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Undertale: No Mercy (The Anime - SPOILERS)
Undertale: No Mercy is a five-episode horror OVA released on Blu-Ray on 15 September 2018, the third anniversary of the game’s release.
Development While several producers and companies contacted Undertale’s creator about the rights to adapting the Undertale series for television, all but one of them detailed Undertale played killing some or none of the monsters. The lone “no mercy” pitch belonged to Carlos Lazaro, a veteran comics writer that also helped create the cult classic Crabface OVA for the Homestuck TrollCops animated series.
After what Lazaro described as “protracted and dog-filled” negotiations between him and Undertale creator Toby Fox, production began in late 2016. The primary caveat of the deal was that No Mercy was not to be released on the same media as the main series, in this case streaming websites. Lazaro agreed to this, and released the OVA as a two-disc Blu-Ray in 2018.
Plot No Mercy follows the same opening sequence and the original Undertale series’ first episode frame by frame until Frisk encounters the training dummy under Toriel’s guidance. However, rather than negotiate with the dummy, Frisk proceeds to decapitate it in a highly-detailed manner. Frisk then proceeds to violently stalk and kill Toriel and each of the characters that they had befriended in the original series, along with any monsters that get in their way.
It is gradually revealed that they are under the influence of Chara, the first human that had fallen into the monsters’ world. Chara had deliberately fallen into the hole out of a suicidal despair and hatred for humanity, and bonded with the monsters only to die of an illness. When Asriel (the son of King Asgore and Toriel) had tried to return the body to the human world that same night, he too was killed in the process.
Chara’s spirit would possess Frisk, a child of similar upbringing, and influence them to jump into the monster world and wreak vengeance. Frisk eventually confronts Sans and defeats him in a climactic battle before killing Asgore and Flowey from a first person perspective.
At this point Chara confronts the viewer directly and asks them if they want to destroy the world, displaying a menu. Either decision leads to Chara walking up to the viewer and slicing their throat, although “refusing” also accompanies this with a jumpscare. The credits then roll over faint sounds of explosions and screaming.
Reception No Mercy was likened to the Genocyber OVA by many reviewers, although many of them were polarized over whether this was a good thing. One prominent reviewer credited the OVA for its depiction of Flowey’s death, saying “it’s a jarring reflection of how much our life experiences mean nothing against betrayal, no matter how much we yearn to have our innocence back. We lose it like the old nursery rhyme, petal by painful petal.”
Easter Egg An easter egg was discovered in early 2019 by viewers who decided to watch No Mercy before the primary series. After making the final decision, the DVD scans for several known streaming apps and places a small file in their folders. When detected by certain streaming services, the file alters the final Undertale episode to play a post-credits scene showing a montage of news reports detailing the violent deaths of the cast. The final shot shows Frisk watching these reports from an unknown location with a sadistic smile red gleam in her eye.
All of the streaming services affected by this easter egg patched their sites to disregard the file. One service also attempted legal action against Lazaro, and the case was settled through a reissuing of the Blu-Ray that skipped the final choice menu and defaulted to the Accept ending, thus eliminating the file altogether.
Fox commented in an interview for the game’s Anniversary Edition that “[The easter egg] was probably what I would have done too.”