Ultima: Runes of Virtue

"From when an Avatar was just 32x32 pixels. And near to monochrome."

They create worlds over at Origin, apparently, but apparently they rehash the successful ones occasionally, too. Ultima: Runes of Virtue(URV) seemed the ideal way to procrastinate finally playing Ultima VI and still feel as though I was closer to playing the game itself, but by the end it was probably another simple RPG that frustrated me enough to be wary of more complex ones. URV features a bastardized version of Britannia, site of the seminal Ultima IV and V. It's a convenient little solo action RPG where you are sent off to find eight runes, each in a separate dungeon, so Lord British can apparently hide them above ground for Ultima IV, and all the time I played it I felt there was probably something better, but I might as well go along with it.

The formula: run through each dungeon and get a rune that improves your Strength, which allows more hits from monsters before you're killed, Dexterity, which doesn't matter unless you really like to run from fights, or Intelligence, which determines how much magic you can use before recharging. You have a handy gauge of stars and hearts at the side, so I think Origin is also re-creating part of the Zelda world.

The characters are also regurgitated, as Ultima fans will recognize your choice of playing as Iolo the bard, Dupre the Paladin, Mariah the mage, and Shamino the ranger, who have varying Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. They even have different icons, but then again when you win, you always get knighted. Including Mariah, a female, or Dupre, who is described as a brave knight of great renown anyway.

But they're all marginalized, really. The result is that what should be old friends feel more like staples of the Ultima series. Towns are also utilitarian; they have no names, and generally you just walk over the items you need to buy there. Castles hold out some mystery, with the most interesting one holding treasure in the basement. As the game buffers the last location you've visited, your character has a small adventuring treadmill to get to 99 gold, the dinkiest cash maximum I've seen in any RPG, as you practice techniques you'll need in dungeons. Even a secret stair in back of another castle fails to excite. The people in the area have nothing much to say.

Even Lord British, the guy who tells you what's what, is wooden. He has eight different things to tell you depending on the next dungeon you have to solve, which is seven more than other NPC's. And they usually crack jokes you can't laugh at even out of charity. Folks in dungeons, on the other hand, creepily reappear every four rooms to give advice or instructions. They include the tackily ubiquitous Dr. Cat and Gnu Gnu, pseudonyms for URV's authors, Sherry the mouse from Ultima VI (did I mention I read a hint book on U6 to procrastinate playing it as well?) and Klip and Klop, two parts of a pushmi-pullyu sort of creature. The only intriguing part here is why the authors made a character named after Lord British's girlfriend so prominent. And the most maddening character may be Chuckles the Jester, because he is animated. He blocks the square he's walking from and the one he's going to, and he often likes to bounce around in front of that doorway you'd really like to leave. Even worse than his usual 'ho eyo he hum' nonsense.

So dungeon crawling it is, then, if we're looking for major strengths! URV lets you focus on that, certainly. Although monsters run around a dungeon room in real time and smack you, you get bopped back where you entered if you get killed. There's also an ankh that all player start with. It allows you back to Lord British's castle so you can reload and retry, and it's easy to find on the item menu, which is a grid of 32 slots where you can just hit A or B to hold the item and use the same button to activate it later.

The conventions of the abstract puzzles are easy to pick up on. Levers, pressure plates and keys are the main parts you need to notice. Levers can raise a portcullis or change the nature of an object. They can be switched back, too. A very late puzzle has a lever that toggles a teleport arrow, which bounces you two squares in the direction it points, to a boulder you can push and back, and a personal favorite has you change a troll's pattern as you flick a lever so he trips a switch you can't reach. Some pressure plates teleport you and others release arrows as a trap. URV also puts out substantial illusory treasures and even some one-way teleports which have you reaching for your ankh--or the 'save state' key. Basically, you step on one square, causing the landscape to rearrange. Then you see what's changed and if you can make it to or beyond a certain door. Sometimes the changes are melodramatic, with half the floor and wall spaces toggled, but other times it'll be just one square changing to a secret door. Then there are three kinds of keys: heart, star and ankh. They open up doors with the same logo on, and often you'll need to pick up a key in one room and bring it to another. With rooms at 16x16 it never seems too hard, and no key is used further than two rooms away.

Puzzles start easily where you can just explore everything, coast, and find the first two rooms. Later you'll fall into teasing traps that get you just once--such as food or treasure disappearing or hopping between sides of a room. The only other dazzling bit is the periodic level where you have a maze of teleport arrows, and some kick you around serially. Which is always enervating and messes with your eyes too. They're good puzzles with nothing too pressing. Occasionally you can even circumvent the puzzles by picking up a needed item in advance from another dungeon, destroying the point but providing the only real spark of amusement. You can even get a treasure from a room that's supposed to tease you.

And when you start piling up the items you need, the game gets very interesting, and it's more than just roaming around a bunch of squares and seeing what triggers what. Generally you'll have to go through a dungeon more than once. For instance, there's a side room in an early dungeon that leads to a magic rope bridge you need to cross to important islands. Later, one dungeon has two nine-room spirals on a lower level. One leads to the whip, which has a range of two squares and lets you smack land enemies from across a river, but the other leads to the rune. Most of the items you find that can destroy landscape, such as the wand of fireballs which blasts thick spider webs that block your way to a ship, are powerful weapons although they do cost magic.

And this is what really brings URV together. In a game where the treasure you find is less valuable than any spare food or potion, poetic intrigue should come from side quests you might not expect in a GameBoy game. Many weapons feel standard; there's the item that freezes monsters and pairs of items that are both good, but when contrasted, trade off between speed and damage. Of course there's the prototypical awesome magic missile weapon and corresponding magic sword near the end, and each weapon is used to solve a certain puzzle or clear a certain batch of monsters more easily.

This ensures that URV picks up pace as it reaches its conclusion; the penultimate dungeon, Pride, sends you down several sets of stairs, off to the east, and back up, where you emerge on the final isle. Levers and toggles become more frequent, as do invincible enemies, including creepy grimacing boulders that fire arrow clumps at you. The underground passage and weapons you find along the way feel momentous, and the best part is that you don't have to do it twice. A boat appears that shuttles you back to where you'll face the final dungeon. A tacit admission of imperfection, but at least a game that feels dinky never gets too long. And cutting back to the twenty-level final dungeon, you can dive right into the kitchen-sink ragout of brute-force levels, teleport mazes, and lever finagling that lead to the Rune of Humility at the bottom of the Abyss.

If there's anything memorable about URV that stands apart from Ultima's conventions, it's how monster abilities are flipped around from what you'd expect. Tough customers in other RPG's are eminently beatable. Reapers, big trees that fire magic bolts, can only have one shot on the screen at a time. You can duck in, fire, and retreat and pick them off easily. It's still workmanlike fun, though, especially if the shot hits another enemy that's chasing you. Rats, on the other hand, are extremely nasty and quick. If they're bobbing around behind a door, you'll probably take damage from them when you open it. And seahorses--well, URV doesn't have U4 or U5's general moral themes, but shoot an innocent pretty seahorse and reap the whirlwind. Slimes, annoying pushovers from earlier Ultimas, still divide when hit, but they're much harder to kill. They can fill up a corridor quickly. Spiders are also supposed to be weak, but they cough out cobwebs you have to hack through. Cyclops are expectedly nasty, as they just run into you and wait before doing serious damage. In several rooms near the end, you fight enough of them that they can surround you, and you need the magic sword to hack your way out. Then there are some invincible monsters put in a spot precisely to inform you that this is a puzzle, not just an obstacle to hack through. And the most consistently annoying monsters, Eep Eeps, can't do any damage. They just bounce around in great herds, blocking you from getting where you want, and with their dialogue('Eep eep!') they are more sickening than anything that can take away from your health meter.

Fortunately the graphic variety is closer to the monsters than to NPC's. URV's dungeons consistently rotate wall and pillar motifs, including the false walls which clearly look different but are similar enough that you always feel smart detecting them. The locked dungeon door convention with different shaped keys is also pleasing, and perhaps the greatest successes are the Easter Island style heads that fire arrows at you if you spring a tripwire. Although the outside world seems very washed up, you'll spend most of your time indoors, and while nothing is terribly exotic the designers recognized the same old tiles would get boring. The cheesiest part would be the cut scenes when you walk into the dungeons and are painfully pixilated, or worse, when you go pick the rune and raise it above your head with the screen flashing. Thankfully the rune is square, so it's not too Zelda. But nobody looks remotely like his snapshot in the item inventory screen, and Dupre in particular looks like he's about to bust out shouting 'NI!' any moment.

There are several types of background music depending on your location, and while you'll want to turn it off when hitting the harder dungeon puzzles, it's the sort of thing you'd be proud of if you started belting it out on a piano. The dungeon music does feel a bit too harpsichordy. It reflects the game accurately; later, when you come back to it, you'll recall it with affection, but it won't make much of an impression unless you're overexposed to it.

It's hard to imagine getting stuck on any part of URV for a while, but at the same time you never feel like you're coasting through it. Rooms generally take a couple of times through to master, but you can still power through them by stocking up early. But sadly without a fun world to save, you're stuck with a few puzzles you have little doubt you'll solve and dungeons that feel livelier than villages. No one puzzle feels too silly, and you have a bit of affirmative action for monsters that largely suck in other RPG's. URV is great as a diversion game that minimizes frustration and outright triviality and is easy to jump into. But it's a great example of how a linear RPG can only do so much without atmosphere, or a story.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/05/04