Ultima: Exodus

"The very first RPG I ever played, and quite an enjoyable game."

To fully appreciate this game, I guess you have to imagine yourself as a kindergartner, having never played a game more complex than Bubble Bobble, suddenly confronted with this game so radically different... with towns, townspeople, a big world you can explore at your leisure, huge dark dungeons, and the ability to create your OWN CHARACTERS!

Okay, so we all have fond memories of our first RPG, and today, coming from Final Fantasy Tactics and Suikoden II, we're not likely to be impressed by this game. First of all, the graphics (aside from the interiors of the dungeons) are sinfully ugly (I even thought so when I first played the game), and, as is to be expected from an American RPG, we're confronted with a lot more annoying details than we care to worry about. You have to buy food, which is consumed at an alarmingly fast rate. You have to select the ''talk'' command from the menu. Treasure chests are trapped. The difficulty of the game is scaled to your characters' levels.

But Ultima 3 does many things better than other RPGs of the time. The game has twice as many selectable character classes as FF1, all of them unique in appearance, which is what made the game appeal to me so much initially (even before I understood the concept of a ''save'' function). It's hard to classify the game as well, as it uses elements from a variety of RPG types. The overall layout and appearance of the game is traditional, but the battles are conducted as in turn-based strategy RPGs, and the dungeons are 1st-person view, multi-floored ''dungeon crawler'' type. There are also some interesting places in towns such as pubs (the bartenders have clues), casinos (play rock-paper-scissors for cash), prisons, and a fortune-teller. In one of my favorite parts of the game, you can sneak into a heavily-guarded city through a forest maze, and find a huge treasury. You can steal an obscene amount of money, but good luck getting out! I should also mention that the game is almost completely nonlinear, and you are given a huge world to explore.

Ultima 3 suffers from some needlessly irritating puzzles-- namely determining where a moon gate will appear, and where it will lead you, according to the phases of the two moons, and when and where to find the lost city of Dawn, but this doesn't detract from the game too much. If you play this game not trying to achieve your goals as quickly as possible, and simply for the sheer joy of exploration, Ultima 3 can be an extremely rewarding experience.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/11/03, Updated 04/11/03