More like "Alpha Genesis," am I right??: Ultima: Exodus | NES Works 108
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2023
- The NES receives its first proper RPG-a port of one of the original foundational pillars of the genre-after almost two years of games that borrowed mechanics and concepts from this one. Ultima: Exodus rightly earned its reputation as a formative masterpiece on home computers in the early ’80s, though here at the end of the decade in a revamped console-friendly format sitting amongst games that distill its ideas into breezy, accessible, action-driven experiences... it does feel slightly out of place. It also doesn't help that Phantasy Star (which boils down to "Ultima, except awesome") had shipped just a few months earlier on Master System. Still, you can see the seeds of America's eventual console RPG love taking shape here... even if that love would take a decade to become requited.
Production notes:
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its RUclips debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more!
Why watch when you can read? Check out the massive hardcover print editions of NES Works, Super NES Works, and Virtual Boy works, available now at Limited Run Games (limitedrungames.com/collectio...! SG-1000 Works: Segaiden Vol. I is available now, and Metroidvania: The First Decade is due in 2024.
NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister. 
Игры
I would love it if Terada released a book of his Nintendo Power illustrations, they're so good (even if their resemblance to the games they represent is occasionally very shaky).
Truly a man who was hired to provide vibes- not accuracy.
9:26 - the way the whole gang casually rides on their horses into buildings really gets me
Everywhere they go, they leave a trail of furious janitors in their wake
lol that super quick quietly whispered "it's not" cracked me up
"Yuji Naka's Sweet-Ass First Person Dungeon Animations" is a really good band name. It feels weird to me that the first US console RPG wasn't released until 1989. That means I started playing RPGs pretty much the moment they became available to me. Good job, 10-year-old me!
@@Khardankov ah yes, my mistake. I should know better, I love Phantasy Star!
Ultima gets its proper video for NES Works, and it's nice that the NES is finally at proper RPGs. I remember trying both Ultima: Exodus and Legacy of the Wizard and not liking them as much as Dragon Warrior or 1990's Final Fantasy.
Yeah, I had a friend at the time who fell in love with RPGs and played pretty much every one on NES. I remember watching him play Exodus and thinking that it seemed way too fiddly and tedious compared to the more streamlined JRPGs. Just a basic shopping trip could take 5-10 minutes with all the menu juggling involved.
I remember playing Ultima Exodus and Dragon Warrior simultaneously back in the day. Ultima was obv more difficult to "get in to" but both were a lot of fun.
I'm the opposite. I absolutely hated Dragon Warrior/Quest I when I first played it at a cousin's house and didn't play it again until I got the GBC I and II collection almost a decade later but I liked the Ultima ports. I liked Dragon Warrior/Quest II a lot more then the first game but still less then the Ultima ports. Final Fantasy I was the first NES Turn-based JRPG I played that I consider on par with the Ultima ports
That’s totally fair. Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy make the games a lot simpler and easier to play.
I was enamored by the spread in Nintendo Power and all the different classes you can play as. When I was finally able to rent Ultima, I was completely lost and had no idea what I was doing.
I got confused myself. I ordered a full color stategy guide directly from Pony/Cannon, which helped me to beat it. 10:27
excellent taste in musical landmarks
personally the big illustrations and vivid if embellished descriptions in the printed material helped me, a kid with only myself to keep entertained and parents too religiously strict to actually play tabletop. I already live a rich internal life so having those art and prose to build a foundation in the imagination helped me look forward to experiencing those dramatic moments on my own. Knowing that doing all the work of reading for comprehension and mastering the few systems or equipment wasn't wasted reinforced their value as a kid in the target age.
Yeah especially with early RPGs there was an expectation that you'd use your imagination to fill in the gaps. When we get to Dragon Warrior/Quest that should also be interesting given how key Toriyama's art was both to the series and its marketing.
First RPG I ever played, it holds a special place in my heart. We couldn't figure out how to finish the game and called the Tip LIne, who told us to pray at the altar in Exodus castle. Then trying to escape the castle was a crapshoot with all the falling rocks.
Man, I hated the falling rocks. Those were exclusive to the NES. They didn't exist on the PC version.
I do have a soft spot for Ultima: Exodus on NES, but it was Ultima: Quest of the Avatar on NES that REALLY stands out in my memory. Exodus' NES port walked so that QotA could run. It's just the superior game in every single regard except, perhaps, music -- for as short and repetitive as Exodus' music is, I still find it to be quite memorable, with the overworld theme, the town theme, and the character creation theme in particular being absolute classics (and that battle theme being one of the best examples I can think of of minimalist 8-bit music composition done right). Nothing in Quest of the Avatar quite managed to measure up.
Everything else, though... Man. Quest of the Avatar remains one of my favorite RPGs of all time, and it's all because of that NES port. It's really outstanding stuff.
Bit of a shame the subsequent NES/SNES ports of Ultima games didn't... quite turn out as well!
I stayed up all night playing Avatar, a few times...beat it at 4 in the morning, as the Druid, and was so sad it was over.
While the NES version is pretty good I have found the SMS port of Quest of the Avatar to be the better version as it is pretty much the same as the PC version with some quality of life improvements (such as being able to mix multiple copies of a spell at once) with the only downside being that all dungeons are top down rather than 3d. Too bad the SMS version only came out in Europe and Japan, not the USA.
This game was ridiculously easy to break. First, you could make scores of disposable PCs just to take their gold over and over. Then, once you get to the temples, you use all that gold to max out everyone's base stats. And THEN you go to the islands to dig up the best armor and weapon, over and over since the game doesn't keep track of that. At that point, you can level up your overpowered party until you get the floor warp spells and use that to bypass the bulk of the dungeons to get the marks and talk to the Time Lord. After all that, go to the Isle of Fire, dodge the big monsters, abuse sprite flicker to find the invisible monsters at the end. Put in the cards in the right order, hope the game doesn't block off your escape route when the island falls apart and you win.
Amazing I remember all this.
Wow. Seeing that Nintendo Power spread unlocked very, very old memories. I never saw any of those games in motion, and yet I very distinctly remember that knight with a heart shield and the snake in an octagon.
I just have to say I absolutely love the filter you use when you address the camera, along with your spiffy threads. That whole aesthetic is fantastic and I think I’d cry if you ever changed style. And your narration is top notch! Really quality content here, keep up the great work
I don't think it's a filter. It's actual 1980s video equipment with modern sound recording.
I was playing Etrian Odyssey Untold just as it came up in this video and it made me smile 😂 it's always so cool to learn about the history and origins of the games I love!
I straight up loved that intro
I like how, normally, when the NES gets a port of something, it looks way worse, because it's coming from the arcade or something.
But in this instance, making the PC game look like a Dragon Quest, actually made the game way BETTER looking.
The Apple II release of Exodus was coded in 1982 and released in 1983. This port released 6 years later. It does look better because the Famicom had vastly better hardware for videogames than the Apple II.
Remember that Exodus was designed to run on an Apple 2 or 8086 with 128kb of RAM. The NES version used 256KB of ROM plus 8KB of working RAM and 8KB of video RAM and unlike on a computer the games run directly from the ROM chips without having to be loaded into memory first. I believe the DS was the first cart based system where the game code has to be loaded from the ROM cart into RAM before being run/executed.
I have so many memories of this game. Got it after the Dragon Warrior giveaway, played it blindly until getting stuck in Ambrosia, then put it down for awhile. Weeks later...
Pretty much systematically worked toward destroying it. Farmed resources off throwaway characters for awhile, held my levels back for a long time while grinding on the easy starter enemies, clearing entire forests with dropped chests. By the time I reached Ambrosia I was ready to have absurdly min maxed characters from stat purchases. Explored every dungeon, then found the end to be guarded by weak floors. 😹
I'll skip the parts about Game Genie but suffice it to say, 10 year old me loved this game to death and ancient me appreciates the in depth dive into the title.
Thanks, Jeremy!
A friend of mine had this...even as an RPG maniac I found the battles daunting, I don't know if he ever finished it either. Quest of the Avatar was a huge step up.
I didn't discover this game until shortly after Dragon Warrior and I remember being very impressed with this game in comparison and it is definitely a big step on the road to really coming to appreciate RPGs. It did help a lot that I had a pretty in depth 3rd party game guide book that included a great walkthrough for this game.
I'm glad you gave this game an entire video because it was monumental for all the reasons you spelled out. I was aware of the Ultima series of games on the PC at the time and had played (and loved!) Dragon Warrior on the NES when I rented Ultima: Exodus. The general clunky nature of Ultima: Exodus is the biggest reason why I couldn't get into the game as a child, especially compared to even Dragon Warrior. It also didn't help that same weekend I rented it my dad ended up in the hospital with what he thought was a heart attack... Still, even back then I was totally hooked on the JRPG formula with better examples like Final Fantasy and the Dragon Warrior games. My love of the genre only got stronger on the SNES.
This is really impressive game actually. Since recently finishing Earthbound Beginnings, starting Dragon Quest 3 and failing to *really* start Phantasy Star, I’ve gotten a new appreciation for the ambition & rules-writing of 8-bit RPGs. The flawed attempts are more intriguing than flawed attempts in other genres, like bad platformers. I played the hell out of Ultima IV in DOS as a kid, but the challenge of shoehorning that experience into an controller with two or three buttons made for some noble efforts in hindsight
but wow, shots fired at Legacy of the Wizard, dang
One of my favorite games for the NES and my introduction to the Ultima saga. I can´t believe I managed to finish it, but I have to admit I used a guide book
I occasionally wonder how the NES role-playing landscape would have been changed (if at all) if Megami Tensei had managed to come out in America. Or even SMT1 for SNES. But of course that would have required Nintendo of America to have very different content policies at the time.
I rented Ultima when it came out, and as a kid, frankly had no idea how it worked. When Nintendo touted Dragon Warrior, though, I fell in love. Nintendo's promoting Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy really did make a difference in helping popularize the RPG. Even today, I haven't gone back to the Ultima games: I have so many other newer games I've yet to play. Maybe I'll try Quest of the Avatar at some point: it's supposed to be the best of the Ultima series.
Ultima V, VI, and VII are the best of the Ultima series but you have to play them on PC. Ultima are the most influential RPGs of all time (along with Wizardry). The only Ultima release on console that is worth much IMHO is the excellent Ultima IV release on Sega Master System, which is the best of all the versions of U4!
@@Will-xk4nm Thanks! I'll give IV a shot on my Genesis/SMS adapter. Thankfully the SMS was region-free, so PAL games work just fine.
@@jorymil Nice! If you like old school CRPGs I think you will enjoy it. But, so much of the vibe was the amazing box and the "feelies" that the PC versions came with. The cloth map of britannia and the pewter Ankh pendant are iconic game accessories. The SMS version was sadly just like any other SMS release and does not compare with the home computer releases of years past in terms of immersive packaging and texts.
Ultima IV had hands-down the greatest manuals to ever ship with a videogame, in my opinion. To understand the game world and lore I would recommend you browse through scans of the Ultima IV Book of Lore and History of Britannia. I have no idea if the SMS version manual was adequate at all, but the port is so faithful that I would recommend you be somewhat familiar with the PC manuals, just to get excited for the game world and to understand the game's religion.
That Nintendo Power article sold at least two people: myself, and my father.
Surprisingly, my dad is barely what one would ever consider "a gamer". Outside of an occasional title the and I would "compete" in, such as Enduro on the 2600 or later a high score contest on SNES's Star Fox, there were very few games over the decades that captured his interests of any genre on any format; console OR PC. But he played the hell out of Ultima: Exodus. So much so, that he beat the game by luck (a moongate plus an auspicious pirate ship spawn allowed him entrance to the final castle before he should've been able- a feat he still occasionally brings up just to troll me).
Both Ultima and FF1 captured his attention in a manner very few other games did before or since... this even includes Dragon Warrior; he wasn't too big on that even though I loved it. Maybe because it wasn't the "gateway drug" it should've been for us since we played Ultima first, then tried to find other similar games. DW probably seemed "too simplistic" to him, and trying to make sense of the obtuse design of U:E was part of the appeal for him.
I remember seeing an article and some ads in some game magazines about Final Fantasy Mystic Quest when I was younger and those looked as epic as the ones shown here for Ultima. Seeing those with their small pictures and the ads make you imagine what kind of games they are. In some ways I miss those old mags.
Congrats on achieving the Neutopia Running Gag.
Thank god this is proto-Tactical so I don't have to cover it! Have always been interested in learning more about this game so thanks for your hard work!
I tried so hard to make sense of this game in my early (as in probably 5-9 years old?) childhood and really just couldn't get very far in the story. I remember looking for some village that only appeared at a certain time of night. Just super dense for my kid brain to handle.
Actually, Sega's Miracle Warriors was the first console RPG to be released in North America, getting released a month before Phantasy Star. But the point still remains that Sega was the one who introduced North American gamers to lite RPGs.
Even Turbo Graphix 16 was better at releasing RPG in the west with Ys I & II and Neutopia less than a year after they came out in Japan.
Never expected to see Etrian Odyssey and Star Trek turn up in the same video.
“King appears”
I remember poring over that Ultima spread in Nintendo Power for months. I wanted to get that game so badly but could never find it in stores when I had money.
Love how you opened with Paula Abdul!
First RPG I ever played was Dragon Warrior. I was seven years old, I've never stopped playing them.
Before I spent enough money renting Earthbound to be able to buy at least two copies of the game, THIS is what got me to love RPG's.
Quest of the Avatar was much better imo on the nes, but this game still had some pretty cool ideas.
Yeah, I played the heck out of Quest of the Avatar, one of the more satisfying moments was beating it with Katrina the Shepherd as my main character. For reference, Katrina can only equip the worst armor and weapons until she becomes the Avatar.
I do find it amusing that the NES Ultima adaptations get less true to the originals as time goes on. Exodus was,for the most part, pretty accurate. Avatar took some liberties but is pretty close. Warriors was hardly recognizable.
10:05 I too ride my horse into inns when we're travelling.
I'm glad Ultima Exodus NES got it's own episode. Not having a computer growing up, this game was such a breakthrough for me.
OMG watched it a second time and finally got the Paula Abdul "Love Card" gag at the beginning lmao. IYKYK
Ahh the memories. I owned the NES Ultima games long before my family owned a PC though I played the computer versions some at other people's houses.
I never played this one as a kid, but I played some of the others mentioned like Dragon Warrior I & II, and of course Final Fantasy. I occasionally get an itch to go back and play them again, then I do and realize that uh perhaps they're best left to nostalgia and great videos like this.
Thinking back, this is the very first NES RPG and the very first Video game RPG I ever bought and played.
I was younger and not paying attention to the hints I was given, in the games dialogue and so I bought a strategy guide directly from Pony/Cannon which helped me TREMENDOUSLY in figuring out what to do and where to go to finally beat it.
I liked the game very much. :)
Ultima is a foundational series that seems all but forgotten nowadays. I'm going through the archives, but skipped ahead when I saw this.
Pony Canyon's works can often be charitably described as "ramshackle," but they did about as well as anyone could expect with Exodus and, later, Quest of the Avatar (one of my favorite NES games). Now, the final Ultima game on NES was actually released as a literally unfinished game, as the final dungeon was never programmed in, but they deserve credit for bringing these dense RPGs to a console that wasn't designed with those kinds of games in mind.
I sank so much time into Ultima: Exodus throughout my childhood. Making my own maps of the dungeons and caves in this game was likely a part of why I enjoyed the Etrian Odyssey games and their custom made maps as much as I did.
As to Legacy of the Wizard...it may have been held up as an RPG, but it seems to share more with the metroidvania genre (which didn't exist at the time, I know). It is a decent game, but can be extremely frustrating.
Phantasy Star 2 was one of my favorite games.
My dad owned a copy of Ultima III: Exodus for Macintosh. I never actually got to play it, but just looking at the box with the awesome hellish gargoyle art on the cover and reading the elaborately-written manuals (including the two in-depth spellbooks for wizard and cleric magic) was just fascinating to me. I think I still have it lying somewhere around the house (although I think I actually broke the disc at some point in my stupid childhood). I own the game on GoG, but it's so daunting that I've never made a really serious effort to get into playing it (that and I haven't beaten Ultima II yet, weird and offbeat as that game is).
Interesting that this was the first proper RPG on NES in America. I've only ever played a bit of this game on PC, and I say a bit because I struggled to figure out the whole party system (if your party gets killed, which is entirely possible, they stay in the save file as dead PCs so you have to create a whole other party who can maybe manage to revive them, assuming they don't die themselves.) Of course a lot of the game's basic structure is still in Ultima IV which I've played a ton of.
I've been waiting for the series to get to this part- even if there weren't a ton of turn-based RPGs on NES (compared to SNES anyway), the early entries should all be fascinating.
I loved this game. The first RPG I ever played. Don't attack the villagers!
I walked into an actual Barnes & Noble and tried to find one of your books but their gaming reference section was mostly D&D 😿
We don't have standard retail distribution... yet. Stay tuned!
So how do we get it then,.... .they can't do orders
Bro, you took the Utopia Planitia reference right out of my mouth.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Treasure of tarmin in 1983 on Intellivision was my first taste of a first person rpg.
I was kinda sold on the idea of Ambrosia, it was such a cool concept to me as a kid.
And on a side note, every time I beat a La Mulana Randomizer run, I see Jeremy's name and smile.
I have s special place for this one with it's esoteric design and unforgiving gameplay. Fun fact, there was a well illustrated strategy guide for this that I happened to find at toys r us back in the day. It's was pretty useful.
I think i was rather shocked to find that the depictions within of Minax the Witch were very scandalous for that era. Try to imagine a Frank Frazetta fantasy painting with a dreamy mid eighties anime style. Yowza!!
The second I captured a ship, I immediately headed for the whirlpool. I'm glad they made that a large part of the game (Ambrosia).
This was one of my favorite NES titles as a kid. When you only got 1-2 games a year, having one that took a long time to beat was a big win. I remember having a pad of graph paper that we used to draw maps of each dungeon floor in order to conserve gems and torches. The game was not easy, but for the time, it was innovative. A PC-based dungeon crawler on a home console? And the graphics might look poor now, but they are stunning when compared to the original version.
One thing I never understood is how Exodus and Quest of the Avatar had such good ports, while the third NES entry, Warriors of Destiny, got a crap port with worse graphics than either entry that were released years before it.
Seeing this reminds me of Spooney's Ultima 3 review
I liked Exodus a lot. It had its charm in the various character classes, the spinny cursor thing, and the sheer number of systems at play making you really wonder at the world. I just wished the battles were a bit more streamlined.
FCI did offer a strategy guide for the game in the manual, though it’s definitely a pretty thin tome. (I’ve never given the Ultima games a playthrough, so I don’t know if a thin book would cover everything.) So they obviously figured out from Nintendo’s Mario and Zelda guides that there was some money to be made selling strategy guides, something that persists to this day, even with GameFAQs, VGMaps, and the like existing.
Yes, that spread in Nintendo Power DID sell at least one person on the Ultima Exodus: me! 😂
Wow remember renting this one based on the Nintendo power spread and just being incredibly frustrated at 6 or 7 years old - the character sprites are still haunting - I don’t know if I had ever experienced frustration like that before - got into final fantasy later on but there were detailed guides - still never understood for example ‘how to use an item in battles’ a lack of in game tutorials in these games assumed that the player was already familiar with the problem solving mechanisms in the game. Ultima was certainly not that. Zelda 2 for example was frustrating but at least the game taught you as you went. Another factor - I’m not sure how it was in Japan but game rental period were 2 nights. Great for contra or a sports game but maddening for a rpg of this vintage. Perhaps this explains partially why jrpgs were slow to leak into the US market
Newtonia should not be confused with Newtek, creators of Lightwave 3D and the Video Toaster.
Of course what's strange of all this is that Ultima IV, which many considered to be incontestably the best classic computer RPG isn't better known among the Master System and NES fans.
In what other NES Game can you fight a statanic computer final Boss?
Crystalis
@@JeremyParish😂
I played the heck out of this game as a kid. Never beat it though, would get lost in the dungeons and never could figure out what I had to do to win.
After I watched this video I thought about Nintendo Power hand-walking its readers through the concept of RPGs, and I remember how, all the way in mid-1992, they felt the need to explain the concept of NPCs for Arcana, including that your party would be constantly changing as the plot dictates.
I wonder if Final Fantasy "II" left a bad taste in some readers' mouths?
Plausible, though I'm not sure how the two compare in that department since I've never played Arcana all the way through.
I love all the Newtopia cutaways. They deserve it.
That's a lot of 'topias to remember lol
Do you remember the choose your own adventure Nintendo inserted when Dragon Warrior came out?
I do not!!
@@JeremyParish I remember it being pretty cool at the time, but I haven't seen it since the early 90s. They just tried to replicate the DW experience and explained a couple of random ecounters.
Oh wait, was it like a comic strip style flowchart? That sounds familiar....
Having been somewhat spoiled by almost any newer RPG Ultima III feels like a much more daunting and granular game with its mechanics than I personally have patience for, given how primitive many aspects of it are. Which is a shame, it has a lot to offer in terms of story and world building! It's like the many things I'm happy to keep track of in a tabletop game here are present, but I'm now responsible for the bookkeeping of four PCs instead of just one.
I can say first hand that that the "what is an RPG" article totally sold someone on Ultima: Exodus.
I remember this cover when I bought the game. I had absolutely no idea what was going on on this game when I was a kid. All I know is I kept going to Ambrosia and I hated the line of sight mechanic.
I remember Paula Abdul being a crush in junior high. Just making that mention.
The soundtrack is so much better than not grating, especially if you get your hands on the fully produced version. Pony Canyon is primarily a music producer and distributor and they knew how to give the Disney treatment to their licensed products.
I'd go so far as to say Ultima Exodus on NES has the best music in any release in the series.
I tried getting my hands on the Exodus arranged LP a few weeks ago at auction, but it went for more than I felt good about spending on an old record of video game music.
I greatly prefer Ken Arnold's music from the original release.
It'll be interesting when Jeremy eventually gets to Ultima IV in 1990, as he'd have a perfect excuse to bring in the PAL-exclusive Master System version to compare it to, despite him not really focusing on those kinds of MS releases.
North America technically had the first console RPGs as far as I know (Dragonstomper, Treasure of Tarmin), although not much came of them.
My dad played ultima 3 on commodore 64 I remember watching him beat by inserting cards in a machine. Looking back it's weird but the final boss was a punch card reader. XD
It came with a cloth map where he inked in all the dungeon and moongate locations.
It was my first taste of an RPG.
Id recommend anyone playing this nowadays to use the Fox Cunning patches that basically fix every issue possible for Ultima 3 on a nes. Including being able to have the original soundtrack. Doesn't sound as good as a C64 SID chip but it does a solid job of it.
I remember playing Ultima IV on the NES, loving it, and going back for Ultima III Exodus, and being horribly disappointed by how unpolished it felt in comparison.
Glad I went in the opposite direction, they were both awesome!
I'm glad your "not to be confused with..." running gag stopped before you got to the worst episode of Futurama.
I'm sure you know that Dragon Quest on the Famicom didn't have battery save but a Japanese sentance translatable to actual sentences and didn't get what we know in the US with save feature and a new name "Dragon Warrior"
The NES Ultima games are super intrguing. I hope to play one at one point.
I strongly recommend the Sega Master System version of Ultima IV.
@@Will-xk4nm Remember playing Ultima IV on the NES and loving it. Not sure how it compares to the SMS version.
@@atoth62 I also enjoyed the NES version of U4, it is certainly more accessible than any of the PC versions. It has the best graphics and sound of any U4 release to my knowledge. That said, it is not a faithful port. The SMS version of Ultima IV is not only a very faithful port but it adds a few quality of life improvements. Unless you are an authenticity die-hard and need to play the most original version, the SMS version of U4 is the recommended way to play that game today.
The more I learn about the history of my favorite game genre, RPGs, the more weird it is that the delineation between eastern and western genre works even exists, especially with how deeply entwined their evolution is
Yeah, YoshiP is right to think JRPG is a pretty insulting term.
I suppose that because Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest became something very different from Ultima and Elder Scrolls at the time they became very well-known, people felt it wasn't right to call them the exact same thing... and I for one found the distinction helpful at the time since I was far more into what Final Fantasy and it's derivatives did then what the Western companies were doing on PC back then.
I have the remastered Ultima 3 ROM hack on my NES emulator and I've been grinding like a mofo thanks to this. Hell, I made a party mostly comprised of characters my boyfriend made up
Ultima is my favorite series of all time and it is wonderful to see it get proper credit here. The Apple II release featured what was, perhaps, the first full soundtrack for a Western video game. A shame they tossed out all of Ken Arnold's compositions for the NES release, though that dungeon theme was hard to listen to after a while!
My first RPG...that I played more like Grand Theft Auto.
The freedom in this game was so absolute that you could attack innocent civilians, and the ROM space so limited that the game would make it just as dramatic as any other fight.
It was like a parody, especially when it triggered the overpowered guards, and you fled the scene on stick figure horseback.
All of this nonsense had already led to a letter of complaint, and an early morality system in the sequel. One that had a more nuanced understanding of ethics in the character creation than any modern AAA production in their entire run time.
It's strange that this series, while so ambitious and influential, would always seem so alien in its own country of origin.
And both ahead of the curve and trapped in the distant past.
That is weird, and sad. But also understandable. Considering it's a game made for a niche market. That also did not age very well (the game not the market it targeted). I mean after doing research on the game I understand what the context was when they made it. But it still doesn't change the fact it didn't age well. I tried playing it and I ditched it later on. Maybe one day I'll try to play it again. But for now, I think I'll try my hand at something like Baldur's gate 1 because Baldur's gate 3 recently released.
Ultima may be one of the most influential series of games ever made, even if it’s mostly known these days for collapsing into an utter dumpster fire around 8 and 9 being one of the most bungled finales to a series ever. But it’s hard to quantify the influence it had with early developers, after it became known for “BETRAYAL!” jokes and its latter, wretched entries.
I think Ultima 4 to 7 are still quite worthwhile, if you can deal with the quirks.
@@bluespaceman7937 4-7 was arguably the height of the series' power, even if by modern standards 4 is incredibly obtuse and difficult to navigate (less so on the NES where it was reformatted into a more linear RPG akin to Final Fantasy). 7 is widely considered a massive step forward in storytelling and exploration, and then the Underworld games pioneered first-person games (even if those looking for a spiritual successor are better off playing Arx Fatalis than Underworld Ascendant). But then EA bought Origin out, 8 happened with its busted ass Super Avatar Bros isometric platforming, and 9, oh dear 9.
@@Dynaman21 Yup. 7 is still one of my personal favorite games of all time. 8 had a decent idea, but they ruined it with the platforming and didn't fully develop the theme. 9 was just tragic, the tech wasn't there yet and the way they wrote it didn't respect the intelligence of existing fans.
I feel like Wizardry and Ultima are like the two most influential games ever. Like you hear random non-RPGs take influence from the games. And I love the irony of Nintendo pushing RPGs only for their competitors to capitalize on that push making the previous RPG fans move to PlayStation and for the genre to boom in the late 90s right when they created the system only beat by the Master System on how little RPGs could use the console with Nintendo pushing 3D models while also taking away the space the RPGs could use.
could you imagine a utopia where you could attack diagonally in Ultima 3-5?
Sega Master System version of Ultima IV lets you do it!!!
Nah, it's actually just a matter of player choice to level characters up equally, or however one prefers. If you want your melee fighters to gain more experience, just make sure to use the ranged attackers only for softening up enemies, allowing melee attackers to deliver fatal blows. Magic users can also deliver fatal blows in this way with harmful spells.
I’ve been watching a lot of Famidaily from @rndstranger lately and it’s interesting to me to see how late Ultima: Exodus appears in the Famicom versus when it appears in the NES.
This was a fairly decent port of an already archaic game, but the port of Ultima IV blew it out the water, so much so that in my opinion that's the definitive version of the game now.
Surprisingly, I never played any of the Ultima line.
10:38 subliminal shots fired
Came here for coverage on new topiaries. Oh well… 😕
The Ultma games are amazing. 😀👍🎮
well until electronic arts effed it up...
Just wanted to mention here, Ultima is currently available on GOG's autumn sale with deep discounts. Ultima 1+2+3 are $1.49. The best games in the series, IV through VII: Part 2, are all available at similar prices.
Uhm...is Attack Animal Gakuen the core of Daicon 3? Or maybe the other way around?
Okay also, Gradius' "Lord British" is in fact, this same Lord British?
Holy smokes.
Fun fact Ultima actually is a shortening of the word ultimatum. Richard Garriott wanted to call it ultimatum but they feared it would cause legal issues with a board game.
Also, please do an NES works Gaiden on Dragon Quest (Japanese version). As you keep outlining it's very important to the games you talk about so I think you should do a video on it. Please, pretty please 🥺
He'll get to Dragon Warrior in NES Works 1989. I imagine it will be a very long but great episode.
Hi! I'm afraid I do not take video requests. I have a very full schedule as it is. Glad you enjoy the series, though.
@@JeremyParishAh well. In that case never mind. Just keep up the good work👍
❤
is this a jared genesis reference?
Who