ESRB ratings make absolutely no sense.
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- Fantasy Violence
- Mild Blood
- Mild Language
- Use of Tobacco
Fantasy violence is fairly straightforward. I'm not going to debate that.
There are two instances of smoking in Undertale. The first is near Doggo where you find a pile of partially-smoked dog treats. The second is this Burgerpants sprite, which also does not appear to be tobacco:
So apparently smoking is bad but poisoning a dog with tobacco-based dog treats or selling people food made entirely out of arts and crafts supplies is perfectly fine and doesn't need any warning for, you know, poisoning people to death.
Now let's move onto the other two: Mild Language and Mild Blood.
Spoilers ahead; proceed with caution
As far as I can tell, the strongest language used in the game is the word "damn", used exactly once, in the fight with Undyne the Undying. And the only blood I'm aware of in the entire game is on the final boss fight of the genocide route, Sans.
Which means the ratings board looked at a story where a child has a plan to kill themself and then kill everyone else, and what happens when you successfully complete that plan, and thought "this is sending a bad message to children. you should not swear when someone murders half of the world's population and these red pixels on this skeleton will clearly scar children for life."
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@ben_lubar Clearly they should have also added a sexual content warning
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You know what I'd love to see? A list of what games have the biggest rating differences between rating organizations.
I wonder if there's anything out there that's rated 17+ in the US and 7+ in Europe.
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@anonymous234 I think the biggest difference are in violence (leads to higher ratings in Europe) and nudity (leads to higher ratings in the US) though that's based of gut feeling and I don't have any figures to back that up.
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Speaking of something only very slightly related, I've just learned that the Delta Rune demo is available on PS4
