PixlBit

I didn't have a NES growing up, but my best friend at the time did, so I spent almost every afternoon at his house playing his NES with him until it was time for me to go home to dinner. I'm pretty sure his parents got tired of me hanging around so much.

After we plowed though Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus, he started renting games for his NES. These games included such well-known classics as Ghosts 'n' Goblins, Bionic Commando, Castlevania, and Dragon Warrior, to some more obscure titles like Faxanadu. And one time, he rented Ultima: Exodus.

This game was a remake of Ultima III on PC. It was the first Ultima to appear on consoles, and this version was actually my first exposure to the Ultima series. It was partly developed by a Japanese developer, Ponycanyon, but Origin Systems in Austin, Texas, headed by Richard "Lord British" Garriott, did a lot of the work of developing it as well. They gave the game a graphical and musical facelift. Originally, Ultima III had stick figure player characters and monsters thanks to the primitive graphics on the Apple II and IBM-PCs that were standard when it was first made in 1983. On the NES, the characters were designed as Japanese-style RPG characters such as you saw in Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. A whole soundtrack was composed tor Ultima III on NES. I found out much later that two of the songs in the game's soundtrack had been produced as J-pop songs, complete with Japanese vocals. Both of these songs, "Hitomi no Knife" (the main theme) and "Magnet of the Heart" (the theme for Lord British's castle) can be found on YouTube.

Now, as for the gameplay, the overall plot was simple. You created a party of four characters of differing races and classes, and then were commissioned by Lord British to destroy Exodus, the demon child of the previous games' villains, Mondain and Minax. You had to kill monsters and find gold to upgrade your party members from daggers and cloth armor, as well as keep them from starving to death. You explored a huge continent, Sosaria, with ten different towns and multiple dungeons. If you could capture a ship from pirates, you could sail it into a whirlpool to the lost continent of Ambrosia, where in exchange for copious amounts of gold you could upgrade your characters' stats. There were a lot of moon gates, whose positions were determined by the phases of Sosaria's two moons, and one of these moon gates was needed to access one of the towns. Another hidden town only appeared when both moons were in the "new moon" phase. While the overworld and towns were overhead-view, the dungeons were first-person. You had to descend into the dungeon and acquire four different "marks," one of which was necessary before Lord British would raise your maximum HP above 550, and one of which was needed to reach the castle of Exodus. Battles in Ultima III were turn-based and played out a lot like SRPGs like Fire Emblem, and I'm sure SRPGs probably took some inspiration from Ultima 3-5, which all had the same battle system. To destroy Exodus himself, who turned out to be a demonic computer, you had to find four different cards on the continent of Ambrosia and insert them into his interface in a certain order.

For the most part, Ultima: Exodus was a reasonably faithful remake of the CRPG, aside from the JRPG-style graphics and sound, thanks in part to the fact that Origin participated in its development. However, the interface was somewhat unwieldy. Origin and Ponycanyon had the task of trying to convert commands executed by a computer keyboard for the two-button NES controller. They did so by making two menus of the field commands that popped up with the A button, with the Select button switching between them. It wasn't intuitive by any stretch, but it was probably the best they could have done in adapting an interface that originally required a full keyboard.  Though they got a JRPG facelift for the NES, the graphics were still rather slow and clunky. As in the PC version, your characters' ability to see the map was obscured by walls, forests, and mountains, something which very few contemporary RPGs do.

In any case, this game ended up being one of my favorite games on the NES, and along with Dragon (Quest) Warrior, it helped introduce me to the world of RPGs, and I did play the series on the PC later on, at which point Ultima VII Part Two had been released. It was one of many NES favorites of mine that was not on the NES Classic Edition, although I certainly didn't expect it to be on there. The Ultima trademark is owned by Electronic Arts, who bought Origin System in the early 90s (and shut it down in the 2000s after EA management micromanaged Ultima IX into a buggy, unfinished mess) and EA was never going to contribute anything to the NES Classic Edition. Still, it's one of the more interesting NES games from my standpoint and one I still return to when I'm in the mood for NES games.