“Why is this so underrated?”

It combination of many things. Marketing certainly play role, and many good movies have been screwed by bad or no-effort ad campaign. Length am also factor. Over the Garden Walls am self-contained miniseries. Gravity Falls am designed for multiple season.

It main reason me fussy bout many things. Cannot expect to just stumble on really good things. Majority of people frequently miss out on the best stuff. It only take a little extra effort to find hidden gems.

First of all, I'd say OTGW is too short to be as known as GF. 10eps x 10mins that were aired in 1 week of 2014, vs 40eps x 20 mins that were aired for 4 years!

GF is too more of a pop culture thing than OTGW, it's funnier and crazier, OTGW is more folksy and I'd say have more bookish qualities than GF. It's also much odder than GF, with its folklore and songs and characters. The first time we saw it I had the "wtf is this LSD cartoon with a feeling of The Wind in The Willows?" for all the 10 series, even though I liked it. So I guess many people cannot get over this feeling or just don't want to rewatch it =)

In the world of anime, I think it can be because people don't know these things exist. They hear about a series from word of mouth or because it has cool action or whatever.

And then you see people complain "Oh, anime is always like /this/" and I'm like "Nooo, you just haven't seen these absolutely amazing written anime!"

Chihayafuru - It's about a card game that doesn't exist in the West, not even with a variant of it to be like "It's a card game similar to [blank]." 100 poems by 100 poets. What could sound more boring than that. But it has some of the best card game action ever and not only is it a sports anime, but it's a sports anime with a very intriguing romantic subplot and characters that are actually interesting AND YOU DON'T KNOW THE OUTCOME! Because the person you want to win and the MC aren't ridiculously overpowered and winning every game.

I would write more but don't have time atm.

Sometimes you just get unlucky.

Some shows get discovered when they're small and have the chance to become more, to make it big.

Some shows get missed while they're still small and end up becoming favorites of small groups, or just falling to the wayside.

I've watched "Over the Garden Wall" twice. The second time someone said that each episode is about one of the Dante's hell circles - and I've liked it even more since then. I know my friends watch it every year for Halloween.
On the other hand - I've only ever watched one episode of "Gravity Falls" and never came back to it. I know it exists, but that's about it.

With "Undertale" - it has an amazing soundtrack. I think about 90% of its popularity came from the music, as is the case with many games.
I've never heard of "OFF" before.

In the case of OFF vs Undertale, everything lines up pretty easily actually.

Undertale basically got popular through Let's Plays on YouTube back in 2015, which was roughly in a sort of golden era for gaming commentary on YouTube. People would just wanna play a funny game for the hell of it, people wanna play it for the views, that sort of thing. It spread like wildfire at the time, and usually some would go out of their way and tell people in the first video covering it "this is an amazing game best experienced by yourself first" which only added to the popularity, on top of the already interesting premise of "you don't HAVE to fight everything you see, you can be friendly and let em go".

OFF.. didn't have these amazing factors in play. It's a French indie game in 2008 with no English translation. Even if someone did manage to find and play it, it's very unlikely that they would've done a Let's Play of it back in 2008, gaming commentary wasn't a thing yet. YouTube itself wasn't as popular back then, that's two years after the site was made. In that time.. gaming review channels maybe could've hyped it up, but those were typically only looking at retro gaming from the 80's or 90's, a lot of which being stuff from the NES up until the Nintendo 64.

It just boils down to the right place and right time, and right amount of public exposure, same with what @Kelheor was saying about OTGW and Gravity Falls.

Advertising and ease of access definitely also apply to how much it reaches out btw missed answering these questions lol Undertale being on Steam with a trailer promoting it helped, but OFF having no trailer made it that much harder to find it especially since trailers usually tell you where you can find and play it. OFF had neither of those.

I don't think Over the Garden Wall is underrated. While I've never watched it, around the time it was airing and there after I saw artists and commentators on you make fanart and sing its praises, respectively. I mean I heard a lot about it, and I still see fanart of it on Instagram. Like @Kelheor said, Gravity Falls had a much longer run time, and also, from what I understand, GF was very interactive. Clues and puzzles were spend throughout episodes which created a dedicated following of people who wanted to discover the secrets of Gravity Falls, just like Dipper.

Undertale had good music, fun characters and a novel playing style. There have been games before where "your choices matter", but not to the extent that Undertale did. Also lots of let's plays, fananimations, and speedpaints made it stick around a lot longer.

It's worth also noting that OFF did have a sizable Tumblr following at its peak. It got a remarkable amount of fanart and word of mouth discussion for how little it was marketed. The fact that it actually has a wikipedia is testament to the fact it's actually considered pretty notable (I'm pretty sure I've never worked on a thing in my career that has a wikipedia page... One of the books I did illos for is on the unofficial Doctor Who wiki...ha....wooooo....).

Undertale had a massive boost from the get-go because it's almost a spin-off of Homestuck, being created by one of the most popular music composers for the comic, which when Undertale launched the demo was at its peak with probably around 3 million readers. It has a lot of similarity in tone and aesthetic but is tighter, more accessible and much more family-friendly. The Homestucks gave the kickstarter a big initial boost, helping it go viral and people to find it and LP the demo, and after that it just snowballed.

"Why isn't this thing I like more popular??"

*proceeds to never share it with anyone *

I mean it's comparing apples to oranges, but I wouldn't say that these titles were overlooked by any degree.

Maybe it's an age thing and who you're surrounded by, too, cuz I'm like 30 so I have heard plenty of OFF and I thought just everyone knew about this. But, maybe people coming into this anew haven't heard of it before? It's a good game, and I think it probably inspired a lot of other RPG maker indies that paved the way for Undertale and how it was made.

And are there really people out there who don't know about Over the Garden Wall? Every Fall it's fanart is all over my timeline. It's like a cult hit.

Kind of unrelated but I have a serious bone to pick against the question “Why is this so underrated?”

The thing is, I only ever hear it about stories that are actually extremely popular. Like you go to a thread and you see a dozen different comments by different people made in the span of like an hour tops that all say "Am I the only one who reads insert extremely popular story?" And you think "uhm, you're not, scroll half a second and you'll find your tribe". I guess kind of in the vein of "am I the only one who noticed insert random detail from the story, why is no one talking about this?" and then you get three dozen comments in the same page about how they are wondering if they're the only ones to notice the same thing.

It's almost as if some people use this question as a way to present themselves as undergroundish and special about something rather mundane, and the irony is not lost in me nearly as much as the meaning of "underrated" was. Anyway, that was my rant lmao

It's also if a show gets a renewed run past it's initial run. I didn't get to see OTGW until just these last few months when I happened to spy it in the On-Demand section. I've never heard of it being re-run on TV, which automatically lessens the amount of people's eyes to see it. Not everyone has On-Demand. Not everyone thinks to look there. Not everyone is looking for something new. They turn on the TV to their favorite channel and if something new pops on, that's the only way they'll see it. Gravity Falls was on, a lot. It also was able to market more merch for it. OTGW can't really market any thing for merch without it, you know, being too creepy or implying death, so it's... not as cute and colorful or iconic as a character's hat or T-shirt. I mean, how the heck do you market a teapot as a hat?

Both OFF and Over the Garden Wall had/have huge fan followings on Tumblr. You might also be able to find stuff on DA too.

For GF vs OTGW...
Gravity falls is a much longer running series while Over the Garden Wall was a surreal short running show that is played around Halloween time. Gravity Falls also appeals to a larger age group, like young kids, while OTGW might be too weird or scary for them.

For Undertale Vs OFF...
Easy, Undertale is a better game. OFF is OK, but I think it lacks the charm of Undertale and it is a super downer. Undertale is very silly and has a message of hope and love which tends to be more popular. OFF however is not an unknown game and I was familiar with it before Undertale came out. And I don't know if it is even fair to compare them.

Bonus, my OFF fanart from 2013

My Over the Garden Wall Fanart from 2014

So I don't know if anyone else has brought this up because I haven't looked at all the responses, but one reason I can give as to why OtGW didn't take off as much could be due to it being a bit more... niche than Gravity Falls.

Gravity Falls is set in Oregon, but it's modern day. Over the Garden Wall is technically modern day, but it draws incredibly heavily from American History. It has an Antebellum Southern aesthetic which is far more niche than modern day Gravity Falls Oregon. That can explain why modern day Americans who indulge in cartoons might have a harder time vibing with it.

Don't even get me started on other countries too. I remember watching someone back when I used to watch reaction videos to cartoon shows. He was not American... I can't remember exactly where he was from, but he had absolutely no connection to American History nor the common children's fables we grew up on that were a clear inspiration for much of the cast of the show. He even stated by the end that he thought it was okay, but that he was concerned there was a lot of American culture within the story that made it difficult for him to connect with it.