Undertale's Genocide Route - The Worst Masterpiece Ever

Small correction. In this video, I use the word "Difficulty curve" synonymously with "difficulty spike" which are actually two slightly different concepts. Difficulty spikes being the word that should have been used.

The genocide route really makes you feel like you're not just fighting the entire underground, but you're fighting the game itself. You're skipping every part of what makes Undertale appealing, so of course the game will make your genocide run as boring and difficult as it can through bad game design. It's great. Fun fact: The encounter system is designed to make grinding harder, as the chance of encountering a monster is lowered the more monsters you kill.

Another little thing that makes the Genocide Route even more disturbing is that you somehow manage to make Flowey, a psychopath who kills people over and over again for fun, terrified of you, to the point where he literally begs for you to not kill him at the end of the route.

One thing I like about geno is, it shows the better side of some characters (namely Papyrus, Undyne, Alphys and Mettaton). Also, one of my favorite messages from it is "You are not better than Flowey".

I actually disagree with your take on the missing puzzles. They aren't removed to make the grinding more tolerable, but rather to make it the focus. It's like the game saying "You wanna grind? Well here you go, you can grind all you want! And you can ONLY grind." It's a little bit of malicious compliance that silently breaks the 4th wall and I love it.

Honestly Undertale has one of the most memorable characters in my opinion, which indicates how well the characters were written.

I know someone who accidentally started Genocide because he enjoys level grinding. But even in his case, he realized fast the game didn’t want him to go down this path.

One minor thing you didnt mention in the difficulty spike section: How it helps the narrative. Because every other fight in the genocide route is easy it makes the 2 actual boss fights feel like genuine heroes. These 2 bosses are the only ones that stand a chance against you, they are the only hope of humans and monsters alike.

My favorite route is the neutral route. But my favorite moment was the cutscene to Undyne The Undying.

The whole point of the Genocide run is that it's not supposed to be fun. Undertale refuses to justify your constant killings, replaces the quirky tone with a dark depressing atmosphere, every battle is either insultingly easy or teeth-grindingly frustrating, there's lots of level grinding, and the ending permanently corrupts your save file. Not only does it deconstruct various RPG tropes, it shows how heartless it really is to kill all of these characters.

I feel genocide's greatness in Undertale is really a testament to how great the characters are written as a whole. Would you feel just as bad killing Toriel if she was just a standard first-boss in an RPG? Would you feel bad beheading Papyrus if he was just another generic skeleton enemy? Genocide's so great as a route because all the enemies you kill in the game are people too. People with their aspirations, goals, views on you and others, as if they were people you'd meet in your own life. So the act of killing them, brutally easy in most cases, is heart-wrenching and villainous in the game's world. You're murdering people, not just enemies. It's also because of how written the characters are that makes the only two outliers in the route, Undyne the Undying and Sans, incredible boss battles. They are fighting to stop you while everyone else fought to defend themselves from you. Undyne becomes the true hero in the story, protecting her world and the friends she lost and risks losing from the impossible threat that is you. Sans fights to have you give up and restore the world back to how it was before your slaughtering, because he knows that after you pass him there truly is no going back. This mindset may even be the reason why many view Undertale's gameplay progression as neutral, pacifist, then genocide. It'd be more impactful narratively if you kill everyone after getting to know them as people in previous routes. It'd be more saddening for you to kill Undyne after you find out who Alphys is in other routes where we actually see her, for instance. People don't give modern Undertale story analysis videos much credit these days in my opinion. Yours was really good and I hope to see more!

Whenever I see someone talk about the genocide run, they normally gloss over the Undyne the Undying fight to talk about how hard the Sans fight is, so this video was a pleasant surprise. Undyne's fight (and her character) is probably my favourite thing to come out of a video game, so it's nice to see it get some well deserved appreciation. Great video

A small correction: a difficulty curve is the overall charting of how a game's difficulty changes over the course of the experience. What you called a difficulty curve (a sudden increase in difficulty) is a difficulty spike, and they're not always unfair or bad game design (see: Monster Hunter).

The absolutely horrendous grind in Genocide is also very fitting lore-wise. As you kill more and more monsters, the monsters in the area become aware of what you are doing and flee. It gets especially bad in Hotland because not only is just about the entire Underground aware of you going around killing everyone, but Alphys is evacuating everyone to the True Lab, something that has only been ramped up by Undyne's death. So when you reach Hotland, there are far less monsters hanging around in the open, meaning you encounter them less frequently.

Somehow, every single time people have tried to make Megalovania sound bad, they've failed. It's crazy how good toby is at composing music.

It's even written in a way that would normally be considered terrible writing. The player influences 2 kids who share a body into becoming evil & murdering everyone in sight. Then, one of the kids takes the other one's soul & destroys the world. No one learns anything of value & only the villains survive. Well, two of 'em anyway. It even revolves around what is usually one of the laziest premises possible. Turning the hero into a villain through mind control. But it all works because you're choosing to do it all & getting the natural results of your actions & the tone is masterfully handled. That & you actually learn cool lore in the process that just ends up making you feel worse. It all ends up pointless but that's because you chose to play the game in the most plainly pointless way possible. Most game devs who make games about choice are careful about who the player can kill because some characters are important & the game would break without them. This game instead asks "How messed up would it be if I didn't do that & the player killed everyone for no reason? What if the game did break & that was part of the experience?"

I'm pretty sure we're over the "you're evil if you play genocide runs" phase of the undertale fandom and it was crazy how people acted when the game first released but I guess that just shows how good Toby fox's writing is because people GENUINELY care about his characters. This is why I think undertale would be incomplete without any of these runs That being said the people who harrased others over this need to touch some grass IMMEDIATELY

The point of the genocide is to punish players for their actions that are sick and twisted, not for the amusement of the players, for example: sans is usually a chill and friendly guy who you wanna be friends with, but in genocide you see him as a really hard obstacle to pass through so I believe that because players did the genocide route for a challenge and good fights Toby made jevil and spamton neo accessible in every route of the game.

I think enemy grinding, but skipping the puzzles is a fair trade-off. Especially if you've already completed the game once before. Great video as always man, I look forward to the next one.

I really like playing as the villain of the story, it really gives you a perspective on what it is to be on that role. One thing that I always liked about this route is Sans dialogue. His speech concerning about the "reason" we are opting to do this during at the last moments of his fight. "No matter what you just keep going. Not out of any desire for good or evil, but because "you can", and because "you can" you "have to". It really dissects what is like to be in the position in which you basically decided you want to treat this experience just like any other game you would play and then forget about it until years later. Consequences be damned.