 EXODUS REVIEW |
  So you're digging around your favorite place to snag up some retro games and you come across a generic looking NES cartridge with a purple label, and a bunch of fantasy looking people on the front running from monsters. You buy it, and take it home, and realize "Dragon Quest this ain't". You're getting pummeled by gelatanous creatures and Skeletons while not quite sure what to do. You have spells that seem to do crap all for turning creatures "Undead" and "repelling" the little grey and black scuba divers on screen. Heck, even character creation was tricky....as you made a Wizard with the strenght of a Barbarian, and a highly intelligent warrior with the arm strangth of a miliquetoast 80's nerd stereotype - and of course you made em' all "human" and named em' after members of your family or a Japanimation franchise. Oh...what to do....what to do....
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ULTIMA HISTORY IN AN NES CONTEXT - FOR THOSE THAT WANT TO KNOW Ultima is a series of games for personal computers created by one Richard Garriott in 1979. The original release was for the Apple II and known as "Akalabeth: World of Doom" and was sold self-published in local Texas ComputerLand stores in Zip Lock baggies with a xeroxed instruction manual with hand-drawn art. About as alt-indie-punk startup as you could get for a computer franchise. In 1981 Richard was offered a distribution deal with California Pacfic, and with their "rockstar"-like behavior - in the "Behind the Music" sense, they went under and stopped paying, then came early Sierra On-Line...again, that went into the doldrums, and Richard started his own company with his brother: Origin Systems. While Ultima I was Cal Pacific, and II Sierra On-Line, and both had some reservations, Ultima III was the beginning of the series getting popular in 1983. I surmise the Nintendo connection began with Dragon Quest TBH. See, Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura entered a contest for Enix the year before Ultima III came out, and the winners woudl win a trip to a San Francisco Apple Computer Festival. I believe Yuji was the one who went there if not both of them, and he fell in love with Ultima and Wizardry - which Ultima would have been premiering their third game possibly by then. It has been said on multiple websites that I've read, Ultima III had some kind of impact on Japanese culture and an indirect-ish sort of influence on the first Dragon Quest game (which was known as Dragon Warrior stateside here in the USA). A year after Dragon Quest came out, FCI/PonyCanyon, with the help of Newtopia Planning (They were the equivalent of Chunsoft for the early 8-bit Dragon Quest releases), decided to do a JRPG-ized port of this western American RPG and release it on the Nintendo Famicom. And surprisingly, in my digging around the internet, I found out that it was a much bigger deal than anyone realized at the time, especially in the USA. To us, we just got Ultima ported to the NES with some strange translation errors and a really hard to follow, non-linear gameplay, but to Japan, they were getting a legendary RPG franchise worthy of it's own Anime. Yes, there was going to be an ANIME Ultima series. Unfortunatley, the tapes were lost to a Tokyo Earthquake in 1989, and it never got made. A shame as it could have been a REAL interesting storyline. This version also, like many Famicom/NES releases, also got released on the Japanese MSX Computer, which seems a bit of overkill since they could have probably ported the PC version over as well. Why PonyCanyon/FCI never chose to start with the 1st game beats me (honestly, I think NES Ports of I and II would be really cool to see, or even Akalabeth) ~ aside from the whole "influence-on-Dragon-Quest" thing. But either way, I'm reviewing it, because I think it's worthy of going over. Remember, my reviews are a bit more than reviews, they are more like a deep-dive history lesson mixed with how I appreciate the series. Think of it as melding LGR, Bithead1000, and Adrian's Digital Basement into the same channel, lol.PLOT GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY OVERALL |
