Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle

The Good
At first sight, what we have here is an add-on of sorts to Black Gate, the first part of the complete Ultima VII saga. Serpent Isle uses the same engine as the first part, looks almost identical to it, and has the same combat mechanics, stat-improvement system, and party management. But in its core, it is a very different game.

Black Gate still continued the tradition of open-ended Ultima games. Its gameplay formula was still about roaming the world and completing tasks in any order. Serpent Isle is decidedly inclined towards a tighter, more focused narrative.

The abundance of scripted events immediately catches the eye. Earlier Ultimas had very few of those. You had an intro and an ending, but the rest of the game was dedicated to your exploration (which was nearly unrestricted), and only very few things did really happen. It is true that the initial impact of those great stories and the fascinating gameplay were enough to sustain the interest of the player, but there has been always very little "inside" story in those games. Serpent Isle is the first one that was created with a different design philosophy in mind. You really play a story in this game, almost in the sense of Japanese RPGs (though naturally with much richer exploration and interaction possibilities) - things happen because they are supposed to happen, you just have to trigger the appropriate event. There are many cutscenes in the game, and more obligatory dialogues and events that advance the plot regardless of your actions: you are often being teleported, thrown into prison, your inventory is taken away from you, etc. As a result, the game has a much more distinct flavor of a good novel than all earlier Ultimas.

Another significant change is the importance of your party members. In all earlier Ultimas they were there just to decorate the game. In Ultima IV you had to find seven companions in order to finish the game, but none of them influenced (or even enhanced) the plot individually. In the fifth game they were little more than speechless fighters once they joined your party. In the two following games they became more talkative and started having distinct personality traits, but were still equally unimportant to the plot. However, in Serpent Isle they have become an integral part of the narrative - they perform various actions, participate in the story, and behave like people with their own wills rather than item-carrying, fighting machines.

The storyline itself is naturally more dramatic and involving thanks to the new technique. There are sudden twists, massive cataclysms, lyrical moments, and even moving scenes that depict courageous deeds and sacrifice. This added a whole new dimension to the somewhat dry, impersonal Western storytelling style. Serpent Isle is an early precursor to the (perhaps upcoming?) great "RPG merge", a game that takes the best from Japanese RPGs without losing the gameplay quality of the Western style.

Being so tightly scripted, Serpent Isle is naturally more linear than all the previous Ultimas. Often you can't access a new location until you have completed certain tasks in the old one. Particularly the first part of the game is of a very straightforward nature. The result is a "user-friendliness" that was practically absent from the earlier installments: Serpent Isle is easy to get into, easy to start playing; it is a perfect starting point for re-acquaintance with the classic series for those who have missed the previous installments.

Certain aspects of Ultima were brought to utmost perfection in Serpent Isle - most importantly characterization and writing. The personalities of the game's characters are more detailed than ever, the dialogues more complex and finely written. There are many more important characters here than in any Ultima game before - plenty of characters are involved in the story and are much more active than the somewhat indifferent inhabitants of Britannia in earlier Ultimas. The addition of large, realistically looking character portraits (the only graphical change in the game, along with the cool equipment screen - equipped items are visible on the character) was a great decision - it is nice to talk to people with such expressive faces, and it adds a lot to their personalities.

The game is long. Although it is much simpler to follow and to play than earlier Ultimas, it will still take quite some time to complete - not wandering around aimlessly, searching for clues, like in earlier Ultimas, but actually experiencing things and making the story progress. The quests are large, wonderfully detailed (take Monitor as an example, with its political conspiracy involving plenty of characters and their personal views of each other), there are huge dungeons and some very colorful and unique locations to explore, like the Lost City with its unbearable heat and gargoyles, or the ice-covered northern regions.

Like in the first part, there are many humorous dialogues and situations in Serpent Isle. One of my favorites was the dialogue choice you have after Filbercio catches you fooling around in his mistress's bedroom and asks you whether you did something with her or not: 1) I'm guilty 2) I'm innocent 3) I'm leaving... By the way, Serpent Isle decidedly the sexiest Ultima game out there, offering quite a lot of action. The aforementioned scene, for example, is quite convincing - if you decide to go along with the mistress, you see both her and the Avatar undress and go to bed...

Those are the "new" good things in Serpent Isle; but together with them, it also contains plenty of traditional Ultima goodness we know and love. Like the first part, it is set in a fully interactive, breathing, believable world - spin threads to make clothes, catch fish, hunt deers, and take and move around everything you like...

The Bad
There are even more plot items in Serpent Isle than in Black Gate - chances are you'll carry around lots of weird things without the slightest idea of how and where to use them. Since your inventory is limited, and you can drop things, there is always the risk of dropping a seemingly unimportant item and then being unable to retrace it back when you suddenly discovered it was needed to make the game progress at a much later stage. Many items are also very small and easy to overlook, like the serpent teeth you need to teleport around.

The amount of locked doors and various keys in the game is a bit too overwhelming. If you don't drop the keys you have used (a few of them have several functions, but as a general rule, a key is valid only for doors in the location where you found it, so it is relatively safe to discard them after usage), you can easily end up with a whole bag stuffed with keys of all colors. The "find a key to unlock the door" puzzle is somewhat overused - you'll spend a lot of time just hunting for keys in dungeons.

I should mention the party AI, which was dangerously close to zero. My companions used every opportunity they had to unequip the best weapons I was giving them and to equip some junk instead. I was careless enough to give a glass sword (basically an instant kill item of one charge) to Shamino, who equipped it without me noticing it, and used it to kill a rat. Boydon jumped right into fire with 3 hit points in the midst of a hard battle. Iolo killed me once by repeatedly hitting me with fireballs while I was fighting a slime.

The new scripted event-based mechanics don't always work perfectly. Often there is little logical connection between the "triggering" action of the player and the scripted event that follows. For example, a door in Shamino's castle is protected by an energy field, that disappears after you find the Hound of Doskar and summon him to trace Cantra. There is no true connection between the disappearance of the energy field and the summoning of the dog - you have to summon it only because you are supposed to.

The Bottom Line
The first part of Ultima VII was the richest and most perfectly crafted realization of the classic template of the series.

Serpent Isle, on the contrary, defines - particularly in storytelling - a new design philosophy, which will eventually become the new template for the great RPG revival of the West. Tightly scripted, story-driven games like Planescape: Torment have been hugely influenced by this seminal work. Large, rich, creative, wonderfully detailed, Serpent Isle, with its focused narrative and outstanding balance between scripted events and exploration, is a masterpiece way ahead of its time.

The Good
What's with these guys?.. We're talking about an essential classic here. In terms of depth, richness, immersion potential, atmosphere and invention, its sole match may be Arcanum, released 8 and a half years later. Every single ambitious isometric RPG after 1993 had drawn upon Serpent Isle for inspiration and basics. With Ultima7/1, Origin had developed way too masterful an engine not to employ in another game; this is that game. More polished and accomplished than Ultima7/1, it is arguably still the best 2D RPG around.

The Bad
The early, amateurish voice-acting and nothing else. Period.

The Bottom Line
This is the original sacred source of all your fancy Baldur's Gates, Fallouts and Icewind Dales--which were generally put together with much less love and attention to detail (similarly to Origin's own Ultima 8, but that's another story).

The Good
Now, now, burning game boxes won't solve anything, will it? Especially not if you'd earn decent money by selling it on Ebay. Or you could simple give it to me, since I like Serpent Isle as a decent, engrossing fantasy adventure.

Sure, it's not exactly the families brightest child. Okay, you could argue that Origin wanted to milk the engine. And yes, it strains your patience with its infamous memory manager and some vexing puzzles.

But, hey, its still a good RPG. Think about the huge and detailed game world. Think about all those secret caves you discovered, the credible characters you talked to, the joy of exploration. That's Ultima style for you, and you'll get plenty of it in Serpent Isle. If you liked the others, there's little reason to hate this one.

The Bad
That Dupre d... oops. Almost spoiled your fun. :-)

The Bottom Line
Doug, do nothing you might regret! Hand me that box!

The Good
First of all, I'd have to say that I liked this game far more than The Black Gate, part one of Ultima 7. The paper doll inventory was different and interesting, but I'd have to say that that was nothing new--Event Horizon/Dreamforge have been using that method for years. I liked the new setting of the game, with its different monsters and characters. Although this explains where the other towns went--except for Vesper, I don't think they've been in any Ultima game since Ultima 3. The graphics were the same for Ultima 7. The exception here is that you could sell more items for cash in this game, until you got the spell False Coin. Jewelry and certain leather and antique armor items could be sold, as well as reagents--I preferred this to only being able to get gems and gold bars and nuggets in Ultima 7. While some spells were the same, others were different. The add-on for this game was no cakewalk, though, but well worth it--not only did you get the highest stats, you also ended up with some really useful items, like the Ring of Reagents--you never had to buy reagents again! Music was exactly the same as Ultima 7, part one. The ending was really great--the animation at the end was spectacular. And NO BUGS--yippee!!

The Bad
The fact that almost everyone in the towns died at the end of the game--what the heck was up with that?! The fact that Dupre killed himself--ok, so it was to save the Avatar, but WHY?! even have this in there!!

The Bottom Line
Very, very similar to Ultima 7. I think most hardcore Ultima gamers didn't really like the change in setting, but I really liked it.

The Good
The box looked good. It had an interesting manual with a bit of cryptography in it. Some very humorous explanations of weapons and armor ("Many experts consider the helmet a vital piece of armor").

The interface was OK. Basic paper-doll inventory, and point and click for just about everything else.

It had some OK background music.

The Bad
Pretty much everything - even the things I liked had negatives to them.

To start, the installation sucked. If you have a CD-ROM, you must put a CD in before the game will install. The game comes on diskettes and will abort the installation (with no error message) if it can't find info on every drive.

After struggling to get the game running with sound and having enough conventional memory for this hog, I finally got to start playing.

Even the paper-doll inventory had problems. You never knew where the pointer was if you picked something up, and it was easy to mis-place something. The story line was - for me - disconnected. I never had a clue as to what to do next; I had never played the previous games before (which probably didn't help). I gave it six months of trying and finally gave up.

I finally gave up and found a walkthrough. That was a mistake. I tried following the walkthrough (and actually progressed very well over the next 3 months). Then I found out that something I had (or had not) done back near the beginning was preventing me from moving forward - and there was NO WAY to get it now.

The Bottom Line
First, don't buy it. If you're given it (like I was), read the manual and throw the whole thing away. Re-format the disks and re-use them to store old copies of AOL on them - it'd be a better use of them.

In all, bad install, problem-matic interface, bad story line, no hints to next step, problems with vital equipment being required - but not being able to go get it.

I literally keep the entire box, walkthrough, map, manual, and diskettes around and try to tell people how bad this game is, then ask them if they'd like to try it themselves. I even offer my first-hand knowledge of what to do in the game. I haven't gotten any takers.

The Good
Serpent Isle is a large, well-plotted sequel that removes most of the infuriating bugs from Ultima VII: The Black Gate. The world of the isle is richly textured, with extensive dialogue and a series of quests to navigate. More so than The Black Gate, Serpent Isle is the natural culmination of the Ultima series style.

The Bad
For all the density and complex interaction, Serpent Isle is a far more linear game than its predecessor. Though the game world is larger, you are shown small chunks of it at a time, with specific quests to complete before any further progress is possible. In structuring the game this way, Origin have removed the most attractive element of The Black Gate - unlimited freedom. A large world seems a bit wasted if you're only going on a guided package tour of it: for most of Serpent Isle the player is kept firmly "on quest".

In terms of game mechanics, Serpent Isle trades annoying bugs for verbal diarrhoea. Yes, atmospheric dialogue is great, but some of the game characters appear to have three-act plays in their heads. And a fair amount of the game depends on trade of information, so there's no real way to skip it.

The Bottom Line
Those who like to be marched through a game may prefer Serpent Isle to its maligned predecessor, The Black Gate. The storyline is particularly strong, with classic elements of betrayal, murder, and redemption. For me, however, the game felt too much like a path with high walls; the opportunity to go sideways sometimes would have been appreciated.

The Good
Ok guys, so this is U7 part two. Before playing this, I've played and completd U6 and U7 - read my reviews, if you want, before reading this one. It has the same graphics (improved, see the inventory display), same 2D engine, same party management. We are in a new world to explore, and in this new world there is a great variety of landscapes (forests, brushlands, mountains, icy lands, flaming dungeons, swamps, and so on). There are only 3 towns, but we face a lot of npcs, with a huge amount off conversation. The plot is more exciting than in U7, definitely. As you begin and go on in the game, you have no idea of its ending, and you are fascinated about this ancient serpent culture that seems to be involved in the game but still you don't know how. So, a new world, new faces, a new culture from an ancient civilisation... and, the dungeons are back again!! There's quite a lot of tunnels, on different levels, to explore (maybe they realized that U7 was so poor, with no underworld levels at all). The northern area si damn cool: all is snow-covered and there are new beasts (the snow leopards are too nice!), temples, a new civilisation again (the gwani). Cool. And the new means of teleportation are very nice (it's something similar to the orb of the moons, but more fascinating).Moreover, the plot is a bit less linear than in U7: there are a few things you can do in an order of your choice (for example, solving the subplots of the 3 main cities in order to get the items of truth, love and courage).

The Bad
it's difficult to explain. What may be a step back for me, it might be a step forward for another player as well. THIS IS NOT A RPG, and it has nothing to do with earlier ultimas. Ok, same graphics and party management, but this is an arcade game, in fact. There is a story you must follow, and various triggered events occour during the game. As you begin, you can only access certain places on the map: the cities of Monitor and Fawn, the Sleeping bull Inn, and a little more. This is opposite to the Ultima core feature: you can go wherever you want, do whatever you want, and have fun just exploring, without following the plot at all. Making the Swamp of Gorlab the only way to get to the northern areas was a bad choice. Since you must go and beat the swamp anyway (in order to get the serpen necklace), it would have been nice to reach the north since the beginning of the game, opening a very huge gaming area for early exploration (northern forest, snow lands, skullcrusher, spinebreaker, Shamino's castle, and so on). I admit this is only my point of view. I say: let's explore everything since the beginning, gathering pieces of information about the plot in the meanwhile, and then start to do things in order to complete the game. Others may say: oh, they finally made a less dispersive game, we like this new arcade-rpg hybrid.Back to the plot: it is cool and fascinating until Batlin dies and the Banes appear. After that, I didn't like it at all. Almost everybody in the land dies. You get to walk in cities and dungeons full of corpses. In general, too many people dies; ok, you restore balance at the end, but at which price? you are almost alone! And the rest of the plot is too abstract (gather various serpent items, visit various shrines, restore a mysteriuos balance in the land). Ok, so the ancient serpent culture becomes the core, but everything is too symbolic- there are a lot of serpent items (earrings, necklace, ring, sword, crown, armour, blackrock serpents, eyes of the serpents.........), and you get very confused about their meanings.

The Bottom Line
Well. This is really a great change from previous Ultimas. They all were rpgs (even U7, although the worst of them all, was an Ultima rpg). This is an arcade-adventure game, with some rpg features. On an absolute point of view, this game is good, really good. far better than U7 for me, since the plot is more interesting, and most of the bugs and the annoyances of U7 are eradicated. From an Ultima fan point of view..... well, if you expect the freedom of U4, you get frustrated. This is not a game where you can enjoy a living world and live in it, getting hours and hours of funny play just walking around, talking to people, exploring the whole map. Still my advice: ok play this, but also play a game from the Ultima enlightenment trilogy - the 3 real Ultimas.