Ultima VII: The Black Gate: Summary and Rating

The stark black box was an unusual choice at the time. I like to think they were influenced by the Batman posters and VHS covers from a few years prior.

         

Ultima VII: The Black Gate

United States

ORIGIN Systems (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS; 1994 for SNES

Date Started: 20 March 2020

Date Ended: 30 July 2020

Total Hours: 74

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: 51

Ranking at Time of Posting: 353/379 (93%)

Summary:

 
The Avatar returns to Britannia in this seventh entry. He's been gone 200 years by the Britannian calendar, and while some things are the same (Lord British still rules; most of the old companions are still around), the world has advanced in technology to roughly Victorian-era levels. Lord British's rule has become apathetic: the Britannian Tax Council oppresses the populace; the caste system is stronger than ever; something is disrupting the use of magic and driving magic-users insane; and a philosophical/religious organization with sinister undertones is converting the people away from the traditional virtues of the Avatar. The Avatar is thrust into this mess in the context of a serial murder investigation that takes him from one crime scene to another.
       
Ultima VII is a seminal entry in not only the Ultima series but games in general. It pioneered the open-world, sandbox environment, and it popularized the idea of the "unobtrusive interface," in which the entire screen is the game window, and interfaces for character sheets, inventory, and other game elements pop up as needed, pausing the action behind them. The game otherwise features most of the elements that people like about Ultima, including an engaging plot that moves the player across the map, finding clues in documents and NPC conversations in towns, castles, and dungeons. However, it falters in elements specific to RPGs, including character development and combat, and a somewhat inflexible narrative makes it difficult to fully appreciate the open-world design.
      

*****

    

As a writer, I like to do the talking myself, but occasionally another writer says something so perfectly that I can't possibly improve upon it. This is the case with a portion of Jimmy Maher's excellent article on Ultima VII, published in February 2019. Maher argues that "classic games" that everyone remembers fondly come in basically two types. The first is those that do everything right, like Ultima Underworld. As for the second: 

             

The other archetypal classic game is much rarer: the game whose designers have made a lot of really problematic choices, to the point that certain parts of it may be flat-out broken, but which nevertheless charms and delights due to some ineffable spirit that overshadows everything else. Ultima VII is the finest example of this type that I can think of. Its list of trouble spots is longer than that of many genuinely bad games, and yet its special qualities are so special that I can only recommend that you play it.

        

Nowhere else has the word "ineffable" been so aptly used. Maher goes on to mention a multitude of game design choices that should have sent Ultima VII directly to the bargain bin: the infuriating inventory management system, the absolute chaos that accompanies combat, the tendency of characters to get hit with friendly fire, and the need to hand-feed the characters. He (correctly) notes that any joy in character development or inventory acquisition is mostly offset by the fact that combat is so easy (or perhaps more to the point, random) that none of it feels particularly rewarding. To Maher's list, I would add a linear quest line that doesn't anticipate the slightest deviation even though it's nominally an open-world game, and the utter uselessness of magic, such that I never cast a single offensive spell except in experimentation. But if not for the perceived need to purchase spells, the economy would have literally no purpose.
          

I thought this was a missed opportunity.

      
So let's try to figure out why people remember the game so fondly. To start, for all the bugs its open-world nature causes, it's still an open-world game, and this was still rare in the era. The openness of the world introduces some problems, but my guess is that most players didn't really treat it like a truly open-world game anyway. Instead, they probably followed the quest in its intended order, yet still sensed the freedom of the open world around the fringes. They might stop at one city on the way to another or investigate a random island and in either case feel the delicious sense of plotting their own course without actually doing anything terribly deviant. I think I felt the same way, the first two times I played.

    

Second, it's a sandbox, and it's always a joy to play in a sandbox. There are intriguing buildings and caves and shipwrecks and other features scattered across the map, satisfying everyone's desire for serendipity. The engine supports a depth of interaction with the environment not seen even today, with players invited to read books, paint, bake bread, forge swords, open and close shutters, turn lights on and off, and cast a variety of spells that affect nothing except the physical environment. We saw it with my playing with the runes and cleaning up Lock Lake. In Nakar's famous LP of the game, he spends most of a session donating used quest objects to the museum. But even here, I think the game plays better in theory than reality. None of the interactions you have with the environment help you solve puzzles, develop your character, or gain a tactical advantage in combat.
        

Batlin is more invulnerable than Lord British.

      

Perhaps most important--and there's no place in the GIMLET to reflect this--Ultima VII moves along at a steady clip. Although there are a few annoyances (primarily the inventory system and the food system), you rarely hit a moment that's slow or boring. No matter what the conveyance, the party hustles across the map, taking no more than a few minutes to get from one city to another. No dungeon takes more than half an hour or so. Even the towns aren't as full of game-delaying NPCs as they once were. Most of them have less than a dozen people to talk with, with fewer words to say, and the "clickable keyword" approach means that you can get through the dialogue relatively fast. Combats are resolved in seconds.

     

The interface is also something of a work of brilliance. I've developed a reputation for being a mouse-hater, but I'm not. I like the mouse when it's used for purposes that befit the mouse, such as dragging items from one place to another. I hate when it's used for clicking on control buttons that could more easily be activated with the keyboard. Ultima VII strikes a near-perfect balance. There are still keyboard shortcuts for most actions, but the mouse works best when you need to actually move the cursor around the screen.

Last, we have the quality and depth of the story and writing, which Maher credits rightfully to Raymond Benson. I would have to name Ultima VI as the first game in which the various NPCs really come alive with such detail that it's worth getting into long discussions about their actions and motivations. I'm on the fence as to whether Ultima VII truly improves upon this--I suspect they'll both get the same scores for "NPC Interaction"--but it does put these characters in the context of a much more interesting plot. In Ultimas I-III, the villains were too one-dimensional to truly despise, and Ultimas IV-VI didn't really have any villains. But the Fellowship . . . wow. I honestly hate them. After typing that, I stared off into space for about five minutes, trying to think of any other video game faction that I've honestly hated, and I could only come up with the Thalmor, the Murfree Brood, and those guards in Assassin's Creed games who suddenly shoot you with unerring accuracy while you're in the middle of sword combat with one of their compatriots.
             

I enjoyed having companions who occasionally spoke up, but it was rare they didn't say anything completely obvious.

        
But it's at this point that the game's approach to storytelling falls apart for me. Because I hate the Fellowship so much, it's all the more frustrating that you never really defeat them. Sure, you get to kill their top leaders and stop their Big Evil Plan, but that doesn't do anything to address the societal rot that let the Fellowship take hold in the first place. Throughout the entire game, I think there's one NPC who you can convince not to join the Fellowship. You otherwise have no opportunity to expose their bull, to demonstrate the shallowness of their doctrine, to hold up a mirror to its weak-willed members and force them to truly face their demons, not hide them by spouting the same words about the "Triad of Inner Strength" or whatever. This would have been a perfect opportunity to introduce a hero's quest along the lines of The Quest of the Avatar; to do what I tried to do in my "surplaying": discredit the Fellowship, restore the virtues, re-invigorate the old religion. On a deeper level, you don't get to address the fact that Lord British is failing as a ruler, letting the Fellowship take hold in the first place and ignoring their most obvious machinations, such as the takeover of Buccaneer's Den and the corruption of the Britannian Tax Council.

Even if you don't agree with me about the plot problems, you have to agree that there are essentially no "good guys" in this game. Who are you fighting for? Lord British couldn't come off worse if he had been written by someone who hated him. Your companions are a bunch of helpless clowns, mewling for food, saying stupid things throughout the game, screwing up in combat. In an era where 99% of games featured NPCs and party members of no depth, Dupre somehow manages the remarkable achievement of having so much personality that it's tiresome. I mean, we get it: the man likes his drink. Do we have to have a five-minute side conversation every time we enter a pub?

     
As always, we must recognize that a game has to rise to a certain level of depth before we can even think to leverage such criticism, and that rise is generally a good thing. Ultima VII will get a high score in the "game world" category. But I suspect the GIMLET in general is going to be one of extremes, with most RPG mechanics getting low scores and a couple of qualitative aspects getting high scores. Let's check it out.

1. Game World. Starting with a deliciously devious manual, Ultima VII introduces a backstory and game world of depth and quality that we've never seen before. Later games would go bigger, as befits their scope, but few would go better. The type of threat is one that goes beyond the typical "big bad" of most games. Britannia is full of lore, including both ancient lore and recent (past 200 years) lore that even an experienced Avatar must learn. The only black mark I'd give in this category is that only rarely are your actions recognized in other parts of the world. Score: 8.

2. Character Creation and Development. I didn't appreciate how few options there are in character creation, nor how little difference character development seems to play. With only three attributes, eight levels, and no skills, Ultima VII lags not only well behind its contemporaries but also previous games in the series. There really aren't even any classes, and only the Avatar can cast spells. Score: 3.
           

Without the companions, any leveling would be near-meaningless after Forge of Virtue.

         

3. NPC Interaction. The Ultima series continues to lead the way here, although the system is still keyword-focused and doesn't really offer "dialogue options" the way we think of them today. Choosing whether to introduce yourself by your name or as "the Avatar" is almost all you get for role-playing options, and I was a bit annoyed that the game so stubbornly made you ask about NAME and JOB even when it made no sense in context. It was one thing when those were abstract keywords typed into a text interface, but when you're clicking on JOB while talking to children, wisps, and furry forest creatures, the Avatar just seems like a moron. Score: 7.

4. Encounters and Foes. You face a small number of enemy types, and while some give you pause, the game really isn't set up to offer different tactics against different foes. There's nothing terribly original about the enemies, although the manual does give them a thorough run-down. Non-combat encounters and puzzles are quite rare. The game's approach to respawning (i.e., the moment you leave the screen) is a crime against nature. Score: 3.

5. Magic and Combat. A real travesty, particularly with magic. The combat system, including the inability to control your characters, makes in-combat magic not only unnecessary but also unwise. A lot of spells don't do what they're supposed to do (particularly "Detect Trap"  and "Destroy Trap") and a lot more simply don't do anything useful ("Fireworks," "Ignite," "Thunder," "Douse," "Great Ignite," "Great Douse," "Curse," "Swarm," "Poison," "Peer," "Locate," "Conjure," "Dance," any of the "Field" spells"), and still a lot more are unnecessary because a Level 4 Avatar with a couple pieces of magic armor and a decent weapon is already almost unstoppable in combat. In the entire game, I think I only used "Light" and "Great Light," "Heal" and "Great Heal," "Cure," "Unlock Magic," and "Seance" except when screwing around. I do have to give a little credit to the sheer variety of spells, however, even if I didn't find them all useful.

I started to go through each spell at one point but didn't continue the effort. Nakar has a great rundown of the utility of each spell as part of his LP. Some of his descriptions are hilarious in their accuracy, such as "Conjure" ("Two chickens and a fox; look out, dragons!"), "Fire Field" ("Sadly, about the only thing that will walk through it is Shamino, because monster pathfinding is slightly more clever than your allies"), and "Tremor" ("Causes your parents' 386 to hardlock").

As for the rest of combat, that's been covered in detail. I started the game thinking it wasn't bad, but that was when I only had a few characters and was fighting against low-level foes who only used physical attacks. Late in the game, it's absolute chaos. There must be a lot of randomness to the game's variables, too, because even at Level 8, against some enemies like headless, there was a chance that the screen would suddenly flash red and I'd be at the Fellowship shelter in Paws. Because of a lack of any ability to control your characters and because of terrible character pathfinding, there are no "tactics" that really work. Score: 3.
        

Fun fact: You still wake up in the shelter even if you died after casting "Armageddon." Your companions are all standing around you, but lifeless.

         
6. Equipment. This category would be more meaningful if combat were harder, but yes, there are a satisfying number of different weapon and armor types, helms, shields, gauntlets, rings, collars, leggings, boots, wands, potions, and fun special objects like powder barrels. Even late in the game, it was fun to find a treasure cache with a few upgrades. I didn't like having to look to an in-game book for weapon and armor values, though, nor that almost everything is in a fixed location. Score: 5.

7. Economy. There's some cool complexity in the ways you can earn money: loot it, cash in nuggets or gold bars, cash in gems, sell silver serpent venom, win it at the casino, and mine lead ore and cast "Create Gold" on it. And I can't say there aren't things to buy, such as weapons, armor, food, potions, conveyances, spells, reagents, and healing. What I will say is that these two sides of the economy are a bit mismatched. First, there's rarely any need to buy anything since you can just find most of what you need. The only reason to make a lot of money is for the spellbook, and for me that was an extraordinary waste of time. Points for trying, I guess. Score: 4.

8. Quests. We've got a compelling main quest but no role-playing choices except the option to take what is clearly intended as the "bad" ending (you don't even get a "congratulations" screen if you take it). Still, it's worth a point. The franchise is finally starting to get the concept of "side quests" but still isn't using them as well as it could, and low or no experience (or other) rewards for solving them means you're really just doing it for role-playing reasons. Some of the side quests let you pursue an "evil" outcome, which normally I'd applaud but seems out of place in the Ultima setting. Score: 6.
             

Fifteen minutes from the end of the game, the Time Lord asks if I will accept the main quest.

         
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Graphics are very good--just about as good as possible for the era. The graphics are clear in what they depict, and quite pretty in places, and have nice touches like ocean waves washing on the shore. As for sound, I though it was a mixed bag. The voiced dialogue from the Guardian was nice, and a lot of places have sound effects where you'd expect them, such as the creak of opening doors and the crackle of fire, and where you wouldn't expect them, such as an audible "gulp" of food going down the gullet. On the other hand, there are a lot of intrusive sounds, such as constant static or constant chimes in the background, as if the characters all have tinnitus. I think these are caused by some of the magical effects on weapons that we have wielded, and they're completely unnecessary. Other sounds, like the shh made every time you open a container, add nothing but annoyance. In general, I played with the sound off or without bothering to put on my headphones.
 
My feelings about the interface are generally positive. The controls work well, and I admire what the creators were trying to do by hiding the actual UI except when needed. I think they went maybe a little too far, however. Certainly, it would have been helpful to see the health status of the party members without requiring me to scroll through the status screens. It would have been nice if items had snapped to the nearest available space when I tried to put them down instead of giving me a buzz and re-appearing in my backpack. While the keyboard is used okay, it would have been nice to be able to hotkey items like the map, the watch, and lockpicks. Keys are just a mess. (Yes, I realize that "Exult" fixes most or all of these things.) An unobtrusive UI is new to the genre, and I don't blame ORIGIN for not figuring it all out yet, but neither can I give it a perfect rating here. Score: 6.
          

I didn't like the way secret doors were handled, either.

         
10. Gameplay. Ultima VII gets half points for the four major things I look for here. It's open world, but only partly (geographically but not narratively). It's somewhat replayable (in party members, in order of exploration) but not fully. It's a bit too easy and a bit too long, but not "very" in either case. Score: 6.

That gives us a final score of . . . ooh. Okay, let's just think about this for a second. I just spent four months playing this game, cranking out more entries than almost any prior game, acting like I was having an awful lot of fun while doing so. Am I really going to suggest, with a straight face, that it not only fails to beat Ultima V and Ultima VI, but that it doesn't even beat Ultima III? That it's on the same level of quality as Treasures of the Savage Frontier? The truth is, I overrated some of the games, in some categories, during the first two years, and I should probably make some adjustments. But that only partly helps us here.

Before I reveal the score, let me ask this: Ultima VII is a great game, sure, but is it a great RPG? Does it have what you typically look for in RPG mechanics? Or do you agree (again) with the words of Jimmy Maher:
       

If you see a CRPG as a game in the most traditional sense of the word--as an intricate system of rules to learn and to manipulate to your advantage--you’ll hate, hate, hate Ultima VII for its careless mechanics. One might say that it’s at its worst when it actively tries to be a CRPG, at its best when it’s content to be a sort of Britannian walking simulator.

 
Again, I think Maher says it perfectly. Almost everything I enjoyed about the game was separate from its RPG mechanics--the same things I enjoy about, say, Red Dead Redemption. Ultima VII is the earliest game I can think of where you'll be walking through a forest, stumble upon a ruined building, and feel an inscrutable exhortation to figure out what's it's about. Or you're flying your magic carpet and happen to see a guy standing alone on an island. You can't rest until you know what his story is. That's where the game's strengths lie, not in the numbers and dice.
 
My GIMLET, regrettably for fans of this game, considers the numbers and dice, and gives it a final score of 51.  I want to thank those of you who are departing my blog at this point; it's been nice having you as readers.
        

Even if you agree with the stressing of the mouse interface, you have to agree this was a particularly weird comparison to make.

          
For those of you sticking around, it's worth noting that my GIMLET score (which I must stress is still high as these things go, just not as high as we all anticipated) is largely echoed by contemporary reviews. Scorpia's August 1992 Computer Gaming World coverage was mixed, praising the graphics and story, but cataloging a host of technical issues that I didn't experience, such as a gate that can't be passed in the final dungeon and missing bodies in Minoc. But aside from that, she had the same criticisms I did: combat sucks, spells don't work, and maybe more stuff. I don't know. Her review cuts off on Page 108 of the issue and, as far as I can tell, never resumes.

As usual, the CGW of the 1990s wasn't going to let Scorpia have the only say. The counterpoint review comes in the following issue and is written by (later) novelist Charles Ardai. I don't want to spend too much time analyzing his review, but one thing I tell my students is that after they've written their papers or essays, go back and lop off the first paragraph. Almost always, what you've just cut is superficial nonsense, basically you talking your way into writing the paper in the first place, and the second paragraph almost always starts in a stronger place. Ardai needed that advice. Here's how he begins:
          

Unlike thirteen, the number seven does not carry with it any automatic negative connotation. Things good, bad, and indifferent come in sevens: days of the week, deadly sins, and dwarves, just to name a few. No one minds being seventh at a dinner table and, should the seventh of a month fall on a Friday, no one cancels flight plans just to be on the safe side.

            
What kind of editor allows that idiotic paragraph to pass in an era where column inches cost money? The same sort of drivel appears in the last couple of paragraphs, too; he's really obsessed with the idea that people won't like the game just because it has a high number, or specifically the number VII, or whatever. I honestly don't know what the hell he's talking about. It's rare that a major commercial magazine publishes writing that is somehow worse than an extra subscription card that hangs on after you've shaken all the others out. Ardai has somehow managed to make a living as a writer, so I can only assume he read Strunk and White at some point.

Anyway, the review is mostly positive, emphasizing mostly the story and wonders of exploration, focusing not at all on anything to do with RPG mechanics, concluding that, "Origin has produced an unusual game, with innovations of plot, tone, and gameplay that, while not spectacular, are certainly worth seeing." The March 1993 issue of the magazine had a reader poll (I am again indebted to Maher for pointing this out) that ranked the game 30th among 100 contemporary releases; above it were Ultima Underworld (#3), Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (#10), Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen (#11), Eye of the Beholder II (#17), and Might and Magic III (#28). That's a worse ranking than I'm giving it, although many of the same games are above it on my list.
     

MobyGames' round-up of reviews has contemporary ratings as high as 94/100 (June 1992 PC Joker) and as low as 40/100 (July 1992 PC Review), but the problem with contemporary reviews is that they're overwhelmed with discussions of technical issues that modern players don't experience. I naturally haven't translated all of the foreign ones, but Scorpia's review is the only one I've seen that recognizes that while Ultima VII might be a great game, it's not a great RPG because it lacks sufficient attention to RPG mechanics.
    
As I prepared the GIMLET, I found myself wondering how my experience would have improved with a smaller party, or even without any other characters at all. I like the way that companions occasionally contribute to dialogue, but beyond a few interjections, they're useful mostly as pack mules. Without them, the Avatar would have to be more careful with inventory, perhaps enhancing my perception of the utility of certain pieces of equipment. Combat would certainly be more interesting and tactical, magic would become far more useful (which would bolster the economy), and my perceptions of character development might improve. The choice of when to do the Forge of Virtue, which I did early, also affects the character development issue. Then again, all games have such variances depending how the player approaches it, so I can't justify bumping the score based on what might have happened.
            

All they had to do was use this line more often. Four companions would have been plenty.

          
If the early reviews were mixed, Ultima VII's popularity seems to have increased over time. PC Gamer listed it among the "50 best games ever" in May 1997 and the tenth best game of "all time" in February 2013. Even as late as October 2017, the site was wondering whether any RPG would ever top it (Divinity: Original Sin 2 "comes close," it ruled).  Rock Paper Shotgun listed it among the "best RPGs to play on a PC" in a January 2020 article (it's number 29) after listing it among the 75 "greatest PC games of all time" in November 2017. IGN listed it as #24 on the "top 100 RPGs of all time" in an undated article. These are just a sample. And yet almost every modern article that takes time to analyze it seriously, like Maher's, finds the same faults and the same "ineffable" quality that somehow transcends those faults. This is perhaps nowhere more notable than in Nakar's entries, which begin by calling The Black Gate "the greatest PC RPG of all time" before spending 38 entries mercilessly trashing everything about it.
 
One curious thing I've noted about the Ultima series over the years is that despite its inarguable quality, it's hard to find games that seem directly inspired by it. In saying this, I am of course dismissing the dozens of shareware and freeware "Ultima clones," but their proliferation does help highlight the lack of Ultima-specific influence in commercial RPGs of the era. Only a few commercial RPGs seem to be deliberately copying an Ultima interface, and even these only stand out because of the relative scarcity of fully third-person games in the era. Hardly anyone is learning from Ultima's attention to NPCs, open game worlds, sandbox engines, or original plots.
 
My experience with 1990s games is light beyond 1992, so I can't say from direct experience whether Ultima VII is an exception. What I can say is that my research failed to find any games clearly influenced by the title. Sure, there are plenty of games with axonometric interfaces, but few that have the type of environmental interaction that Ultima VII allows, let alone its other qualities. You could potentially see some influence of the game on the Infinity Engine, but even there I suspect the lineage comes more directly from Interplay's two Lord of the Rings titles (which, I should note, beat Ultima VII to the "unobtrusive interface"). Later, we'll see plenty of open-world sandboxes in which objects have been carefully hand-placed throughout the game, but the best of these (e.g., Morrowind) have interfaces and mechanics so different from Ultima that you have to hear it directly from the developer (as we have from Bethesda's Todd Howard) to make the connection. The Ultima series, it seems to me, is widely admired but not (again, in the commercial market) widely copied, except perhaps in the modern "retro" scene. This is a nascent hypothesis, however, and one to which I invite counter-arguments.
 
What is more factually established is that The Black Gate was the last ORIGIN game. The studio would continue to exist as a division of Electronic Arts after 1992, but the EA influence is felt immediately and progressively, to the point that many fans consider the last Ultima unplayable. In that sense, Ultima VII wouldn't be bad end to the series. The Avatar, having saved Britannia time and time again, is finally allowed ("forced," the game would have it, but come on) to stay in the world that reveres him. If the series had ended here, you could imagine it as a poignant moment in which the "Avatar" was finally divorced from his player's control and allowed to retire. (If I had been in charge of development, I would have played up this aspect with the same cleverness that Richard Garriott introduced the Avatar in Ultima IV.) You can imagine him speaking comfort to the disillusioned former Fellowship members, rebuilding the shrines, perhaps even ultimately replacing the apathetic Lord British as the land's ruler. Ultima Underworld II (1993) could have maybe been seen as a coda in which we start to see some of the Avatar's new role, in the context of preventing another Guardian invasion.
        

I can imagine the Avatar assisting with this endeavor.

         
Instead, we got Ultima VII, Part Two: The Serpent Isle (1993), which for all its mechanical improvements tells a fairly idiotic story,  Ultima VIII: Pagan (1994), which at its best seems like a bad clone of Ultima VII, and Ultima IX: Ascension (1999), which I want to hold out hope for, but am not encouraged by what I have heard. Of course, by the end, attention of both developers and players had shifted to the successful Ultima Online (1997). Despite much Googling, I still don't understand how it fits with the earlier series or what role (if any) the Avatar plays within it. I'm sure readers will help fill in the gaps. What I can say is that when I first heard about the game, I regarded it with horror. My experiences in Britannia, my connection to the idea of the "Avatar," were so personal that I couldn't imagine sharing the experience with thousands of strangers, many of them probably the sorts of people who paid only 1 gold piece to the blind reagent-seller in Ultima IV. I originally had hopes for Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues (2018), but I was put off early in development by talk of more multiplayer nonsense and ended up never investigating it.
         
It is thus with some sadness that I say goodbye to the last game of the series that I know for sure I will like. This entry was a real struggle for me. I started it the day I won the game and didn't finish until nearly three weeks later (it usually only takes me 3-4 hours to write an entry), in the process writing and cutting more content than in any previous posting. How could a 51-point game, of which I've had at least 27 prior, offer so much to say, and yet none of what I say seems adequate? It's ineffable.