This is another one
where you wander all over the land
getting killed
not being able to afford resurrection
you probably don't have the instruction manual or the official hint book
you get to a point where you start fighting smart
grinding it out close to the save point
if you're 8-bit authentic
or working those save states
if you're contemporary
you start socking away those golds
buy horses for your crew,
so now you can get around quicker
and you did manage to get a seaworthy vessel
you're excited to escape the continent
but the sailing's just too realistic
you feel like you're constantly fighting the wind
you seek the land, all over again
but then you were surrounded by pirates
before you could dock
and it went poorly for your people
killed to the last hero
back to the character creation menu
I suppose I could've stuck with the save
but I wanted a fresh crew
a fresh reality
you can do that right-quick in these sorts of role-playing games,
y'know,
delete the old family
roll up a new one
if only something something real life something something
. . .so I download a PDF of the hint book, and I discover that the first sixteen pages are a beautiful sorta watercolor looking comic book summary of the 'story so far' in the Ultima Franchise, featuring vivid depictions of a messiah wandering between dimensions via mysterious woods and gatherings of stalwart heroes and onslaughts of slobbering beasts and swirling undead miasma hordes and tyrannical villains Mondain and Minax wielding terrifying sorcery and I just wanted it to go on and on-
-but it doesn't.
The rest is a perfectly functional, if incomplete, guide to the equipment the weapons the classes the differences between the Magic Power system and the Will Power system-like just have one magic system, okay? This is an NES cartridge. Don't overtax shit, all right?
Let me quote
what ended up being
the most consequential line
for me
from the Hint Book:
"Four great adventurers challenging Exodus by order of Lord British. What is Exodus? Is it human? Is it a monster? In order to prevail, the adventurers must solve many mysteries and increase their own natural abilities."
Oh.
That's what I'm about.
Okay.
I thought that EXODUS was an event,
but in this game it's an entity,
a . . . final boss, even?
Well, now.
The hint book is just a stripped down walk-through with no story content beyond the comic book 'Previously on Ultima' opener. I gather from its pages that I should talk to priests, talk to prisoners, learn to bribe, learn to pray, and visit holy sites suffused with mystical power in order to learn how to pray and/or bribe . . . or do I learn how to bribe by bullshitting my way past the jailhouse guards? I might've got some of that confused.
Oh, yeah! You can also bet on games of Rock-Paper-Scissors! That's what passes for gambling in the mystical realm of Sosaria. (Now I want Paul Schrader to write and direct a gritty film about an isolated loner who develops a perfect system for winning just enough at Rock-Paper-Scissors so as to contain a mysterious trauma from the past, but not so much winning as to get hustled out the door by the pit bosses. Call it . . . The Finger Counter.)
This is one of those games where important items of mystical potency have been brought into being that can vanquish Ultimate Evil . . . except they've been scattered all throughout the land, and, on top of that, people's awareness of them seems spotty, like different people have been told different things about what's actually going on . . . even though the method of vanquishing Ultimate Evil is relatively straightforward and procedural to the point where it would've had to have been a protocol established by a group of engineers-
Look, Exodus is an evil computer. That's the twist. Okay. Even though this is a sword and sorcery reality, it's a computer running the show. In order to shut it down, you gotta collect punch cards to insert into the four terminals that comprise Exodus, and these punch cards crash the system-so to speak-and all is well in the land.
I guess this could be a 'breaking out of the program' moment like in The Matrix, or a 'fictional character busts loose of the fiction' like in those Grant Morrison scripted Animal Man comics. Ultima:Exodus got there a bit earlier, in any event.
I was going to criticize the usual video game absurdity of having the punch cards scattered all throughout the land. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the punch cards all in one place? Or, um, you encounter an engineer who worked on the Exodus project at one point? They've still got a bunch of junk in their garage from when they hired on with Mondain and Minax?
But maybe it makes more sense that the punch cards are scattered all to hell.
Video game companies are notorious for discarding source code. They grind out a product, ship it, clear the deck for the next cycle. Maybe Mondain and Minax were similarly sloppy once they finished Exodus. Mondain and Minax were the villains of previous Ultima games, and presumably they built Exodus as a way to carry forward their legacy of evil in a rationalized, fully automated form. This suggests that they concealed the punch cards to maintain control over Exodus . . . but maybe they just got lost in the shuffle.
Or maybe Mondain and Minax lost interest in their pricy mechanical boondoggle once it was all designed and done and, in the end, disappointing.
Perhaps, Mondain and Minax saw their own obsolescence wthin the machinery of Exodus, and therefore scorned it, even as they let it operate, a pitiless doomsday cheat in the event of their deaths at the hands of party-pooping heroes. Sorcerers make mistakes, lose battles, are all-too-human . . . but an evil machine just keeps on grindin'n'cyclin'-
-until it, too, gets trashed by heroes.
The ending is worth reheating.
I think it is.
In the NES version, the Exodus terminals are called 'altars' . . . oh, so these psuedo-mediavalist Advanced Dungeons and Dragons types-your player characters-don't grok computers but apprehend them as sites of religious offerings, a way to interface the divine or the diabolical or what have you,
I think that’s an amusing detail.
You input the punch cards in just the right sequence,
and the altars sink into the ground,
an ankh appears, which you must collect so it can be all significant in the sequel Ultima: Quest of the Avatar,
the castle housing Exodus shakes and shudders as it collapses all around you,
pulling a total Dracula’s Castle Routine,
now's the time for a horseback escape by the skin of your teeth,
ABRUPT-ASS CREDIT ROLL.
If you played the game with no reference to external sources, you might very well be perplexed.
If you played the game with reference to external sources, you might very well be perplexed.
If you are unfamiliar with Ultima:Quest of the Avatar-
If you don't know what an ankh is-
An ankh is that cross looking thingy with a sorta oval teardrop shape at the top. If you were a goth kid in the 1990s, you probably read the Neil Gaiman scripted The Sandman comics, and you probably remember that Death was personified as a goth girl who wore an ankh necklace.
See . . . it's ironic . . . because an ankh is popularly understood as an ancient Egyptian symbol . . . for life . . . and Neil Gaiman has Death wearing it . . . that shit is so fucking deep I want to start screaming!!!
Look. Gaiman's got millions in the bank. Who am I to criticize his touching simplicity? Alleged grown-ups-if they are reading anything-are mostly fucking with Harry Potter and a bewildering array of creepy BDSM wealth porn fairy tales . . .
Gaiman's not so bad, I guess . . .
Hey, I wasn't even a goth kid in the 1990s, so what do I know.
I did read a lot of Doom 2099 and Hellblazer . . .
. . . okay, so . . .
. . . you destroy the evil computer Exodus
. . . you get a symbol of life, the ankh
. . . and the ankh goes on to become your symbol as an avatar of virtue in the next game . . .
Shutting down the program of evil was just the beginning.
Now you must make your way in the world, cultivating your righteousness by dealing with people and situations as they cross your path. There is no more mechanization of evil. No more centralized villain or villainy.
Just a lot of perplexing shit.
You're never quite sure if you're right or wrong.
People stop wanting to join your party.
You've given some offense.
It remains obscure.
And you never quite got to the end of it,
even with the online walk-through,
and you think back to the conclusion of Ultima: Exodus,
"Fuck. That was the True Ending. I broke the program, and I shoulda just kept on riding outta the cartridge, away from the incomprehensible intrigues of Sosaria, and into the Perplexing Meaty Now. My confusion remains, but I am always moving forward, even if it is just Pitiless Time hustling me ever closer to the grave. I can vary up the scenery. I'm already better off beyond the clutches of Exodus . . ."
. . . and then along came COVID-19 . . .
"Fuck this shit, I'm getting back in that cartridge! Get the fuck outta my way-!"
ABRUPT-ASS CREDIT ROLL.
-November 2021-January 2022
