*click*
*music starts*
Dear Toby Fox...hi! It's me! Austin...
Ugh. *sigh*
Sorry, I'm trying to act pumped, but I am so freaking exhausted.
Can I...can I level with you Toby? You know why I'm so tired?
VidCon. Which was fun, but there's flying and landing and I made a mistake.
*YELLS* Toby! Toby! I made a mistake!
*PHYCHO YELLS* I!
Took my baby with me. What was I thinking?
You think convention flu is just a thing that adults get? Nope! So
yeah! I've been running on a total of about ten hours of sleep for the past five days coddling a screaming, baby
fighting getting sick myself and failing, while also trying to bring the
magnificent world of SCIENCE to undertale. There aren't enough
stimulants in the world to make up for that amount of sleep deprivation, but I'm powering through Toby!
I've downed about 20 cups of coffee before hopping into the booth to record this so today
we're gonna let anxiety attacks carry the team as I follow in the footsteps of Alphys and
Gaster by using the power of SCIENCE to unwrap the mysteries of the souls in Undertale and...
*starts laughing like a madman*
*gasp*
*laughter comes back*
*small gasp*
I HAVE DONE IT!
*loud music*
And in so doing I have uncovered a deep dark secret about the
Underground that I'm convinced nobody but the oldest residents of the kingdom knows. I know I'm according
disaster by doing a video on Undertale, and the Undertale Fandom has been notoriously
unfriendly to theory from this channel.
But I have to let y'all know, this is still, like, seriously, to this day one of my favorite games of all time.
I think I've listened to every remix and cover of the soundtrack on YouTube, since they're my go-to
tracks for writing and researching science episodes;
and I've been wanting to do an episode on this game for forever, but I just couldn't find a way to do it!
I mean, it's a magical adventure/Dark Horror Fantasy RPG game.
It's not like it's really filled with a bunch of stone-cold science to examine, but then I came to a realization.
Science isn't just a set of rules and regulations for how the world works. Science is a
methodology. Science is a way to
understand everything that exists as objectively as possible.
Science is about making the immeasurable: measurable.
The unquantifiable: quantified.
So instead of trying to take the SCIENCE OUT of Undertale; today
we're gonna bring the science to Undertale.
I began my journey into the underground to answer two questions.
One, how powerful is a soul, and two: what exactly
allow Toriel's and Asgore's souls to live albeit temporarily outside of their bodies?
And I'm going to be honest with you. I...
Couldn't answer that question. There simply isn't enough data, but! While trying to figure this out
I uncovered something way, way more awesome!
But before we get to that, let's refresh ourselves on what we know about souls in Undertale. So...
Souls. We don't know exactly
what a soul is. We know that there are six human ones in
boxes in Asgore's castle, taken from six humans that fell into the underground before us.
We know that souls take the shape of hearts. A book in the Snowdin library says that monster souls are made of love, hope and
compassion, but,
that's not super reliable and even an entry admits that humans' don't need these things anyway.
Regardless, it's a pretty consistent theme in the game over and over again, that monster souls are weaker than human souls by a pretty
significant margin. It's mentioned a couple of times in dialogue, and most importantly on the ancient glyphs in the Waterfall area where it says
specifically that it had take the soul of nearly every monster to equal the power of ONE human soul.
Human souls can persevere after death, due to their Determination, which most monsters lack in abundance except for
presumably Boss Monsters of which there are only two known. Asgore and
Toriel. Their souls linger on for a little bit longer after they die.
Importantly...
Monsters are capable of absorbing the souls of humans.
It's this ability that led to the humans' fear of monsters to begin with; and what led them to go to war against them, and,
ultimately,
seal the monsters in the Underground. The war, of course, was a massacre and
supposedly no human souls were ever taken by any monsters.
Anyway...
That's what we know as far as what the game tells us, but there's more information
unspoken. Undertale hides a ton of its story in the mechanics, so it's time
we throw on our hardhats, grab our calculator drills and go data mining
As I said before, my entire quest started because I was trying to figure out
how strong souls in Undertale are. We don't get a ton of direct
numerical indicators of what exactly a soul does or doesn't do. I compared every number in the game, built several
cross-sectional amalgalmated metrics and did find some really interesting
correlations between EXP and the various stats, but at the end of the day,
there's not enough evidence to really connect any of these data points to a
quantifiable measurement of soul strength. After all, the in-game law states that a
monster's strength is more indicative of their willingness to fight than anything else,
which is why so many monsters take
more damage the more you hit them, and why tons of bosses die in one hit if you're doing a Genocide playthrough. So as cool
as this is it doesn't give us what we need. Days of research rendered irrelevant in mere moments!
But I'm not one to be done in by one failure. Even if that failure came while I was fighting off
neumonia over several days. If you drill a bit deeper into the game's code, past where Toby Fox ever wanted any of us to see,
there are two secrets that reveal more about the history of the underground than any book; and both these secrets lie
with Flowey.
Specifically, both of the boss fights with him and I know this seems strange,
but the fights with Flowey reveal more about the world of Undertale than I could have possibly
imagined.
The first fight you have against him, not counting the one during the introduction of the game, is during a
neutral run of the game. Flowey absorbs the six human souls and transforms into
Photoshop Flowey. A veritable collage of nightmare fodder. He regains his ability to Save and Load and,
horrifyingly, gains the power to create
save states. Something ordinarily reserved for video game emulators.
It's here that we get our first glimpse into the power of souls in
Undertale. In order to win this boss fight, you have to sever
Flowey's connection to each of the six human souls;
and it's here that things get interesting. You see, each time you sever his connection to a
soul his defense drops until eventually it reaches 0. This means unlike any other place in the entire game,
we have a direct metric for souls to strength. Of course,
irritatingly the data for this particular fight is
difficult to find. I couldn't find it, and nowhere else online is it available. All we know for certain is that
Flowey's defense drops to zero when his connection to all the souls is severed. So, we're screwed right? Wrong.
Well, we don't have back-end data
to use; what we do have is front-end data that we can use to extrapolate back-end data. How?
Trigonometry and log functions, son.
You see each time you sever Flowey's connection to a soul
you can do increasinly more damage to him.
Using average damage done per phase, and knowing that at zero souls his defense drops to zero, and
comparing this data to another endgame boss, Asgore,
you can build a functioning model for how damage and defense correlate, then expand that into an
exponential function that ties souls to defense; and what do we learn? Souls are
freaking, awesome.
Going from Zero to one soul gives someone a huge boost in strength, followed by slow gains from there on out, that increase
exponentially. As you start to get higher and higher, each soul gives you more of a boost, as opposed to diminishing returns.
But, why is this important? Well...
It's not. Not by itself.
But when you combine this formula with the second fight with Flowey (or more specifically, Asriel Dreemurr), the results are
Truffle n', Kerfuffle n', terrifying.
...that...
Okay, okay. I-I'm sorry Carter. I tried, it's just--ice-cream names don't have the punch
I'm looking for, but, while I'm here can we just talk for a second about the terribleness of some Ben & Jerry's Flavors?
Toothpaste and Orange Juice, Schweddy Balls? What the heck is wrong with you?!
Anyway in the neutral playthrough, you beat Flowey, get an ending, yadda yadda yadda...
then you go back if you didn't kill anybody your whole way through you do some side missions
Go through some extra areas, including the super freaking creepy true
Lab Or alphys experimented with determination and created the not ok amalgamate then
Finally you get your happy endings. Sorta, first you got a beat flowey all over again
but this time, he hasn't just absorbed the human souls. He's absorbed the souls of
Everything, in the underground. If you check for his states it says, that he had infinity defense and
Infinity attack. Though he is the god of hyper death after all, but if you look though the data like we did before, we discover
That his defense is an actual number, which makes sense
Infinity isn't really a number, not one easily integrated into a video game without crashing your computer anyway.
What we find is that as defenses 9 thousand nine Hundred and Ninety nine
Knowing this. in having our trusty formula at the ready. We can actually figure out how many souls worth of power
This is. Luckily as we mentioned before, the more souls you absorb the bigger the boost to your power
So shouldn't be too many more than flowey had during the first fight, when his defensive a little over two thousand. What we find when
We plug the numbers in is that... on top of the six human souls Asgore has sitting in his basement.
Flowey has absorbed 7.687 human souls worth of power, and this is freakin
Earth-shattering. Why? Because we've already established that A. the souls of monsters are
incredibly weak best-case scenario all the souls of monsters equate to Roughly the amount of one human soul and B.
Monsters can absorb human souls. Just these two facts alone should be chilling you to your core. If every monster
Combined equals Roughly one human soul where are those extra power coming from?
That still leaves 6.687 souls. Well, I think I know exactly
exactly where it's coming from
*DRUMS START*
Seven Human Mages created the barrier that locks monsters inside the underground
And only the power of seven human souls can shatter the barrier.
Interesting isn't it? That it requires the power of seven human souls and all said and done every monster combined equals not one
But over seven humans worth of souls themselves. What does this mean?
Simple. The human vs Monster war. The one you learn about from those ancient glyphs.
Monsters aren't quite as innocent as they would lead you to believe. Think about it
You can go through the game as a pacifist, get that feel good ending you crave but the monsters
They don't care. Bunch of them straight up try to murder you, all the time
Everywhere you go, you have to go out of your way to not defend yourself and even then they can kill you
Undyne the big old hero of the monster. Literally
Terrorizes you through the waterfall and Gerson, that craggy old turtle selling stuff, this dude fought in the war and
Was known as the hammer of justice. If humans killing monsters was supposed to be such a slam-dunk. How on Earth are there any survivors?
because
absolutely and
undeniably Monsters
definitely
and
totally used to hunt humans before they were banished to the underground. Think about it. Gerson who's
Approximately eight thousand years old was able to hold his own against humans. Asgore is so strong
He can destroy your mercy option. Undyne
Undyne has a capacity for determination that far surpasses any character that isn't you or flowey, and sans has the ability to manipulate
space-time, and in-game mechanics. This precious lovable creatures
Definitely, and totally murdered humans for their souls when they were above-ground and while the combined efforts of humans were able to repel them to
the underground make no
mistake
Monsters are freaking dangerous
It took seven mages to lock the monsters away because hey there's six human souls floating around inside the bodies of the various monsters
They may be deluded at this point
but they're still there and after you complete your
totally adorable true
Pacifist ending, who knows, I bet you anything that another war breaks out after a monster tries to become the next
God of hyper death who knew secretly all along the real twist was that monsters aren't the good guys?
Monsters aren't cute. The monsters of undertale well, they're monsters and through a real threat to humanity.
Sincerely, Austin
Thank you everyone for watching my video on undertale. I know I sound super vivacious and
just so
powerful
But I am dying on the inside. Oh
Follow me on Twitter. They are arhourigan
We're all talking about some of my numbers from today. Subscribe to the Game Theorist, From all videos on me
If I don't die
if I don't die
*THUNDER ERUPTS*