"It's party time in the Ultima series! And you get free food and gold for just being there!"

Ultima III(U3) brings more to the player than the ability to control a party of four instead of just a single character. It has a treacherous overworld, symmetrical and pleasing puzzles, a complicated town system, tension and foreshadowing(you can see or intuit many places you can't easily visit,) and few loose ends. It also has the honor of spawning two great games: Deathlord and Ultima IV. Each game does well incorporating different facets of U3's gameplay while branching off well in its own direction. While U3 is more of a GCD than an LCM of the two, it's incredibly entertaining even if you've played later Ultima games first. I never really got this feeling playing Ultima II, which was barely satisfactory. U3 is satisfying.

The blight on Lord British's latest land, Sosaria(good thing he has your psychic summoning wavelength on whatever magic devices he uses for that sort of thing) is an entity called Exodus, the result of an unholy alliance of Mondain and Minax that is more ludicrous than many find the Virgin Birth. Once you know what Exodus is, this statement will seem raucous, but it is the only weak link in the game. Your object is to travel through Sosaria, pick up clues in the towns, search the dungeons for important items and even an important figure, and eventually enter Exodus's castle. It's easy enough to find where the island is on, and you can even enter the castle's island through the new feature of moongates; the locations and destinations cycle depending on the moon phases. But you can only gaze and wish, so probably it's better to start by entering the town and castle near where your party is dropped, although nearby dungeons may have an immediate payoff for moderately improved characters.

U3 adds some likely extraneous but still entertaining and unique character classes, replete with varying Mage or Cleric spell ability or weapon affinity, but more importantly, it allows you to create a roster of twenty characters, four of which can be on a quest, and the combat is accordingly more complex. It's also lost the flippancy and 'I-ain't-tellin' attitude Ultima II seemed to project. The challenges are subtler; Sosaria, for instance, wraps diagonally, an interesting change from the vertical scrolling, and as you follow it you'll notice a town and a dungeon on separate islands(it's annoying to wait for a pirate ship to get there, the game's second biggest nuisance.) Then there's a mountain range you can't seem to pass, and worse, nonviolent magic in U3 has developed to random teleportation up and down in dungeons but not in the real world. Yet it manages to insert a general element of mystery. There is a town that that's rarely there, and the game now has forests, which along with mountains block your field of view, to create mazes that hide people with critical information.

Given that you need to control four characters, U3 accordingly forces you into more sophisticated combat. The biggest annoyance? When chasing you outside, monsters move diagonally(except the ones in dungeons that are invisible,) and you move linearly, and you can't flee combat once it starts. But the background for combat changes with the terrain you're on, and it's not tough to win levels in combat. Given that there are about four monsters per combat, and each one gives at least three experience, that means only eight combats are needed for a level gain. So it never dominates the game. But it makes itself useful. There's a combat near the end where you need to understand how monsters moved in combat in order to defeat invisible monsters, which caps off the ending working out well; the new feature isn't just a snazzy hook to impress the player and card for level-two weakos slipping by and performing heroes' tasks. It's a legitimate part of the story even if making an illegal move loses your character his turn.

One gets the feeling U3 actually tries to be realistic now that the series has pinned down the fantasy aspect. The moons add a sense of time even if they're still represented by numbers, the weird futuristic gadgets are gone, along with many cheap wise-cracks, but now you can actually picture real characters questing. For instance, you peer at a gem to view a landscape or(new to U3) a dungeon level, after which it disintegrates. This is more believable than the helms from Ultima II and more widespread and functionally useful, and best of all it's not a total spoiler. Special locations are designated with question marks, leaving you to map stuff. Also the mish-mosh of items has been honed to something more manageable, which is almost as nice a restructuring as cutting dungeon levels in half.

The most impressive detail, though, may be how winds can stop your boat from moving in a certain direction. It can get almost as annoying as waiting for a boat to come along, but it's a better way to trip you up than the usual onslaught of monsters. On the combat grid, boats are even more inconvenient as they block off many squares on the combat grid. But to expedite things you can also use missile weapons when monsters are far away(although the magic variants are oddly only +2 and +4) and switch later, or leave one party member back. Along with everyone flailing his fist you get the sense there's a brawl. When your party gets good and you feel you want to concentrate on the quests, you even have a wonderful way to avoid that combat you can't flee from once you enter it. Placing chests throughout the land to block the more mobile enemy groups helps you feel affluent(you're so swimming in gold you don't need chests--and besides you don't want to 'roll over' at ten thousand) and allows you to warp the terrain. It's not clear if this was by design, but it adds an awesome wrinkle that allows you to avoid unnecessary combat and focus on the real stuff when you get good.

The game makes a genuine effort to dialog with you. It still has the keyboard commands, but you must [Y]ell 'SEARCH' to search or 'DIG' to dig. Although I am not a big talker and may be biased, I suspect even gregarious and attention craving people who are excited when they're about to do something important may be confused why this was not put under 'O'ther commands--or they'll at least argue loudly that it should be. You discover many of these commands talking to townspeople(no conversations yet--their social skills haven't quite matched their collective knowledge, or otherwise a party might've formed and whipped Exodus before you) which gives the game a slightly contrived feel(but not as bad as monsters that greet and then attack you,) but on the other hand it opens a dimension besides defeating monsters and getting stuff.

Ambrosia, while not U3's 'Biggest Part of Me,' provides a strong antistrophe to the usual overworld. It has forests where you can't see much of a maze as well as a bunch of doors to unlock, many of which lead to a dead end. It can be a nuisance to find your way there as you need random cooperation to enter, but once you do there is an intriguing maze with many odd monsters attacking you for entering the wrong area. With monsters only in set locations and also the complete lack of friendly outposts, it's a good mysterious counterweight to the bustling Sosaria.

Visually U3 does little to surpass Ultima II in towns or outdoors(especially on the wretched four-color PC port--grass isn't purple or blue, and it now needs to be slowed down, so who cares how much easier cheating is) although it has ditched all non-graphical attributes scenes and the ugly swamp icon and instead decided to include lava, whirlpools and a pleasing font even if the character stats take up too much of the screen. The increased monster names and animations(titans and Bradles--rubber balls with legs--trump the firecrackers that once passed for demons) are good even if the game cheats by assigning several different names to an icon(and experience--I suspect they're not REALLY different,) and even different backgrounds during a fight allow for a change of pace. You'll encounter some minor graphical shortcomings such as Lord British still waving as he rushes to attack you should you start a disturbance in his castle(one massively entertaining 'bug' is that this is the only game where you can kill him,) and they don't have icons for bridges or for each letter yet. The perspective in the dungeons is still very bad. Walls right in front of you look a half-square away although they've fixed the bit about walls popping up where they aren't. There are even rough icon-grids for fountains and special characters you'll meet, nothing compared to the dungeon rooms in Ultima IV, but still a sign dungeons can be more than just important chests or nasty monsters to defeat.

U3 retains some nasty holdovers from Ultima II such as statistical roll-over or the game saving whenever you enter a new location, which is fortunately not as critical, because it's tougher to get killed, and if all else fails you can shift items and gold from your deceased party to a new one anyway. But the game is overall aesthetically pleasing. The place names still aren't, well, in place, and in fact the best way to denounce them is to deride one town name without using vowels. LCB. WTF? But at least they, as well as monsters' names, are obvious, and the places themselves have acceptable detail, forcing you to walk around barriers in order to find important knowledgeable people tucked away. The underworld is also better defined; it's not exactly more hospitable, but the colored walls, fountains and other mysterious locations make them more impressive, if not nicer, places to be. The dungeons also serve different purposes. Although some just allow you to accomplish the same parts of your quest more easily, there are a few hard-to-find ones you must ultimately explore.

There were a lot of wasted spaces for open areas in Ultima II(which also required one more disk,) but U3 compromises well between losing you and having enough secluded places to keep being interesting, and there are also plenty of random people with generic information bouncing about that add Local Flavor(i.e. druids are in the forest of Yew)--different professions for different towns. You also do not waste food as quickly there--ah, moderation, but sadly that is in moderation as well, with the towns still the same grid-size as the outerworld. Yet this allowed Exodus's castle to be a monster fortress, and when dragons started spewing breath at me as I walked past the cells and magic fields, I really felt under fire, and I didn't care about the ending that a well-meaning friend had spoiled for me a decade earlier; in other and even more recent games I have just felt as though my party's hit points are drained to force the game to be harder, which is often part of the convention. And I had to smile when the ending implied that the masterpiece Ultima IV could only be vaguely imagined. With all the features it added, the 'vaguely' part is justified, but it could only because U3 brought enough clout.

It took me a while to get psyched up to play U3, but it was not just an accomplishment or another task gotten out of the way. I had bought Ultima Classics(I-III) in high school and didn't have the Mockingboard for U3 to work, and U2 was impossible and seemed buggy too, a sophomore jinx in more ways than one. So I wound up paying $50 for Ultima I, basically, but I got my revenge when I got a new collection(I-VII) on eBay for under $40. It made me feel less guilty playing the Apple emulator version but after Ultima II I assumed U3 would be even harder. It wasn't; U3 has some bizarre features(you can get attacked by horses in Ambrosia) and its once-revolutionary combat system has flaws, but the mistakes found are smaller and even humorous. The plot is solid, with several pieces being recycled as something more mature in Ultima IV, and the repeated cheat actions you can use to build up characters actually require clever puzzles. I could picture myself going through the game again to see how much time it would take the second time around or to check if I could maybe win with three characters.

Revelations
--four players, not just one!
--intricate combat system never gets too exasperating
--interesting ways around problems
--more physically realistic actions
--ending is exciting and tense, except for Exodus himself
--moongates allow cool teleportation
--foreshadowing woven in well, lots of 'see and don't touch yet'
--not too tough to improve characters
--you can make it tougher on replay

Lamentations
--Yeeecchhh-xodus. But I'm glad the inconsistency didn't stop the game being made
--waiting for a ship can be a bore
--you'll probably have to junk your original party
--seems unpolished at times
--graphics and monsters could be more diverse

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/13/02, Updated 06/13/02