Asriel is the biological child of Toriel and Asgore. He is also the adopted brother of Chara. He is also Flowery and the God of Hyperdeath. He doesn’t appear too much in the Undertale, and if you want his backstory, you need to go for the True Pacifist ending.
I’m going to have to talk about Flowery and Chara a bit in this. They’re connected in several ways.
I think Asriel has a fascinating backstory. It goes along with the theme of the game nicely. His story is about how violence doesn’t solve anything, and you should try to do good because violence only causes more violence. Before we go on with our complete Undertale Asriel guide, here are some key details you need to know about the child of Toriel.
Key Details Up Front
- Character Type: Boss
- Difficulty: I thought it was hard.
- First Encounter: The Ruins as Flowery, and in New Home.
- Optional: Yes, depending on the ending you’re going for.
- Personality: As Flowery, he is evil. As Asriel, he starts as being a bit introverted until he meets Chara. After you defeat him, Asriel is remorseful of his actions.
- Skills: Asriel can absorb the souls of monsters and humans. As Flowery, he claims that he can save, load the game, and restart. You don’t see this happen, but he tells you that he has the power to do this.
Description/Overview
Some of Asriel’s backstory is given to us as you play the game. He isn’t mentioned by name until the True Pacifist Ending. This was a little disappointing for me. If you want to finish the game, you miss out on a great story.
Asriel was friends with the first human to fall into the underground, Chara. The royal family adopts Chara, and Asriel becomes Chara’s adopted brother. Eventually, Chara dies, and Asriel crosses the Barrier to bring Chara home.
He can do this because he absorbed Chara’s soul. However, on his way to Chara’s village, Asriel gets attacked and fatally wounded. He returns to the underground and passes away. This is where things get creepy.
Dr. Alphys starts doing experiments and is able to resurrect Asriel as a flower. This becomes Flowery. I’m not sure if anyone in the game knows Flowery is an Asriel/Chara hybrid. They would probably act differently towards him.
In the True Pacifist Ending, you get some closure to Asriel’s story. He is back to being a normal kid, and you can find him tending some flowers in the Ruins. It’s a nice ending for him.
Key Moments
There aren’t too many Key Moments for Asriel with his limited appearances in the game. There are a few small moments that I didn’t understand in my first playthrough. Let’s go over the two most important ones here.
True Lab
This opens up after you have completed your date with Alphys and have delivered Undyne’s love letter to Alphys. Papyrus will call you and tell you to go to the Lab. Here you find a note from Alphys telling you to go into a previously locked room.
This is where you find out how Asriel became Flowery. It is heavily implied that this is what happened. You also find out more about the experiments that Alphys was doing.
She was doing experiments on Determination, Souls, Fallen Monsters, and Golden Flowers. Her goal was to bring Fallen Monsters back to life. She did, but most of her experiments turned into amalgamates. There are some Lab entries that you can read for more information.
It’s revealed that the first human, Chara, had a darker plan to merge their soul with Asriel. This was to let Asriel leave the Underground and gather the souls needed to break the barrier.
Once you have turned the power back on in the True Lab, then you can return to New Home and face off against Asriel.
There are a lot of backstories that go into this. I like how this is a story of how his friendship with Chara corrupts Asriel. You can see how Chara’s actions differed from yours in the pacifist route.
This is one of the things I love about Undertale! The game’s story can make you think if you want it to.
True Pacifist Ending
Asriel is the final boss in this ending. In the other routes, you fight Flowery, but here he transforms into Asriel. After the fight, you find out more information about him.
There are four forms that Asriel appears in during this ending.
- Normal – Were he looks like a child version of Toriell. He has a striped shirt, black pants, and no shoes.
- God of Hyperdeath – In this form, he is wearing clothes similar to Toriel. His face looks more demonic, his teeth a sharp, and his horns are longer.
- Final Form – This form comes at the end of your battle against him. He gets wings, his horns get longer, and his body looks more demonic.
- Overworld – This is how he appears out of battle. He has a striped shirt and looks more like a child version of Toriel.
Once you beat Asriel, he reverts to his child form, breaks the barrier, and begins to cry. You have the option to comfort him or not. He then asks you to take care of his parents and walks away.
In the Epilogue, he can be found tending to a flowerbed in the Ruins.
Key Relationships
Asriel doesn’t have too many relationships in the game. The few that there are get explained in the True Pacifist route. Let’s talk about them.
Asgore and Toriel
I wish there were more about this. Asriel is their son. Once he becomes Flowery, they don’t interact too often.
When you first meet flowery, he almost kills you. Toriel ends up saving you. This makes me think that she doesn’t know that Asriel has been brought back in that form. It’s kind of sad.
I’m also not sure that Asgore knows what happened to Asriel. I wonder how they would react to this, and maybe they would get back together.
Chara
This is one relationship that gets complicated. Asriel and Chara have the following relationships:
- Friends
- Half-Siblings (Asgore and Toriel adopted Chara)
- They share a soul
- They both makeup Flowery
I wish there was a prequel to Undertale to explain better how Chara and Asriel became friends. It’s such a fascinating idea, and I would have liked them to explore it more.
I don’t think that Chara was a good influence on Asriel. It feels like Asriel was being manipulated and was only going along with the plan so he could have a friend.
Flowery
This is the main antagonist in the game and is the reincarnation of Asriel. He is a version of Asriel, but one that is missing some key emotions. Specifically, he can’t love, which causes him to become twisted.
Flowery is the result of a science experiment on some flowers sprinkled with Asriel’s ashes. This happened after Asriel died while trying to bring Chara back to his home.
In this form, you get messed with quite a bit. He knows what you did in the game, remembers why you wanted to reset, and is creepy with what he says.
Quotes
There aren’t a lot of quotes from Asriel in the game. You have more from his alter ego, Flowery. I included some from Asriel and Flowery that I thought were particularly funny, creepy, or memorable.
“There are a lot of Flowerys out there.”
Asriel tells you this if you beat the game and restart. He is warning you to be careful when you leave the Underworld. It kind of feels like the developer is talking to you through Asriel.
“You really ARE different from Chara.” “The truth is… Chara really wasn’t the greatest person.”
These two quotes come from the Epilogue. Asriel reflects on what Chara was like and compares your actions during a pacifist run to how Chara acted. He also mentioned how Chara hated humanity.
“Frisk, when Chara and I combined our SOULs together… The control over our body was actually split between us.”
Another one from the Epilogue. Asriel talks about how he wasn’t totally in control of his actions and how he is regretful of what he did as Flowery. I wish there were more of this in the main game.
“There is one thing. One last threat. One being with the power to erase EVERYTHING… Everything everyone’s worked so hard for. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? That’s right. I’m talking about YOU.”
This is from Flowery. This is from his post pacifist dialogue. He reminds you that you can reset the world and try to do something different. I like how they try to make it sound sinister. Like you starting a new game would be a bad thing.
FAQ
He is a fascinating character. While he doesn’t appear as Asriel in all the endings, he does play a significant role in the game. Here are some of the things I learned about Asriel.
Question: Do you fight Asriel in the other routes?
Answer: You fight versions of Asriel at the end no matter what you do.
• Genocide route: As Flowery, he begs you to kill him.
• Neutral Route: He appears as Photoshop Flowery after absorbing the six human souls.
• True Pacifist Route: He appears as Asriel, and after he absorbs the souls of all the monsters, he becomes the God of Hyperdeath.
Question: When Asriel becomes the God of Hyperdeath, is there a monster whose soul isn’t absorbed?
Answer: As far as I can tell, he absorbs all of them. However, Napstablook isn’t shown here. He might have gotten out of this okay because he is a ghost.
Question: What happens if you don’t forgive Asriel?
Answer: If you don’t forgive him, he tells you that he understands. If you comfort him, you hug Asriel.
Question: Does Toriel know that Flowery is Asriel?
Answer: No, it doesn’t appear that she does. It seems like Asgore knew at one point, but Flowery used his power to reset the world, and now neither Toriel nor Asgore know his real identity.
Question: How did Asriel become Flowery?
Answer: Because of science! Okay, more when into it than that. His ashes were spread across a flower bed by Asgore. Dr. Alphys then did some experiments on the flowers using DT, or Determination, which allowed Asriel to come back to life as Flowery, but without the ability to feel love.
Conclusion
Asriel is a problematic character to separate from Flowery and Chara. At least for me, I wanted to jump into talking about both of them. I think it was a great idea to give this much depth to a character that the player rarely sees.
I also like that you can only see Asriel if you play the game the way the developer wants you to play. You don’t need to see Asriel to beat the game, but if you want to avoid killing things, you get rewarded by seeing the good ending.
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