A Tale of Undertale

An hour ago I had never heard of Undertale. Now I'm grooving to its music.

It started with Realm of Roses by Chris O'Neill / Oney. I was ambling about on Bandcamp's "Discover" section and saw a super cool picture of a face constructed of rose petals with a thorn filled mouth.

So of course I had to give that a listen. And I liked what I heard quite a bit. Most of it is orchestral-y music . . . though the second track is something that I think is called Chiptune, wherein the point is to emulate the sound of early video games. (And as awful as that sounds, the track here--"Pixel Fags"--was actually pretty entertaining.) A real standout for me was a song entitled "Theme of Genesis," which featured a very lovely violin part:

So I checked to see who did the violin on this track, and it was a lovely gal named Michaela Nachtigall.  She has several songs on her YouTube channel, so I listened to a few of those, and was particularly entranced by "Calling the Four Giants and Oath to Order." Go give it a listen.

I know, right? So of course I went back to Bandcamp to see if Michaela had any albums of her own. She didn't, but she did appear on some other pieces, and as I looked down the list I saw a lovely image (of a cavern with an open dome roof, the whole scene suffused with bright sunlight and looking all watercolor-y) for a song entitled "Cave of Monsters" (from Fallen: An Undertale Tribute by Materia Collective) by Will Dawson & the aforementioned Michaela Nachtigall. So I gave that a listen (I love it that Bandcamp lets you listen to whole songs . . . hell, whole albums . . . before you slap down the dollar bills) and it was quite a lovely thing. Starts off with some scary and echoey percussion, then the sound of Michaela's violin comes in, sounding far away and fragile. Very nice. Then an electric guitar repeats the violin theme, and then the violin joins in for another go. Good stuff. So I started listening to some of the other songs on this album, and they were all quite interesting. I was particularly taken by one called  "Undertale" by Triforce Quartet. You can hear a live performance of it online which is quite good, although slightly marred by voices talking at several points and a couple of clunker notes (neither of which are present on the album version of the song, I hasten to add). 

So about this time I started to wonder what this Undertale thing was, so I checked with my Wiccan friends and they told me that it was a game . . . kind of a riff on Alice in Wonderland. With guns.

I also went to the webpage for the game and was amused by the instructions near the top of the page, which said that you could play the RPG non-violently if you wanted to do so, or you could Let It Rain.

And that's the tale of how I found out what Undertale is.

By the way, you can check out / buy the Undertale tribute album on Bandcamp. It clocks in at 97 tracks, with a total playing time of 6:05:59, so I think you get more than your money's worth for $14.99, but I feel compelled to tell you that you can purchase the same material for download from Amazon for $8.99, so do what you want to do, be who you are.