Undertale

UNDERTALE: Player's Analysis

(unfinished)

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

This quote fundamentally describes the premise of Undertale. For all I know, Undertale may have been based upon this quote. Undertale is not a game about fighting monsters. It is a game about the player's morality. Of course, Toby Fox's intention was that everyone would go into the game blindly, not knowing about the three different runs so that the game would authentically reflect their morals and respond to their actions. However, it is difficult to explain the game's genius without explaining the three different runs, so I often do so (sorry, Toby). Personally, I think Undertale is pure brilliance. On the other hand, Toby states on the game's about page "Don't know why... but people seem to love this game. Maybe you'll love it, too."
In the Pacifist Run, Undertale is a cute, quirky RPG with adorable characters and humor, and a touching story. In the Genocide Run, Undertale acts as a subversion of traditional RPG concepts. Killing the monsters is destroying an advanced civilization of individuals, for no reason at all. Resetting the game to amend your mistakes could be a moral act to improve someone's life and make you a better person, or it could just be a way of covering up all the terrible things you did so you won't have to deal with the consequences. Either way, at least one person will know what you did and why. Just as in the quote, if you FIGHT the monsters, you will eventually become a monster yourself, to the point where you are not even recognizable as human (at the end of the genocide run, Asgore asks you what kind of monster you are).

The game makes a point that monsters are people too. In fact, monsters are actually nicer than humans are. Every conflict can be resolved through being nice. Monsters believe that their SOULs are made of love, hope, and compassion (as opposed to humans, who have caused them so much pain and suffering). Even the monsters who actually try to kill you and take your SOUL usually have good intentions for the benefit of their people, or are willing to let you go eventually. Narrated from the monsters' perspective, the War of Humans and Monsters seems more like a massacre. So why did the humans try to get rid of the monsters in the first place?
Well, duh, because they're monsters.
Humans naturally fear whatever cannot be understood. We try to control whatever we perceive as "different". The humans knew that monsters were capable of absorbing human SOULs and obtaining unfathomable power, and decided to prevent that from happening even though the monsters had never tried to do it. The humans made an attempt to control the monsters by locking them underground.
The psychologist Carl Jung developed a theory called the Shadow Complex. Human emotions, personality traits, subconscious desires, and instincts that are considered inferior or bad by society are repressed. These repressed aspects are called the "Shadow". Human beings like to believe that if these aspects continue to be suppressed or ignored, they will go away. But if you ignore a wound, it festers and gets worse. The repressed Shadow will begin to project and express itself. The more it is repressed, the more it takes over. That is why people usually become or create what they most fear. That is why you become the monster in the end if you choose to FIGHT. Ironic though it may seem, the only way to control the Shadow is to accept its existence. It may seem counter-intuitive to embrace your supposedly negative traits, and it certainly is scary, but this process (which Jung termed "Shadow Work") is the only way to achieve integration— to know and come to terms with yourself.
The monsters represent the human Shadow. The humans fear the horrible creatures the monsters could become with their SOULs (the horrible things the Shadow could do). To control the monsters, the humans repress them by shoving them underground, which symbolizes the deep subconscious (as underworlds often do in media and mythology). The monsters are not actually as bad as the humans think they are. They are generally well-intentioned people that never originally meant any harm to humans, and they have a very peaceful community among themselves. However, their repression creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Shadow is angry that it has been shut away and works to get itself out at the conscious person's expense. The monsters begin killing humans to free themselves, which they never would have done if they had not been repressed in the first place. Their plan is to destroy all of humanity, but one brave little human will dare to face the Shadow. This human faces their own fear and the uncertainty of what lies in the unconscious. In the Pacifist Run, they accept the Shadow by making friends with the monsters, and bring all those repressed aspects back to the surface, where the monster society will become integrated with human society again. In the Genocide Run, however, the human still fears and represses the Shadow by destroying the monsters, and it ends badly for everyone.

Several characters experience this on a much smaller, more personal scale, dealing with their personal Shadows rather than the Shadow of a community. Alphys is one of the prime examples. Alphys is very repressed. At first, the player is led to believe that Alphys is insecure about her nerdy interests and personality, but in the Pacifist Run, they learn that Alphys actually has a very dark secret. Alphys represses her mistakes in the True Lab for supposedly years, keeping the Amalgamates hidden in the lab and not talking to anyone about it. She believes that it's safer to lie about who she is and what she's done, but doesn't realize it's the cause of her utter lack of self-confidence. During the "date", Frisk, Undyne, and Papyrus convince Alphys to admit to herself and become confident about who she is, which motivates her to finally do her Shadow Work. She says it herself in the note she leaves in front of the elevator door: "...you guys alone can't magically make my own problems go away. I want to be a better person. I don't want to be afraid anymore. And for that to happen, I have to be able to face my own mistakes." At least Alphys knows what she needs to do, and at the end of it all, she takes the Amalgamates home to reintegrate with their families.