Thou hast saved Sosaria, avatar. But can thee now save thy own world?
This is kind of unbelievable. In 3 days, I've beaten two classic Ultima games in my first attempts. Although I have only tried a bit of Ultima 1, I had zero previous experience with Ultima 2. And I still beat it.
Best yet, I beat it all by myself. On my own. No walktroughs. The only information I kind of looked up from the internet was how to advance your stats and asked TA to look up where I can find the coordinates to Planet X (didnt even get proper information for that), but otherwise I figured things out all by myself.
Anyway, Ultima 2 is pretty much like Ultima 1, except with even more grinding and crypticisms. This time the bad guy is Minax, apprentice and lover of Mondain, the badguy of the previous game. Because she's pissed off of his death, she takes over Sosaria and the player characters world.
Or something...Its bit of confusing and it gets even more confusing when they try to explain it in later games. All I needed to know is that Im on earth and I have to kill Minax.
Character creation is pretty much the same as last time. This time though, only mages and clerics can use spells. Other than that, anyone can use any weapon and armor and thieves are better at stealing.
You start off once again completely clueless on what you should do. There are couple of towns in the map and you can now talk to NPC's, give tips in pubs and visit seers for vague hints on what you should do.
Time traveling is also a big concept in this game. There are 5 eras: Pre-historic, dark age, present, post-apocalyptic future and "legend" era where Minax's fortress is located. You can travel through time via time gates and with the map you can figure out what gate takes you to what time. There are also dungeons on the maps, but this time you dont have to go to these places at all. They only serve purpose for level and money grinding.
Speaking of grinding, there's lot of that in this game. A lot of time you need to grind for money for food, items and quest related tasks. Food is especially important, since I think it depletes here a lot faster than in previous one. I did play as a thief again and stealing now really helps, since you can get lot of food for free with stealing. There's still no proper way to heal yourself other than by giving money to Lord British.
Sometimes when you kill things, you might receive an item. These items all have their own unique uses and many of them are necessary to beat the game, but there's no explanation what they do except for vague hints.
Overall, this game is worse than Ultima 1. While it expands the plot more and makes it bit more than standard hack n slash, its all very confusing and cryptic, and you have to run back and forth and figure things out. And when you're not trying to figure things out, you're probably grinding for money.
Not to mention the game is ugly as hell. Its in 4 color CGA. To be fair, original Ultima 1 was in CGA too, but the version I was playing was a updated version which makes the game whole more appealing. Fortunately, there's a fan-made patch which makes the game better looking and adds other functions like quick restart.
2 out of 5. Dont really recommend it, especially if you didnt like Ultima 1.
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And now, the madness that I had to face. Spoilers ahoy again.
After I finished the game, I watched Spoony's video of it again. Its kind of funny that he gets some things wrong, for example that you cant figure out things without help. Granted, its really cryptic but I did figure it out. Either Im a genius or Spoony's just dumb. He also claimed that you cant kill Minax without a specific weapon. Wrong again. Im starting to think he never actually played the game.
Anyway, it all started by figuring out how the time gates work, then I spended some money on bar tips and seers to get tips, like what I should do and what some items to. For example, there's plenty of locks in towns. How do I open the locks? With keys. Whats the way to get the keys? Only way to get the keys is to slaughter town guards, which are of course hefty meatshields that can kill you easily if you dont have lot of HP. I did eventually figure out a good way to grind some keys: enter the shipyard in one of the towns, take the boat and kill guards with cannons. Cannons are the strongest weapon in the game and they can kill anyone with one or two hits.
Other than ship, which really makes grinding easier, I needed to hijack a plane from New San Antonio. With this, I could easily travel around the world. I could also enter the time gates on it and traverse through the other worlds easily as well.
With the plane I managed to reach an unaccessible city in the post-apocalyptic future which apparently is a former Soviet city. This city also has several space-shuttles which of course means I have to go to space again.
So why to go to space? I need to meet Father Antos, who couple of NPC's say I have to meet. He's on place called Planet X, which is not mentioned on the chart in the manual.
But before I can go to space, I need two things. First is fuel, which is another one of the random items dropped by killing enemies. Thanks to lot of grinding I did get decent amount of fuel. Second, I needed to buy a Power Armor from store.
BUT before I could use power armor, or some of the better weapons, I needed to raise my stats. Only way to do raise the stats is to go to New San Antonio and give money to a guy in Hotel California. This is the only bit of information I looked up online. He then raises one of my stats randomly. After re-loading several times I was finally able to equip the power armor and a phaser. Time to head to spaaaaaace.
This game fortunately has no space combat. All you gotta do is set the coordinates, land and explore the planet. While its neat, its pretty much useless since all I need to do is get to planet X. Unfortunately, the star chart has no coordinates to the planet X and I have no idea where I can hear of them. Luckily I managed to GUESS the right coordinates. 9-9-9. Im starting to think it was on purpose.
Anyway, on planet X I meet father Antos and he tells me to get the ring. By this point I understood what he meant: I've paid money to seers and found out there's a old man in San Antonio who I have to give the money to get the ring. Now that I have the blessing, I can get the ring.
So what does the ring do? I can now walk through forcefields in Minax's castle. I could do that before, but they take 1000 hp damage. Fighting against Minax is not easy though, as the place has couple of Balrons who are super strong and can put me into sleep. Minax also has taken cues on fighting from her mentor, as she teleports to other side of the fortress after getting hit.
So after grinding some more and pumping HP to OVER 9000, I came up with a plan. Using a strange coin which freezes the enemies movement momentarily and abusing the game engine, fortresses architecture and the enemies non-existent pathfinding, I trapped the Balron's in rooms so that they wont bother me. Then I proceed to kill Minax and win the game.
So Ultima 3 is next, and this one I actually have some minor experience. My guess is that saving the world wont be easy this time.