Ultima V is a thoroughly impressive game. It takes everything Ultima IV
brought to the table and polishes it many times over.
Unlike Ultima IV there is actually a story in this one, one of total
chaos to boot. Lord British is gone, Blackthorn is reigning supreme and
the shadowlords are running amok. Throughout the game there is that
heavy feeling of oppressiveness which is really well done for a 1988
game. The fact that the early game is incredibly tough contributes
greatly to this feeling; early on you have no idea what you're supposed
to do and feel very lost. Help is hard to get because everyone is
scared of Blackthorn, the guards who are enforcing the new laws or the
shadowlords themselves. The general gameplay is pretty similar to the
previous game. You need to talk to people, gather hints, solve clues,
find objects and solve the game. At first the amount of speech is
overwhelming but you soon find out that it is only a facade, they don't
really talk more than in Ultima IV they just pad out what they are
saying more. The text is also much better written and lively which
makes the hint gathering portion of the game much more enjoyable.
It's still not perfect though. Although the dialogue is much better
written, it is incredibly dry. I don't think I've ever felt a hint of
an emotion while playing this game. There's a part where you go down
the underworld and talk to a shipwrecked captain. He tells you his
story of having killed his shipmates while under the influence of the
shards, causing them to become the shadowlords. Now in a modern game
that would have been an absolutely gripping confession, but in Ultima V
it is said so blandly that it didn't elicit much of an emotional
response from me. The whole game is like that, total lack of emotional
involvement. This truly drags the story down a couple of notches. There
is also a lack of reaction to your accomplishments. No one notices that
you've killed the shadowlords, no one compliments you on a job well
done. Without the shadowlords Blackthorn should go back to normal, and
even if Lord British had been lost forever Britannia could have strived
under a new ruler or the council. Still no one notices that the
shadowlords are gone, it is sort of a bummer.
This game also introduced night cycles. It is a good idea however it
can be a pain sometimes. Simply put, nothing happens during the night.
Very few NPC's are awake during that time, so the only thing you can do
yourself is sleep. I've played this game for 7 months and 6 days of in
game time and most of it was spent sleeping to skip the nights. The
concept is good but it needs to be executed better in the future. The
world of Britannia is much richer in this game. The castle of Lord
British has suburbs and there's keeps and huts scattered throughout the
land. This makes traveling more fun than it used to be because you're
always stumbling on something new. The dungeons are greatly improved.
Most of these improvements are graphical; dungeons are now fully
detailed, each sporting a different look than the next. They also feel
less maze like, but that could be an illusion stemming from the fact
that the added clarity of the graphics makes them easier to navigate.
At the bottom of the dungeons there is a new landmass called the
underworld. It has the same exact proportions than the overworld and is
quite fun to go through. The monsters are really tough and come at you
often. You also don't see much around you down there and everything is
hilly so you often have to follow a set path. It definitely feels
different but to me that was one of the strongest part of the game, I
loved going down there.
So far I've only been heaping praise on the game so why the 7.5? Well
obviously this game is old. The graphics are good, I sort of like them.
At this point you could say that they are "simple but clean". However,
this is the fifth game in the series that has been using the same
overall graphics engine and it is starting to wear thin. Luckily it is
also the last. I'm tired of all that black!
The battles are better than in Ultima IV but they're also somewhat more
annoying. In Ultima IV everything was way too easy, monsters were
simply XP fodder, it was a contest of who can kill what faster. There
was absolutely no challenge to the battles. Think about it, near the
end of the game my party was put to sleep for about 30 minutes by
reapers, and the surrounding monsters weren't able to finish us off
since they couldn't hit us even while we were sleeping. If something
like that happened in Ultima V, my whole party would be dead within 20
seconds. That is a good thing.
But there is also some bad. Your characters are incredibly inaccurate
and they often hit your own party members rather than the monsters. I
could understand at level 1, but level 8? How can a maxed out level 8
avatar throw his magic axe sideways, hitting his teammate, instead of
forward? It seems to get worse when everyone is crammed closely with
the monsters, it's not uncommon for your party to be hitting each other
more often than the monsters.
Even when they're not hitting each other they might miss like crazy. At
one point my 29 DEX avatar missed a mongbat like 6 times in a row. Just
imagine how much the other party members were missing. A reason for
might be to focus on magical spells. Simply put, magic is devastating.
I don't want to imagine how hard the last dungeon would have been
without eight level spells.
The music in Ultima V is absolutely astounding. Granted I am using the
music patch for the PC version, you'd have to be an idiot to play the
game without it. The music has none of the problems found in the
previous games. It doesn't feel repetitive like in Ultima III and the
songs are great across the board unlike Ultima IV. Ultima V also marks
the introduction of the traditional Ultima soundtrack with 'stones' and
the like which is quite pleasant. Overall I loved the music.
To me, Ultima V is the first truly great Ultima. At least by today's standards :)
