Undertale: The Unfinished Sequel To A Game That was Never Released

I have a point to make, but it may take a while to get there, and the road is kind of winding. Weirdly enough, in order to start talking about Undertale, first I need to talk about the Mother series. What was the first game made in the series? Mother. What was the first game that got a western release? Mother 2, or as it was called here, Earthbound.

It’s was a common problem with japanese localizations of classic RPGs of that kind. Often, they just elected to not release them in the west at all. Players would be forced to play in a sort of machete order, playing the first game open to them and then waiting for the prior one in the series to be released or pirating it and playing it on their own time if no such localized version was ever made. Mother 3, Undertale’s inspiration, (*) still remains in that limbo-space, and many other sources of inspiration for it, such as Live a Live and the other mother games, are japanese only games entirely, so this is a phenomenon that Toby is very familiar with. (*)

So, Undertale was heavily inspired by these. Toby will explicitly tell us how important Mother was in the development of Undertale. The experience of being a fan of these series must have been incredibly interesting. First, you find yourself introduced to Earthbound. And then you begin to realize that Earthbound is only the tip of the iceburg, there’s a history, a past that you don’t have at your fingertips. You jumped into the middle of the story! So you look for it, you grasp for the beginning, until eventually, you find it …

Those of you who have been following me for a while probably know where I’m going with this.

Doesn’t the opening of Undertale strike you as kind of odd, in retrospect?

The song that plays here is ‘Once Upon A Time,’ a phrase evoking the beginning of a story. As we are introduced to this world? We see 201X in big letters on the screen. We see Chara running toward the mountain. We watch them plummet … of course we think that game takes place in 201X at first, of course we think that we are playing as Chara. Where’s the sense in thinking otherwise? The way that Undertale jumps to us controlling Frisk is unnatural, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like …

It’s like we skipped over the beginning completely. It’s like we jumped into the middle of the story!

Undertale is our Earthbound. It’s a story that cuts to somewhere in the middle, instead of starting in the beginning. What story is Undertale a sequel to? What did we ‘cut’ into the middle of?

Chara’s story. The Mother to Undertale’s Earthbound.

And now? Where is this phantom game? Is it going to just . . . sit, ethereal, unreachable forever? Some victim of fake localization we’ll never see? Is this story lost to us?

Read the things Toby has said and draw your own conclusions.