Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress...

aka: Ultima 2, Ultima II: Revenge of Enchantress
Moby ID: 880
Apple II Specs

Description official descriptions

The sequel to Ultima featured several improvements over the original, such as larger town maps, and the concept of traveling through time gates into different eras on Earth. Other than that the gameplay is pretty much the same as in Ultima I, with your single character roaming the land fighting monsters and looking for key items.

In the original Ultima a hero from a certain third rate blue planet orbiting an insignificant yellow sun came to the world of Sosaria and slew the evil wizard Mondain before he could fulfill his dreams of universal domination. Thus peace was brought to Sosaria, and the hero hailed as a champion of the people of all time.

Unfortunately, Mondain happened to have a young apprentice/lover named Minax who is understandably upset over his death. Using her considerable powers, Minax travels through time and space to the hero's homeworld of Earth and instigates a nuclear war, thus serving the dual purpose of working out her frustration as well as erasing the hero from history. Of course, as the hero, this works out rather badly for you, and so with the help of Lord British you must travel through time and somehow find Minax and prevent the events which culminate in the destruction of Earth.

Spellings

  • ć‚¦ćƒ«ćƒ†ć‚£ćƒž2 å„³é­”ę³•ä½æć„ć®å¾©č® - Japanese spelling

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Screenshots

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Credits (Apple II version)

13 People (12 developers, 1 thanks)

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 74% (based on 5 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 111 ratings with 7 reviews)

More like Time Bandit fanfiction than Ultima

The Good
This game isā€¦ interesting, to say the least. The whole concept behind it is unique to this very day, and given this game came out in 1982, thatā€™s saying a lot. Time travel combined with a villainess unleashing a horde of mythical monsters on the real world and throwing all the timelines of the world out of whack sounds like it has a lot of potential, and if this game were remade today it would probably kick ass.

On top of that, youā€™re not just restricted to our world, but can visit every single planet in our solar system, including the ex-planet Pluto and the mysterious planet X. Like I said, the concept behind this game is very imaginative, but thatā€™s all thatā€™s really good about it.

The Bad
The badā€¦ Ok, this going to be a two parter, the first part being the first time I actually played and completed it, and the second time after I saw the movie that inspired it and the whole moongate concept: Time Bandits.

The game is very large, but also very confusing. Thereā€™s very little in terms of direction for the player, when I first played it way back in the day (back in 1998 when I first got the Ultima Collection CD), I had not the faintest idea what to do. Even after reading the manual (which was very, very well written and definitely thought provoking) I still found it very hard to navigate my way through the world and just survive, let alone follow the plot to complete the game.

Speaking of which, there just didnā€™t seem to be much of a plot as there was an objective to defeat Minax. The clues are far and few between amid the mindless one-liners of the denizens of the world, and most everything is based on luck instead of skill, such as the only person who can increase your stats, and he does this when given a large amount of gold. Speaking of gold, it seems that a majority of the game is focused on just that, getting money. Even the walkthrough on the Ultima collection CD outright says that 80% of the game is just gathering gold, so youā€™re going to spending a lot of time just attacking monsters to get some gold, and to try to get those items that you need in the game, which brings me to another negative point about it.

Thereā€™s no indication as to what the many items in the game are! And thereā€™s a lot of them, coins, tassels, brass buttons, ankhs. Hell, I still donā€™t know what some of them do, and the manual doesnā€™t tell anything about them. I was a complete loss as to what they did until I went through the walkthrough on the CD and the guides online, and by then I was basically fed up with the game and on the verge of quitting, but being an Ultima fan, I felt the need to complete this game at least once.

The other problem is the massive dead space found in the game. Itā€™s a big game, with many maps and many dungeons and towers, but most of them are useless. The only reason why theyā€™re there is to provide the player with yet another way of gathering money, which can also be obtained in the outside world. It would have helped if perhaps some of those towers contained items at the end of them, like blue tassels or brass buttons or keys, but no, theyā€™re just for decoration and needless busy work. The planets are also equally useless, as you only need to go on one planet in the entire game.

Thatā€™s the first part of my criticism, the game on its own. Now comes part 2. I heard that many concepts of this game were taken from the movie Time Bandits, a 1981 sci-fi movie. I watched it recently and it was a good movie, and it completely changed my perspective on Ultima 2. The game was always the odd one out since it involved such bizarre concepts as taking place on earth, landing on planets in our solar systems, and time travel to as far back as the dinosaur era.

I didnā€™t understand why, I donā€™t think anyone really would understand until you watch Time Bandits (seriously you should, if not only to put this game into context), and realize that this game was basically Time Bandit fanfiction with the whole Ultima angle tossed in because Richard Garriott wanted it to be a part of his game series. The game takes not only the concept of the time portals (which work the same in the movie as they do the game. Little black gates that pop in and out of existence and take people to a different time and place) but also the of the solar system map (featured prominently in the movie and in the gameā€™s manual), and even the Time of Legends (where you defeat the evil Minax) is explicitly mentioned both in the movie and in the game. The game wasnā€™t so much Ultima as it was Time Bandits with a twistā€¦ youā€™re a time bandit running from a supreme being, but a time traveler using those moongates to defeat Evilā€¦ oops, I mean Minax (watch the movie, youā€™ll understand). The only thing that makes it from being a complete Time Bandits remix is that Lord British is in the game, and the manual explicitly states that Minax is Mondainā€™s ex-lover.

The Bottom Line
This game is the odd one out, it isn't the worst Ultima game (that dubious honor goes to Ultima 9) largely because because in 1982, the Ultima series had yet to find its direction and purpose (don't forget that Richard Garriott made Ultima 1 to 3 almost completely single handed, with Akalabeth programmed on a computer in Richard's high school for Pete's sake! This was the stone age of computer gaming and there was plenty of space of experimentation and trial and error.

That being said, should people play Ultima 2? I would say only if you consider yourself an Ultima fan, because there really isn't that much else to it, or if you've watched Time Bandits and you want to see how it might have been if it was turned into a game.

In fact, if you want to play this game, I would strongly recommend watching Time Bandits anyway, at least you'll be in the mindset as to where this game came from and the concept of the moongates which play such a vital role in the remainder of the series.

DOS · by Salim Farhat (69) · 2013

(Don't) Sing That Ole Blue Tassel Blues (Never Again)

The Good
Hm... good question... Let me think...

Well one nice thing is that it's got a BIG game world. Not only have you got 15 large outdoor maps, you've also got about 30 indoor maps. Each map is 64x64, so you've got a lot to explore... and I usually like games which give the possibility to explore. However... well, see below.

Then, the timegates' concept and implementation is nice, and also nicely confusing, at first. It was fun to figure out all those connections between the different eras and where they lead to, and to explore the different cities in the different time zones is fun.

A third thing I liked was this silly, zany humor. Meeting the creators of Wizardry shouting "Copy protect! Copy protect!" is genuinely funny... However, after a while, it gets somewhat tiresome, and in the end, it kind of got on my nerves. Again, see the next section.

Finally, the playability is good, as with all Ultimas I've played. Lots of keyboard commands, which are pretty easy to remember, especially if you played other old Ultimas before.

Now let's see what's wrong with this game.

The Bad
Well, there mainly are two things:

  1. BIG, EMPTY, UNINTERESTING GAME WORLD

I said the game world is BIG. And it is. In fact, it is even bigger (in pure map-cell-count terms) than Ultima 3. However, it is also quite BORING. Yes, boring. On most of the maps, nothing much happens. Overworld has monsters, towns have shops, but that's it. Of course, there's some NPCs walking around, but after a while, I realized that most of them really had nothing useful to say. Some chuckles here and there, of course, but it wasn't really enough to keep me motivated. In the end, I started hating running around these great big maps and had to force myself talking to each NPC, so that I wouldn't miss one of those rare hints. In fact, pretty much every important thing is in a single city.

In fact, many party of the game are completely uninteresting. For example, you don't EVER need to enter a single dungeon. So the whold 1st person 3D part of the game is unnecessary. I just hate this kind of waste. If it's not necessary, why is it there? It's superfluous. sigh

And it gets even worse in space. There are ten planets to explore, about half of them are completely empty, and all but one have nothing interesting whatsoever. No interesting locations, no hints, just silly NPCs telling silly jokes. And the worst thing is that you can not save in space, and that landing on some of the planets takes very good timing and luck.

  1. LUCK INSTEAD OF GAME DESIGN

Oh yes, luck... That's the absolutely worst part of this game. Richard Garriott though he could do without game design and just rely on the bloody random number generator. Let me tell you...

When I started my first game, I ran around, bought some equipment and food, talked to NPCs, and began slaying monsters. (Actually, I didn't buy food, I stole about 6000 food in the second town I went to and NEVER had to care about this problem anymore. Call that game design? I don't!) I quickly realized that the rewards you get for fighting monsters (gold and XP) are totally random. You get the same XP for fighting a guard that does 200 hits and for fighting a measly orc. Call that game design? I don't.

Anyway, after about one hour of running around and fighting, I started to feel bored. Running from Afrika to South America and back for the n-th time isn't that much fun, and the "bash, get bashed, bash, get bashed"-style combat isn't exactly exiting neither. It doesn't help that monsters randomly spawn on islands which you cannot reach. However, you'll need LOTS of money for healing, then you need LOTS of money buying good equipment, and then you'll need even MORE money for improving your stats so that you can USE this equipment. This doesn't have to be bad, but really -- after an hour of running around and hitting monsters, I felt I hadn't advanced one bit. I started getting annoyed.

Then, a friendly bartender make me realize that I probably needed a "Blue Tassel" to get on board a ship, whose cannons make grinding more fun and less tiresome. So how do you get this thing? Well, you need to be lucky, punk! You need to kill a thief and hope that he drops a Blue Tassel! Of course, you may get it after the first battle. However, in my game, I took me about two bloody hours of running around until I had this bloody Tassel. Then, run around some more and start looking for a ship. After a mere hour, I found one. Try boarding it... WTF? They don't let me? What about my Blue... Huh? WHERE THE FUCK IS MY BLUE TASSEL?!!! Well, another thief must have stolen it from me in a later battle, without me noticing. Haha!

I stared blankly at the screen for a while. I cursed Garriott and his breed up to the fifth generation. Then I saved the game, exited, started my trusty hex editor, and played god. I hex'ed me loads of Blue Tassels, just to be sure. And then, I also hex'ed me a nice supply of gold. Because, frankly, I was PISSED of running around through the empty worlds of Ultima II, going nowhere for hours. I usually enjoy hard games (I've been playing Rogue for nearly 20 years now and have never won, see), but Ultima II isn't hard. It's just tiresome. In the end, it's a game of chance -- in fact, in another game I started later for checking stuff out, I had a pirate ship after 10 minutes.

I also read a walkthrough to make sure I didn't miss anything. No, it's pure luck.

If I hadn't cheated, I would have had to grind away for hours. It IS somewhat easier and more fun with the pirate ship, but it still takes HOURS of boring grinding to get the money needed to get good enough to finish this game.

Ah yes. One more thing I just remembered. There's one place in the game where you can increase your stats. And you need to do it, because otherwise, you won't be able to use this better equipment. So you go to that place, pay you're hard-earned 100 gold (the equivalent of 10 boring fights), and then... well, if you're lucky, a random attribute is raised, if not -- 10 minutes of your time wasted. And even if you're lucky, you may well have your wisdom raised which doesn't help you a single bit. You may spend 1000 gold and NEVER have your dexterity or strength increased. God, this game really PISSES me off! I like SOME randomness, I like SOME frustration, but Ultima II just isn't so rewarding that I can take this.

The Bottom Line
Easy. It was an incredibly disappointment. Ultima II is by far the worst Ultima I've played yet (U1-4). It's MUCH worse than Ultima III, it's even much worse than Ultima I. It's probably the worst Ultima ever, and it also belongs to one of the worst role-playing games I've ever played. I'd even prefer Telengard or Dunjonquest to this. It's repetitive, tiresome, boring and frustrating, it replaces player skill and game design with pure chance, and it's big, big game world is essentially empty and boring, full of unhelpful and uninteresting NPCs that are just there to tell you silly jokes.

Garriott obviously was experimenting with his RPG formula developed in Akalabeth and Ultima I. He obviously wanted to make it epic -- but he primarily made it BIG, and forgot pretty much everything else. The game design is horrible, the atmosphere is pretty much non-existent, and the game soon begins to be just tiresome.

I really enjoyed both Ultima I and Ultima III, and Ultima II clearly is the missing link between both, having some of both games' elements, but the whole game feels so unfocused and patchy that I strongly suspect that Richard Garriott was on drugs when he created this game. The computer gaming world can be glad that Garriott obviously learned from his errors here, and pulled himself together for the wonderful Ultima III but one year later, not to mention the justly famous Ultima IV.

I really had to force myself to finish this game. In many respects, this game tortures the player. Right down to the big boss fight at the end. The Enchantress is not too hard to kill -- but you'll have to do it not once, not twice, no -- all in all it's six times. And every time, you'll have to run through her whole castle again. Then again, I didn't expect otherwise. I'm glad to be through with this game, and I'll never touch it ever again. Just thinking of it makes me angry. Blue Tassel. AARRRGH!!

After having played both U2 and U3, I'm really wondering why the hell does U2 get a score of 3.93 on Moby, while U3 which is MUCH closer to U4 than to U2 gets only 3.71?! At least the U2 reviews all say this game sucks, more or less.

DOS · by General Error (4329) · 2012

To Be Honest...This Isn't My Favorite Ultima Game

The Good
The manual was an interesting read. I liked the overall concept. Space and/or time travel could have been really cool if they pulled it off...

The Bad
It took me forever to get a complete copy of this game. And then to acquire the neccessary patches. When the game finally got running...I had all these expectations. And I was sourly let down. I could have endured this game...if the food management would have been more realistic and all the tiles for seperate time periods didn't look exactly the same. I guess there wasn't enough story in U2 to enthrall me.

The Bottom Line
If you're a die-hard Ultima afficionado, it's worth a look. A short one.

DOS · by rs2000 (13) · 2001

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Screenshots: Double and I'm not sure if this should be like this Edwin Drost (9295) Nov 5, 2017
Resolution? Edwin Drost (9295) Feb 9, 2017
Ultima 2: hotel raising stats And Wan Jan 19, 2017

Trivia

Development

While designing the game Richard Garriott went to see the movie Time Bandits repeatedly just to copy down the map seen in the film and incorporate it into his game. He eventually decided that the map didn't actually make much sense but still wanted to include a cloth map with every copy of the game. Every publisher in the industry turned him down because of the cost, except Sierra.

DOS version

Little known is the fact that the IBM PC port is supposed to be played on an IBM CGA with a *composite* color monitor (EGA/VGA cards only emulate the display of an RGB monitor). Using that configuration, the pink-striped water becomes blue, the pink-speckled street tiles become red, and the cyan trees become green (see DOS screenshots).

Fanpatch

There exist a freeware EGA graphics patch, which adds some colors to replace that original CGA graphics.

References

  • The weapon needed to defeat the villain(ess) in the game is a sword called Enilno. Spelled backward, it becomes Online. Sierra Online was the game's publisher.
  • Richard Garriot in general and the various Ultima development teams in particular have something of a reputation for hiding various inserted oddness into the series. For example, in the map of the solar system in this game Earth is at coordinates (6,6,6). Make of that what you will.

Release history

In its original release this game was published by Sierra Online. For one reason or another, this didn't work out, and Richard Garriot left and published Exodus: Ultima III under his own outfit. It was never re-released by Origin as a single game. They had trouble getting the publishing rights back from Sierra, and it wasn't until Electronic Arts published the Ultima Collection almost 15 years later that the game was commonly available for purchase again.

Unofficial Port for the Apple IIGS

Rebecca Heineman and Brutal Deluxe Software were working in 2011 on an unofficial port for the Apple IIGS port of Ultima II, whose code was based on the one that was used to create Ultima I in 1994. Unfortunately, this version was for 50% completed before being cancelled due to the fact that she could only sell about 500 copies at the time and the steep licensing fees from current copyright holders Electronic Arts. If the port would have been completed, it would have been released on two disks.

Information also contributed by Eisentel, NewRisingSun, Pix, Terry Callahan and Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Alan Chan.

Macintosh, MSX, Atari 8-bit, PC-88, FM-7 added by Terok Nor. PC-98 added by Unicorn Lynx. Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple II added by Jeanne. Windows added by eWarrior.

Additional contributors: Rebound Boy, Unicorn Lynx, jlebel, Patrick Bregger, Infernos, Edwin Drost.

Game added February 21, 2000. Last modified March 27, 2024.