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.

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.

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. Tropes for the other routes can be found here:
 * Undertale/Good Route
 * Undertale/Bad Route


 * 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.)
 * 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 ends up being a single-subversion of the Hopeless Boss Fight. Because they are  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 them, either prompting them to give up, or be put down for good (if you manage to land a killing blow in the final encounter).
 * Finally, there's . Unlike the previous examples, they actually do take scratch damage to start with. And when you, the boss' defense drops to 0 and you get regular healing, allowing you to wail on them without mercy. After you deplete their HP fully, they.
 * Leitmotif: Nearly every song in the game draws from a small pull of recurring melodies.
 * My Beloved Smother: When you first meet, it seems that her character is being built up as this...
 * 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.
 * Obfuscating Stupidity: fits this to a T. Like everyone else you meet, they come off as incredibly goofy and impossible to take seriously, which is why it's all the more startling when they take off the metaphorical mask and speak frankly with you.
 * 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 that acts like a stereotypical tsundere, and wears a mob-cap with a ribbon resembling the one worn by Chitoge Kirisaki from Nisekoi.