The Ultima series is one of the great-grandaddies of the role playing genre. Ultima III: Exodus was released in 1983 for PC’s by Origin, the original creators of the franchise, while the Famicom edition was released in ’87 in Japan by FCI. The folks over at FCI pushed the ever living daylights out of the Famicom port with all sorts of marketing strategies; publishing a manga with kickass art, an album of the game’s music rearranged with vocals from prolific voice actress Noriko Hidaka, plenty of exposure from Famitsu magazine leading up to its release, and even an (unreleased) anime series were only a few limbs the Ultima behemoth had to swing at consumers. That album is pretty great if you like a bit of 80’s J-pop, by the way.
Though Ultima: Exodus was a moderate success in sales figures, it was thoroughly overshadowed by the competition in the long run. Even at the time, the Famicom’s core userbase – that being young Japanese kids – were baffled by how complicated and unfriendly Ultima felt when compared to the Dragon Quest they loved so dearly. It probably didn’t help that 1987 was a killer year for Japanese RPGs on the Famicom: Dragon Quest II, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Digital Devil Story Megami Tensei, and the first Final Fantasy were some of the heavy hitters of that year, with most of those bookending Exodus’s Japanese launch by just a few weeks. Ouch. The game eventually made its way to the North American NES two years later, albeit with less fanfare than the marketing typhoon that accompanied the Japanese release.
Ultima: Exodus is a master of deception. Booting up the game for the first time and cycling through the available classes, I’m met with colourful super-deformed character art. Poppy 8-bit music chirps alongside the cute visuals. It won’t take long for me to realise that I have been deceived. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled. There’s no way I could have known the absurd level of frustration and mistakes that lay ahead of me.
At first glance, it’s as typical of an RPG as they come. Party of four, fantasy setting, spells and swords, the whole nine. If you’ve played one, most games in the genre become self-explanatory, don’t they? Therein lied my first mistake: the grossly incorrect assumption that I actually understood how to play it.
Leave what you know about the role playing genre at the door, because Ultima: Exodus is playing by no rules but its own. NOTHING is simple or straightforward; battles are brutal from the word go, dungeons will chew you up and spit you out if entered unprepared…hell, even something as basic as levelling up is a process that’s one long beginner’s trap. The game’s official subtitle should’ve been Ultima: School of Hard Knocks.
Anyway, back to my plight. In my pig ignorance, I made what I thought would be a traditionally balanced party: A paladin, a ranger, a cleric and a wizard, and started my journey properly. I immediately jumped into grinding outside the first town to boost my levels, picking up Gold as I went along, as is RPG tradition.
Ultima: Exodus is home to the slowest combat I’ve ever experienced in an RPG, bar none. It feels like tiny people inside the cartridge are rolling dice and tallying up damage in real time. As 99% of the game is spent battling, this pacing problem easily elongates the game to be a few dozen hours longer than it needs to be. If you want to rethink a move on your turn you’re shit outta luck, as trying to go back to the previous menu unceremoniously ends that turn immediately. Also if you run into a problem, you can’t flee from battle, which is a, uh, “feature” exclusive to the NES port of the game. The only way out is victory or defeat. Double also the amount of monsters to battle are pretty damn limited, meaning you’ll be staring at the same 10 or so baddies ad nauseum until you finish the game or die in real life, whichever comes first. Tack on the fact that the battle theme is the worst song on an otherwise great soundtrack, and all in all, fighting is just not fun.
Regardless of ALL THAT, I trudged on. After two hours worth of mind numbing grinding, I presented my party to Lord British, king of Sosaria and resident level up giver. That amount of time spent levelling up rewarded me with a level 2 Paladin and Ranger, while my casters didn’t have enough EXP to climb the ranks, so at level 1 they remained.
It was at this point I put the game down for a bit. Needless to say, I was feeling frustrated. Really, I’m lucky that it dawned on me early into my journey that I was completely out of my depth. It felt like I had just shown up for my first day at a new job, only to find that it was for a company that only spoke Simlish. I considered dropping the game altogether, but as my goal to finish every game on the NES, I’d be coming back to stumble my way through eventually. To my mind, giving up now would be silly. So I donned my robe and wizard hat, and started researching like mad to formulate a plan of attack.
I would’ve been up Ye Olde Shite Creeke without a paddle if not for the kindness of internet strangers on this one. GameFAQs was an indispensable resource for my duration in Sosaria, as were various walkthroughs and fan sites outlining things I wouldn’t have stood a chance to make heads or tails of myself. For example, remember when I said that levelling up was a beginner’s trap? Here’s why: when you level up a character, their attributes don’t increase. The only thing that boosts is HP, at a fixed rate of 100 HP per level. So even if you’ve managed to scrape and claw your way to level 5, you’ll still have the stats of a level 1 greenhorn, and will get trounced by the level 5 enemies that’ll whoop your ass across space and time. Stat levelling is done in the hidden world of Ambrosia, through Gold instead of experience points. The official manual doesn’t mention this mega important stat levelling fact even once, so it’s up to the plucky player to piece together vague clues from infamously unhelpful NPCs to figure all of this out. Or to seek out the exceedingly rare Ultima III hint book. Or to just Google it. Whatever your preference.
After studying Exodus’s intricacies, party line-ups, and important pieces of information, I decided to restart the game with an all-new party: a paladin, a ranger, and two wizards. Because the only thing better than one wizard is two. Building up a plan of attack was a huge step in the right direction, because every aspect of the game feels as though it requires careful strategy before tackling. Party setups, when and where to use spells, the least dangerous routes to other towns…even something as simple as the right time to level up is a hotly debated topic with many different approaches to consider.
Stopping and considering all approaches before continuing onward turned out to be one of my favourite parts of the Ultima: Exodus experience. It’s rare to have punishing, no-nonsense difficulty to tackle in an RPG these days. Living by the sharpness of your own wit was a thoroughly rewarding feeling, which is a sensation that still feels exclusive to old school RPGs to this day. In a similar vein, how open-ended it was ended up being another one of my favourite bits. There’s no set order to progressing in Exodus, so how and when to tackle the game’s few story beats is up to you. It brings a strong sense of adventuring on your own terms to the table, the likes of which has only grown in popularity in the decades since. There was some fun to be had when the challenge came from legitimate challenge as opposed to mind melting tedium.
So after over-analysing the hell out of 20 year old GameFAQs posts and manically taking and re-taking notes, I had a solidified plan in mind. Kill a horrific amount of monsters, get mountains of gold from doing so, max out my stats before levelling up properly, seek out the best gear, and go on with the game.
It may not look like much breaking it down like that, but this was a really, REALLY time consuming experience. The grind is absolutely obscene. To put it into perspective, I’d easily say I spent 50 hours or more on Ultima: Exodus. About four hours of that were spent on dungeons and relevant exploration stuff while the remaining 46+ was pure, unfiltered grind. I was eventually Stockholm Syndrome’d into enjoying this after awhile; my brain had shut down and accepted my fate. Numbers good.
In case you couldn’t tell by my unhinged rambling, I had a bizarre, tumultuous relationship with Ultima: Exodus. One day we’d be at each others throats, sick to death of the sight of each other, while the next I’d be relaxing with it, enjoying its company like nothing had happened. It was an odd back and forth with this game – when I settled in and genuinely made a go of it, it felt co-operative and was as nice as something so ruthless could possibly be. When I approached it with aggravation and frustration, it gave as good as it got and made me despair. And I clearly lost my goddamn mind playing it because I’m talking about it like it’s a toxic ex I just couldn’t stay away from, even though it had so little to offer me. What the hell.
To call back to the beginning of this entry, I think “unfriendly” is the perfect descriptor for Ultima: Exodus. The simple act of healing your party is horrifically time consuming in and of itself, the townsfolk feel as though they intentionally have nothing helpful to say to point you in the right direction, and if I put any more detail into just how crunchy battling and grinding truly is, I might just shrivel up and blow away in the wind. Ultima: Exodus is a greedy beast of a game, gobbling up the free time of anyone who dares to try conquering it, but it’s not without glimmers of charm to unearth. The immeasurable sense of accomplishment I felt upon finally defeating the titular Exodus? I can honestly say most game endings don’t hold a candle to that feeling. Impeccable.
Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention the absolutely stellar Ultima: Exodus Remastered hack available on romhacking.net. It drastically overhauls almost every single aspect of the original NES edition, improving literally every single thing about it. If it wasn’t for the self-imposed rule of having to finish every NES game’s vanilla release, I would’ve chosen this glorious hack over the original in a compass heartbeat. Highly impressive stuff, would 100% recommend if you have a hankering for this game.
All in all, Ultima: Exodus is, more often than not, difficult to digest. If you want to test your chops and get your ass thoroughly kicked by a tough as nails old school RPG, this one’s a top contender. But really, I don’t think I could recommend it in good faith to just about anyone else, if only because the grind is so un-fun. In my personal opinion, there are many more dynamic and worthwhile RPGs to play on the NES alone that deserve your time more, unless you’re an Ultima superfan who wants to try every version available. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to file a restraining order against Ultima: Exodus. But ooh, that NES version of Ultima IV sure looks cute…
Final Rating:
(in actuality I give it something like a 4 probably)
NESJunk 