Ultima II: Revenge on the Enchantress

With space conquered and Antos having given me his blessing, there was only one task left in this strangely condensed, time-twisted version of Earth for me to do. Defeat Minax.

Aric's final stats

Which meant, of course, that tonight's session began the same way most of them have. With a grind-fest to gather the resources necessary.

I sailed around the Time of Legends, smacking down the baddies I found there for a rather hefty stack of gold - I should have done that sooner, it feels like the spawn rate for monsters in the Time of Legends is a lot faster. I don't know if it actually is, or it just feels like it due to there being considerably fewer nooks and crannies and islands for monsters to get caught up on so I find them faster, but either way, it meant that it was a lot easier to get myself a pile of gold there (then?) than anywhere (anywhen?) else.

Awfully expensive ring... that could have bought me 3000 hit points!

Once I amassed myself a sizeable chunk of change, it was off to Lord British's castle to buy as many hit points as I could hold (it still strikes me as somewhat odd that HP is a purchasable commodity), then off to - where else? - New San Antonio one last time to pump up my stats as high as I could off the several thousand gold that I'd stocked up. The last time I finished Ultima II, I ended the game with my strength somewhere in the 70s, and most of the rest in the mid-to-high 50s. This time around my strength was at a whopping 96, wisdom not far behind, and no stat lower than 60.

I was feeling pretty good, until I realized that I depleted my gold resources *before* obtaining the ring.

Have fun storming the castle!

So it was back to the Time of Legends for another smackdown session until I had 500 gold to dart back to claim the ring from the old man beneath ATREE. I never did get the message in-game that it was necessary to get the ring from him, I think it only comes from oracle messages, the near-prohibitively spendy ones, I'll have more to say on that in my closing thoughts post. Suffice it to say that I was properly equipped now, and I headed for Shadowguard.

With trepidation I wandered in through the gates, past the force fields and the devil-and-demon pair of guards, who left me alone. Slowly, carefully, I explored the castle, finding a life insurance salesman, a small chapel for devil worship, an eerie museum with a specimen of nearly every creature and brand of townsfolk I'd met, a she-creature that looked strangely like an orc begging me to take her... Minax was keeping some twisted things in her castle. I eventually found her in one of the corner towers, and I rushed her amid spell slinging and many shrieks of "Die fool!" before I landed a hit and she simply vanished from her position.

This is no time for a nap, Aric!!

I found her again in the opposite corner's tower (conveniently labeled 'Chamber Two') where I again suffered at the hands of her long range spells before getting close enough to land a blow with Enilno, and again she simply winked out of the room once I struck her. Back and forth I ran between the two towers, taking ever more circuitous routes with copious use of the strange coins I'd collected throughout my journeys to avoid dealing with any more of her minions than I had to (they overpowered me on two previous attempts to assault her stronghold). With each blow, she grew weaker and weaker, until with the fifth strike, she perished beneath my blade, her castle crumbling to ruins around me, all her works dying with her.

So ends the tale of Ultima II and the Revenge of the Enchantress, time and space one again set right with her death. The game continues to be something of a slog - it didn't feel much different the second time around - but I did a fair few things this time around I didn't last time, and the assault on Shadowguard was just as gleefully tense as any endgame sequence should be. I'll have a post with my final thoughts on the game in the coming days, and then it'll be time to gear up for another adventure - there's rumors of a creation of my two previous foes still lurking in wait...

Ultima II: Small Spaces

...wait, Father Antos is a she? I'm confused.

True to my goals in my last post, I borrowed a plane to steal a rocket to head out and explore space, to the fullest! (Space is a lot tinier than I expected it to be. Then again, what did I expect when I can sail around Earth a dozen times in the space of a few minutes?) But that's going a little too quickly. Let's start back at the beginning, shall we?

Some good ol' hack-and-slash.

Now that I can smack guards around and keys and locked doors were no longer an issue for Aric, I made one last round of the towns and villages to poke around to see what I might have missed in my previous explorations. Not much, as it turned, out, although I realized that I forget to ask around in Baradin's Town way back in the Pangaea era, which was rather a blunder, as it's there where one can obtain a good deal of information about Antos and Planet X! Kind of confused that some of this information comes from astronauts - prehistoric astronauts - but I guess that can kind of be handwaved due to Minax's confusing time shenanigans in the first place.

Anyway, during my explorations, I blundered into the Time of Legends, and decided to take a whack at the first wave of monsters that I met there. I remember the first time I played through Ultima II, I blinked several times at that massive gathering, thinking 'oh shoot.' It's not a terribly difficult fight to plow through, though, when it comes down to it - just simply finagling of enemy pathing and making use of the tight passageways. This batch of monsters is a lot tougher than their standard counterparts, but I made my way through them without too much difficulty. I was glad for my large stash of idols, capes, and boots picked up from my many grinding sessions, though, they saved me from a good deal of sleep and paralysis spells.

Forget going through Customs. Takes too long.

I saved the bunch of baddies awaiting me outside Shadowgate for later, ducking back into the time gate for the A.D. period and New San Antonio, this time to break into the hangar and steal myself a plane. Musing once again on how many rules I have to break in order to win the game - and how much worse that seems since I'm playing a cleric this run-through - I leapt into the plane, shot down a few guards, and ducked my way into the jail to nab Santre's Quicksword for 500 gold. I'd bought some power armor after a grinding session too, so now armed with the best equipment in the game, I taxied the plane past the time-negated guards at customs, and took of for a time gate and the Aftermath Era.

From there it was a quick flight to Pirate's Harbor, home of the remnants of the Soviet Union. First priority was exploration, of course, finding such places as 'Red Skware' (ow), 'Red Magic,' and a run-down 'Red Lobster'. It was here that my plan ran into its first snag, too - I found myself backed into a corner surrounded by guards and ended up dying. One reload later, I made a beeline for the launch center, negating time to bypass the guards and hop into a space shuttle.

Enilno is mine!

And then it was off into space! I actually had a lot of fun poking around the planets this time around, I just went straight for Planet X last playthrough. A lot of space and the other planets is... well, empty space, as I think I've remarked upon before, but at least somewhat interesting things are done with it - the tight mountain passages of Mars, the huge empty plain of Neptune, the transportation logistics necessary to explore Pluto... this session by far had the largest collection of screenshots yet, from all the interesting things I thought to snap a picture of. Proof that George Washington visited Mars; Izod Burgers on Jupiter; daring the swamp of New Jester on Uranus; some meta-humor, orcs around a campfire and a belligerent cook in Computer Camp on Neptune... all fluff, when it game down to it, but it was the flavor I'd been missing in-between all the grindfests. I also found a few clues pointing to Antos and New San Antonio on Pluto... which was kind of extraneous at this point.

So from there I went on to Planet X, and Castle Barataria, home of Ozymandias. After replenishing a few hit points, ducking through Kueen Susan's Room (ow again) through the jail (why is the jail right off of the queen's room?), I managed to find my way to Father Antos in the castle's chapel, who gave me his blessing and the exhortation to return and claim the Ring. Which I shall do next session, after making my final preparations to face Minax herself.

A camp run by orcs? Think I'll pass.

That covered my progress for the day - I actually think this was one of my favorite days playing Ultima II! I wish more had been done with space, either making it a bit easier to get there and eliminating some of the grind-slash-busy work in building a character up to the point where it's actually feasible to steal a rocket to explore, or having a bit more than just a lot of extra space with the occasional single dungeon or town to poke one's head into. It was nice having a few more maps to explore, something apart from the areas I'd become far too familiar with from seeking monsters to kill for cash. Much of it served little to no purpose as far as the overarching plot/goals of the game went, but it was good to have a little change of pace. I'm glad I took the time to explore this time around.

There isn't much left to do in the game, so I should be able to strike down the sorceress in my next session - my own revenge against the enchantress is close at hand!

Will do, Father.

Ultima II: Guarded Thoughts

It's been approximately two months since I last documented one of Aric's ventures through the varied worlds of Ultima - I suspect Minax is beginning to get impatient. Once again life decided to slam me all at once (this time with work/moving-related issues), but I'm still here and rarin' to get back to the journey.

I did have some opportunity for a play session during the down-time, but I'll be relying more on my notes rather than fresh memories for this particular record, as there's been a decent amount of intervening time between session and blog post. This ought to be interesting!

The Midwest gets overrun...

It does strike me, however, how... forgettable a lot of Ultima II seems to be. I think a lot of it has to do with how insanely grindy that it feels, and how... well, empty and superfluous the world as a whole feels. I haven't made my way into space yet (that's the plan for the next play session, at the very least), but there's a lot of empty space that doesn't feel like it has much purpose other than to just Be There. I mean, we get to see Earth in four distinct time periods, but beyond a settlement or two and a handful of dungeons that need a fair amount of equipment to really poke around, there's... not really that much. And even those towns don't really have all that much to them once you've found the handful of citizens that say something unique, most of which are closer to in-jokes and pop culture references than actually relevant to the game. I'll go into more detail on this in my closing thoughts (note to self), but Ultima I felt more streamlined, and it's not just because of the fact I was playing a remake. Ultima II's kind of the transition between the dungeon crawl of Ultima I and the sense of a living, breathing world with a story that Ultima III kicked off, and it puts it in kind of a unique position.

Man that's pricey.

We're here for the continuing story of Aric at the moment, though! I mentioned in my last post my belief that the moment the game opens up is the moment the player obtains his first ship. It serves as a fine first goal (beyond survival, that is) for a new game of Ultima II, but it's only a first step. Defeating guards is the only way to get keys, which are a necessary item in that necessary vehicles are behind locked doors. That being the case, my goal for this particular play session was to build Aric up to the point where he could take on a guard and come out of the fight in reasonable shape. Can't get to space without unlocking a few doors!

Of course, doing practically anything in Ultima II involves scads of gold, which means slaying a whole bunch of monsters, so of course I went sailing around the world again in order to find baddies to beat. I was amused by the veritable deluges of monsters that politely lined up to get smacked around one at a time by either my cannons or my weapons.

All of my new toys!

There were three things I needed to see to in order to ensure I could take down a guard and live to tell the tale - better stats, better weaponry, and better armor. Stats took precedence, and there was a lot of running back and forth into New San Antonio and the Hotel California to bump my stats up to the 40s-50s range. That done, I turned my sights toward a new weapon and a new set of armor - which turned out to be rather expensive, and that was with fair-to-middlin' charisma! Still, enough time gave me enough money (and a fair few more levels - I know I said this before, but what's the point to keeping track of levels if they don't do anything?) to pick up a shiny new phaser and reflect armor!

Yes, that gold and experience is from a guard. One down...

Since I was spending most of my time in that time period anyway, I meandered over to Port Boniface to test out my new toys and see if I could slap a guard silly. I felt a little weird doing so, especially as a cleric - I suppose this is part of what makes Ultima IV so poignant, the Stranger ended up doing a lot of questionable things before he became the Avatar, didn't he. I can't count how much food I've stolen throughout the course of this game, and my guard killcount tally is starting to spike. (Where do they find guards in Sosaria, anyway? Can't be a pleasant job, standing around saying the same thing over and over until some adventurer shivs you for a few keys. Although apparently you don't need much more the UG, ME TOUGH.)

I survived the encounter little worse for the wear, so slapped a second guard around too. Now I finally have the keys I need to progress further! I spent a while going in and out of the city to smack the guards' new replacements, so I could build up a good stockpile of keys. Now that those are in my pocket, I can poke around town a little further, and most importantly, turn my sights toward space!

That's what my next goal is, and hopefully it won't take a few months to get there...

Ultima II: Trudgin' Along

Life is picking up speed again, or at least it has for the past week or so, but I'm still pushing forward, albeit slowly. This post is a couple days due at this point, covering a session from... Wednesday-ish, I think, but hey, slow and steady wins the race and all that!

And now on to the good stuff.

Not yet, but I'm sure I will eventually.

There comes a point in the Ultima games (and indeed, most RPGs) where the game readily and definitively opens up. A point where the training wheels come off, a point where basic survival is no longer an issue and honest-to-goodness exploration becomes truly possible, where early stumbling blocks become little more than a small speed bump, if that. The definitive transition from Act I to Act II, from the humble beginnings to the real meat of the story and the game.

For Akalabeth, that moment is figuring out the magic amulet, skyrocketing your stats to nigh deity-level, whereby the only real limiting factor anymore becomes your food counter - and even then, you've got an easy way to beat up beasties for the gold necessary to replenish it.

For Ultima I, I think that moment comes when you obtain your first ranged weapon, able to start wearing down enemies before they can strike you back, allowing you to approach fights with less worry that each one will turn into a battle of attrition. This in turn allows you to put your money toward things other than hit points, and lets you push your way further into dungeons and spend longer out in the world rather than attempting to keep to the safety of the towns or castles.

For Ultima II, that moment is unequivocally the moment you commandeer your first ship.

Yep, he's definitely programmed to receive.

Up until that point, it's a desperate dashing about from here to there, hoping enemies will spawn where you can actually do something about them, hoping that your stats are enough to not make you lose too many hit points, hoping that you'll be able to scrounge up enough gold to replenish your food or at least be able to swipe enough...

That all changes once you get a ship. Your cannons can strike down most enemies in one hit, their location is no object to you as you can reach the islands, food has no meaning as it doesn't decrease when you're on a ship - you can then turn your goals toward more far-reaching things. Collecting enough gold to increase your stats, stocking up enough food to make exploration a bit more feasible.

I have no idea what this thing is.

And indeed, that was the first thing I did. This post actually covers two sessions, but I took no screenshots through the first as it was entirely spent sailing around the AD years looking for literal cannon fodder - I don't know how many creatures I blasted in the name of treasure. By the end of it I was swimming in gold and had gained a couple levels. (Which reminds me - what's the point of keeping track of levels and experience if they have no discernible effect whatsoever? Gaining levels doesn't increase my stats, and it's not even a requirement of anything else as far as my knowledge goes - at least Ultima I required you to be level 8 before a princess would tell you where a time machine was.)

When I started my next session, I blew all my gold on raising my hit points to respectable levels, then sailed over to the Hotel California to up my stats. Musing briefly on being a prisoner there of my own device, I wandered around New San Antonio to get a sense of the lay of the land - I'd come here often, after all. There were monsters in the pool there (whose bright idea was that!?) and I learned at the pub that mages carried wands and staffs, and that aviators needed skull keys. I also explored Lord British's castle a little more, and found a brother by the name of Antos in the chapel that asked me if I'd met his father yet.

With that under my belt, I decided to timegate myself over to Pangaea and see what I could see there - the map took some deciphering, but I eventually made my way over and stumbled my way into Baradin's Town. The deli was rather crowded there, and I stumbled across an oracle, but I had no money for a reading, so I made a mental note to check back later. On my way back, I realized just how many monsters crowded the very beginnings of the planet - I made a mental note to come back when I was a little stronger.

What the heck is this referring to?

While I was out exploring, I decided to snag a couple clerical spells (that was why I had no money for an oracle reading) and a new sword, then make my way into a tower. Dungeons and towers are different experiences than they were in Ultima I - I needed torches to see my way, I came across monsters that would blow them out, I stumbled across many traps that tools helped me get through... all in all, dungeons and towers struck me as rather more dangerous places than they had been in Ultima I. Less variety of creatures, but more interesting to navigate.

Still, I was losing more than I was gaining from the venture, so after gathering some more gold, I went back to Baradin's Town to see if I could get any good advice from the oracle - and promptly got swarmed. I'm pretty sure I had to fight through a conga line of at least a dozen creatures before I could make my way into town. That was... well, one of the most entertainingly tense experiences I'd had yet in this round of Ultima II. I gained little use from the oracle for my trouble, being told that the Queen is the King and the King is a spy, whatever that meant, and a musing on the evil man is capable of. I suppose I should know something about that, considering all I'm about to do.

It was about there that I drew my session to a close again, my next goal getting enough resources to up my stats to the point where I could start smacking guards around and beginning to enact some of that aforementioned evil that men are capable of. Grinding ahoy!

Everybody wants a piece of me...

Ultima II: Honor Among Thieves

As is traditional, my opening stats.

And so my (in)glorious adventure of Ultima II begins! Having conquered the World of Doom and defeated Mondain the wizard, Aric the Stranger now finds himself attacked in his own world. This is probably the weirdest thing to wrap my mind around when it comes to Ultima II - I mean, this is meant to be Earth, but it doesn't take long at all to traverse the globe, and anyway, Britannian (er, I guess Sosarian, at this point) characters can be found hanging around. I can only surmise that Minax's attempts to strike down the Stranger and conquer the planet through the timegates have distorted space as well (inextricable as the two are from each other - yay physics!) as Sosaria and Earth are beginning to merge together... yeah, I'm thinking about this one a little too much. It's confusing to begin with, so might as well just run with it.

Anyway, as I indicated in my intro post, I decided to make Aric a cleric this time around, which is turning out to be rather an odd choice, thematically - I mean, my main means of getting more food has been stealing it thus far, which is hardly a holy thing to do. And just what are clerical orders based around in Ultima II-era Sosaria? It's never established that there's any gods, at least not by this point. Ultima III's manuals shed some light there, but now? I'm stumped. And probably overthinking things again.

Once I had my stats and such in order (hey, that reminds me, what's with the other races in Sosaria, too? I can play as four, but I never really see anything except what appear to be humans, although I suppose it never specifies one way or another, just indicates class, and-- NO, stop that!), having opted to emphasize the physical stats at least a little, I was dropped into BC-era Canada, unarmed, unarmored, and waving a cross about. First order of business - equipment!

Guess this is who the town's named for. Feel kinda sorry for him.

I blundered my way over to Towne Linda, getting accosted by a thief in the process, just outside of the city and before I could get myself anything more hard-hitting than my bare fists. I managed to knock him down, though, and I crossed my fingers that I'd get lucky - but alas, no blue tassel for me, just a cloak. I bought myself an axe and some leather armor in town, as I felt certain I had the stats to make use of them, then spent a bit of time in the pub to pick up some tips. I learned that some fighters wore magic helms, and that I needed ankhs to open space. I wandered around town a little bit more before picking up a horse in the hopes of it helping with food to at least a small degree, and with food becoming a concern, I left Linda and set my sights on Le Jester. In the village, I bumped into a nymph who told me I should visit the Hotel California (I hear it's such a lovely place), and after buying what food I could, I went out into the world to slay some monsters.

So close, and yet so far - stop taunting me like that!!

And from here on, most of my session consisted of hunting down monsters, whacking them for gold, and hoping against hope I'd run into a thief and that I'd be able to procure a blue tassel to commandeer a ship from him. The opening stages of the early Ultimas are always tense, hoping that you can cling to your wits tightly enough to not run out of hit points or food while you struggle to climb up the ranks, but I feel like so much of the early game of Ultima II is based on luck - that monsters will appear where you can actually get to them, that right kind of monster will appear (namely thieves, as they give you the most interesting stuff when you defeat them, and then a ship, once they give you the right item), that you'll get the right thing from them when you whack them, and all the while trying to keep your supplies up.

I mostly kept to the BC years to fight, sneaking over via timegate to the AD years to visit Lord British for HP and Port Boniface to swipe food from the McDonall's (oy) ride-through, feeling somewhat guilty that I have to resort to it so often and cringing over knowing what other less-than-moral acts I'm going to have to commit by the time I've defeated Minax. I found sea serpents rather frustrating to deal with, as they'd keep running away after getting hit, and being sea-bound creatures and me being land-locked, I had no way to go after them, until I figured out their pathing and managed to lead them into little eddies where they had nowhere to go. I was vaguely amused by the point I caught two of them on either side of  the Indian subcontinent, bouncing back and forth between them to trade hits on them.

Okay... but it would help to know why...

I explored the four towns I kept to, the two in the BC years and the castle of Lord British and Port Boniface in the AD years. I was told to find the Father and claim the ring, so it's nice to have that plot point triggered properly somewhere. Thieves constantly taunted me by popping up on islands where I couldn't reach them, and I shook my fist at them as I rode by. Still, it was better than my last game, where I had a demon appear in England that tried paralyzing me whenever I rode by the English Channel.

Eventually enemies stopped appearing on the main landmass of the BC years - I guess I hit a max enemy limit or something. I poked into Le Jester to whack the thief at the entrance, careful to keep him between me and the guards (man do guards hit hard!!), but still no luck. By this point I'd managed to blunder my way to level three, and a couple thousand hit points and food, so I felt I could explore a little more. Blundering my way through timegates, I whacked a thief in a time zone I had no idea where, and after the dust settled, I squealed - somehow I'd obtained not one, but two blue tassels - and a ship was on the horizon!

After taking it for myself, I sailed around cackling madly while firing cannons at everything in sight, and to my further delight, realized I'd ended up in the AD years - New San Antonio was sitting there calling my name. After hitting level four I made port in Australia to call it a day, ready to build up gold so I could boost my stats.

It's slow going, but now that I've got a ship? Things should be, pardon the obvious pun, closer to smooth sailing.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me...