Ultima V: Won!

Anyone have Richard Garriott's e-mail?

The Dungeon Doom was hard, but not as hard as I expected. I finished it in about 2.5 hours of playing. Among the points that make it difficult:

• It's a maze--a complex maze that has you going up and down many times looking for the right path.
  
• Once you enter, you can't get out except by dying.
• Almost every room has some sort of puzzle or set of triggers you need to solve to advance.
• The monsters are fairly hard, including several rooms of both dragons and sea serpents.
  
• Invisibility rings--game breakers in other dungeons--don't work at all. And I had eight of them saved up. Bollocks.

A level with no way to go but back up.

But there were a few factors that made it not so tough:

• Most of the creatures are magical, and the crown negates their worst attacks.
• Many of the rooms start you with barriers between you and the enemies, allowing you to attack them across the barriers with pole-arms.
• There's no one big "final" battle.
• I over-prepared for the dungeon, loading up with the maximum possible reagents, items, and spells. I only used about 12 of my 99 VAS MANI ("great heal") spells.
• I had half a dozen "resurrect" scrolls when I entered.
  

One thing is certain: I didn't need to do all that grinding the other day. I think I could have made it with Level 5 characters.

When you first enter the dungeon, it fools you into thinking you're making progress. Adopting the expedient of going down when I could and backtracking when I couldn't, I was on Level 6 in no time. Most of the battles were in rooms like this...

...where I could calmly take out the enemies across the barriers before dispelling them. However, I soon began to encounter tougher fights. This one introduced me to a new enemy: sand traps. As a golfer, I found it delightful to kill them.

You don't like it so much when I shank my magic axe into you, do you?

When I initially entered this room, I backed everyone out the door except my Avatar, had him don the ring of invisibility...and promptly got slaughtered. The monsters in this dungeon don't even acknowledge it. I had to resurrect him with a scroll and try again. Dragons and sand traps carry fabulous amounts of treasure, which of course is utterly useless here.

In the room directly below the one above, I encountered dragons and sea serpents, and I lost Gwenno in the course of the combat. As you can see from the screen shot, there appears to be no way out of the room except the ladder I came from, but when I attacked the wall in the far northwest corner with my magic axe, a bridge appeared. I don't know what would have happened if I didn't have ranged weapons.


Later on, for the first time in the game, some sharks were able to engage me in melee combat.

We're going to need a bigger axe.

The final combat room (which I didn't know at the time) was swarming with daemons and mongbats, and it seemed quite difficult at first. When my Avatar moved forward, the ground that everyone was standing on changed to lava. I took so much damage that I eventually led them back down the ladder, but I lost both my Avatar and Iolo in the room. Two more resurrection scrolls wasted.

On the second try, I avoided the lava-causing spot and opened just a corner of the barrier. Letting the monsters come to me one-by-one, I was able to defeat them handily.

This turned out to be the last combat. Just like Ultima IV, it was a little anticlimactic in that regard. (Actually, pretty much every Ultima except the first one is a little anticlimactic when it comes to combat. In II, you spend more time chasing Minax than battling her. In III, if I recall correctly, the final battle is with the floor.) I figured I'd have to fight Blackthorn or someone. I didn't even get a chance to use my glass sword--there's a lesson about saving your weapons too long.

Once I realized that was the end of the game, I reloaded before the room so I could video the final combat as well as the endgame. Somehow I hit the wrong key combination, though, and missed the final combat, so the recording picks up just as I'm leaving the room.

Essentially, I find myself in nice, well-furnished room, with Lord British in a mirror at the north end. Moving in front of the mirror, each of my characters gets sucked in, to find themselves in a mirrored room on the other side. Lord British, after only a perfunctory greeting, asks for his box.

Opening it up, he explains that it contains the Orb of the Moons, an artifact from Earth that opens up moongates. Tossing it on the floor, a gate opens and we both go through. He ends up back in Britannia, and I end up back on Earth.

One of the better jokes in a CRPG.

I tell you, my Avatar is pissed. I spent all that time rescuing him, and he immediately sends me home? Don't I have any choice in this at all? Could I maybe say goodbye to my friends first? What if I like Britannia better? Could I become the baron of Blackthorn's old castle?

Oh, well. At least I get to see Blackthorn's fate. In a dream, I see British confront Blackthorn and give him the choice of a trial or taking the Orb of Moons to a random world. Blackthorn chooses the latter. I have this vague memory that I encounter him again in a later game, but I'm not sure. No spoilers!

The problem with Lord British's belief is that Blackthorn didn't become "good" once I killed the Shadowlords.

Thus, the game is concluded, only a few days after I was thinking I would have to abandon it for later. I'd like to look forward to Ultima VI, but there are more games than I've already played between now and then.

On to the GIMLET and then a pair of post-apocalyptic CRPGs!