| ULTIMA III: EXODUS |
 
In 1983, Ultima: Exodus was released, and it was quite a biit different from the first two games. Now we're back in Sorsaria to find and destroy the love-child of Minax and Mondain - Exodus. What is Exodus **SPOILER ALERT** - Exodus is a punch-card driven computer hidden in Castle Exodus on the ISland of Fire that you need to get a series of punch cards (oddly like Tarot Cards) to destroy. It was the first Ultima game with an actual party system, class system, occupation system, and even species System (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Bobit, Fuzzy, Barbarian....etc..). Probably the closest the series ever actually came to a Dungeons & Dragons campaign from what little I know of it. Ultima III seems like it was successful enough to warrant a PC Port in 84' (along with II and I), and even an FCI/Ponycanyon NES port released just as "Ultima: Exodus" without the installment number for the MSX Home Computers, Nintendo Famicom, and the NES Stateside. This would also be the last "fetch quest" style RPG - with the "formula" getting severely altered (for better) in 1984 with Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.
Ultima III on PC is not much different from the NES Counterpart. Basically, you build up some characters, form a part of 4 of them, and then embark on a gind-heavy fetch quest. You have to obtain the "4 marks" for stats boosts, then go to a lost continent to pay money to get more stats boosts and pray at the altars of those shrines to get the punchcards you will need to shutdown Exodus. While most people credit Ultima IV for focusing a bit on virtue, virtue is also a thing of note on here PRIOR to Ultima IV because it seems you can attack pretty much anyone and then get outright murdered by the guardsmen in this game. Overall....it's kind of amazing this one was the *big hit* before Ulitma IV (which was an even bigger hit). Ultima III: Exodus though, must have been one of the more influential installments for some company in Japan to go through the trouble of porting this to the MSX and Famicom - and then push for a USA release on the NES in 1987. But overall, it's a bit more overshadowed and forgotten by the "Avatar Trilogy" games (Ultima IV, V, and VI), and the "Guardian Saga" games (Underworld 1&2, Ultima VII parts 1 & 2, and the often maligned Ultima VIII: Pagan and Ultima IX Ascention).NES VS. PC - My Experiences My first experiences with RPGs was with this game ~ on the 8-bit NES. See, my oldest sister is a HUGE RPG fan. She liked Zelda, she was the only one playing Dragon Warrior whatever-roman-numeral-it-was (I think it was II) when we borrowed it from one of my now bro-in-laws, she knows of the SSI AD&D franchise, probably played REAL pen and paper DND too. Me, I hated RPGs when I was a kid. Just too complx, and not enough instant gratification to keep me engaged. See, at that time, I was a MARIO kid. They called me "Mario Freak" in day camp for pete's sake! But I never even knew Ultima was a COMPUTER RPG until years later when I got Ultima VI: The False Prophet to play on my sister's 386 on my 11th birthday. My introduction to the *real* Ultima III: Exodus though came via a big-box copy of "The Ultima Collection" which I bought at some pawn shop in Auburn when I was about, I dunno, 18. Anyway, this was hauntingly familiar, though drastically different from the Utlima: Exodus for the NES in visuals. See, Ultima:Exodus vs. Ultima III: Exodus is like this: Ultima III is visibly designed for a PC of the early 1980's with teh single direction sprites, CGA color pallet, a fast-running, assembly language programmed engine, and not a whole lot of production fanfare. Whereas the NES port makes you wait through 5 screens of credits before you even hit the title screen (1983 Origin Systems Inc........1988 FCI/PonyCanyon LTD.......Published by Newtopia Planning.......(start Tsugutoshi Goto soundtrack). In early 2023 I picked up the NES Release and it now has it's own page on the NES section.VIDEOS
ULTIMA III: Exodus Comparison - CGA vs. EGA vs. MIDI Upgrade vs. NES (2007 ~ DOSbox/FCEUx) |
