Individual Games (to the level I'm familiar with them)

Ultima Series

As already noted the Ultima Series was originally programmed by Richard Garriot, a teenager at the time, in Applesoft Basic on the Apple II computer (if I remember everything correctly). We've played the first three games (there were at least six, eventually) in a version specially released for the Tandy 1000 (a PC Jr. Clone with special color and sound capabilities). Of course we also played Ultima III for the NES. Ultima II was played on a map very similar to the world map we're familiar with. We never got the computer version of Ultima III to work correctly, something was wrong with our disk and copy protection squelched all chances we might have had to recover it.

The trick to winning Ultima III is to build your characters' levels and abilities. You build level by fighting. But your level only actually increases when you talk to the king. As long as you're below level 4 (stay at level 3 and don't talk to the king any more), you only face the simple monsters that can be killed with magic (Undead or [Flash I think]) long before they move into a position where they can do you any damage. The other trick that works well is that treasure chests persist between battles. Go out and fight (and fight and fight and fight) and stack up a large number of treasure chests. With experience you can control where you meet a monster so you can place each chest where you want it. When you have a few hundred scattered around, start collecting. You WILL get poisoned and damaged, but when you're done you'll have enough money for the doctor, the inn, more food, better weapons, and most important of all, for level building.

You can get several crews. Take a secondary crew out and get them up to level 5. (Talk to the king.) At level five you can pick a fight with pirates. Win the battle and get the ship. Take them to the alternate map (through the whirlpool) and get the flowers so you can have some compass roses. Now take out the crew you have left at level 1. It's tricky, but you can get them in the ship and avoid the sea monsters. Yes, it's tough for a level 1 crew to make it through the alternate map, but it can be done. The compass rose will allow them to return without getting back on the ship and risking a confrontation with the sea monsters, for which they are not prepared. Use your money to build all their ability levels to the maximum with donations at each of the temples. You'll have to make several trips, because there's only so much money you can carry.

By now your characters will be ready to go to the maximum level. NOW talk to the king. You'll have plenty of money, plenty of level, plenty of strength, etc., and you'll be ready to do the caverns and, eventually, the final battle. By the way, Ultima III does not have a final "boss" monster. Instead, you place cards at alters (the correct placement is given by a wizard in the bottom floor [8th level] of a dungeon in a hard to find location) and race to get out of the castle before it falls in on you.

Dragon Warrior

Simple, but interesting. At one time I drew up the entire world map on graph paper. I worked carefully counting each tile as I went. RPG writers have never been totally original in developing and naming monsters. Most all of them have a golem (in this game it's a rock golem which you put to sleep with a flute so you can defeat it and get into a city). Poisonous toads (snatches) scorpions, knights and demons of different varieties, and other fairly well-known mythical beasts are common.

This game was programmed with 16-bit integer values for experience and money. So it was possible to max out on experience and gold at 65535 of each. If you got to the top level and talked to the king he'd say, "Thou art strong enough! Why canst thou not defeat the DragonLord?" We tried it once. If you come back to the castle after defeating the DragonLord but having never rescued the princess, she would still come running down from the throne room!

Dungeon Magic

My wife rented and later bought this game. It used the face-on presentation of Ultima III's dungeons for the whole game. It could be confusing, because you could be attacked from behind or from either side and you couldn't see your opponent. You might take quite a bit of damage before you figured out where the enemy was so you could hit back. I don't think she ever finished this game, and I never really tried. The magic system was difficult to understand, so I won't even try to explain it because I never played long enough to figure it out!

Simon's Quest

This was one of several "Castlevania" games, but the only one I seriously played. It had day and night modes. When you were at a lower level you wanted to be in town at night, because all the monsters were tougher then. In fact there were monsters in town at night, but they were usually easy enough to kill without getting hurt. This game has one glaring typo in it. When you get one of Dracula's parts from a castle, it says, "You now prossess[sp] Dracula's [fill in the blank]." I believe there was a typo on one of the game's ending screens, too.

Zelda Series

This series of semi-RPGs was produced by Nintendo for their consoles. The first was Legend of Zelda. This was a modified top down game. My wife played it so many times she could finish it in a few hours and without dying. There was a second game for players who had finished the first. All battles were real time, and the transitions between areas were like those of Legacy of the Wizard except the scrolling was both horizontal AND vertical. I never put much effort into completing this game.

The second Zelda game was Adventures of Link. This game used side-on presentation for towns, dungeons, and battles. There was a modified top down for the main map. The real time battles made this game a challenge for players like us, but I believe I got through it with the help of my wife. For this game Nintendo used two "sprites" for Link's battle and town character.

Link to the Past

This is the third Zelda game. Nintendo prepared it for the SNES platform. I seem to recall it was released about the same time as the SNES (Super Mario World actually came with most decks early on). It had the same presentation and battle system as the "Secret of..." games. The 3D map capability of the system was used to present a world map for the player.

You might have been tempted to think you were about finished with this game when you had finished the three dungeons/castles in the main world. But just as you got to the final battle you discovered that there was a parallel world and that you had at least seven more dungeons/castles to complete before the game really ended. Plus there were tricks to the final battle that we had to call a game counsellor to figure out.

I have finished the game on my own. But my wife got so good at it that she actually managed to finish and have zeros show for the number of attempts for each area of the game. That means she finished the game without dying or turning off the console even once!

I understand there's a version out for the N64, but we've never had one of those machines and, now that we have the PlayStation, we probably never will. One feature that remained the same throughout the Zelda-Link series is that Link's sword became a long range weapon whenever his hit points were full. It made getting hit very frustrating because all battles after that would be that much tougher without the long-range capability.

Crystalis

This NES game was really a precursor to the capabilities of the SNES. It allowed the character to move anywhere on the game screen (except mountains and rivers, of course), allowed the character to move behind screen objects for a simulated 3D effect, and had fully-rendered backgrounds in place of the usual tiled backgrounds. My wife managed to make it to the final area (a floating tower), but was not able to finish it from there. I never even got that far, though I did play the game some and with limited success. She felt she needed her son to finish the game, but by then he'd "grown up" and wasn't interested any longer.

Pirates

This NES game also came in a Commodore version (and probably other platforms) and was a favorite of my wife. I played around at it but never tried to finish. In the game you become captain of a pirate ship and begin to attack shipping in the "Spanish Main" and collecting goods, gold, and more ships. The main world map is a fairly accurate map of the Carribean, with actual cities of the era in their approximate locations (including one in Florida). It is presented modified top down. Sailing can be tricky, because the direction buttons work relative to the direction your ship faces, not relative to the screen itself. So if you're facing south (down on the screen) and press the right directional button the ship will begin to move to its right, your left.

Battle screens for ship-to-ship battle are top down and only show two ships, even though you may have an entire fleet with you. Once you catch up to a ship your character engages in a sword duel with the captain of the ship or the commander of the fort. This is done in a side-on view. Duels are also held for winning your first ship, for getting information from "evil Spaniard"s, and for winning a wife. Eventually you get so old (upper 20s, usually) you aren't agile enough to consistently win duels and it's time to retire. You'll get a rank based on your accomplishments. To get the highest rank, King's Advisor, you must obtain a lot of land and wealth, win a beautiful wife (you marry a governor's daughter, and different daughters have different desireability levels) and rescue four lost relatives.

NOTE: There is one other NES game to discuss, but it will go in the section with the others of its race -- I speak of Final Fantasy.

The SNES seemed to be a windfall for the RPG genre. Again, I'll only cover those I'm familiar with.

Wanderers from Y's

This is a semi-action game with very little story to it. We bought it used at next to nothing, probably at Topps in Benton Harbor, MI. I fairly quickly found a place where you could stand your character, put a book or something on the "fight" control (you didn't even need turbo), and leave it overnight. After 16 or so hours of this your charcter would have maxed out on experience and have accumulated wads of $$. Since all the weapons were purchased in the character's home town, you could equip the best stuff at the highest level before you really played much at all.

The game uses side-on presentation and real time battle in the action areas. There's a world map, but you don't "walk" on it. By using the method noted above, I was able to get through all the areas but the last. I never managed to beat the final "boss." The only reason I got as far as I did was that I was way ahead of the expected level for all the other fights.

Illusion of Gaia

This is another game with real time battle, but it has more story events which place it closer to RPG than something like Wanderers from Y's. For the story you have a number of companions, but for battle you go as yourself or as one of two alter egos you can morph into at combination save/ heal/ morph points. These points look something like mirrors on screen, and the character steps through the mirror into a special zone only he can reach.

There are a number of special jewels hidden throughout the game. The booklet that goes with the game tells where each is hidden, and if you actually collect them all you get to play a new battle zone and learn more about one of the characters. I was barely able to complete the main world, and didn't have the dexterity to successfully complete the final quest or the additional battle.

The entire game uses a modified top-down semi-3D presentation. The only SNES feature I could tell it didn't use was the 3D map.

Uncharted Waters

This RPG uses fairly simple graphics, given the capabilities of the platform, and puts far less emphasis on battle. The game has a world map which is a roughly accurate map of our world. You start out as a Portuguese sailor with a single ship. You trade goods (buy low, sell high). As you advance there are some seagoing battles. These are played in a turn-based battle system on a top-down screen that shows all the ships in both fleets. You can win by sinking the opponent's flag ship even if you lose all but one of your ships doing it and he has all his ships (except the flagship) left.

Secret of Mana

This is the first truly multi-player RPG I ever encountered. Granted, it's actually a semi-action game with real time battle on a modified top-down semi-3D world map. Later in the game you get a pet dragon which will fly you to any place in the world, and this uses the SNES's 3D map capability. The multi-player part is possible because there are three fighting characters in the game. You can have a second controller and let a friend control one of the three characters while you control the character of your choice.

This can be particularly helpful if you're trying to build a particular character up. A character gets battle experience only if he or she actually kills a monster. It can be aggravating to have a screen partner set to defend (they will still hit occasionally at the highest defend setting), get in all but the last hit on a monster, and have one of the other characters jump in, kill the beast, and get the experience. By using the second controller at least one of the characters will be totally idle while you beat the stuffings out of as many beasts as you want.

The magic and weapon system in this game is a little unusual. One of the non-playing characters in the game is Watts, an Elven steel smith. He will refabricate your weapons if you bring in the next "orb" for that weapon. You usually get these by defeating a boss. The weapon then goes through three levels. At each level you can add more power to the weapon before you release the charge for an attack. (Link to the Past allowed you to charge your weapon also.)

Magic spells also increase in level every time they're used. You get magic by befriending an elemental. Each character in the game gets a different set of spells from each elemental. This is one game I was able to finish on my own. The real trick is the last battle. You have to know where to stand and when to hit. It works best if you have two people to play for this so one can cast cure and protect spells while the other powers up and hits.

Secret of Evermore

As its name suggests this game is quite similar to Secret of Mana. It has the same presentation and a similar weapon building system. The story line is more science fiction than the Mana game and you play with only two characters, the main character and his dog. Magic is replaced with alchemy, the combining of ingredients to produce effects that are useful in battle. Alchemy ingredients could be found just about anywhere, and your dog was really useful in sniffing these out. We did find that it could be hard to figure out exactly where the item the dog had found was located.

Secret of Evermore had three distinct areas on the main world, plus a fourth area on a space station. The three areas were separated from each other and you couldn't get from one to the other by walking. Special game events propelled you from one to the other, and later you got an aircraft followed by a space shuttle which allowed you to move freely from one area to the other.

The game had music -- fairly good music, in fact. But the feature I liked most about it was that for most battle areas it used "environmental" sounds instead of music. So in a swamp you'd hear the frogs and insects and trickling water, and in a desert you'd hear the dry wind. It made for fairly realistic game play. It had a relatively tough final battle, but I did manage to finish the game more than once, something my wife has found very difficult -- and it's unusual for me to be better at a game than her.

Because of space (file size) limitations of my HTML editor I have had to move the relatively large section on Final Fantasy to another page.

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