Ultima RPG

Then, when the player least expects it, they get gazeebo'd.

I'm sure it's just unintended text left in the game, but it's very amusing to enter a board and immediately have that message pop up.

Quite a number of other messages appear as if the player talked to the woman before the player can actually do so. Her name is Agries and she is indeed cleaning up after a party. Despite the stone sounding like a powerful macguffin of some sort, she says Zack can just have it, not really caring for it herself. She changes her mind almost immediately afterwards once she realizes this is a good opportunity to get somebody else to do the cleaning. Zack is displeased by this, begrudgingly accepting the task.

Okay, now we can gawk at the gazebo. It looks nice!

After Zack picks up all the trash and puts it in any of the various trash cans scattered around Agries will then begin demanding you find her missing key. This is yet another bug, as she'll do this immediately during all the misfiring dialog upon entering the board. It's supposed to be a second chore, but I am no stranger to doing household chores in ZZT. Due to the coding issues you can't finish the garbage quest, which means Agries won't clear out the invisible objects obstructing the gazebo, which means you'll have to cheat yet again to get to the gazebo and find the key.

It's her final task at least. The stone is placed under Zack's care and he can run off to the bar and claim his reward.

Just kidding! Once again a flag isn't set that needs to be.

I don't understand Zack's ire at getting the key. Divorce guy points out that it's surely going to be important to him eventually, which is true, but like, Zack should be well aware what this key is. The only way he wouldn't would be if the player talked to this guy, and didn't bother talking to Yomanay for some reason, which would require entering the bar and walking past him.

Also Zack was under no obligation to accept this quest to begin with! Maybe don't take quests without asking about the reward next time?

Talking to Yomanay with the key actually does work properly with the back of the bar opening up just to give the player a passage to enter to move to the game's ending sequence.

Half of the world map is present with some cute little tracks added to show the ground covered by the Zack and Yomanay up to this point. It's a pretty suitable spot for a chapter break.

The ending is optimistic at least. Zack is usually pretty laid back about, well, everything. Here though he's undeniably excited about what comes next. This world seems to treat him a lot nicer than the one he's from. There's not a lot here to really do much in the way of character development making it hard to say if the enthusiasm is meant to be him finally put his guard down.

There is an Ultima RPG 2 Demo, but it offers very little (other than a platformer engine of all things) and provides no real idea as to where the story was meant to go from here. Instead, things just end with our heroes riding off into the sunset awaiting the next adventure that will never come.

Action and Puzzles?

So the story in Ultima RPG isn't anything too spectacular. It provides reason for Zack to move forward through the game and that's pretty much it. There's not much explanation of what's going on and not much description of the two worlds the game spans. The other side of the coin is the gameplay, which... well it's also not spectacular. Like the story, the things the player gets to do are also fairly bare-bones. The main complaint here though is one of quantity rather than quality.

For quality, you can tell Ultima is trying to make his action sequences stand out from the rest. In the ruined world portion, this is done through the clip system, something rarely seen even in worlds that are exclusively focused on action sequences. (A streamed playthrough of bucket's Resident Evil may be the only time I've covered a game in any way that uses such a system.) What I've seen plenty of times has been inventory systems handled by entering a custom cheat to set a flag to open the player's inventory. This clip system uses the same idea, having the player type in ?+CLIP to reload Zack's assault rifle.

Upon setting the flag, an object detects it and exchanges one of the player's torches for thirty ammo instead. It might not seem particularly different from just giving the player thirty ammo when they find a clip, but it theoretically impacts how the game plays out. It just probably doesn't accomplish as much as Ultima (and others) would have liked.

The most obvious change is that it prevents the player from just holding down the fire button and shooting hundreds of bullets if they can spare them. The alternative is to mess around with things like the maximum shots per board, though this in turn can punish the player for missing shots and being unable to shoot. Here in Ultima RPG, enemies only take three shots to kill so it doesn't feel like preventing spam is really necessary.

Usually these systems do what Resident Evil did: forcing the player to waste any bullets still in their clip when they reload. This presents a tactical decision as the player doesn't want to waste ammo, but running around with just two bullets ready to go puts them at risk of running out in the middle of a fight. Ultima actually doesn't do this with their engine. If the player attempts to reload with bullets waiting to be shot a message tells them that they can't reload yet, thereby changing the choice to "Do I shoot these last two bullets at a wall so I can reload?" which has the same result but accomplishes it in a far less endearing manner.

Personally, if the player isn't given the chance to reload whenever they like, I think that the better system would be for the game to automatically reload for them. Detect that the player's ammo count is zero and then automatically consume a clip. You'd get the benefit of an upper ammo cap without the annoyances of making the player stop and enter a cheat code.

Perhaps the reason you don't see this engine all that much is that it adds pauses to every fight. There's a pause in the sense that the reload takes a moment to perform after inputting the cheat, which is a reasonable way to make the player vulnerable for a moment and have to play defensively. That I don't mind. Opening the prompt at all effectively pauses ZZT, giving you all the time in the world to stop and think about what actions you should take next. It's also a long cheat! In adventure games, ?+I is generally a system that's fancier than it is practical to be sure, but the generally more relaxed pacing and shorter cheat input makes it far more bearable. In Ultima RPG for those surprisingly few boards where the system is in place it feels like a lot more stopping and a lot more typing with little benefit.

Of course, the enemies in the Random Inc. building are also shooting bullets constantly with plenty of opportunities to get them to shoot each other as they all rush in Zack's direction.

I don't think anybody's ever done a full length action game using a system like this. I wouldn't write the whole thing off entirely (especially if you bring Weave into the equation), but this is not the game to showcase manual reloading properly.

The reload system is clearly intended to be the feature that separates this one from other action titles (at least until it goes pseudo-RPG). Ultima does have a few more tricks up their sleeve which are a bit more effective at making the game stand out from the rest. The environments offer a few destructible elements. Countless office plants can be shot to pieces and windows can be shattered as well. This is just some simple #char changing, but it's a detail often overlooked. If only the world wasn't already so broken, then it might be a bit more fun to wreck things.

Ultima also takes care to hide his enemies in other rooms until the door is opened. The furnishings are apparent from the start, so unlike Lebensraum, the only surprise is who is inside, never what. Another divergence from Nadir's 1999 gold standard of ZZT action comes in how items are obtained, where I feel Ultima actually is on to something. Instead of your usual vacuuming of clips and med-kits off the ground, rooms will just contain... well I'm not entirely sure. They may be doors to closest, or just cabinets. Maybe they're lockers.

Whatever they're supposed to be, they're embedded into the walls in such a way that the player can just quickly touch them and grab their contents without having to stop and pick everything up. Zack can find clips for his gun, cash for his ego, and lunches for his health. The real advantage to this style over a walk-in closet is the decreased amount of board space dedicated to these collectible items. Environments are instead able to be designed around shooting without having to worry about ZZT's bullets colliding with a clip on the floor and being destroyed.

There are good ideas here to be sure. The short Random Inc. segment means that Ultima just doesn't have the time to really explore them. Instead the sequence ends up playing like any generic action game with enemies doing the work for the player and red fakes staining the ground when all is said and done. There are a grand total of four boards that let the player reload and rummage in the first area of the game. As the story's shown, this sort of thing is promptly discarded once the player is brought to the other world.

Everything above in this section thrown out once Zack arrives on Taiiagi. Zack's gun is magically turned into a sword with the combat rules changing accordingly. Ultima goes for the common melee system where objects have one character where they're vulnerable and another where they'll harm the player when touched, though even this gets discarded once the player reaches the zombie infested cellars of WestWood where the zombie fights rely entirely on vibes.

The first chapter's action suffers from the usual flaws, but Ultima is quick to avoid the critical mistake of the player having no idea which character is used when an enemy can be safely attack until they try. Most impressive of all is that this information is woven into the game itself. The Ryagar that populate the forest and cave alternate between and . Yomanay's explanation of when to attack provides a staggering amount of information for just one sentence. The player learns the enemy's name, that they'll be dealing with this on/off melee system, and even gets a detail to help imagine what the creatures being fought look like. In most ZZT worlds, I'd be describing a Ryagar as dark gray objects that use accented "A" characters. Instead we all get to imagine something with a retractable horn, a far more fitting fantasy monster rather than a deadly letter.

Now if only the rest of the gameplay could be this distinctive. Zack's journey consists of board after board of fighting these creatures with little to break it up. On occasion such as in the above screenshot you might find something that looks kind of neat. This giant blue crystal sure seems important, though Zack refuses to comment on it, just grabbing the key from its base to the cave.

There's also an attempt to engage the player a bit by hiding gems on most boards. These twinkle regularly making them quite easy to obtain compared to any entries in tseng's Gem Hunter Anthology. They're also completely optional, only giving Zack a little extra spending money for the one shop in WestWood.

It's not all playing with sharp weapons of course. The caves do offer a short break with some very crude puzzles.

From what I had seen of the game up to this point, I was with Zack. The series of puzzles that follows are not good. The first is as simple as pulling a lever to open a door, which I assumed were just going to be an introduction to switches so that something more puzzling could be done with them later. No such luck.

Another cave board dedicated to puzzles prevents Zack from exiting until he's solved all three in order to obtain the required keys. They are not good.

Up first is the invisible maze.

Pros: Ultima placed some dark red fakes to help guide the player.

Cons: It's an invisible maze.

Then comes a boulder with an accompanying sign saying that it can be broken if you push it.

Pros: The solution to this bad puzzle is technically given to the player.

Cons: The solution to this bad puzzle is to just touch the boulder repeatedly, with no feedback, until it breaks. FORTY TIMES to be exact.

When the correct solution to your puzzles causes the player to think your game is broken you have made a mistake.

The final puzzle is the best of the lot, though I'd argue it's not really a puzzle. You just need to use the boulders to block some spinning guns until you can reach the key.

Pros: It's actually fun to block these things off, and the firing rate is enough that you'd want to use the boulders, but not so high that you'll lose all your health the moment you make a mistake.

Cons: Even played perfectly you'll have to run in front of an exposed gun at some point.

This leads to the blade maze. It's a maze with blades that spin around fixed points in the middle of various rooms, instantly killing the player if they come in contact with the blade. Despite the instant death, this wouldn't be too bad. The real trouble is finding where the exits actually are.

Two words. File Viewer.

It's a lot more fun not having to run in circles constantly as you desperately try to find a fake wall.

This room feels like it doesn't belong in this game. The suddenly solid brown visuals are quite different from the heavy blending seen everywhere else, and strangest of all upon entering the room the player is given five ammo that can't be used on this board. I completely missed it at the time, and went the rest of the game with these five bullets for some reason. Even weirder is that the zombies fought later can be shot despite this portion of the game being intended to be gun-free.

Speaking of WestWood's zombies, they're pretty much the end of it for anything of merit in gameplay. The shop in WestWood allows you to purchase armor which will cause their bites to deal one less damage. I feel like I've been let down by most ZZT armor implementations due to constantly running into bugs, so it's well worth point out that this one does exactly what it says it should. Get bit, lose ten health. Have armor, gain one health. ZZT only checks for game overs on the player's tick so even if the initial bite drops your health to zero, Zack can carry on with that one point that gets restored.

Oddities And Ends

Ultima RPG is a very weird game. Here are a few other bizarre moments on the adventure that are worth sharing with the class.

Before starting the game, we get a look at our protagonist Zack. It's a pretty good ZZT anime fellow to be fair.

Ultima is certainly proud of it.

Zack definitely looks Final Fantasy VII inspired, with his name counting for some extra evidence to draw conclusions from. The spiky hair is great, but I really like the way the ZZT player's colors are worked into Zack's clothing. Good job Ultima!

Hands down the worst thing about the game are the graphics. Boards are frequently unpleasant to look at, and this board in particular is extra-barfy. There's a real lack of color contrast between the grass and the leaves on the trees that can make the delineation of walkable ground and solid wall difficult to read at a glance. The outdoor areas tend to be very open spaces so it never impacts the player's navigation of the board, but you could just as well tell me that those trees up top are actually a dirt path that gets obscured by the cave in the foreground.

The game relies extensively on ZZTAE's fade tool. ZZTAE being the other popular third-party ZZT editor alongside KevEdit back in the early 2000s. Being a DOS only program its use fizzled out once the DOSBox era had arrived, but for a few years it was the preferred editor for a decent amount of ZZTers. While KevEdit also has a fade tool, ZZTAE had its critics who couldn't stand its output in that regard. Sometimes they come out alright. The background in the homes of WestWood are all certainly made with it and look fine, but they're also abstract backgrounds not meant to look like anything.

Once the blends are meant to actually be something, it's tough to praise them. The sky in WestWood along with the ocean on the world map serve as good examples here. In both cases the color choices are an identical fade from light to dark blue. Something just doesn't sit right with me when I look at them. I think it may be just how often opposite ends of the blend come in direct contact with each other. The fade from solid to normal to breakable to water to a now dark colored solid is a staple of ZZT's graphics, but look at how often bright blue comes in direct contact with dark. Ironically after the too low contrast of the leaves and grass we've now got too high of a contrast seen in the skies and oceans.

Is this just me?

For an unexpected surprise, one of the homes in WestWood has an NPC that suddenly offers Zack some scrambled eggs.

They even have a little bottle of cooking oil! After a moment the eggs are plated and served with Kanter asking for some feedback.

Rate. Those. Eggs!

Of course, the first message betrays Zack's true feelings on the matter. They're yummy! This is the sort of kindness I feel Zack didn't see much of in his world. This world is way nicer to its people. Well, other than that horde thing probably.

Responding in kind nets the player a gem for being so polite. For a neutral response Kanter vows to try harder next time, and for a negative response he apologies for the eggs not being good enough. Regardless of Zack's response the conversation ends with a generic "Hi Zack." message if you try to speak with Kanter again. Sorry, only one egg meal per playthrough.

Finally, one of the emptier boards of Leux contains another one of those big crystals being watched over by a guy who kindly tells you to go away. The actual important part are the tombstones in a small graveyard. Despite having twenty of them available, only three names show up which are repeated a number of times. You've got "Bum Licker", "Max Lucado", and "Greg Hauck". There are some genuinely amusing moments in Leux so "Bum Licker" isn't exactly a laugh riot. Mr. Lucado at least hints at something with that Lucado stone. Lastly, Greg remains a total mystery to me, and has the most graves. Don't question it.

Final Thoughts

I suppose if I had to sum up Ultima RPG it would have to be described as a perfectly run of the mill ZZT world from the early 2000s plagued with bugs. I get the sense that Zack is supposed to be kind of an edgy character from the earlier more mean spirited portions of the game, but that aspect of his personality is discarded like pretty much everything else once he arrives in Taiiagi. There could be something clever there with a cold-hearted hero from a post-apocalyptic world letting his guard down once survival is no longer a struggle. I would like to see Zack emboldened with a genuine desire to protect this new world from evil so that it doesn't have to fall apart as his own did. Ultima doesn't do that, or anything with the character really. It feels less like Zack's personality changes as he helps others and is helped by them (yummy eggs and such) and more like Ultima just made Zack accept everything he came across in this new world because it's easier than having to constantly question it and demand Yomanay come up with a suitable explanation for things.

Whatever Ultima RPG wishes it was, it's not. At multiple points in the game it's implied that there will be RPG battles that you'd expect from games with "RPG" right in the title. In the mayor's home in WestWood, there's even a blurb about the importance of healing over attacking in combat. Nothing of the sort can be found in the game other than the vague hints that Ultima wanted to make an RPG. Instead it's a mix of gun-focused action and very rudimentary dungeon crawler. The reloading system tries to enhance things a tad, but the identical enemies that mostly take themselves out mean that what action is there gets no opportunity to impress. The melee combat avoids being a guessing game at first, yet by the end it too feels like there's less and less effort.

The whole game feels like it has an identity crisis. It's edgy, it's humorous, it's dull and gray, it's bright and green. There's no real cohesion to it with Yomanay just directly intervening on the player's behalf to get them to go to various locations. Sure there's supposed to be an underworld horde threatening the world and taking over entire continents, but the only information the player gets on that is through Yomanay's mouth, and he's purposely not saying much. Like many ZZT games, I'm sure this one was also an instance of the author just making up the story as they went along, perhaps deciding they wanted to make an RPG but not wanting to throw out this Random Inc. action sequence. It all feels hastily put together, literally falling to pieces by the end.

Having played through it, I get why this game doesn't have anything in the way of reviews. It can't focus on anything long enough to captivate players, and the sheer number of bugs towards the end are very likely to get players to just quit. As soon as I ran into silent guards and passages to the title screen I immediately assumed that I was playing unfinished content meant for part two or something, but there is a demo for the sequel so it's clear that what's here is meant to be played. I'd be willing to bet this was a mistaken upload of an almost finished version as the game's credits do claim Knightt to have beta tested. Fatal bugs have frequently wound up in "final" releases, but this one just doesn't feel right to me with how quickly the code collapses after a dozen or two boards without the slightest issue.

The sequel demo is no help either, and if anything continues the trend of Ultima not knowing what it is they want to create as it begins with a platforming engine. An RPG without the RPG, Ultima RPG is ultimately a game that's trying its best but can't find solid footing. The numerous bugs towards the back half of the game turn an okay-ish adventure into a mess that makes it tough to recommend for fans of ZZT action titles, rpgs, or just fantasy adventures. While other games in ZZT's history have mixed gameplay styles or mixed settings quite nicely, Ultima RPG a jack of all trades and master of none.