Evidence for Undertale player theory.
People are often confused when the player is brought up in discussion in Undertale, wondering what ground is there to support it being a canon part of the story as a third entity.
In most video games, the player is only here to experience the content or the story that the game presents. They are not an actual part of the plot itself.
There are exceptions however, where the player is recognised as an in game entity by the lore. The fact that there is someone playing the game has a direct impact on the story of said game. The player thus becomes a character within the game that they are playing.
In games where the player is canon, it is usually said pretty explicitly such as in One Shot or OFF.
In Undertale however, the player’s existence as an in game entity is not made as obvious.
What is difficult when it comes to gathering evidence for the player is that it can be difficult to distinguish what is actual evidence of the player’s existence and what is a simple fourth wall break either as a joke or as a tutorial sequence.
is NOT necessarily evidence of the player, plenty of games have characters refering to pressing buttons and it does not show that the player is intended to be canon. Most of the time, it is merely here as an indication of what to do for convenience and is not meant to be taken seriously in universe.
The ability to SAVE/LOAD existing isn’t evidence of it either, those traditional game mechanics are integrated within Undertale as actual parts of the lore and can exist independently from the player.
So what is it that actually does hint at the player being canon then ?
The first needed step for there to be a player within the story is for the game to recognise itself as such : Either as a video game or at least as a world that can be interacted with through a video game.
For there to be a player, there needs to be a game to be played.
Firstly, Undertale refers to itself as a video game on a few occasions.
This video game is intended to be Undertale itself.
This is fairly obvious. Mettaton only appears once we make it to Hotland in Undertale.
MTT here is actually paraphrasing the Undertale release trailer.
“Attractive robots” obviously refering to Mettaton himself.
This is indeed the case in Undertale.
Once the video game turns out be an explosive, MTT makes the following comment :
The mention of the cliche that video games are usually violent is a direct reference to the main slogan of Undertale, which searches to contradict that statement :
Checking the video game again even adds the following dialogue :
The fact that MTT says “AH, YOU UNDERSTAND.” means that we have just followed the advice that he gives right afterwards : That in the game he just presented, we should check everything twice.
This is indeed exactly what we just did by checking the video game twice… In Undertale. Once again showcasing that Undertale is the game MTT is talking about in this scene.
Even the single red pixel in the title is a match for the red heart within the “R”.
Please note however that this sprite came to be two whole years before the release of the game on consoles, it shows what Toby had imagined a physical copy of Undertale would have looked like back then
By avoiding all of the credits, we can access a secret room in Snowdin.
In this room, it is confirmed that this exact same game Mettaton presented us was created by the annoying dog. Toby Fox’s in game avatar.
The in game version of Toby Fox having created the in game version on Undertale is a clear parallel to make to their real world equivalents.
It seems pretty obvious that this video game was intended to be Undertale.
Talking about the annoying dog being Toby Fox’s in game avatar, this same dog also addresses directly the existence of hard mode, and as such that we interact with the world of Undertale via a video game.
Toby Fox of all people of course, would be fully aware of this fact.
At the end of the genocide route, Chara destroys the world.
However, this is not how Toby Fox had originally intended for the genocide route to end.
Toby’s original idea for the ending of the route was for the game to automatically uninstall itself following Chara’s destruction of the world.
In fact, we can still find the code that Toby wrote to get the game to uninstall itself within the game files.
What this bit of code shows is that the erasure of “The world” of Undertale, corresponds to the erasure of “Undertale” the video game program on our computer, and therefore, that the video game we play is at least recognised as existing by the world of Undertale.
This bit of code ended up unused as Toby failed to make it work and is therefore no longer canon. However, the fact that this was Toby Fox’s original plan does show that this is what his intention was when he first made the game.
Besides, the narrator outright refers to reaching for a SAVE file as “SAVING the game”. It is difficult to get much more explicit than this.
But alright, plenty of video games have this type of self awareness without considering the player as a part of its story.
Undertale recognising the existence of the video game we play on our device doesn’t prove the player to be part of the story yet.
There are multiple times in Undertale where the player’s existence within the story is hinted at by in game characters.
Lets start out by the smaller hints and move progressively towards the real pieces of concrete evidence.
One of the answers when MTT asks us who Dr Alphys has a crush on is very strange…
When we select the “Don’t know” option, Mettaton explains to us that Alphys believes there exists an entity out there, one that she cannot see, but that can see everything playing out.
This would seem to be a reference to the player, the one that exists outside of this world but can interact with it and observe it.
For more evidence of this, once Alphys tries to justify herself about her belief, MTT then decides to give this “theoritical person” a chance to prove its existence by giving them a sign.
What follows afterwards is a break of a few seconds.
The only one who can do anything during these few seconds is indeed the player, by moving the red soul around. The player can give Mettaton the sign he asked for.
But since all he sees from his perspective is Frisk’s soul moving around, he cannot catch on that this sign was indeed from the entity he just refered to and assumes it was just Frisk.
Flowey hints at the player’s existence several times. The most straightforward of them all taking places near the ending of the genocide route.
Once again we have a character insinuating that there is an entity out there watching everything taking place as he speaks.
This one however goes a step further, not only does it hint at the player, but it even hints at the existence of lets players too. Refering to the viewers who want to see the genocide ending, but merely watch other people play it instead of doing it themselves.
Flowey’s last speech at the end of pacifist shows him mentioning the existence of one last threat to the monster’s now peaceful life on the surface.
He personally believes this threat to be Chara.
however, the rest of his speech suggests that Flowey has actually gotten it wrong.
Here is what he has to say to the entity.
The one that Flowey is talking to is the one using the power to SAVE through Frisk’s determination, not Frisk themself. In fact, Frisk is not part of this conversation at all. Flowey talks about them in third person to the entity.
Regarding Chara, depending on one’s take, they are either not awakened or stuck with Frisk, who we know isn’t here.
In all cases, Chara isn’t present to listen to Flowey either.
What Flowey’s words are fully concrete about is that Frisk is not truly the one in control of their own ability to SAVE. This outside entity is the one who can, if they want, RESET everything and do whatever they want instead of letting Frisk and the monsters live their lives.
And immediatly after his speech ends, we end up facing this screen.
The option of the TRUE RESET presents itself. And just as Flowey claimed mere seconds ago, the last threat, the only one who can still RESET everything right now with the press of a button, is the player.
We are indeed after all, the one in control of (most of) Frisk’s actions and the one who can decide to use Frisk’s determination to use the SAVE/LOAD power whenever we please at any point throughout the game.
We perfectly fit the description Flowey made of the entity which no in game character does, not to mention that we, unlike Frisk or Chara, actually got to hear Flowey saying all of this.
Whilst the question of how much does Flowey knows is debatable, Toby clearly wrote this dialogue with the player in mind.
The nature of the TRUE RESET itself is evidence of the player. It is not a simple RESET, its a factory RESET of the entire game back to the state it first was (except for genocide run consequences). Its more comparable to the way RESETING a SAVE file works in any other game than Undertale.
Normal RESETS are just looping the timeline back, allowing characters to maintain déjà vu and for Frisk to remember the past TI and shake Sans’ hand before he tells them to for example.
But in a TRUE RESET, none of those things happen. The monsters have no déjà vu and even Flowey’s and Frisk’s memories are erased as well.
In particular, the fact that Frisk’s memories are erased too proves that Flowey was indeed correct during his speech, that Frisk wasn’t the one in control of the TRUE RESET but that an outside entity was.
The one who actually was being the one who has control over Frisk, their ability to SAVE and that pushed the TRUE RESET button. The player.
In Deltarune, the existence of the player within canon is made very obvious unlike its predecessor.
The existence of the player in Deltarune doesn’t prove it to be true in Undertale as well.
However, there are still connections between the two worlds. For instance :
A number of tweets from Flowey were posted just before the release of Undertale, in those tweets Flowey addresses who he believes to be Chara : The outside entity.
Those tweets were presented identically to the tweets from Gaster addressed to the player for the release of Deltarune three years later.
Both times, they start off by recognising that their interlocutor has finally arrived to where they are.
They then admit to having been eager for our arrival.
Finally, at the end of the speech, they invite us to come with them and introduce us to the world of the games, with the respective games releasing as soon as the speeches end.
The obvious parallels here would seem to imply that the outside entity from Undertale that Flowey keeps talking about and the player from Deltarune are the same person : The one seeing the tweets, us.
Gaster’s comment on how we have been ”looking for him” in particular is also a wink to the countless fanmade theories that have been made about the character for years by the players.
Now, lets start getting to some of the more serious evidence.
Chara, at the end of the genocide route, cannot be talking to Frisk. They are talking to the player.
There are multiple reasons for this.
The first of those reasons is that the second genocide route shows that the person Chara is talking to remembers the events of the first genocide route.
But Frisk just… Doesn’t remember.
After the world is erased, Frisk’s memories are wiped out, just like after a TRUE RESET. They don’t remember having seen Toriel die before if she was killed or having met Sans already, then shaking his hand before he asks them to.
Frisk simply doesn’t know the things that Chara’s interlocutor does. The player on the other hand, absolutely does remember all of this.
Second comes the speech pattern. While the difference i am about to point out does exist in the original english version as well, this one is made incredibly explicit in the japanese version of Undertale which is why i’ll use it here for this argument.
In japanese, there are multiple different alphabets that are used in very different contexts.
Hiragana is the ‘simplest’ of them all, its the one children and foreigners tend to learn first and it is viewed as the more ‘childish’ and ‘simple’ way of speaking japanese.
Pretty much the entirety of Undertale is in hiragana (or katakana). This includes Chara. All of their lines that are either addressed to Frisk or are Chara’s own thoughts are in hiragana.
However, all of that changes at the very end of the genocide route during the final speech.
In this sequence, Chara speaks using a ton of kanji instead.
While hiragana was a simple ‘childish’ way to speak, kanji is considerably more complex and speaking using it is the signature of a highly polite, sofisticated and formal conversation in japanese culture.
The way that Chara speaks to Frisk and the way they talk to their ‘partner’ at the end of genocide are not only different, but are in total contrast with each other.
While the way Chara usually speaks is pretty normal for a child, the way they talk at the end of the route is more comparable to the way one would talk to a co-worker during a highly important meeting.
It just wouldn’t make any sense for Chara to be suddenly addressing Frisk this way.
However, this formal speech makes perfect sense if we consider that they are talking not to Frisk but rather to the one controlling them. To the one who actually decides of the fate of the world, the being mentioned by Flowey.
There is one more important factor to take into account when it comes to this subject : Earthbound. The game that was the main inspiration of Undertale.
In Earthbound, Itoi made the deliberate choice not to use kanji and only use hiragana/katakana for the text, making it sound more like spoken Japanese and encouraging players to read it out loud as they played.
There are two scenes in Earthbound that make the point related to Chara above considerably more important.
Not only was the player confirmed by the developers to be canon in Earthbound, but the way they show it in the game is very particular.
At the end of the game when the player’s help is called to defeat Giygas. The name that the player chose back in the village is displayed but translated in kana.
the biggest one however, is the coffee time scene.
In this scene, it was confirmed by Mato that Itoi used Kanji instead of the normal alphabets in order to “pull the player out of the game and remind them that they and Ness are not the same person”.
To put it simply, the main game that Toby took inspiration from when making Undertale was confirmed to use swapping between japanese alphabets to showcase the player’s existence and even to specifically use a ton of Kanji instead of Hiragana during a scene in which it is shown that the player and the protagonist are two separate entities.
With that in mind, the fact that Chara literally does the exact same thing down to the smallest detail in Undertale appears beyond reasonable doubt to be extremely intentional on Toby Fox’s part.
Next, Chara is talking to the entity that controls Frisk’s SAVE power, and thus is free of the consequences of their actions. Flowey’s words already confirmed that this person isn’t Frisk.
“We” here cannot be Chara and Frisk either as Frisk isn’t the one in control.
In reapeated genocide, the one Chara is talking to is the one making the conscious decision to pursue the genocide route over and over again.
How could this person be Frisk ? Not only are they not the one in control but they do not even remember from one genocide route to another.
This person is also shown to be the same one who sold the red soul to Chara back in the first genocide route. Which will be relevent shortly.
Next, lets cover the world erasure in more detail.
When the world is erased. The files 0 to 9 are erased as well.
This was also the case in Toby’s original self destruct script for the genocide ending.
The relevent part here is that file 0 and file 9 are included in this. The files that are controlled by Frisk are erased together with the world just like the other files such as Flowey’s.
When one merely just loses the SAVE power, the data of their file still persists. Unlike what Flowey said, no file is ever erased in a neutral route, the file cannot be accessed until we get back the power to SAVE but its data remains untouched.
Here, all the files, including those controlled by Frisk, are utterly deleted.
When the world was destroyed, so was Frisk with it.
Yet, even after this event, the person Chara was talking to is still out there and is capable of responding to Chara. How can Frisk respond to Chara if they were already erased previously ?
Even after every single thing in the world of Undertale is gone and all that’s left is Chara and some howling wind. This person is still here, the only explanation would seem to be that this person chara is talking to is not part of the Undertale world.
The one behind the computer.
Chara’s dialogue always has voice bites, except during this last scene. This is relevent because the presence of voice bites is linked to Frisk.
When a character is ‘hidden’ such as Sans during his speech about LV or Undyne when we first see her meeting with Papyrus, Frisk cannot hear their voice bites.
This is the case for Chara too at the end of genocide.
Furthermore, during the conversation with Chara, we are no longer ‘in battle’. Between Flowey’s death and Chara’s appearance, we have left batlle mode. Notably, Chara’s sprite is colored.
We are back in the equivalent of an overworld view.
This means that if Frisk was there, we would see their sprite facing Chara’s. Somwewhat similarly to how it was here when facing Flowey in neutral.
But as we see, Frisk is absent at the end of genocide, its just Chara and their text.
Frisk is nowhere to be seen.
The one Chara is talking to is the one who woke them up from death.
Having a lot of determination and being close to a dead person’s remains alone isn’t enough to bring someone back from the dead. Else any monster we killed would be revived immediatly or the other fallen humans would have woken Chara up as well.
As much as the idea of both Frisk and Chara having red souls being the cause of this would be a great narrative, its not something that the game ever hints at either which would be a game design flaw if it was really meant to be the full explanation.
It would seem there is another factor at play here…
What else could have played a role in waking Chara up ?
According to Chara themself :
Chara appears… When their name is called.
Chara comes when the player calls their name, at the very first frame when the game begins.
“But what about Flowey ? Didn’t he call Chara’s name too ?”
Yes he did. There is also a very clever meta parallel involving Flowey here.
In the previously mentioned tweets, Flowey invited “Chara” to come play with him, in the message that came right after this one, Undertale released. Thus allowing players to ‘wake up’ Chara.
In his own way, Flowey did also make them wake up by calling for them.
In addition, Chara comments that their interlocutor wants to go back when the player chooses to relaunch the game and wait.
The important detail here is that Chara’s interlocutor did something that gave away that they wanted to “go back” despite this dialogue popping up after doing literally nothing but waiting in the nothingness. This is something that Chara hadn’t anticipated and was surprised by, so it wasn’t the wait itself.
The thing that made Chara say this was that we relaunched the game. By doing this, we attempted to go back to the world we led to its end by going down this path.
Which is not what Chara was expecting.
“But Chara calls the red soul ‘your soul’. Isn’t that soul Frisk’s ?”
For Chara to be talking to the player, the red soul would need to be both Frisk’s soul and the player’s soul at once.
Is such a thing ever implied in the game ?
Well the answer is yes, in the game files.
One of the sprites for the red soul had a particularly odd name. It is called…
(One important thing to note is that this specific red soul sprite is used with Flowey in particular, who happens to be the character who hints at the existence of the player via words the most often.)
This soul does belong to more than just one person at the same time.
The second owner is not Chara, as they are currently asking for it, they do not already own it, this whole bargain would be pointless otherwise.
So we do have a third party at play in addition to Frisk and Chara here. Who else to be the second owner of Frisk’s soul than this entity that controls Frisk’s actions, as well as their SAVE power and that exists outside the world of Undertale, behind their computer ?
We are the one Chara is talking to at the end of the route, not Frisk.
Talking about Frisk, they are the one under the player’s control, as such they are a key element to identifying the player’s influence.
There are moments in the game in which Frisk resists the player’s commands.
It is in those moments that we can see the player and Frisk acting as two separate entities from each other, thus making our influence over Frisk appear explicitly for a short while.
The first examples are those in which Frisk refuses to attack, even when the player asks them to.
The first case of this takes place in Undyne’s house.
Frisk is obviously strong enough to be able to do more to a tomato than just knocking it over when striking at full force. They are the same Frisk that can push around rocks half of their size.
Despite the player’s command, Frisk did not have any intent to punch the tomato resulting in this extremely weak attack instead despite using their “full force”.
The same thing happens again later on in that same hangout. Except this time its made much more explicit.
During the rematch against Undyne, we have the choice to make a fake attack.
However, even if we don’t select this option and choose to do a real attack against Undyne…
Frisk disobeys us and still does the fake attack instead. Dealing only miniscule damage.
Because just as Undyne says :
Frisk does not want to hurt Undyne, and as such, they do not comply to our command when told to attack her at “full force” without faking it, choosing to execute a fake attack instead.
Frisk is also said to feel bad when we make them punch the dummy in Waterfall if they have a low LOVE.
Considering that this happens immediatly after the punch, that this action has had so far no consequences that could have made them regret it, and that Frisk is characterised as being (mostly) good natured, it seems very unlikely that Frisk would have chosen to punch it on purpose on their own only to feel bad about it immediatly after.
One more thing to mention here is the lost souls.
They do not dodge the attacks, but they take no damage. While its not impossible that this could be due to the nature of the souls and the Asriel fight itself, Frisk might be refusing to injure the lost souls here too.
But even beyond merely refusing to attack, there are more instances of Frisk refusing to do as the player commanded them.
During this sequence in the true lab, Frisk walks considerably slower than in any other part of the game.
This is only the case until the curtain has been moved, once this happens, Frisk’s pace goes back to normal. It also only works one way, Frisk is slow when moving towards the curtain but not when moving away from it.
This peculiar detail takes all of its meaning once taking into account that Frisk is also characterised as someone who is easily intimidated or scared.
After seeing this shadow behind the curtain, Frisk didn’t want to go there and look behind it.
They were still forced to do so by the player but they show clear reluctance to that idea due to either fear or hesitation, hence their slower pace as they attempt to express that they do not want to do this.
Checking it wasn’t Frisk’s own intention but rather something that we made them do regardless of how they felt about it.
This control of the player over Frisk’s body through playing the game is also made incredibly explicit in the Xbox version of Undertale.
If the player disconnects their controller whilst in the true lab, this control we hold over Frisk is not only temporarily broken, but it is explicitely spelled out for the different parts of Frisk’s body that the player is no longer in control of them, only for things to go back to normal once its plugged back in.
One more very important detail to note here is that one thing is missing among those parts of Frisk.
The soul if the culmination of one’s being, its the most important of all and yet its simply missing from this strange screen.
The reason for this detail is because the player never lost their connection to Frisk’s soul. its already partially ours.
Still in the true lab, Frisk directly disobeys the player when facing Snowdrake’s mother. Twice.
If we tell Frisk to laugh at her :
Same thing if we decide to tell Frisk to heckle her.
Once again, Frisk ignores our command. They do not say anything of the sort.
They refuse to behave like this with Snowdrake’s mother no matter what we tell them. Frisk refuses to comply with the action we chose, on their own accord.
It couldn’t have been Frisk who had chosen to laugh or to heckle in the first place, Frisk isn’t disobeying themself.
For one last example of Frisk fighting back against the player’s control, lets’ go back to the Undyne hangout.
Frisk dislikes soda, they find it gross.
And i mean, they really don’t like soda.
but something very interesting happens if we tell Frisk to pick the soda during this hangout once she proposes Frisk to choose what they want to eat.
As soon as Frisk points towards the soda, Undyne immediatly picks up that they now look unhappy after doing so.
Frisk does not make such an expression with any of the other options, not even the “weird” ones. Obviously Frisk does not actually expect Undyne to be eating a sword or an entire fridge as a “drink”.
The only change that took place between before and after was that Frisk pointed towards the soda. It is the only possibility as to what could have caused this change of humor in Frisk.
But why did pointing towards it make Frisk feel so unhappy ?
The reason is quite simple, it is because, as mentioned before, Frisk finds soda “gross”. They don’t actually want to drink it.
But, if doing this had been Frisk’s own decision. They wouldn’t have been unhappy about it.
We know that Undyne specifically told Frisk to point towards what they wanted to drink, even if for some unknown reason they chose something that they hated on purpose. It would have been a choice they made on their own free will, and as such they would not have expressed that they disliked this choice the very moment they made it.
This is what free will is all about, the possiblity to make your own choices based on what you currently consider to be the best option free from any other influence.
To Frisk, the soda was not their prefered option. Yet they still picked it.
Frisk, while picking this soda, did not have free will.
Something else, or rather someone else, made that choice for them.
What actually happens during this scene is that the player forces Frisk to pick this drink they dislike against their will. Because of this, Frisk manifests that they do not like this outcome by making a face expressing that they aren’t happy about this, which Undyne then notices and points out.
“But what about the narrator ? They can move Frisk’s body too, maybe they were the one who made them pick the soda and not the player.”
The narrator does not seem to be the greatest fan of soda either. That description of it is really not flattering.
However, they seem to have much more interest in the golden flower tea.
Even when choosing the sugar, they try and push us towards picking the tea instead.
If the narrator wanted to force us to select anything in particular, it would have been the tea, not the soda.
It must not be forgotten that one of the key points that Toby Fox built Undertale round in the first place was to include traditional parts of RPG games that are not supposed to be relevant “in world” such as EXP & LV, SAVING or the narration into actual canon parts of the story. The player being included as well was nothing more than the next logical step in this direction.
The list of games Undertale was inspired by includes Earthbound, MGS or OFF, all of which recognise the player as an entity within canon. Toby Fox seems to have been following down the same path as those games regarding integrating meta elements into the story.
For instance, Toby himself mentioned in an interview from 2018 when asked about the way these games inspired him that :
Toby Fox : “I guess as a specific example, I really liked how Metal Gear Solid had all these strange, game-breaking moments (==> interacting with the player) within the series. […] The game design can be part of the story, too.”
From his words to his inspirations passing by the game design model he’s been following and the very way he envisioned Undertale, adding the player as part of canon would only have been a logical choice.
In the end, it is better to let the games speak for themselves.
Whilst it is down to each person to come to their own conclusions, game evidence heavily suggests that the player is intended to be canon in Undertale.
