Exodus: Ultima III

You can now make a party of four ala Wizardry, and also enter a Heroes/Fire Emblemesque grid-based combat situations where you basically lead your party across a field but functions similarly to Ultimas I and II. Still demands a lot of grinding as well as arbitrary "collect the four items" to get to the final dungeon.

I have to say the mess that was Ultima II had one thing over III: It had a sense of direction, and you knew where you were supposed to go, because Ultima II was mostly linear. With Ultima III you are once again given the immense freedom you had with Ultima I, but this time you can't just grind and exploit a single dungeon. This time you are required to visit all the places across the world to get the ellusive items and hints, but the game offers nothing in the sense of which dungeons to tackle first, how to differentiate easy from hard dungeons, but I assume there is nothing to lose here as the dungeons are sparse, and you only really need to visit three of the eight dungeons in order to get the essential items. The rest of the floors are not worth exploring, or trying to frustratingly map. It's a good framework with an awkward, half-baked content.

On the bright side, the classes in Ultima are more fleshed out than ever, and now spellcasters are glass cannons and thieves are dexterous trap-evaders they were always meant to be. Being able to play many of your desired classes at once brings a great and liberating feeling to Ultima, as now you don't have to conform to one type of strategy or getting by with a single, archetype-bound character.

Ultima II was very odd, and not necessarily in a good way. Thankfully, its conclusion allowed for limitless possibilities for a successor. At the end of the game, all of time is completely reset, and the ending slide even directly announces Ultima III: Exodus. This ending allowed Richard Garriott to legitimize reconstructing his world pretty much however he liked. It was an opportunity to take what good had been added in Ultima II, abandon or refine the bad, expand upon the experience as a whole, and develop a more realized entry to the series. And he pretty much did just that…for the most part.

The storyline is very simple. The land of Sosaria is once again at peace, its main villains dead, and their damage to society phased right out of existence thanks to the events of the previous two games. This peace is interrupted however by th exact same plot device used in the previous game. Apparently, Mondain and Minax had a child before being killed, and now, twenty years on, if that even makes sense given the confusing time travel elements of games’ passed, that mysterious child is now an adult. A volcano emerges on an island off the coast of the Lands of Lord British, and monsters start roaming the countryside again. Yep, it’s another kill-the-ultimate-evil plotline, just like the first two games. You’re still fighting the same bloodline, even. I’d say more, but’s there’s simply not much to mention. The plot progression is just like the first two games – develop your characters, go to the antagonist’s lair, and kill him/her/it/whatever.

First off, the character creation process has been greatly expanded upon. Unlike the first two games, in Ultima III, you get to control a party of four characters as opposed to one, and there are now much more options for character generation as well. While the game keeps the same four basic classes (Warrior, Thief, Wizard, Cleric) and races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Bobbit) from Ultimas I and II, there are also seven other classes with mixed benefits from the four archetypical classes such as Barbarians, Druids, and Rangers, as well as a new race called a “fuzzy” (you can also pick “other” as a gender, if you so choose). These choices are made much more significant as well, as each class features different attributes like disarming traps or increased magic regeneration as well as stat increases, and each race has locked maximum stat levels. For example, a fuzzy can never become as strong as a dwarf can, and an elf can never become as wise as a potential bobbit. This adds a much-needed layer of depth to the largely inconsequential character design options from the previous entries. For the first time in the series, as well, leveling up your characters is actually important. While the level of your avatar in Ultimas I and II was mostly arbitrary, in Ultima III, with each level a character increases, so does their health cap. This is essential to surviving long dungeon crawls and periods of exploration, and adds a more reasonable character progression than what was featured in the previous games.

Having a party of four characters also adds a new layer of depth to the combat. Engagements now occur against randomized groups of enemies as opposed to the simple one-on-one+ battles of previous titles. This adds a new dynamic of tactical character placement in response to one’s enemies, allowing for a wider variety of combat situations. Magic has also been largely expanded, with a total of sixteen wizard-category spells and sixteen cleric-category spells, ranging between simple magic missiles, multi-fireballs, healing, resurrection, etc. At first, learning the new battle system is quite engaging and allows the party to advance in levels while you explore the overworld, learning how to develop combat strategies. But then the game goes on for another twenty hours, with practically no additional depth to these encounters whatsoever. After one hour of playing, I had already developed the combat strategies I would be using for the rest of the game – the rest of the twenty-some hour game. Not too far into the game, each fight largely plays out the same, and this is only made worse by the fact that battles are now much longer due to the sheer enemy and player count. Enemies also lack variety (a noticeable downgrade from Ultima I actually) with the only key differences in combat amounting to whether or not a foe can used ranged attacks or poison you. And poison is just an annoying game-staller, really. I don’t mean to judge it too harshly, the combat is still deeper than previous entries, but Ultima III is over three times (at least for me) as long as its predecessor – it’s hard not to be underwhelmed after all that time.

While magic and combat have improved (to a degree), the interface has suffered pretty bad. While utilizing a party of characters allows for better combat tactics and larger encounters, navigating the menus has become more of a chore. With nearly every interaction, you now have to decide which character performs the action by selecting their respective number. Every. Single. Time. While you will soon become used to this process, having to micromanage gold, items, and equipment between party members is a persistent hassle throughout the game, and leads to more tedious busywork outside of combat.

Tonally, Ultima III is much more consistent than previous installments. As previously mentioned, the setting is located back on Sosaria and this time it’s strictly fantasy. No time/space travel, phasers or aircars in the whole game. This alone gives the game a much greater sense of identity than its predecessors, whose themes and settings frequently clashed oddly against each other. Sosaria’s geography has changed quite a bit as well, featuring the Lands of Lord British as one Pangaea-like globe with many small, surrounding islands, with the other continents from Ultima I removed altogether. While this may seem like a limitation, the game world of Ultima III is easily the liveliest of the original trilogy. There are a few small touches to the overworld in particular that make Sosaria much more interesting to explore. First, the screen now hides parts of the map obscured by mountains, and limits your party’s view when traveling through forests. While this may seem a bit off-putting at first, after becoming accustomed to the change, it becomes much more enjoyable to explore the woods of Sosaria, and to try to find ways around mountains in search of new locations. The game also introduces moon gates to Sosaria, which function similarly to the time gates of Ultima II, but instead offer teleportation to obscured parts of the realm, featuring hidden towns and dungeons. Towns remain fully explorable, and each one has its own layout, buildings, and secret areas. This gives each town a sense of identity that they lacked in the first game, where they were essentially just bare hubs for buying and selling equipment. These additions are not simply cosmetic, either. Towns often feel unique from both a visual and gameplay perspective. The town of Yew, for example, can be found nestled within a forest surrounded by mountains, and is navigated by traveling through the woods to find shops and priests scattered among the trees. Death Gulch is a town ruled by demons, featuring a chest-filled storeroom that can be accessed by bribing guards or sneaking in through a secret tunnel network. Perhaps most interesting, the town of Dawn is hidden out in a forest and can only be accessed at a specific time of day (guess when) and it contains the best armor and weapon shops in the game, as well as NPCs with some of the most useful advice. These kinds of additions help to breathe life into the world of Sosaria, which often felt so generic in the first game.

Dungeons have also undergone great improvements. The randomly generated wireframe hallways of Ultimas I and II have now been replaced with pre-designed rooms, traps, and secret passages. This gives each dungeon a hand-made, deliberate quality to them that allows for clever setups like windy rooms that leave you persistently blind and unable to ignite a torch, secret treasure vaults, and fountains with various effects. The dungeons are also made purposeful to the storyline again, as you need to explore them to recover four marks necessary to further advance your party and allow unhindered access through Castle Exodus.

If there’s one place where Ultima III falters in its setting however, its Ambrosia. In addition to Sosaria, you can access the lost continent of Ambrosia by becoming engulfed in a whirlpool while sailing across the ocean. While the continent itself is not so bad and, at times, fun to explore, its relevancy to the character and plot progression of Ultima III is. Unfortunately, leveling up character stats is very similar to Ultima II. To do this, you have to travel to Ambrosia, find and approach a shrine of Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, or Intelligence (Stamina and Charisma are gone and unmissed) and send a character in to pay for stat increases. While this is certainly an improvement upon Ultima II’s chaotic and grind-heavy stat system, it is rather annoying and does still require some grinding on the part of the player if he or she wants to flesh out his or her party. You will also find each of the four cards necessary to defeat Exodus by searching the floor of each shrine, thus ensuring at least one necessary trip to Ambrosia to complete the game.

After finding the necessary equipment and building up a strong enough party, you will finally be ready to assault Castle Exodus by sailing into the volcano past a giant serpent. The castle itself proves to be a fitting finale to the game as a whole, but surprisingly, it’s also a bit underwhelming. The castle has two prison blocks, a death chamber for priests, and is filled with demons and dragons. Not bad. It’s actually kind of a step down from Minax’s castle in Ultima II, but it’s still a decently enjoyable final assault. The path to Exodus is actually quite interesting in the final stretch, as you are forced to fight invisible enemies known as “the floor.” Yeah, well…they function like invisible enemies, and it helps to finally mix up the combat a bit after twenty hours of pure repetition. The revelation of Exodus itself is perhaps the only noteworthy story element of the whole trilogy – it’s a computer terminal. In a game that so adamantly held onto its fantasy theme until the very end, we learn that the result of Mondain and Minax’s consummation was an evil computer. And it’s actually pretty cool. Well, not really, but it is an interesting revelation and fits with the series theme of merging technology with fantasy that it did so poorly in the first two games. After inserting the cards (floppy disks?) of doom into the terminal, Exodus is destroyed and a text screen comes up verifying that. Yes, it’s that anticlimactic. Even Ultima I had a better ending. Oh well…

Ultima III is an improvement over its predecessors, and not a marginal one, though on a personal note I’m not sure I’d agree entirely with that statement. While the game makes plenty of leaps forward in world design, dungeon exploration, and magic, it’s let down by its more tedious features and repetitive combat encounters. It’s still a good game, and I would recommend it over the first two entries, but it could have been so much better. So, does Ultima III hold up? I’d say yes, but only to whatever extent that you can squeeze enjoyment out of some expected tedium.