8-Bit RPG Retrospective, Part One

Gamernode’s George Brandes looks back at the role-playing games he played on the Sega and NES in a multi-part editorial, starting with Ultima III: Exodus.

Once the overland map had been explored and I realized that every town was providing the same things to buy, I tried exploring the caves. The caves were set up in one of the most asinine formats that has ever graced the RPG genre, and this completely shitty format was hardly an Ultima exclusive, either. The format goes something like this. The player is always given limited or no information about the cave. The view inside the cave is from a first-person perspective, however you only can see one step in front of you. When you engage in a fight, you usually end up encountering enemies that are significantly stronger than anything you fought before. The risks always seem extreme and the rewards although vital to completing the game, were difficult, nearly impossible, or just fucking aggrivating to find. Even when I would know what I was looking for in a particular cave, I usually either avoided it anyway because I did not want to lose the characters so dear to me or I died wandering aimlessly in my dimly lit version of a cave, one step at a time. Besides the fact that you risk losing your characters, it is virtually impossible to figure out where to go without actually mapping out each cave through trial and error. Since there are no landmarks or distinguishing features in ANY of the caves, once I lost my bearings (which easily happened after five steps or so), I would often find myself going deeper and deeper into danger. The only saving grace in Ultima were the “ascend” and “rise” spells.