this line: "Oh my! This is a family friendly TV show." [ratings drop 150 points] "Now stand still while I murder you."
 * I Ate What?: Plenty of the food items in the game are made of questionable ingredients. Hot dogs made of water sausages, burgers made of sequins and glue, steak made of anything but meat, junk food made of actual garbage...
 * If You're So Evil Eat This Kitten: In a meta sense, the game does this to the player if they're attempting a genocide run. Notably, you have to murder Papyrus in cold blood and attempt to kill the obviously defenseless Monster Kid.
 * I Love the Dead: Played for Laughs during Mettaton's Quiz. One of his questions is "Would you smooch a ghost?", and ALL the answers are "Heck Yeah!". This becomes more significant after you learn that Mettaton is probably Napstablook's cousin (thus, a ghost) in a robot body.
 * I'm a Humanitarian:
 * The Vegetoid enemy is a sentient vegetable. After weakening them with attacks, you can take a bite out of them to recover HP. This was played even straighter in the demo, where you ate the whole enemy... that counted as murder, but the final version doesn't, due to some changes in design.
 * Spider cookies and spider cider, made with real spiders, by spiders, for spiders! Muffet herself pours you a cup full of spiders during the very boss fight with her. Of course, real-life spiders are often cannibalistic, so this is totally normal for them.
 * I Need to Go Iron My Dog: "I need to go to the bathroom" seems to be a catch-all for monsters excusing themselves but not having anything better to say, since monster food doesn't go farther than the stomach. Papyrus does it to excuse himself, then proceeds to jump out a window and run off, and Alphys does it and runs into another room to avoid having a panic attack (and it also disguises the fact that it's an elevator to the True Labs).
 * Inventory Management Puzzle: To a degree. The child can only carry eight items at a time, not counting their current armor and weapon. This will fill up fast because of stockpiling healing items. To help out, the game provides a "Dimensional Box" in numerous locations that allows you to swap out items whenever you want, which is useful for storing specific foods for later events or for old weapons until they can be sold. The limitation of the box (it's only in a few select locations) becomes moot with Alphys' cellphone upgrade, which gives you permanent access to the box and a second one via the phone (though not during battles); you can't get this in a Genocide run, but several more Dimensional Boxes appear near the end of the game as a compensation.
 * Irony: A game that is heavily critical of replaying it makes it, by far, one of the most replayable games ever. One might ask, "What if I spare this boss?" "What if I spare that boss?" "What if I do a Genocide run after a Pacifist run?" "What if I do two Genocide runs?" "What if I do two pacifist runs?" etc, etc. Though given the game's overall message, this could be completely intentional by making you choose, honor Flowey's last request to let the happy ending be? Or reset everything to scratch the itch?
 * Kent Brockman News: Mettaton runs a sketch like this, featuring you.
 * Klingons Love Shakespeare: Because of all the stuff that flows down from the surface world, monster culture has absorbed a lot from human culture, to the point where it's pretty much impossible to say where one stops and the other begins. Most notably, Toriel has a brand-name chocolate bar in her fridge, and both Alphys and Undyne are very dedicated anime fans.
 * Leave Your Quest Test: Toriel wants you to stay with her at home. She genuinely means well by it though.
 * Leitmotif: Nearly every song in the game draws from a small pull of recurring melodies.
 * Lethal Lava Land: Hotland, the last major region of the Underground, is dry, volcanic and has many fire-based enemies. It also has some Eternal Engine elements, given that Mettaton has reign over it.
 * Literal-Minded: A fishlike NPC in Grillby's tells you he "put out a line" for some girls and is taking the "plenty of fish in the sea" phrase literally. The fishing pole can be found north of the ice room with the save point, and there's a note with a phone number at the end of the line as bait.
 * Made of Magic: Monsters are described as having bodies made mostly of magic, as opposed to humans' bodies being mostly water.
 * Manly Gay: The duo of Royal Guards stationed at Hotland are this to a T, especially the guard who speaks like a stereotypical "bro". Defeating them peacefully has you.
 * Mercy Invincibility:
 * After you get hit by an enemy's projectile, you'll have a few frames of invincibility. This duration can be increased by specific items.
 * However, the final boss in the Genocide route does not feature any mercy invincibility, as you obviously deserve none by that point.
 * Mood Whiplash: Undertale undergoes this near the end, several times. It ends up being not as lighthearted as before, to say the least..
 * A minor one occurs in the MTT resort, during the Dinner with Sans event. The scene is more melancholic than most of the interactions with the character to that point,.
 * Murder Is the Best Solution: Flowey seems to think so, and advocates it. In gameplay, however, unless you're majorly overlevelled for the area you're in, most fights take just as long to kill someone than they do to spare them (about three to five turns, depending on the enemy setup), making killing, even in self defense, unjustified.
 * My Beloved Smother: When you first meet Toriel, it seems that her character is being built up as this... and it is, in the most benevolent sense. She's just a sweet and overly-protective old monster lady with no ill will at all.
 * My God, What Have I Done?: This is how the player is expected to feel when stands before you in the Final Corridor, and proceeds to lay down the truth for you..
 * This revelation could occur much earlier for the player; if you decide to grind in an area an end up killing a lot of monsters,.
 * This also turns out to be how feels about.
 * Obfuscating Stupidity: fits this to a T. Like everyone else you meet, he comes off as incredibly goofy and impossible to take seriously, which is why it's all the more startling when he takes off the metaphorical mask and speaks frankly with you.
 * Occam's Razor: The factor resulting in the acceptance of certain theories such as Gaster being Sans and Papyrus's father or Narrator Chara.
 * Rainbow Speak: As standard for RPG, but Undertale has some interesting uses.
 * Rated M For Manly: Should you wish, you can flex at certain monsters, one of which (the merhorse Aaron) will return the favor. In fact, two monsters can be peacefully defeated through flexing:, and.
 * As for specific characters, there's the buff flex-happy Aaron, the beefy Royal Guards and especially the hot-blooded anime hero-wannabe Undyne, who at times during her battle will suplex a boulder for no reason other than because she can.
 * Red Oni, Blue Oni: The two skeleton brothers, Papyrus and Sans. Their clothes even indicate it. The former is a bit hyperactive and very passionate, the latter is laid back and lazy..
 * Second Place Is for Winners: In the Snail Race minigame, the best prize is obtained if you manage second place, on the logic that your snail mistakenly believes they won, and Napstablook (the one running the game) doesn't have the heart of correcting the poor animal out of their mistake.
 * So Unfunny It's Funny: Papyrus, Sans and many other characters will often tell really bad jokes, which do end up being funny nevertheless.
 * Stop Helping Me!: Toriel, during the Tutorial Level. Then later on, Alphys is very insistent on helping you. Both these instances end up making a lot of sense in-universe though, the more you find out about these characters.
 * A Tragedy of Impulsiveness:.
 * The backstory:.
 * Tsundere:
 * When interacting with the cactus in Toriel's home, it is described as "Truly the most tsundere of plants."
 * Much later on, in Hotland, you encounter a monster called Tsunderplane, a miniature airplane that acts like a stereotypical tsundere, and wears a mob-cap with a ribbon resembling the one worn by Chitoge Kirisaki from Nisekoi. The way to peacefully defeating her, of course, is to get her all flustered by.
 * Undyne's behavior towards the player ends up being quite tsundere, should you attempt to befriend her. Though arguably, it's more of a different "dere".
 * Tutorial Failure: Flowey's tutorial parodies the trope; the player will likely find that they've learned nothing from it. Then Toriel comes in to pick up the slack; she's a bit more informative, though the player might be somewhat frustrated by all the hand-holding.
 * Unexpected Gameplay Change: The idea of having bullet-hell minigames in between your turns is already novel enough, but every so often, a new mechanic comes along to shake things up.
 * Well-Intentioned Extremist: While Asgore has ordered his Royal Guard to hunt down and kill human children, it's out of hopes of freeing his people who have been imprisoned underground for millennia..
 * Undyne as well. She's a ruthless nutcase who will stop at nothing to hunt down the player and brutally kill them, but she's VERY passionate about helping free monsterkind from their underground prison and has some choice words for you should you kill certain monsters. If you've been playing rather violently up to this point, her murderous rage certainly comes off as justified.
 * Even Toriel has shades of this: she's willing to kidnap the player and keep them holed up in her home forever and reacts violently should you defy her, but she genuinely wants to protect the player from Asgore.
 * Its hinted ths fallen child used to be this..notice how we say used
 * Wrong Genre Savvy: In a way, the player may befall to this, specially when playing blind. Play in a way typical of a traditional gamer, ignoring the Mercy mechanics (and the game slogan), and you are for a nasty shock . The game is intended as a Deconstruction of JRPG mechanics and 100% Completion.
 * Well-Intentioned Extremist: While Asgore has ordered his Royal Guard to hunt down and kill human children, it's out of hopes of freeing his people who have been imprisoned underground for millennia..
 * Undyne as well. She's a ruthless nutcase who will stop at nothing to hunt down the player and brutally kill them, but she's VERY passionate about helping free monsterkind from their underground prison and has some choice words for you should you kill certain monsters. If you've been playing rather violently up to this point, her murderous rage certainly comes off as justified.
 * Even Toriel has shades of this: she's willing to kidnap the player and keep them holed up in her home forever and reacts violently should you defy her, but she genuinely wants to protect the player from Asgore.
 * Its hinted ths fallen child used to be this..notice how we say used
 * Wrong Genre Savvy: In a way, the player may befall to this, specially when playing blind. Play in a way typical of a traditional gamer, ignoring the Mercy mechanics (and the game slogan), and you are for a nasty shock . The game is intended as a Deconstruction of JRPG mechanics and 100% Completion.