For this year's "Unfinished Business" game I choose Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress, as this one's been a thorn in my paw for decades. Unlike last year's run on Bard's Tale, my play history with Ultima II is a bit less direct, involving attempts in both the 1980s and late 1990s, and my own road to Ultima II being a bit rocky.
It was released in 1982 on floppy disk for Apple and Atari computers at first, and at some point after that for the Commodore 64 as well. I was stuck on a Commodore VIC 20 with a cassette drive by mid-1983, lusting after just Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash after seeing an ad for the legendary vaporware game. The state of the art floppy disk RPGs of that time were mostly out of reach for me at that point.
Fast forward to the summer of 1986, and me juggling college, work, partying, and barely reaching third base in erratic and sporadic dating efforts, but high on the glory of a Commodore 64 and 1541 Disk Drive and the incredible library it had opened. By August, I had been campaigning on The Bard's Tale for five long months, but was lured to Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar by reviews in the legendary Questbusters newsletter.
I would have started the Ultima series with Ultima I, but there was not a C64 version out for it yet. The reviews were glowing, the game mechanics a leap ahead of its predecessor, and well, I wanted state of the art. As a regular reader of my gaming habits of the 1980s might suspect, I played Ultima IV for months (ask me about the best week of my life sometime), and gave up while fighting my way through the final dungeon.
Less than a year later, Ultima I was finally released for the Commodore 64, with a new box to match the Origin Systems standard box size introduced with Ultima III. I decided that since I could now play all the games in order, I'd pick up Ultima I and do just that. Seventeen days later I had crushed that game and had found a cheap, used copy of the Sierra On-Line Ultima II, beautifully complete with instructions and cloth map inspired by the movie Time Bandits. Elaboration on that ahead.
Pissed off about murdering her boss/teacher/lover at the end of Ultima I, Minax the Enchantress throws the universe into chaos somehow, fracturing the world into five different time eras connected by doors that appear and disappear and link the various eras, again inspired by the aforementioned Time Bandits. Garriot was feeling experimental with this one.
The world is tile-based and the action is turn-based, and each movement on land consumes one food. When a monster is on a tile next to the player, they attack. The player issues keyboard commands like A for Attack (a command which is followed by a query as to which direction the player wishes to attack). Towns, castles, towers, and dungeons appear here and there. The first priority is getting weapons, armor, and food sustainability so you can begin to explore and of course, grind some more.
Grinding becomes much easier in the three eras where, eventually, a pirate galleon sails up and attacks the player at the shore. Simply walk onto the ship and press B to board, which creates a duplicate ship under your command. Since under your command C fires the cannon, you can quickly take out the other ship any any onlooking spawn along the shore. Sail around, visit islands you could not reach, and kill everything that spawns, because guess what? Sailing does not consume food.
Back in those late summer of 1987 play sessions, which came and went into 1988, I explored every town, talked to every NPC, and took chaotic notes. In addition to the five time eras in the main world, one of the future eras has a rocket ship to steal, opening up the entire solar system to explore. Some planets have nothing, some have towns, and some are just silly. Realizing that the dungeons and towers were actually superflous loot sources whose exploration was not necessary for the campaign, I only mapped a few levels.
After solving all the puzzles and grinding my way up to a level I felt was ready, I took on Minax and lost. I do not remember how many attempts I made but I never looked back. Which is a good thing, since the boyfriend of my college housemate had asked to play Ultima II in my room since I was often at my girlfriend's apartment anyway. I agreed to let him and left instructions about creating his own character disk, which he of course ignored when he just overwrote my character disk, erasing my save. I wasn't about to start over, as I was just starting to add Ultima V to my burgeoning repertoire of unfinished Ultima games (I made it to where I beat the first Shadowlord).
After that, I did not play an Ultima game until Ultima Online, which finally got me to get a PC in early 1998. Shortly after that Origin released Ultima Collection for PC, and I made a second attempt to play Ultima II. I have notes from that time but clearly got bored with the grinding and abandoned that playthrough.
With my newfound desire to take care of "Unfinished Business" games from my backlog, I returned to Ultima II a few months ago, dusting off those old notes and sitting my ass down for some serious grinding. I reactivated my Good Old Games account, seeing that I still had Ultima IV waiting there, and I added the Ultima I-III bundle for less than ten bucks.
My notes were thorough about what to do but lacked basic gameplay hints (like using the ships as described above), so it took me awhile to get my footing. Remembering where to go to level up attributes took a minute too, but soon I was off to the grindy races. A few weeks of sporadic gameplay later, I mounted a final assault on the castle of Minax the Enchantress, whose main weapon being a teleport spell to the other side of her castle, making you run back and forth across that place over and over.
Nonetheless, victory was mine:
I imagine it’ll be a few years before I feel like taking on Ultima III, but it was immensely satisfying to finally put Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress behind me after all these decades.
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