One of the most important aspects of Undertale is it's many battles that mix RPG and Bullet Hell gameplay. It's not surprising that the most common type of Undertale fangames is a battle. Undertale Battle Mode promises the player an entire collection of high-quality battles that you can either try seperately or play through them in a boss rush-esque mode. Now let's see if this game prefers quality or quantity.
Before letting you access the menu, the game shows you Omega Flowey's TV Screen face jumping around the screen, two light figures in a dark place and flashes the words "MEET YOU AT THE END OF DURATION MODE". I assume that these characters are supposed to be the final bosses. Alright then. The menu is very simple, but for some reason colored Flowey's face is slightly pink colored instead of being completely white.
You can choose between Arcade(randomly picked fights), Custom(you pick the fights) and Duration(linear series of fights).
The music here is mix of constant guitar noises and bell rings, encouraging us to already start. Let's start with Pacifist/Neutral!
This is where I will rant alot, so prepare for a wall of text.
I tried to fight Sans, he said something like "woah, kiddo. be careful. we don't wanna hurt anyone now, do we?" before attacking me. His attack was a single bone that deals damage every frame. Not sure if Sans can actually do that with LV1 Frisk. Anyhow, I died quickly to it. When I reloaded the fight and attacked him, he said that he warned me about his special attack. Odd, how does he remember what happened? Then he said "Sorry old lady. this is why i don't make promises." while the flavor text still displayed just above the ui... then Sans turned my soul blue, and I immideatly jumped, as the warning sprite for his bones attack appeared. But no bones appeared as my soul shattered into pieces, and then game over text was displayed, alongside... bones being thrown there? Is that meant to be Sans's actual special attack? Was my sudden death a glitch? And then the window kept closing and opening, and then it moved up and then I just closed the game and it stopped.
You might be wondering, what happened? Well, I didn't mention the fact this game was in Clickteam Fusion. Generally speaking, it's an engine usually used for a young developer's first game. And FNAF. As I will show later in this post, this game easily gets broken if you, metaphorically speaking, look at it the wrong way. And remember, it's still trying to be a meta experience like Undertale. So with a certain boss fight in particular, the line between extremely broken code and meta subversion blends so much it might as well have mixed the two concepts into one...
Anyway, the fight isn't really remarkable. You can talk, flirt and make puns for Sans in the fight, but if you want to, you can spare him immideatly. Oh, and if you repeat an act twice in a row he will say "this is going tibia blast". The dialogue is just... servicable. Though this is around the time I started to notice how my soul immideatly goes into a seizure if I try to hug a wall. Also, the ACT button skips the part where you choose which enemy to ACT with(except when it doesn't), and immideatly starts loading various ACTs... in real time(except when it doesn't). It's extremely weird.
The next fight is against an OC, Luskeye. His sprite is quite alright. He has only 1 attack pattern, and to spare him you need to motivate him to open his eye by telling him there's something cool in front of him. This is quite silly, and not out of place for an Undertale encounter. Though the monster is quite similiar to Loox, down to it's only attack pattern. Certainly not a bad start.
The next fight is against Nice Cream guy(NCG for short). It starts when a broke Frisk tries to buy Nice Cream. Because they don't have enough money, NCG offers them a discount for surviving his bullet patterns, and so the battle starts.
His sprite is, quite frankly, bad. His proportions are out of wack, and he looks incredibly stiff. And he's also "animated" like Sans, as his head and body bounce up and down. He technically has several bullet patterns, but they all have the same concept: Nice Cream Cones fall down. The attack is quite easy to dodge and not too creative. To progress the fight, you compliment Nice Cream a few times and spare him. That's it. The fight is extremely short and quite disappointing, yet this is the second to last fight in the Pacifist branch. Overall, so far it's been quite underwhelming for a series of boss fights. But perhaps the final boss will change my mind?
In the true lab, we find... and amalgamation of Papyrus and Sans? For context, in the early days of the fandom there was a very popular fan art depicting an amalgamation of Sans and Papyrus called "Sixbones"(made by DevianArt user zarla). The boss fight is based on that. This concept is quite interesting, and finally gives me hope for a good boss fight in this game.
It's sprite looks quite good and is animated well enough, which is surprising for this fangame.
It's first attack is a bunch of bones scrolling to the left, and it's another attack is launching crossbones at you. Technically fine attacks, but they don't quite scream "horrific fusion of two brothers into an incohesive monster" to me, which is unfortuanate.
You progress in the fight by reminding of Sans and Papyrus their things, like in the Asriel Dreemurr fight in the original game. It doesn't take long before you can spare it.
And that was the entire pacifist branch. The fights were short and forgettable and not worth playing. So far, I can give this fangame a 3/10 rating. This post has been taking me quite a while to finish, as it's very long and extensive. As such, I am going to make a post about the rest of the game later on. Surely the game can only get better from here...right?
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