Almost a full decade before Square Enix confounded gamers with the strangely-entitled Final Fantasy X-2, Origin was causing the same numerical headaches for fans of the Ultima series.

Why is this game called Ultima VII, Part 2 and not a straight jump into Ultima VIII? There are two schools of thought on this. First, Ultima VII was originally planned to be a much larger game, but memory and space constraints at the time forced Origin to break their planned storyline into separate pieces. And second, Richard Garriott had always taken pride in the fact that each new Ultima was a virtual ground-up rewrite from the previous game, and since Part 2 would be using the Ultima VII engine with only slight enhancements, Origin felt bound by their founder’s word in this case.

Whatever the case, the resulting game would prove to have one of the most intriguing backstories of any Ultima, with callbacks to the very first game and a downright facinating take on the eternal struggle between Order and Chaos. Alas, it would also prove to be the last critically-acclaimed game in the cardinal Ultima series…

Ultima VII, Part 2: Serpent Isle (1993): Picking up from where Ultima VII ended, you, the Avatar, have successfully stopped the Guardian’s planned incursion into Britannia by destroying the Black Gate and exposing the Fellowship, the Scientology-inspired cult that unwittingly worshipped him, as the criminal gang it was. Yet your victories seem somewhat hollow; by destroying the Black Gate, you’ve marooned yourself in Britannia’s dimension indefinitely. Worse still, Batlin, the former Fellowship leader and willing pawn of the Guardian, managed to escape with nary a hair on his heavily-lacquered scalp out of place.

Serpent Isle opens eighteen months later, after a castle guard discovers a disturbing message from the Guardian among Batlin’s personal effects. In it, Big Red gives his servant a contingency plan in case the Avatar somehow managed to destroy the Black Gate: In this Plan B, Batlin was ordered to capture Gwenno, wife of Iolo and longtime friend of the Avatar, and use her as bait to lure the Avatar away from Britannia to the remote Serpent Isle, where the forces of Order hold no sway. Even though it’s almost certainly a trap, you agree to set sail through a Serpent Gate to rescue your friend’s wife.

Unfortunately, once you arrive at Serpent Isle, a teleport storm wrecks your ship and scatters Iolo, Dupré, and Shamino throughout the island, and leaves you with only junk in your inventory. Upon recovering your senses, a monk named Thoxa welcomes you to Serpent Isle and tells you a little about what has happened, and how your coming was foretold by her order. She is then attacked by another monk, leaving you on your own to figure out the meaning of her words. Well, this is sure going well as a rescue mission, isn’t it?

If you’ve been playing the games all along, you may soon notice that Serpent Isle seems just a little bit familiar, especially with location names such as “Monitor,” “Fawn,” and “Spinebreaker Mountains.” The capper comes when you discover an abandoned castle that supposedly, at one time, belonged to the self-same Shamino who’s been by your side since before you were elevated to Avatarhood! As it turns out, Serpent Isle is one of the three “lost” continents of Sorsaria (what Britannia was called in the first three Ultimas), populated by dissidents who did not share Lord British’s ideas of Virtue and fled what they percieved as his tyrannical power grab following the defeat of Exodus. After traveling through the same Serpent Gate you did to arrive here, they discovered this continent – the former “Lands of Danger and Despair” from way back in Ultima I – and decided to rebuild their society here. Evidence of a much earlier, apparently reptilian culture that inhabited the island long before humans settled on it caused them to name the place “Serpent Isle.”

As you play, you will learn about the culture that has sprung up here, in what for all intents and purposes is the Sorsaria that could have been had Lord British not formalized the Way of the Avatar. In particular, you will become familiar with the beliefs of Thoxa’s order, which subscribes to a theory of Balance derived from the original inhabitants of the land. In this system, there were three great Serpents of old; one representing the forces of Chaos, one Order, and a third representing Balance that kept the other two from getting too powerful. It is their belief that, just as Chaos without Order breeds discontent and evil among the people, so too does Order without Chaos do precisely the same thing. It is very similar to that old thought problem, “If we could not feel pain, how would we know pleasure?”; only through the existance of its opposite can an abstract concept be clearly defined. This is very deep and philisophical stuff for a video game, even one as richly detailed as Ultima has been to this point, and will undoubtedly cause many players to view the eternal battle between Light and Dark in a new… well, light. If you’re a Babylon 5 fan, think of it as the same thing that drove the war between the Vorlons and the Shadows… the same principle applies here, that neither side is inherently “good” or “evil,” but it is only through combining the best elements of both philosophies that true progress can be made.

Of course, the Guardian is making his presence felt here too; he has caused the forces of Order and Chaos to become unbalanced, creating exactly the sort of havoc he thrives on. Batlin, sniveling coward that he is, has also holed up somewhere on this island, and you will finally get the opportunity to mete out Justice on his carcass. Along the way, however, you will permanently lose one of your most faithful companions (no spoilers as to who), plus you will have to temporarily abandon the principles of Avatarhood just to get by; after all, you are a champion of pure Order, which to this game’s philosophy is just as “bad” as what the Guardian is doing! So you’ll end up having to embrace some of your darker instincts in order to win the game.

Gameplay-wise… well, it is Ultima VII all over again. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you! The Ultima VII engine is still, even today, one of the deepest and most detailed CRPG systems ever devised, and you will once again find that everything that can be touched in the game can be used in some unique fashion, even if it’s not essential to your quest. Perhaps better yet, this time the gloves are off when it comes to your Karma; Serpent Isle subscribes to the Jesse “The Body” Ventura School of Rule-Breaking (“It ain’t cheating unless you get caught”) and no longer bothers to keep a Karma score. You can do anything you like, even kill innocents, just so long as nobody else is there to rat you out.

(Serpent Isle may also be a groundbreaking game in yet another way. During one not-entirely-optional set piece, you will encounter a woman named Frigidazzi who will invite you into her bed for a night of passion. Whether you accept her offer or not is up to you – the result will be the same either way, with her husband barging in – though you could potentially gain a useful item if you do. Now, the option to have sex with an NPC is not in and of itself a new concept in Serpent Isle; indeed, Ultima VII featured the chance for you to do the nasty with a bathhouse worker of opposite gender to your character. The groundbreaker here is that Frigidazzi will make the same offer to your character even if you opted to play as a female Avatar! That means exactly what you think it means, friends. This is almost certainly the first recorded instance of overt HLS in a mainstream computer game.)

There really isn’t a whole lot more to say about the gameplay. It’s a more linear version of Ultima VII, using the same gameplay engine and graphics. While that’s technically a cheat, the storyline is good enough (and its well thought-out concept of Balance strong enough) to make me overlook the creative shortcomings of the coding team. Plus it provides an actual ending to the earlier game, which doesn’t climax so much as it cuts off just when the story is getting interesting. Definitely worth a play if you loved Ultima VII, or if you would just like to play an RPG using that engine with the “handcuffs” of keeping the Virtues taken off.

The sad part is, after Serpent Isle it would all be downhill for the landmark series…

Next time: What happens when the Avatar gets punted into a world ruled by evil? And why did so many wags refer to the result as “Super Avatar Bros.?”

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, Part VII - Of Black Gates and Red Skulls
2. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, The Finale: Stark Raven Mad
3. Retro-Active: The Better-Late-Than-Never History of Ultima, Part IX: Super Avatar Bros.?
4. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, Part VI: Prophet Motive
5. Retro-Active Special: The History of Ultima, Part V: Lord British Takes a Holiday

No Comments »

No comments yet.

Leave a comment