Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 6- Ultima VI, continued!

[NamerOfStars]

(Previous entries here Lessons In Video Game History: the Ultima Saga, Part One here Lessons In Video Game History: The Ultima Saga, Part 2- Ultimas II and III here Lessons in Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part III- Ultima IV! here Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 4- Ultima V! here Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, part 5- the spinoffs! and here Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 6- Ultima VI! and geeze, I'm already at almost a thousand characters; I'd better find a better way of doing this, or my last entry will be nothing but links to earlier ones!)

So, I left off talking about a better way to equip a party with magic armor, using the in-depth systems of the game; essentially open-worlding your way to victory. You COULD use the one free suit of magic armor and magic helm to equip a party member and grind up the nearly four grand you'd need to equip the other seven- or you could just animate the free stuff, clone it seven times...

Like so.

...and "kill" the animated forms, netting you the gear itself for a total cost of 350- the same as buying just ONE suit, with no helmet- in spells and reagents. Pretty nifty!

Then we come to Sherry. This is Sherry:

And no, there isn't a "Shom".

Unlike most- all, in fact- of the other party members, she's a mouse. An EARTH mouse, brought to Britannia... somehow. She befriended Lord British and lives in his castle. Her being from Earth explains her long lifespan (she's still around in the next game), but not why she can talk. No explanation is given for that. She's recruitable for one particular puzzle: one of the runes you need to recover was stolen by a rat and taken into its hole, and no one can get it out- until you come along with a mouse in your party. The developers assumed, since Sherry's strength is so lousy, that players would dump her from the party immediately afterwards (she'll even ask if you want her to leave whenever you talk to her). But her dexterity is VERY high, and you can train strength, so many kept her. One of the playtesters did so, and wandered into an area without a necessary key, and got stuck behind a portcullis. He lacked the telekinesis spell (of COURSE there's a telekinesis spell) that would've let him flip the level and escape, so Warren Spector, watching him play, figured he'd have to reload- but instead, he tried to send Sherry through the portcullis, and since it was coded the same way the mousehole was, it WORKED- he flipped the switch with her, and Spector, watching, was dumbfounded. He'd cite it later as the motivating reason for his focus on immersive sims; apparently it played a HUGE role in his thought processes for Deus Ex.

Sherry also comes up in one of my favorite quirks, and perhaps the most bizarre (if entirely optional) moment in the series- perhaps ANY series:

Wait, am I implying...

Yes. You can hire a prostitute to have a lesbian encounter with your halberd-wielding, chainmail-wearing MOUSE. Kinda puts Bioware's efforts in the romance department to shame, no?

I think you get what I'm driving at; the open-world wideness, souped-up graphics, and general permeating weirdness all add up to something truly amazing, but the game also has a plot! Remember the gargoyles I last mentioned eight or nine thousand words ago? The ones terrorizing Britannia?

And swarming the shrines?

It turns out that, as the book being carried by the one who was trying to sacrifice you suggested, they're not unthinking monsters- in fact, they're not monsters at all. Eventually, you learn to communicate with them, and discover their prophecy of the end of the world: it warns of a "False Prophet" who would come to their world, following virtues that are not their virtues, and desecrate their great shrine, stealing their most holy object. Then the False Prophet would return to their world, descending deep and voyaging far within, and this would be followed by the world beginning to tear itself asunder. Then the third time, the False Prophet would come with a band of warriors, and destroy what was left of the gargoyle race.

It turns out that Britannia is not round, like Earth, but flat, and on the underside is the world where the gargoyles live. The decision, made by British and his Council between Ultimas IV and V (while you were back on Earth), to raise the shrine that held the codex to the surface disrupted both the ecological and mystical systems holding their side of the world together, and massive earthquakes were literally tearing it apart. Famine and plague followed, and by the time Ultima VI begins, only one city remains, and even it teeters on the brink, its inhabitants wondering every morning if THIS will be the day that sees the last of their world destroyed and their race wiped out.

There IS, however, a way around the destruction- a way that the gargoyles could be saved. The prophecy notes that there is one way, and one alone, that the doom could be averted: with the sacrifice of the False Prophet. THAT was what the beginning was about: it was *the gargoyles* who sent the Orb of the Moons to you and opened a gate, waiting to ambush you on the other side; setting up a trap, not as a foul trick to snare a too-powerful enemy, but as a last desperate ploy to save themselves and their world.

All this means that those "balrons" you killed in IV weren't monsters defiling a holy relic, but pilgrims- making a journey not so unlike yours. Whoops. And your decision to take the Codex back robbed them of their most sacred object. Sorry. And then your descent into- wait a second! WE didn't cause any earthquakes! WE didn't tear anything apart! All we did was save a captured king! Is it really so certain that we're responsible? It was British and his followers who raised the shrine and set the devastation off, not us! The mystery deepens, and the resolution is one of the most poignant and meaningful of the series. The exploration of the Gargoyle code of philosophy- THEIR virtues- contrasts with the Britannian ones in a fascinating way; I refrain from discussing it here not only because it'd take ANOTHER several MyTakes to finish my thoughts, but because I'm simply not willing to spoil it. If you can spare the few dollars, and handle the outdated graphics and old-style interface, give the game a play; you won't regret it.

But there's one more thing I'd like to note before closing this out: the level of dedication to world-building. Up to this point, the games were pretty much standard fantasy (except II, which was standard fantasy on various points on Earth, with a heavily schizoided-out twist). This was when the backstory began to get elaborate, and became more than "a man came to a fantasy world long ago, faced lots of regular fantasy dangers, and united it all under his rule; then more standard fantasy stuff happened". For example, the Gargoyles don't use Britannian runes, which makes sense, since they're not Britannian. They have their own alphabet, the clearest in-game example of which is seen on the altar from the intro:

Those runes translate to "kal mani ze". Just more video game gibberish? No. See, Britannian runes are just an alphabet- a slight modification of the real-world version of what English would've been written in had English existed at the time. Gargish runes are a whole other LANGUAGE, and a surprisingly robust one. It's actually the basis for the words of the various spells the games use. *That* is the level of detail and care that went into this game. THAT is the level of effort and passion. And *THAT* is why I call this the best of the Ultimas.

But it's not by much. If Ultimas IV and V were the foothills, then VI and VII are the high peaks. Tune in next time for Part 7: But what if we went BIGGER?