Does open world better than many current open world games. It's all a quest to gather information from people, piece it together and eventually reach the end of the game.

The morality system is great and I enjoyed the experience of making my maps for the overworld by hand. Unlike the dungeons, I can quickly draw it and have more room for error in interpretation.

However, it has the WORST battle system I have ever seen. It's also incredibly slow and you need to grind a fair bit. I'd honestly recommend this to anyone interested in RPG history and a unique experience to open world exploration. But don't force yourself past the point it stops being fun.

It's really odd to me that so much of the writing on backloggd about this game is about whether it is "bad" or "good". Is this why we play games? Just to determine whether they pass a factory inspection test of being better than Mario Bros?

I recognize I am simplifying the process of review here, but isn't it kind of incredible how much influence this game has held over time? How you can see it in modern mystery titles to this day?

Isn't it cool that Yuji Horii played Mystery House and was like, "damn why can't computers talk to you?" and made a non-linear world for you to explore and work through dialogue trees?

Isn't it kind of just....wild that the end of this game is an abstract white walled maze that feels completely tonally offbeat in comparison to the rest of itself??

Is it a pixel hunting game with solutions that are a complete stretch! Totally! It can be a slog to play to be honest!!

But it was also paving the road for a genre and experimenting with what was even possible with an on-screen mystery adventure. Knowing this while I play makes it enjoyable enough for me.

By the time I had discovered that Ultima existed, I think I had all of the sprite based Final Fantasy games under my belt already, so I understand and appreciate its historical importance. The problem here, just like with so many of these early progenitors of entire genres, is that the ideas which would go on to be refined over years and decades are still raw, unpolished and severely restricted by the computing power of the time. Couple that with an extremely sophomoric attempt at world building that amounts to basically a teenager throwing EVERYTHING he thought was cool into a single universe and you get a mess of a world.