Ultima™ 9: Ascension

Gentlemen and ladies, let us not trash Ultima 9 too harshly. Yes, it is an awful, awful game. But it deserves a five star rating in the following ways: 1) On technical terms, it was amazing, even despite the buggy initial release. The graphics were fantastic for 1999. The level of interaction with the world was inferior to U7 or UW2, but still better than Diablo and other action-"RPGs". The interface and controls were superb. In fact, the whole journal idea (which first appeared in earlier Ultimas but was done best in this game), with the game explicitly tracking your progress through quests, has since been used in almost every MMO including WoW. Oh, and it's the first RPG to have full voice acting. 2) It is possible to enjoy this game ironically, and count all the awful plot holes that develop when you talk to even minor characters. Let's not mince words: the writing is atrocious, and in some places it does reach so-bad-it's-good territory (unintentionally). 3) It's probably the easiest Ultima game to play. 4) It inspired one of the biggest Ultima fans to do a massive series-wide video retrospective, culminating in a three part apocalyptic trilogy of reviews. This is no ordinary bad game. It is the ultimate bad game. You may think you've played some bad games in the past, but have you ever played a game that was bad enough to make you want to destroy the world? http://spoonyexperiment.com/category/game-reviews/ultima-retrospective/

Basically one of the worst games every made. Espically If you played any of the previous ultima games as it betrays almost every single important aspect of those games. Want to know just how bad this piece of grabge really is: http://spoonyexperiment.com/2012/08/11/ultima-9-ascension-finale-uncut/

sorry gog i love you but this game is crap, broken on every level. watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQUVfo_kBMU&t=516s much more entertaining than the game itself.

I purchased this when it was released at retail, and despite the fan patches and years of hard work that went into them, this game remains a virtually unplayable mess of code. It's difficult to review the game properly when so much of it is ruined by the ceaseless technical issues that plague it. Suffice to say, I did not enjoy my time with Ultima IX, and it's one of the rare games that I feel I have to warn people to simply avoid. It has no redeeming features, save for the soundtrack - which is actually really quite nice.

The Ultima games had a similar trend as the Star wars movies. Doomed to repeat it...