Towns offer respite between battles and a chance to shop around or tag citizens for bits of information. You roll through a couple dozen, auto-level up, then haul your booty back to the nearest town in trade for better weapons, armor, magic abilities, and potions. The easy ones only took a couple seconds, and the longer, more complex ones were usually interesting enough to keep me engaged. I didn’t mind the random-occurring, relentless battles, premised on a simple “you go, they go” system that lets you attack, cast spells, use items, or run-run-away. That last “had to” took five hours, literally, wandering around a blank, featureless desert.Įlfheim in Final Fantasy for the PSP, one of the few series nods to Western mythology…as well as a jab at Nintendo’s Zelda series–poke around, and you’d come across a gravestone bearing an epitaph that reads “Here lies Link.” And then I had to add the ultra-rare tyrannosaur-creature that pops up once every 64 random encounters to my bestiary tally (gotta catch ’em all!). And then I had to get the canoe so I could see where all those twisty streams went. I had to get the mystic key to open all those mysterious locked doors (what could they possibly be hiding?). And no, I couldn’t pick up dinner knives or loaves of bread or brass candelabras and toss them around or use them as weapons or stuff them in trunks, satchels, and backpacks.Īnd yet I couldn’t stop playing. Moral choices never presented themselves.

Sure enough, it didn’t have complex personalities or a story to speak of. Last night, 18 years after completing Final Fantasy IV, I finally caught up with 1990 and finished the game on Sony’s PSP. The vertical battle screen–enemies up top, your party along the bottom–in Ultima III: Exodus for the NES.įinal Fantasy for the NES hit Japan in 1987, but didn’t finish paddling across the Pacific for its US debut until May 1990–seven years after the Apple version of Ultima III: Exodus, and roughly one after FCI’s NES port. (That sounds weird in hindsight, but try sitting on the floor in front of your spiffy “entertainment center” and playing for hours with your head tilted up 45 degrees) Before I’d saved up enough to spring for a Commodore 64, I puttered around the dual realms of Sosaria and Ambrosia on an NES attached to one of those old color tube TVs encased in a stylish wood frame that planted it flat on the floor (shag carpeting, actually) so you tended to look down instead of across at eye level to watching anything. That’s the version I played after fiddling with earlier installments on my primary school’s Apple II, sneaking in perfunctory sessions over recess (parochial grade school administered by nuns, wildly allergic to electronic gaming). Mad graphics for a computer game in 1983. The title screen (and running demo) from Ultima 3: Exodus for the Apple II. The game was really about poking your head inside dungeons and wandering through fields of jutting gray triangles and neon-green blobs to answer questions like “What’s that squiggly-looking thing over there?” Somewhere in all that was a story about an evil wizard and forgotten lands and diabolically magical computers, but it hardly mattered. In exploration mode, you arrowed your party (represented by a single character) around the game’s “overworld,” scouting for treasure, bumping into enemies, accruing experience points to level up, and visiting towns to upgrade kit or restock supplies. Your party-of-one in prior games became a party of many, each member maneuverable independently during skirmishes. It traded a “you-hit-me, I-hit-you” combat system for zoomed-in, snap-away battle arenas that supported thoughtful tactical play.

It employed crude, chunky, primary color pixels to fake a world with mountains, plains, forests, and cities squashed flat. Ultima III: Exodus, with its controversial “Hey, are you really promoting Satan?!?” game cover, was a creature of the early 1980s and the venerable Apple II computer family. The box art for Origin’s Ultima III: Exodus.

Ultima iii exodus theme