Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Shattered Hands, Ultima in Japan and My Hero Academia: All's Justice
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b-dragon
Posts: 629 |
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Some picking at nits (because, occasionally, I am That Guy.)
IIRC, Garriot's motivation for moving Ultima 4 in a more spiritual, less "defeat the bad guy" direction was at least in part due to enraged parental letters that he got after Ultima 3. Since this was the 80's, amongst the moral panic of the time, that checks out. Also, the original Stella Deus actually did have class changing, if a very limited version. Classes could upgrade if you spent the appropriate materials on a unit- becoming the next class along that chain (Swordsman to Swordmaster, as an idea.) Granted, definitely not class changing in the vein of FFT, but still present. It was a decent enough SRPG- because my creaking old bones do remember it, and I still have a copy- but was often more mechanically frustrating compared to some of the contemporaries. Unlocking the extra characters was a pain, and level was a huge part of damage calculations- rewarding victory by numbers over tactical acumen. |
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AiddonValentine
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-Ultima: And let's not get into how Ultima VII: The Black Gate has an Easter Egg of a Killrathi starfighter from Wing Commander, which has interesting implications for the space sequences in Ultima I. And then we have Ultima Underworld which were basically proto "immersive sims" (i.e.first person RPG they say wasn't actually an RPG because RPGs on the PC were waning). And we don't talk about anything after Ultima VII.
-FF Tactics: One thing the development team brought up was how they had lost the original source code because they overwrote it while localizing it for other languages. A lot of people bring up how they used fansites, but mostly to remember what the formulas for damage calculation and whatnot were. FF fans on Gamefaqs and fansites were a bit crazy. I also love how Matsuno just casually blew up the Ivalice Alliance by saying "Yeah, the Ivalice in FF Tactics and FF XII are completely different worlds and have no relation to one another at all." So many timeline theories rendered pointless. The absolute LEGEND. Last edited by AiddonValentine on Fri Sep 05, 2025 2:59 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2560 Location: Online Terminal |
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I don't remember if this was brought up in previous entries but Project Voltage has been an ongoing (for 2 years!) collaboration with TPC, and I assume the concert is a culmination of the first phase of the project. IIRC the original project was one Miku & song per type and then I think an E4 version??
(Semi-related: I like "Castle on the Hill". Fight me.) |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 5149 Location: New York |
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Ultima remains a fascinating piece of gaming history for the sole reason that it influenced so much, but its two final entries, both 8 and its busted Super Avatar Bros. isometric platforming, and 9, a complete disaster whose plot is one of the most bungled, mean-spirited things ever with the moral that spoiler[every act of good you did was actually evil because the universe hates a moral busybody and created an evil god as a counterpart to your quest for enlightenment. Thus the only way to atone for the evil act of trying to do good is to sacrifice yourself to destroy the evil borne from your quest for enlightenment.] Makes you feel like you haven’t wasted your time with the previous six games (plus the two Underworld spinoffs and if you were really devoted, the two Worlds of Ultima spinoffs),
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varmintx
 Posts: 1320 Location: Covington, KY |
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I always wished Eternal Sonata got adapted into a live-action/anime hybrid movie. The game has a lot of fat that shaving it off would actually improve the story.
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Arxana
Posts: 46 |
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I played through Eternal Sonata from beginning to end a few months ago. I can honestly say it has some of the worst writing I’ve ever experienced in a video game, and that’s saying a lot. I wouldn’t even blame the localization; I’m confident that it’s just as bad in the original Japanese version as well. The dialogue is so ham-fisted and clunky, it sounds nothing like how people would actually talk. One might argue, “but it’s in a dream world,’of course it wouldn’t sound natural,” except the dialogue sounds just as bad in the real-world segments in the game as well. The story is also poorly written - there are so many sections that contribute nothing to the overall narrative and are clearly there just for padding, and the connection to Chopin’s real-life is tenuous at best. Oh, and those musical interludes where a Chopin musical piece is played while text explains part of Chopin’s life story are aggravatingly dull and boring. Their attempts to connect the composer’s experiences to the musical piece feel more like speculation than genuine association, and the saccharine writing just makes it feel tedious to read.
The gameplay is fun, though. Just a shame it’s attached to such a poorly written story. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19140 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I played nearly all of Ultima II (got stuck beating the final boss), most of Ultima III, and a little of Ultima IV back in the day. (In fact, it's quite possible I still have the floppy disks for them setting around somewhere.) I've long thought that they had to be distinct influences on Dragon Quest, since some of what the early DQ games standardized appeared in those games first, so it's good to see that confirmed.
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 926 |
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Yeah, I watched Manjuular's video on Exodus and the big demon on the cover really was tailor-made to terrify the folks during that ridiculous Satanic Panic during the 1980s. Also, thanks for clarifying the Stella Deus bit!
The amount of dumb retcons in Ultima 9 really do feel insulting to the legacy of the series. Did Garriott even work on it? They did his baby so badly. I'm going off of what I know from Spoony's vid (haven't gotten to Manjuular's vid on 9 yet), but there was also 9 bringing Blackthorne back as a villain, even though he was only ever misguided in 5 and was stated in one of the later games to have dedicated himself to the clergy in a bid for redemption. And he found it! The man quietly lived out his life as a man of the cloth and found peace! And you learn all this in a random book in a church somewhere in The Black Isles (I think?). That's such a profoundly touching way to handle a character in a game. Not to mention the ways that all of the post-4 Ultima games deconstructed The Avatar felt more than enough than what you described 9 doing. The very next game after you became the Avatar, you have to fix a situation where the Virtues you struggled to embody have become a means of subjugation! There's no better deconstruction to an entire character than that! And the same thing goes for 6 and 7-II, where the games have such even-handed approaches to foreign values systems. Even though the Avatar is the living embodiment of Britannian virtues, he nevertheless strives to live up to Gargish and Ophidian Virtues just the same. Unthinkable, but part of his heroism neverthless! The even-handed "there's no good without evil, you idiot" approach feels so dumb... |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2956 |
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I mean, at that point the whole arc that began with Ultima VII was seven years old which was an eternity for gaming in the 90s. It was clearly meant to be used as an re-introduction for a lot of stuff that had happened and was probably forgotten about by the audience. As such, that's where you get events like "What's a paladin?" It also didn't help that by the time VIII came out RPGs were on the decline on PC and IX was in a time where Baldur's Gate and Diablo were already out and just a month after Ultima IX came Planescape: Torment, so even in the shrinking RPG market for PCs it had already been outclassed. Then there's how Electronic Arts saw Ultima Online as the more important game which, to be honest, it was for 1999. Even without the production problems, at that point Garriot's whole style and world were pretty outdated. Last edited by AiddonValentine on Mon Sep 08, 2025 5:05 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Beatdigga
Posts: 5149 Location: New York |
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Any hope of Ultima IX making sense was killed by EA, twice. First, when they delayed the game to get Ultima Online up and running, and then again when EA gave Origin a hard deadline to get the game out by Christmas. There's arguably a lot of that bitterness in the final product, with even Lord British himself declaring the whole thing was a waste of time because instead of inspiring the people to pursue enlightenment, it made the Avatar a savior the people turned to again and again to help them, spoiler[and again, nature hates that, hence the Guardian being made solely to ruin positive you may have done out of sheer malice]. Western RPGs may have been fading in popularity, but this was the same year as Final Fantasy VIII, which sold 8.6 million copies on the PlayStation. There was a market for single-player RPGs, but no one gave this game the ability to succeed.
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