Idle Thoughts

The Anti-Undertale (★★☆☆☆)

Quick, name that quirky, Earthbound-inspired JRPG with a quirky battle system where you meet a cast of quirky demi-humans that intermittently act as friends, enemies and comic relief and where the entire plot is governed by a twist that reveals itself differently if you pursue a pacifist or a homicidal route.

Nah, not Undertale, silly. We’re talking about Everhood here.  Anyway, spoilers ahead, you’ve been warned.

So is “Undertale-like” officially going to be a thing now? Well, it’s not like Undertale was the first: Yume Nikki was a quirky Earthbound-inspired JRPG more than a decade before it. Lisa is another notable one, but it got so quirky it became weird and gross. Anyway, Everhood isn’t derivative: it really does take the framework in a different direction. So yeah, there’s more than one way to breathe some life in the creaky husk of the 16-bit RPG.

So the first twist is the battle system: it’s a sort of rhythm game. Sort of, because the beat follows the enemy’s attack and you’re trying not to hit the notes, so technically playing in tune to the beat isn’t even useful. It works sometimes: during the final battle, piano notes are your best shot at the boss, so you need to listen to those closely.

Visually, the battles can be described as nothing less than badass. They’re a sight to behold. And yet, I didn’t like them that much. For one, they’re pretty damn hard. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but having to start over an entire battle over a few mistakes really breaks your sense of flow, which is especially bad for a rhythm game. Even “story” mode is not exactly the piece of cake you’d usually expect. Second, the game constantly pulls off psychedelic tricks (surprise, the game is upside down and controls are reversed!), which is part of the game’s “thing”, but it makes hard battles even more tedious. Third, while the music is certainly rousing in-game, after listening to the soundtrack separately, I realized I didn’t want to hear any of the songs again. Ok, the flower shop tune is particularly catchy, this one I love! Other than that, a lot of the music turns out to be grating EDM music, at least to me anyway. Undertale had impeccable boss music, but here, eh, I dunno.

The exploration is barebones. After all, there are no equipable items, shops, character building, etc. The areas are sparse, floating in a black ether without much rhyme or reason. Most characters are completely forgettable. However, I did like the DnD-loving Green Mage and the mysterious, straw-hatted, guitar-playing Frog. While short, the game still somehow overstayed its welcome. I kept waiting impatiently for the “twist” to show up. Worst of all, the game has pretensions of having some grand meaning, something which I am especially wary about, because video game designers are no less privy to the secrets of the human condition than anyone else. The game opens with telling you an “Absolute Truth” and, as expected, the answer ends up being semi-coherent verbiage that could have been spouted off by AI.

Now the twist. So yeah, what Everhood is really about is… euthanasia. Way to swing for the fences, devs. It’s not the easiest theme to tackle. Euthanasia is, at best, morally ambiguous.  Basically, it’s your job to kill everyone “for their own good” and then commit suicide in order to “reset the world” or some such. The idea that the genocide route leads to the “good” ending is an amusing (?) reversal of a trope, I guess? Anyway, the fact that the game handles such a hard subject with such ham-handed writing legitimately made me sad at the end of the game. For one, after you “kill” everybody, everyone comes back to life to speak to you, sometimes four times (!), including one instance where every single character literally congratulates you for killing them. Yay? You do realize that the terrible thing about mercy killing is that no one comes back to give you a high five and tell you how great it is that you’ve killed them, right? All you are left with is silence and the hope that the evil you’ve done is outweighed by the suffering you’ve prevented. On the one hand, some characters genuinely seem to need some way to end their misery. Then again, most of them seem to be pretty happy with the way the world is going. Green Mage’s character actually pulls off being outwardly peppy with literally hiding under the surface the depths of his despair. It’s such a cop-out that some of your victims undergo a complete character reversal and end up emphatically telling you that you did the right thing.  The game also completely lacks the gravitas you’d expect from the twilight of a civilization of immortal beings. Frog kinda comes close, but his attempts at “answers” fall terribly flat. The game was written at the level of a “wacky” Saturday morning cartoon, so there’s an enormous mismatch there. I mean, Brown Mage’s character is entirely written around his toilet (brown, get it?) and Nosferachu’s dialogue pauses so he can sneeze, every single time (achu, get it?). I suppose if after living for untold millennia, the best I could come up with is DnD and Go Karts, I’d be asking for a way out too.

Everhood has the ingredients of a cult classic, but the recipe isn’t really working, in my opinion. The rhythm battle system is engaging and visually striking, but ultimately tedious. The game’s theme and story are so grim, yet handled with such simplicity that it is genuinely depressing.