Ultima™ 9: Ascension

Unfortunatelly it's not the one at Krondor ( See what I did there?) First of all Dear Good Old Games, this game misses the point by not being GOOD. I also feel inclined to call your bullshit "Dive into the rich and extensive fantasy world that is a worthy setting for the extravagant finale..." Lie...Outright fucking Lie " Witness the final chapter in the chronicles of Britannia--a story so epic that its script takes hundreds of pages in writing." Another outright lie. Even if it took hundreds of pages in writing it didn't help the story not to be the worst story told ever in an RPG " Take up the mantle of the Avatar one last time and free the land of Guardian’s curse using an incredibly vast assortment of weapons, armor, items, and spells." What we don't mention that through good chunk of the game magic doesn't work. Enemies get stunlocked after each hit making them harmless. Everyone involved in the creation of this deserves to lie frozen in the ninth circle of hell with acid in the eyesockets. THIS is the most insultingly bad game I ever played in my fucking life and it can go RIGHT TO HELL along with everyone involved with it. I have never seen a worse story told more poorly, the button-mashing retarded combat with over 90% of enemies being rats and brigands, OFFENSIVE NARRATIVE retconning and fucking up the story stated previously. Completely atrocious stability, this game crashes like crazy and saves take eons to complete. The Avatar character behaves like an utter moron (WHAT'S A PALADIN!? The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom? Who are the Gargoyles? What are the Mantras to the Shrines of Virtues?(Which even if YOU written down won't work unless you discover them in this game). Basically EVERYTHING from begining to end is wrong on this game. t

Everything anyone needs to know about Ultima IX can be heard at spoonyexperiment.com in not only a 4-part retrospective of this game, but the entire Ultima series from the beginning. Only an avid life-long fan of the series can fully articulate how awful this game is. And from a personal perspective, the game is just insulting to one's intelligence. Much of the sub-par quality can be pin squarely on EA's poor handling of Origin Systems during that time. Ultima IX went through 4 builds and just as many rewrites to the plot until everything was so garbled and switched around, it no longer resembled it's original conception. "What's a Paladin?"

I'm not a long time Ultima fan. I've only just recently gotten into the series. After playing through PAGAN (which I didn't care for at all) I wanted to stop. But this was the last game in the series so I had to play it...to finish the storyline... Ignoring the sheer stupidity of the story, the horrid story changes they made, the ugly graphics, the incredibly boring, the atrocious voice acting and the characters they destroyed with this game, let's just look at the game itself... The game is your typical "open world" role playing game. You fight monsters, do tasks, etc. That's where the typical part ends though. Pretty much all you have to do to win at this game is mash the attack button. The combat has no strategy of depth to it at all. There is magic in this game, but apparently it doesn't work the way it should. For most of the game, you can only use magic from scrolls. In older Ultima games, you had a spell book where all your spells were or even a bag of runes to put together your spells manually. This is where the game's "classes" come into play. Since you can't really use magic for most of the game, the magic based classes are completely useless. There's a shepard class, which I still don't really understand. The only class you should pick is a warrior class, because all you'll be doing is clicking nonthreatening monsters to death. There are puzzles, but they aren't that great either. The puzzles themselves are the easiest things in the game, pretty much boiling down to flippin switches or pushing buttons. At the end of the day, this game is just plain broken. Every time I ran it, the game crashed after an hour, sometimes less than that. The game is an incredibly buggy mess too. I've found characters floating in the air, spouting the sounds of the rats you fight. I've been killed just walking around Britannia, with no mobs or anything trying to kill me around. Ok, so the game must have something positive about it? Nope... Well, there is one positive thing I can say about this game...and that is... I NEVER have to play this abomination of a game EVER again... Ascension shouldn't have been released at all in the shape it's in. If you are any kind of Ultima fan, stay FAR FAR AWAY from this game, unless you like pain...

This could have been a very solid entry in the Ultima series were it not for technical problems that made the launch version unplayable. Even the patched versions however are not stable, so expect restarting the game every 30 minutes or so.

What's a Paladin?