Ultima VII Retrospective (AD FREE EARLY ACCESS)
3 exports later, this one is finally in the can. Adobe Premiere wasn't playing nice. Adobe programs never play nice.
Anyway here it is! I know a lot of Ultima fans in particular were looking forward to this one. I know I was. After plenty of writing, editing, and making goofy renders in Blender, I sincerely hope that you enjoy the video. It'll be ready to roll on YouTube very soon.
Comments (13)
i hate to be a late pedant, but Tolkien absolutely copy pasted Turin Turambar & the legend of Hurin from the Finnish epic Kalevala. Turin is a 1:1 copy of Kullervo, down to the talking sword that kills him. There's a badass tone poem about it by Jean Sibelius that's like the most Finnish thing ever. Anyway, this isn't to nitpick or ~well, actually~ at all, just to add even more context!
Just so you know I’m unbelievably invested in this series now….so much that I went on eBay bought a commadore 64 to now play the early ultima games with sound in a pure form thank you for your hard work!
An absolutely awful week made a little better by a Majuular drop!
Thank you for this. Well done. Regarding the Guardian as a villain, in my first pass through I took him to be a manipulator who had set up what we now call a Xanatos Gambit. Writing choices in future games would wreck this, but I always took that to be EA interference. Consider: the Guardian recognizes that the Time Lord has slipped his imprisonment and sent a red moongate. The Guardian also knows from the wisps a great deal about the Avatar and finds it likely that the Avatar could and would oppose his efforts. So the Guardian taunts the Avatar and confounds him throughout his adventure, ensuring he enters Britannia while also ensuring that the Avatar does not trust his words or "help". At the conclusion of the Black Gate, the moongates have been broken by the destruction of the generators. If the Avatar takes his one chance to leave Britannia, he cannot return and the Guardian wins. If the Avatar instead destroys the black gate, the Avatar is instead trapped in Britannia and the Guardian can freely conquer Earth and other worlds without the Avatar being alerted and moving to oppose him. Either way, the Guardian has won in some way. Alas, rather than the opening of the next game simply having us pursue Batlin they have the Guardian open his dumb muppet face via hologram scroll and everything breaks after that. But for a brief time he was a believable manipulator antagonist and had not yet stepped in his own plot holes.
That's an interesting thought! I have to admit, that possibility didn't occur to me. As everything unfolded, I started to get an idea of what may have happened, and probably got tunnel vision. What it SEEMS like to me is that there were earnest plans to have the Guardian be a sort of morally conflicting figure along the Avatar's journey. The voice lines that most strongly suggest the Guardian is your ally occur close to the beginning. If you leave Trinsic to the south, you're told that you're going the wrong way. When you enter Despise at Batlin's behest, you're told that it's a trap (which is true). Gradually, you'd start getting more sardonic lines ("Yes, rest my friend... rest and heal", "Do you even know where you're going?!"), before he finally outright starts to mock and trick you ("Tell them you're the Avatar!"). Of course, this is all a wash for two primary reasons - the first being that the Guardian, whose voice is unmistakable, ostensibly reveals his evil from the get go. (Also, to some extent there's no "intended" path through Britannia, so you can get the good/evil voice lines in any order. But that's just a byproduct of player freedom, so it is what it is). Secondly, the Passion Play outside of Trinsic begins with the actors reciting part of the Guardian's speech word-for-word. Just to make it a little more obvious, the Avatar internally monologues about "hearing that line somewhere before...". This instantly and unmistakable sets up a connection between the Guardian and the Fellowship, especially considering the Passion Play is likely the first interaction the player will have after completing the prologue. Outside of those two instances, the rest of the game does such a great job of stringing you along and obfuscating the Guardian's true motives prior to Alagner's reveal, that I struggle to imagine the original intention was anything other than that. Especially considering the "inner voice" that the Fellowship adherents mention every once in a while - that would be a great way to further cause the player to question the events of the story. I find it hard to imagine that all of those context clues were set up so beautifully just to make the player temporarily confused. It all made me think that the writers/designers had at least completed the scenario outline, down to specific dialogue, before the introduction was planned and completed, or that some kind of change was made late. Maybe they figured Batlin wasn't a threatening enough villain? Maybe Richard decided at the 11th hour that he wanted the Guardian to be more front and center? He seems like he'd be just impulsive enough as a producer to do something like that. Like I said, that's just what I got thinking and I have no way of knowing for sure. I really like your explanation, but I think there's just a few gaps that would have to be filled with the player's imagination there. And like you said, it's kind of a nonstarter given how later games turned out. Thanks for sharing that though, I'm gonna think about it some more. Writing this on a phone so sorry if there's typos.
2:28:40 ASTRAL ZONE HELL YEAH
Looking forward to U7 Part 2 as well. I played that a fair bit, but never completed it. It didn't grab me nearly as much as U7 did - it feels like a smaller, more condensed story and world. I've since read that it has a pretty good story, but at the time it felt like a noticeable downgrade vs the sprawling wonder of U7 with its hundreds of NPCs and mini quests and things to discover. And after that.. we enter the precipitous downturn :( I hated U8, and never even knew that U9 (which I've since heard was a total disaster) came out. Fuck EA!
Amazing work, loved the video. A little hard for me to hear you trash it as an RPG, but you're right of course. But back in the day when I was 12, that didn't bother me at all. I played this game more than I'd ever played a game before - I remember telling my (decidedly unimpressed) school friends that I'd played it for "150 hours"! (Not sure how I calculated that, decades before Steam!) The combat was clunky yeah but I still enjoyed it. And I never had Forge of Virtue, so I don't recall getting super OP. I distinctly remember getting into massive fights with huge groups of guards which always presented at least some risk. I was also one of those who wrote to Origin (or some UK subsidiary) to request the patched version, due to all the bugs. I don't now recall which bugs I had, but I remember writing a huge, messy letter helpfully detailing them all for them! I imagine they just chucked it in the bin haha, it's not like they didn't already know what the bugs were. I started a new game when I got the patch disk(s) - can't remember if that was required, or if I was already softlocked, or if I just took it as an opportunity to play more game
I love Ultima VII to the point where I had a hard time talking about its lesser parts too. But you know, objectivity and all that. It takes a special game to rise above those issues and STILL go onto to be one of the greats.
AYO BASED HYGGE MENTIONED!
Thanks for clueing me into that one!
The day has come, the one I've awaited since discovering you through the Akalabeth video way back whenever. It's been awesome watching the channel grow, and I cannot thank you enough for convincing me to dig my father's Saturn back out to play some Three Dirty Dwarves. Here's to many years of your honeyed voice covering niche topics in long-form videos.
And lo through the crowding depths of darkness shone a solitary piercing bright light: the latest early access ad-free Majuular Ultima vid 🥲🙏🏻