Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 10- Ultima IX, continued!

[NamerOfStars]

[Continued from Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 10- Ultima IX! ]

We left off pondering just how long it'd been since we last left Britannia. Clearly, it can't have been particularly long, if the Guardian has arrived but hasn't conquered it yet, but it can't've been too short, since massive ecological and geological devastation has been recovered from- at least enough that life has gone more-or-less back to normal. Well, one place to learn about the world is at the Museum of Britain, and when we go there, we learn just how bad things've gotten- and I don't mean in-game.

Among the exhibits is the skull of Mondain.

We DESTROYED that in IV, and it was CONFIRMED GONE in VII; how is it in the museum now?

Why is the Vortex cube not a cube?

Why is the silver horn, larger than WE were in VII,

now smaller than our head?

And how do they have Korghin's Fang,

an artifact from PAGAN? Okay, it's a powerful magic dagger, but how do they know where it's from, or that we used it? We JUST got back from Pagan ourselves! Now, it's true that Iolo, Gwenno, and Shamino must've returned from Serpent Isle somehow (I'm sure we WON'T find out anything about that), but they didn't even know where we WENT- we vanished into the Void with the Serpents, and that was IT, as far as they knew; they couldn't've told what it was even if they somehow got it. It's clear that no real thought went into this; it was just "look at all these items from the previous games! You remember them, right? We do, too!" Of COURSE you do, you morons; you MADE those games! ::Sigh:: Let's just talk to Aleena, the curator.

She recognizes us as the Avatar quickly, and with no ambiguity (a perk of working next to the giant mural of us all day, I guess). She tells us that the Runes have been stolen, and mentions that they were taken around the same time as the columns appeared. She also tells us when it happened. Are you ready? The columns arose... twenty years ago. TWENTY YEARS. The Guardian's been staging this invasion for TWO DECADES. And despite building a giant stone statue of his own HEAD, NOBODY HAS NOTICED HIM. If we go upstairs to where the Runes were stored...

We see they haven't even cleaned up the BROKEN GLASS. Sure, the local authorities need to investigate the crime scene; I'm sure they'll get around to it one of these DECADES. Although you can't see it in that picture, there's even broken glass still on the *floor*. For that matter, we get a journal entry from talking to Aleena that says "...according to legend, the Codex is located on the Isle of the Avatar. No one seems to know where that island is located, but at least it’s a start”, despite the fact that IT'S WHERE WE BECAME THE AVATAR IN IV AND HAD TO KEEP GOING BACK TO IN V. WE KNOW WHERE IT IS.

Perhaps you've noticed the core problem here: they just didn't care. None of them. They've of course kept the day/night cycle the series has had since V (and I'm pretty sure GAMING has had since V; I don't know of any earlier game in any genre that had one), but stores are open 24/7, and people still do their thing, even outdoors, so it doesn't actually CHANGE anything, except that it's hard to see at night. Enemies respawn at such a rapid rate that (in an admittedly extreme case), I once found myself fighting a respawned staff fighter before I'd managed to kill the original:

You can't see it very well, but the guy in front has at least a dozen arrows in him. And the REASON you can't see it very well is that it's night time, and the sun won't be up for another real-time HOUR or so. Unlike earlier Ultimas, there's no "rest" function (there ARE beds you can sleep in, but that doesn't actually DO anything), so you just have to wait.

The core gameplay loop is as follows: go to a town, learn that the people are acting against the town's virtue- not always *willingly*, which is an interesting idea the game barely explores- and some blame the column. Go to the town's associated dungeon, find the corrupted rune, locate the "sigil" of that virtue, return them to the shrine, meditate, repeat. Since the game's so linear, the story can do some interesting things with that idea, and it kind of does- kind of. But these bits, too, are poorly thought-out. See, much like Iolo, we discover that most of our traditional eight companions (there are three exceptions: one's excluded for a very uninteresting reason, one died in Serpent Isle, and one I'll get to presently) has been corrupted into the Wyrmguard, and through dedication and careful planning, we can spare each of them- but the OTHER Wyrmguard? The presumably-normal people who got corrupted in Blackthorn's service over the twenty years that the Britannians did nothing to save themselves? They're dead. Oh, you can usually CHOOSE to just run past them; enemies will chase you, but not too far. But there's no special dialogue or karmic reward for sparing them. We're only the Avatar for people we already care about, I guess.

Now, we eventually DO run into Shamino, sort of- he actually chose to DO something about the incoming Guardian threat, and journeyed into the spirit realm, where he got stuck, and now he can only communicate with us through special Spirituality stones. He tells us that the reason people are acting so poorly is due to the corrupting nature of the columns; that "it's not their fault". This is VERY odd; it runs counter to the doctrine of responsibility and control of one's actions that underlies the whole POINT of the virtue system (systemS, actually, since the Gargoyle and even Ophidian ones required that, too). It's not like we really see people struggling against the corruption; they've just lost. Of course, after twenty years, there might not be anyone LEFT still fighting, and some people would've had the influence for their entire lives, but still, it's shown in-game very poorly; you should NOT rely on fans providing after-the-fact justifications they've made up themselves to explain away plot holes (I wonder if Rian Johnson ever played Ultima IX...).

The idea that the presence of (or even promise of) the Avatar weakens people, because they always assume "he'll come around to fix things if they get TOO bad for TOO long" is an interesting one, and one that the game COULD have explored in-depth, but... no (we get ONE LINE about that, which is NOT the same as having the game be about it). The shrines being corrupted and falling into disrepair shouldn't really matter; they're a SYMBOL of virtue, not the SOURCE of it- but... no. Instead we get stupidity like this:

No, Janna- we STOPPED the Guardian from getting here. We blew up the Black Gate before he could use it. Batlin screwed over the Guardian in Serpent Isle, so I don't claim credit for that, but even if we failed to stop the Guardian getting here eventually, you're not helpless without us; and for all YOU knew, we had DIED after returning the Serpent to the Void. It's hardly fair to blame US for trying and failing to pull off what you never even TRIED, given that we were on another planet at the time.

But we can't call her out on it.

Now, the sigil is usually held by a high-ranking person in the relevant town, but in Yew, the city of Justice, it isn't- it's held by Eustus. The Vulture of Justice.

One of the few things about this game I unambiguously appreciate is that it let me use the phrase "the Vulture of Justice" in casual description; the only downside is that it's not the weapon of some soft-hearted Wild West sheriff, who can't use a gun and is REALLY bad at selecting birds for falconry. Also, Yew itself is pretty interesting, from an architectural point of view; they've moved it up INTO the trees:

The game does a good job of making the different cities actually feel like different places; the level design and music do solid work there. Also, check out these torch holders:

Giant demonic Tiki heads. Awesome. And practical, too, since they'd shield the flames from rain; bear this design in mind if you ever need to design a receptacle for firelight. Not sure how you'd make the eyes glow, though. But it just goes to show that SOME effort went in to making this game; it wasn't just abysmal design decisions and technical incompetence- only mostly.

Like the dungeon Hythloth. Hythloth is the dungeon of spirituality (the name is derived from hylotheism), and is usually one of the trickier ones (from IV onwards, the games use mostly the same dungeons, at least in terms of location and name), and in IX, it's the obligatory sewer level, because it is written in the Book of Fate, "All video games must have a sewer level, and they must all suck". By Hythloth is different- it's not just cramped corridors, boring architecture with a dark color palette, and a poisoning enemies- it's also filled with nonstop chittering so loud that I had to remove my headphones. Not just slide them off my ears and onto my neck- it was STILL too loud. And this in a game where the first sign of combat is often the *music* changing meant I died WAY more than I should've. Arguably, the dungeon Wrong is even worse, since while the music is normal, and the guards' SPEECH is normal (well, normal in VOLUME; they repeat the same two lines ad nauseum), there's a periodic coughing sound they make that can be heard literally ANYWHERE in the dungeon. Nothing quite like terrible sound design in a forced stealth section, is there?

We continue on, and learn that we can't physically or magically hurt the Guardian; we learn this as we watch him destroy Skara Bare (um, again), and then we go to the ruins and meet this guy:

And a bang-up job you did, letting it get destroyed TWICE.

Here, ultimately, is what it boils down to: Ultima VIII needed a better set of mechanics, and the writing needs a serious overhaul, but if it were given that, and the half or so of the game that got cut restored (and finished), there'd be something worth playing there. Ultima IX, while it also needs a better engine (after TWENTY-THREE YEARS worth of official and fan patches, I still encountered things like this:

which is not the start of the gender-swap of "It's raining men", but a woman, who's a critical-information-giving NPC, taking off and flying into the sky, never to return, BEFORE I get a chance to talk to her), has a more solid one, that could be used to make decent, or even good games. But the writing... it needs a total teardown and rebuild of the story and world-building. As it stands, it's quite possibly the worst saga ending I've ever seen, of ANY medium; worse than Mass Effect 3 or even Game of Thrones. And because this part of the story was always intended be a multi-part affair, you can't just "stop" and call the story done, unless you go all the way back to VI, and skip out on what most call the greatest game of the series.

Why? Well, when we finally restore Shamino, he tells us the origins of the Guardian- he's NOT a warlord from another dimension; he's the coalescing of the evil part of ourselves we got rid of when we became the Avatar. THAT is how the game justifies saying we brought the Avatar to Britannia: because we sought to become better. That's the core lesson of the game, and so apparently the series: self-improvement is bad. Becoming a better person will just make things worse for other people. Morality- of any kind- is a trap. You should accept human awfulness because evil always wins.

THIS, from the series that was about virtue and striving to better yourself. THIS, from the foundational series of the CRPG genre. The apotheosis of middle fingers, raised to both its predecessors and its fans. I don't know how fans who'd been following the series for all twenty years of its lifetime kept going after seeing this screen; but I played it long after even the shouting was finished- so I'll keep going here.

We need to reach the last shrine to restore it, but Lord British has chased Blackthorn into the Abyss (despite it being destroyed in Underworld II), and magically sealed it against us following. So we need to summon a being of the Abyss to remove the seal. And so...

Pyros. Who NO LONGER EVEN *EXISTS*. And who, when summoned, casts us into the Abyss without a word on either side, then vanishes. Great. It gets even better when we recover the Codex and learn that the Guardian can't be destroyed- by anyone- while it's separate from us. So we need to gather the sigils, magically summon the Guardian, cast the super-duper barrier spell, and then cast... Armageddon. The spell added into Ultima VI as a JOKE, because it destroyed all life on the planet. That's the game's solution to the Guardian's invasion; reintegration, followed by DISintegration.

The very last shot of the game is of Lord British and Raven (our sudden inexplicable love interest) coming across our ankh (the series' logo, and a personal symbol of the Avatar) in, presumably, the ruins of the Guardian's fortress. They share a sad look, then gaze up at the night sky to see a new constellation has formed- in the shape of ankh. It's a nice last scene, but given the game it's a sendoff to, it just feels hollow.

A weak, whimpered groan instead of the triumphant roar that should've ended the series. The great blazing bonfire of the Ultima saga had dimmed to embers- but even embers can be rekindled into a great inferno. And time would pass from 1999, and creators would get another chance- more than one, in fact. Could they recapture the glory and goodness of the series' heyday? Find out in Part Eleven- Reviving the Past!