"A near flawless game in the classic Ultima series"

Ultima has always been a unique RPG series. The creators of the Ultima series wanted to give the player more than just another game, but to also give them an experience as well. They attempted to create immersive worlds in which your actions had consequences and to beat the game meant more than simply whupping a single bad guy. And Ultima 7 is the best in that sense. Below I will explain why.

GRAPHICS:
For the first time in an Ultima you can really see what is going on in the game. Monster's loom large on the screen, buildings are large as life, and the Avatar looks like more than a little stick figure. Strictly speaking the graphics are not all that good by today's standards, but for its time these graphics were the best thing out. However they aren't rendered in an efficient manner. The Graphics engine is so hard drive intensive, that some times your hard drive won't stop whirring and running. Which, of course, slows the game down. A feature that was reduced since Ultima 6 was the character portraits, which became little thumbnails in Ultima 7. This doesn't allow for detailed portraits, and leaves out any personality from graphics in its characters.

GAMEPLAY:
Gameplay can be divided into two main categories, Fighting, and Non-fighting. The fights are not done very well. There is almost no strategy involved in a fight, and you can go the entire game without casting a single fighting spell. It doesn't help that the CPU handles the NPC's and doesn't do a very good job of it, quite often putting weak characters on the front line (even if you tell that NPC to attack the "weak creature", he will still attack the strongest one he can find). But outside of fights, the gameplay is rather top notch. I have yet to see a non-Ultima game that lets you do as many things as this. You can bake bread and sell it, take a part time job gathering eggs, and of course rifle through people's personal belongings. Other touches include a vast array of items, spoons, forks, shears, tables and chairs; all able to be moved around and even taken. Wandering around is one of the best parts of the game simply because there is so much to do.

PLOT:
The plot is rather simple and straightforward. Stop Guardian from destroying the world. But with its twists and turns, the story takes off. There are the evils of men, the evils of the supernatural, and the evils of those who blindly follow where they are led. Ultima's have always had somewhat of a political agenda, or at least a spiritual one. Ultima 4 tried to show us what it would be like to be a moral person. Ultima 7 warns us of the danger's of following what we perceive as moral without seriously considering the consequences.

Ultima 7 also benefits from a vast (24) number of subplots in the game. I consider anything a subplot when completing it isn't crucial to the outcome of the game. These subplots allow you to fix up a great number of people's lives in Britannia. Anything from finding a locket, to reuniting old friends, is covered in a subplot somewhere. In fact it is the subplot feature alone that takes this game from being great, to being a classic; and it is something that hasn't been done as well in the later (Serpent Isle, Pagan) Ultimas.

So what does the plot add up to? Let's do some math. You save the world 3 times (the obvious Guardian main plot, the Skara Brae liche plot, and the Exodus Isle of Fire subplot), and you can solve 24 subplots. Plus all the secrets and NPC's in the game. It all adds up to one monster game.

Other Issues:
The biggest problem in the game is that it is a rather buggy product, prone to leave gamers high and dry in the middle of the game. I have encountered 3 types of bugs in the game, one is where it drops you back into DOS, second is when it gives you an error and automatically reloads your last save, and lastly is where it just freezes up for all eternity. The last one is by far the most common of the 3. Saving also takes too long, and without Mo'Slo this game runs way too fast.

Summary: A very good game marred by only a few defects, which aren't egregious enough to make this game anything but Classic.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99