Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar - Review / Retrospective

Comments · 96

• FI

  @finntrovert · 2 years ago · pinned

  The entire Ultima review series playlist: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ySdS-taQCLCyXvRRoHCYgBDo2h8bUle">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ySdS-taQCLCyXvRRoHCYgBDo2h8bUle</a>

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• KA

  @kaiserschnitzel89 · 3 years ago

  The &apos;walking around&apos; music will NEVER get out of my head.

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• KA

  @kasimirmaser99 · 3 years ago

  I&apos;m enjoying your retrospective on the Ultima games. It really takes me down memory lane. I remember playing Ultimas and the Gold Box D&amp;D games with my cousin and uncle back in the 80s on their Tandy 1000, with a beanbag ashtray on the desk, unfiltered Pall Mall smoke in the air, and orange carpet on the floor.

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• PR

  @protoroc · 3 years ago

  Ultima 4 more than any deserves a modern remake.

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• KO

  @korallenkaiser · 3 years ago

  Why don&apos;t these videos have 100K hits? great work!

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• AT

  @atmaweapon2803 · 3 years ago (edited)

  The only thing that drives me crazy about this game is the amount of combats. It becomes absurd after a certain point, and worse once you add more characters, increasing the amount of enemies per encounter for each character added. They got the encounter rate perfectly in Ultima V and VI. In IV, the game sort of encourages you through this to complete as much of the game as possible before getting any other characters. If there was a hack to cut down encounters, it would be a perfect game for me.

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• JO

  @johnsmith2046 · 3 years ago

  Hello from northeast Ohio, USA. I played Ultima: QOTA on Nintendo many times, and it has always been one of my favorite games. Thanks for doign this video.

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• CH

  @Chaosherold · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMbRYVg-xtM&amp;t=637">10:37</a> - I&apos;m sure Fessor will appreciate this reference. ;-)

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• SK

  @SK-le1gm · 2 years ago

  The virtues mapped <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMbRYVg-xtM&amp;t=1078">17:58</a>

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• RI

  @ribenasquash · 3 years ago

  I think the Master System port is easily the best way to play this game. The simple tunes translated very well to the 3 channels of PSG square wave music and Sega redrew all the tiles to be a bit better and lose much of the black that makes the game very dark.<br><br>Keywords no longer have to be guessed as you have a menu to choose the default questions such as “job” or such and when a new dialogue option is unlocked by asking the right question, you can scroll down to select that question. I think the menus make the game alot more playable and you won’t miss any important clues. Then also you can select the number of spells you want to mix, up to 99, which saves a lot of time.<br><br>Also, projectiles can now be aimed at any angle, no longer needing to be straight or exactly 45 degree diagonals. Apart from that and some minor differences, like the inclusion of Nate the Snake (is this new), and changes to the appearance of certain tiles, its a direct port.<br><br>Then you have the NES version which redesigns the game a bit, losing the status panel to the right and giving everyone giant heads and is much closer to a jrpg in appearance. You can control the hot air balloon without needing wind spells and there’s no food or spell and reagent mixing. But it’s otherwise intact I think.<br><br>My favourite aspect of this game is the writing. It’s quite witty and thoughtful at times. With monsters giving funny responses, if you can speak to them in the towns. But the standout feature is the complete freedom of every tile being interactive, giving you full control to murder an entire town or speak to inanimate objects (which sometimes reply). Although to kill a civilian will set you back a very long time in building up your virtues.<br><br>You can gain clues to how to build up the virtues by meditating 1, 2 and 3 cycles. You need to take a break between each meditation of maybe a few days, but each shrine has 3 clues. If you have the requisite virtue points, 3 cycles earns you the virtue and draws a part of the ankh symbol on the info panel. You can potentially lose up to three ankh points in one moment by not saying “bye” and just turning away from an npc (which is a simple button press on the SMS control pad). That happened to me once.<br><br>The most outstanding feature of the game is the almost complete none-linearity and truly open-world. You have eight runes, stones and mantras to discover and dungeons to defeat to use two stones at the lowest level, in the altar, once you’ve discovered the correct combinations. <br><br>Once you’re a full avatar, you can discover the mystic arms, which is in two places, for weapons and armour respectively.<br><br>But actually the standout feature of the game is how it makes <i>you</i> the avatar. Not playing a fictional character, but actually you! This is enforced by the character profiling that is the moral questioning at the beginning with the fortune teller. Although I’ve noticed almost everyone end up as the bard for some reason unless you finesse your answers a bit. But then you start to realise that you really do have complete freedom in the tile based game world, but your actions have consequences, in that you might lose an eighth of your ankh/avatarhood in a virtue, ie. the objective of the game and have alot of grinding or donating to beggars and not killing spiders to do.<br><br>So unlike any other game, maybe ever, this game draws you in and makes it consequential and feel real, despite the simple graphics.<br><br>Which makes this game a contender for the greatest game ever made.

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• LO

  @lostpony4885 · 3 years ago (edited)

  Good ol Dupre. &nbsp;I remember the guys thought you had to be a sheperd until someone figured out where katrina was. &nbsp;Omigosh the 80s are gone

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• BR

  @Brucemagoose511 · 3 years ago

  I&apos;ve only played one game series with this talk process (the much later and excellent Exile trilogy). It makes you feel much more connected to the setting and your own character typing out prompts to the conversation.

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