Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress...

The Good
This is a much larger game than its predecessor. This time, towns are on scrolling maps, instead of the one screen, and there are numerous world maps to represent each time zone. Its also the first Ultima to feature moon-gates, although this time they take you through time as well as space. You can now talk to people in the towns, although you will just get a brief (and usually meaningless) one line response.

It was also the first Ultima to come in decent packaging with the obligatory cloth map. The over-sized box, map and manual are seriously impressive and a lot better than anything that comes with today's games.

The Bad
The game took place on Earth, which seems very out of place to an Ultima fan. It was necessary to give the time travel context but it doesn't fit in with the rest of the games.

The game was also extremely open ended, the quests of the last game have gone altogether. This can be a good thing but here it just made the game less fun. 95% of the time to complete this game was spent gathering experience and sailing round and round the time of legends island shooting monsters with my ships cannon. This sort of mindless grinding is something I dislike in RPG's. Getting a blue tassel (required to get a ship) also takes forever.

The dungeons in this game were basically pointless, I never went into one during the whole game. Its far easier to gain experience with a ship.

There's no story, and some very strange gameplay elements. Stats are raised by offering gold to a clerk at the Hotel California. Getting to key characters means butchering your way through innocent guards - this is definitely not the behaviour of the avatar of later games.

The Bottom Line
I couldn't honestly recommend to anyone that they bother playing this game. Its part of the Ultima series so I had to play it, but the game is a bit of a mess, doesn't advance the plot beyond what is in the manual and requires a reasonable amount of time to finish (maybe 5-6 hours).

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.

The Good
A lot of reviewers tend to look down on Ultima II as the black sheep of the series. But when you consider what was available at the time, its actually a pretty good advancement over the previous game. Improvements from the previous Ultima include :

Gigantic World - The game world is huge, the towns and dungeons are huge, and there are several time zones and planets to explore. Getting to those planets and some places in the time zones is a real challenge.

Faster Gameplay - Akalabeth and Ultima used Applesoft BASIC and Atari BASIC (for Ultima's 8-bit port to the Atari computers) for most, if not all of the games. Travel in Ultima was ridiculously slow, as you can literally see the screen refresh itself with every step. Dungeoneering is an exercise in frustration as the slow refresh rate leads to lost keystrokes and extra hits from the monsters. Everything feels faster.

More Detailed Graphics - While many of the tiles in this game were reused from the last one, the graphical level of quality has improved. Water is now animated, each character class has a unique icon, and overworld enemies have real shapes. Dungeon enemies now are shown in color instead of wireframe. The towns no longer are in a smaller perspective than the overworld.

A Sense of Direction - In the original Ultima, the player practically figure out what to do by spending hard earned gold at the taverns and figuring out to do quests from the Kings. The manual was very sparse, it did not even inform the player that there were multiple continents that needed to be explored. Nor did it identify that the object of the game was to defeat a bad guy. Ultima II gives the player a backstory and a cloth map with the time gates delineated.

More Lively World - In Ultima, you could only transact with Kings and Merchants. In Ultima II, you can actually talk to townspeople. While most can only spout a canned line, there are some in each town which can provide you a clue or some amusement. They also move around, except for guards (unless you kill someone in town).

Lack of Disk Swapping - In this game, you will not need to swap disks often. After the initial Program / Player swap, you will not swap again until you lift off from Earth.

Packaging - This is the first Ultima game to come in a box and a cloth map. The previous Ultima had come in a ziplock bag without a map. Unlike today's games which may include a cloth map, Ultima's maps are actually useful and necessary for gameplay.

The Bad
Bugs - This game has two very nasty bugs. One of which is that, in the original release versions for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit and IBM PC, it is impossible to raise your strength level. The second one is that your stats, like HP, Food and Gold, can "roll-over" if you earn more than 9999 in a stat. So if you have 9950 food and buy 50 more, you are dead.

Unforgiving Death - If you die in this game, the game will force you to restart. It writes your death to your player disk, forcing you to make another. You can die from lack of food, bad luck or failing to land your ship properly.

Lucky Items and Thieves - You can buy weapons and armor in this game, but all items, including useful ones, are randomly acquired upon defeating enemies in the overland. For example, one special item is a Blue Tassel, which you can use to board any pirate ship. You need to board pirate ships in this game. But if a thief randomly steals your Tassel, you cannot board another pirate ship unless you find one again.

Combat Inequality - It seems like, no matter what kind of weapons and armor you acquire, you can never really carve your way through even the weaker monsters like Orcs and Thieves.

Inability to Reset the Player Disk - On the Apple, Atari 8-bit and IBM versions, you had to create a new Player Disk each time you began a new game. There was no utility to reset the maps or the character, so if you mistakenly used your original Player Disk, you were out of luck if you saved to disk. The C64 version does include a reset utility.

The Bottom Line
Ultima II is quite an improvement over its predecessor, and it is only fair to judge the game against what else was available in 1982-1983 and its predecessor. To judge it against the Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness 1986 remake is not appropriate. It had little competition, as the second Wizardry scenario did not drastically improve on the first and the rest were Rogue-like games.