The Psychology of UNDERTALE's Final Boss

Power, force, denial and the need to let go

SPOILER WARNING: Please play UNDERTALE before reading this post.

Hey everyone, and welcome to this new little Substack. If you’re from my YouTube-channel you may have seen my latest video on the symbolism of Chara in Toby Fox’s UNDERTALE.¹ Now UNDERTALE is a game positively full of fascinating ideas, and in my opinion it is on one level a kind of psychological drama, so it’s well deserving of being the first topic of discussion here. Therefore, as my first post I’d like to have a look at what is one of the most, if not arguably the most impactful sequence in the entire game. The one which, hopefully, brings every immersed player to tears and cements the long-awaited catharsis of the game’s True Pacifist route. Namely, the final boss battle with the lost prince of the Underground: Asriel Dreemurr, and how this battle can be looked at from what I like to call the “psychophilosophical” point of view.² Keep reading, and you’ll probably come to understand what I mean by that if you don’t already.

The battle with Asriel takes place after a long and arduous journey you the player have embarked on. In the game’s pacifist route, this journey began merely with the desire to escape the Underground and return to the surface, but has since become a selfless quest to befriend and aid the various monsters of the Underground in their various pursuits, finally culminating in the destruction of the Barrier: the nigh-unpassable border between the Underground and the human surface. The final boss can only take place when Asriel, having previously existed as the soulless Flowey, absorbs the six human souls as well as every single monster soul in the Underground, thereby gaining his long-lost ability to feel compassion and love. With his now god-like power he wants to force Frisk (the player), who he mistakes for his long-lost friend Chara, to stay in the game, planning to reset and recreate the world and force us to play through it again without our memory of what happened before. Therefore, the battle itself, though presented as quite an epic ordeal, is essentially and most clearly Asriel/Flowey’s last-ditch attempt to prevent the player, thought to be Chara, from finishing the game and leaving him behind; it’s his final, desperate grasping for something which has been lost to him for a long, long time, yet which he deep down knows he has to let go of yet again: companionship. In the process of doing this, by absorbing their souls Asriel is denying the monsters of the whole Underground of their individuality, forcing them to abide in him as tools by which he can regain what he’s lost. The player, on the other hand, seeks the liberation of the Underground and has their motives based entirely in selflessness and compassion, including for Asriel himself.

Power vs. Force

With this contrast in mind, philosophically, the battle with Asriel is instructive in presenting the what we can call the symbolical contrast between force and power. This is an idea I’ve borrowed from the book Power vs Force by David Hawkins which, if nothing else very lucidly presents a distinction I think we all instinctively know to some extent, namely the distinction between the kind of power which stems from selfish or distorted desires, and the kind of unassuming yet pure and resolute power which is grounded in altruism, compassion and true self-certainty. The former is here called force and the latter is power. Keep this difference in mind as you read.

The difference can roughly be understood like this: on the one hand, we have force, which while morally inferior, is menacing and imposing. It’s the kind of power which is easy to identify because it likes to show off, pushing hard against the obstacles in it way and inciting fear in the onlooker. Yet, as is often the case with things which appear one way on the outside, force actually reflects a hidden weakness: its own opposite, on the inside. On the other hand we have true power, which is unassuming because it has nothing to gain from being imposing, yet in itself is a kind of strength which is far superior to force. This distinction is a very eminent theme during Asriel’s boss fight. Asriel, the “God of Hyperdeath,” is the representative of force in this case. Ultimately of course, he isn’t malevolent in his intentions, and only wants to re-experience the compassion he had access to before his transformation into Flowey, and enjoy the companionship of Chara. He wants familiarity and unity, to be together with his childhood friend again, who he believes the player to be. But this desire is distorted, likely by the incredible trauma of his situation, into a megalomania which wants to dictate the lives of others as away to compensate for so many years of isolation and moral helplessness owing to his lack of ability to feel emotion. Asriel feels helpless and weak on the inside, and so he presents the shallow façade of the God of Hyperdeath, the most absurdly overblown self-image imaginable, and takes on the player in the form of an imposing god with an infinite health bar and strength. The player, in contrast, is presented externally as weak and hopelessly outmatched, a single soul posed against a virtually infinite number of souls united under Asriel’s will. This is made worse by the fact that the player has in the True Pacifist route collected no EXP whatever and hence has practically no concrete advantages. Yet, like the superficial superiority of force over power, this contrast is illusory, and the true power in fact resides on the side of Frisk and the player. This is seen most “literally” in the moment towards the end of the fight when Asriel pounds Frisk with an energy beam, his façade clearly at the precipice of collapse and desperate to get his will. But no matter what, he just can’t seem to defeat the player, the health bar instead decreasing down to a vanishing fraction of a point.³

This violation of the “rules” of force is one of the surest ways to identify power. Forces oppose each other, some stronger than others yet all obeying the “framework,” but power transcends the framework. Hawkins describes force as something like the force which is produced by a human’s push, or by the combustion of an engine. It’s limited to an action or reaction which eventually runs out of steam, whereas power is a field, like gravity or electromagnetism. It’s always there, and can’t be reduced by means of force at all, because the force is entirely ephemeral while power is lasting:

Force has transient goals; when those goals are reached, there remains the emptiness of meaninglessness. Power, on the other hand, motivates us endlessly (Power vs Force, p. 139).

It doesn’t matter how low the health bar is pushed because the “health” is not actually where the strength lies. “Health” is an artefact of the battle system, but unlike force, which is prone to accept the rules and tie itself up in the concrete,⁴ power does not reify the battle system. The whole of its strength lies on the inside, in this case the inside of Frisk and what they represent. It doesn’t matter how much force Asriel has or how much he blows up his ego for the sake of victory, because the true nature of all this pomp is actually weakness, not strength. The purpose of his new form is to hide the repressed part of himself which is just a child, helpless and in dire need of care and compassion, and to this end he takes on the persona of the God of Hyperdeath as a compensatory mechanism. On a similar note, Asriel’s inherent inability to defeat the player is also reflected by the fact that, despite Asriel having nominally superseded Frisk’s determination and thus removed the ability to save and load, Frisk being defeated in the battle nonetheless simply results in the broken soul re-assembling itself with the prompt “But it refused,” appearing on the screen:⁵

The symbolism and imagery related to the force-power distinction is commonly seen throughout video games and stories in general, embodied by the fact that very often, an apparently weak protagonist with hopeless prospects of victory consistently comes out on top against all odds. But I think this battle is an especially instructive example of how it can be used to illustrate the superiority of having intentions based in compassion rather than selfishness and repression. If you’re operating from the point of view of the latter, you’ll struggle and struggle but even if you “win,” you’ll never find happiness. The former, on the other hand, is always content, because they know what they’re doing is the right thing.

Moving On

As is the case throughout the entire True Pacifist route, the theme of the player’s non-violence is also continued in this final battle, and interestingly the actions taken by the player to win consist in “saving” the souls of their lost friends by performing various acts which are familiar to them. Their faces start off obscured by a kind of static and their personalities are reset to their initial state at the beginning of the game. For example Alphys is insecure, Sans demotivated and Undyne apparently determined as ever to kill all humans.

On the one hand, their lost memories are diegetically due to Asriel’s ongoing attempt to reset the world and create a new one, but there’s plenty of psychological symbolism to be seen in this as well. In that context, Asriel in his distorted state becomes a representative of not only repression,⁶ but also regression. He wants everything to stay the way it was in the past, and in the process to deny happiness from everyone else in order to protect himself from the inevitability of moving on and letting go. But to cling on to the past in this way amounts to a suppression of the natural evolution and development of things, a development which, if allowed to flow freely, is often positive. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where your life is clearly ready to enter a new phase, but a part of you doesn’t want to let go? The current situation is comfortable and familiar to you, while the future on the other hand looks scary and unknown in comparison too it. This could be the experience of a college student moving away from home for the first time, of someone on the brink of switching careers, or any number of other people you can think of. You’ve almost certainly experienced such an event in your own life.

To a point of course, holding on to the things you’re comfortable with is a good thing, but at a certain stage it becomes pathological. At a certain stage that healthy conservatism becomes a barrier to your own positive development, and in Asriel’s case it even becomes a barrier to the development of everyone else as well. In the game, it’s up to us to remind them of the who they really are, or more accurately the greater and more developed people they’ve become as a result of Frisk’s compassionate actions. In analytical psychology, there’s an idea that the destiny of the ego, the person we start off as, is to grow an develop so as to eventually encompass the entirety of the self: the entirety of who we really are. We start of limited, but as time goes on we accumulate new experiences and perspectives on the world and ourselves in order to reach a greater whole. We become increasingly less limited and more open. This is of course exactly what happens to the main characters of UNDERTALE during the True Pacifist route. Their once limited personalities have become expanded, wiser and more complete as a result of their encounters with us. We’ve helped them grow, but Asriel is trying to negate the greater stage of completeness they’ve reached in a misguided attempt to hold on to his own past. Therefore, the forceful regression of the personalities of UNDERTALE’s characters back to square one becomes an expression of Asriel’s own refusal to accept the natural evolution of things, and on a meta level the tendency in all of us which wants to hold on to things in our lives which quite simply need to be let go of if we want to become whole. In the end then, it becomes our, and Frisk’s task, to show Asriel himself that this whole endeavour is useless, and will only ever bring him more pain, or at best delay it. Hence, when everyone else has been saved, we get this: 

“Strangely, as your friends remembered you… Something else began resonating within the soul, stronger and stronger. It seems that there’s still one last person that needs to be saved. But who? Suddenly, you realise. You reach out and call their name.” 

Just as Undyne’s newfound wholeness was literally obscured,⁷ leaving only her initial personality and anti-human philosophy, and similarly for the other characters, Asriel’s true self is obfuscated by his long-held ‘kill or be killed’ attitude and his denial of the impending sacrifice he will have to make. Despite being the one who is supposedly ‘in control’ and erasing everyone else’s memories, Asriel is hiding the truth from himself just like he hides it from everyone else. This is the reason why we can save him in exactly the same way as we save everyone else. Just like them, he’s not evil, not at all. He’s only lost and afraid, just like them.⁸ Lost in the past, and afraid of losing his only true friend: you. Just as we remind our friends who they are, we show Asriel who he needs to become, and what he needs to let go of, in order to become the greater version of himself. He’s finally able to release all those souls in what can only be described as a heroic self-sacrifice knowing what it means for him;⁹ letting go of trying to use force to keep things artificially in the past, and instead embracing the power of compassion and acceptance. Acceptance of who he truly is, and of the world he has to live in. The overblown projection of the God of Hyperdeath then gives way to the child, the one who was residing on the inside all along, trying to compensate for his own fear and lack of control using a false image of absolute power.¹⁰

Saving Asriel thus becomes representative of washing away the unhealthy attachment and metaphorical fog which obscures the people we’re meant to become. And now that Asriel has finally let go, there’s only one more person who needs to do so, namely you the player, by ‘putting down the controller’ and moving on to new things. This is, alas, something many players clearly haven’t been able to do. But then again, that’s perfectly understandable, because Toby Fox’s UNDERTALE is well and truly a masterpiece. When the game’s own theme of ‘not being able to let go’ is reflected even in the relationship that players have to it, you can be sure that it’s accomplished something magical.

References

David R. Hawkins, Power vs. Force, 1994 - https://veritaspub.com/product/power-vs-force-the-hidden-determinants-of-human-behavior-book/

1. You can watch it here:

2. Apparently “psychosophy” is already a thing. Damn it.

3. A funny thing I realised is that this fraction is actually one ten billionth, and the population of Earth is of course (very) roughly ten billion. So, perhaps ambitiously, the fraction could be interpreted as corresponding to the fact that everyone’s soul is contained within Asriel; “10 billion souls,” whereas we have a 10 billionth of a single soul, and yet still prevail because the true power resides with us. It becomes the ultimate symbol for the unlikely victory of David over Goliath, so to speak. Of course, there are almost certainly not 10 billion monsters in the Underground, but that’s besides the point.

4. “The concrete” can also mean material objects. Force is covetous of material prosperity and perceived superiority, but this reification of the concrete also takes the form of a clinging to traditional beliefs or other orthodoxies. In the game, these “orthodoxies” are represented by the limitations of the battle system, and quantities like health and stats. The in-game explanation for this is probably Frisk’s determination, rather than their power,  but the symbolism is still there nonetheless.

5. Funnily enough, this sentence has a double meaning: “refuse” can be taken to mean to refuse to die, or that the soul physically re-fuses. Toby Fox, my friends.

6. Repression because he’s repressing his own inner sense of helplessness, fear, etc.

7. See the image above with the white cloud covering her face.

8. The reason I emphasise this is because it goes to show that symbolically at least, there’s really no difference at all between Asriel and the people whose souls he’s controlling. It’s just that Asriel, having the power to do so, puts on a glorified persona to hide the inner weakness inherent in his actions.

9. Since Asriel has no soul, letting go of everyone else’s souls means he’ll lose his own ability to feel love and transform back into Flowey: “I can’t keep maintaining this form. In a little while… I’ll turn back into a flower. I’ll stop being “myself.” I’ll stop being able to feel love again.”

10. This is called enantiodromia. If you unconsciously feel weak on the inside, you compensate by projecting an image of superiority on the outside. Yin and yang always exist together.