Beaten: Ultima Runes of Virtue (Game Boy)

 Talk about a pleasant surprise. At some point in the past I picked up a loose cartridge of Ultima Runes of Virtue for the Game Boy, knowing that it would not be a full Ultima-style RPG, and tried it out. It seemed at first to be more of a dungeon puzzle game than even an action adventure and I didn’t fiddle with it much.

Then I plugged it into my new Analog Pocket and really dug in. Having beaten it after a few weeks of portable fun, I can gladly say that this game stands shoulder to shoulder with Final Fantasy Legend, The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening, and Final Fantasy Adventure as must-play Game Boy RPGs and action RPGs. 

So yeah, puzzles. It is a masterpiece of a dungeon puzzle game, with lots of monster combat thrown in. By that I mean, stepping on a floor plate might remove a wall and unleash a horde of spiders. That’s just one example though and fails to describe the gloriously crazy variety of such puzzles and traps.

Once again, playing this on an Analogue Pocket allowed me to save anywhere, eliminating the frustration of multiple repetitive dungeon runs. No, only my own lack of thoroughness and attention to detail resulted in multiple repetitive dungeon runs. None of these puzzles are insanely hard, and if I remember correctly, most can be solved within the same dungeon, with the items you should have, through trial and error and observation.

The game takes place in a standard, classic Ultima top down world. The player starts on a single continent with a few castles, shops, and dungeons, and opens up other sections of the world as the game progresses. Boats act as ferries to get to and from these landmasses, with the final continent only reachable through a dungeon at first, but a ferry opens up once the player has made it through so the dungeon trip does not have to be repeated.

With such complex and clever puzzles in the dungeons, the designers had to come up with a way to get players unstuck if they did the wrong thing. It is possible to get stuck in a lot of situations, so there is an item in the player's backpack to instantly teleport them out of the dungeon and back to Lord British's throne room for a quick healing and reset. It's an ugly solution that forces a complete dungeon restart, but with the Analog Pocket and its save states, I did not need to utilize it often.

There is not much in the way of NPC conversation and interaction, but the player does level up attributes and equipment to a basic degree. And it bears repeating that the player must explore every tile of every dungeon to avoid missing important items. While the goal of each of the eight dungeons is to recover a rune, there are also important items hidden that will be required for the player to advance.

In this sense, the game requires some level of backtracking if the player is not paying attention (like me), and some level of grinding to save up money for some of the more expensive purchases available in shops. Fortunately, it was easy to find places to quickly grind gold, and even some of the more useful items.

It's always a good feeling when a game gives you more than you were expecting. I was expecting a half-assed dungeon crawler that was just cashing in on the Ultima name. Instead, this is exactly what one would hope for in a portable adventure and it was a joy to explore and solve over a few weeks. I guess I had better start looking for the sequels to Ultima Runes of Virtue for more pleasant surprises.