Game 560: Excelsior, Phase One: Lysandia (1993)

 

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Excelsior Phase One: Lysandia

United States

Castle Software (developer); published as shareware
Released 1993 for DOS, 2000 for Windows

Date Started: 17 October 2025

      

Excelsior is a superior Ultima clone, so superior in its opening stages, at least, that I hesitate to even use the word "clone," which seems pejorative. But it is clearly inspired by Ultima, down to the tiled iconographic perspective, the use of most of the keyboard for the game's commands, and the detailed "handbook" that gives the player a tourist's view of the game world. 

    

The backstory (perhaps only a framing story; time will tell) casts the player as a "Fixer," an agent of the Council of World Watchers, sent to various planets as necessary to "correct any deviation in the cosmic fabric of planetary history." You have already served the Council for two eons. Your latest assignment is to the planet of Lysandia, where some unspecified evil is growing. "The populace is losing their will to advance, and progress is stagnant." The mission requires you to adopt the guise of a local, and thus the character creation process is couched as the Fixer selecting the body he or she will inhabit for the duration of the mission.

      

Part of the backstory.

     

As for that process, it's far more extensive than any Ultima, and I really hope the game makes use of its complexity. Every character starts with 15 points allocated to strength, dexterity, and intelligence and 5 allocated to luck, charm, and piety. After giving the character a name, the player next selects the race, which modifies the statistics. There are 13 race options: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, imp, troll, half-orc, half-elf, half-gnome, giant, golem, and glynn, the latter being a kind of angelic being with yellow skin. The effects on attributes are predictable: elves get lowered 1 point in strength, and raised 2 in dexterity and luck; trolls get 3 points of strength, -4 to intelligence, and -3 to charm; and so forth.

    

Sex is next. Males get +1 strength and -1 dexterity, women the opposite. "Sexless" is an option for imps, golems, and glynns, given their magical nature. The player then allocates a pool of 30 points to the three primary attributes and a pool of 5 points to the secondary ones. 

         

The final steps of character creation.

      

There are 13 classes available: warrior, archer, swordsman, ranger, militiaman, mage, cleric, paladin, scholar, bard, rogue, pirate, and assassin. These classes have various attribute minimums, not covered in the book, so it takes some experimentation to allocate the right number of points to meet the requirements. I wanted to make a sexless golem paladin, which is possible with 30 strength, 25 intelligence, and 8 piety. Yes, yes, hah, hah, paladins are always "sexless." 

   

The final step to character creation is assigning two skills from a list of 12: bandage, survival, scribe, lockpicking, seamanship, dark eyes, fencing, marksmanship, swimming, music, fist-fighting, and magic. Sometimes, a class gives you a skill already. My paladin had "Magic." I chose "Dark Eyes" and "Survival."

      

A final selection is the character's alignment, which is not absolute but set on a scale from "evil" to "good." I made my paladin modestly "good," but more on this in a bit. 

      

My starting character. Well, close to it, anyway.

      

Gameplay begins on an outdoor map, with the character standing between a city to the west and a castle surrounded by a moat to the east. The tiles are small, allowing for 26 x 18 of them to appear in the view window. My character starts with 60 hit points, 3 magic points, 250 food, and 100 gold pieces.

         

A new world awaits.

       

As I begin any Ultima clone, I tend to run through the same investigative questions.

    

How's the interface? 

   

Answer: in the best Ultima tradition. One command per keystroke: A)ttack, B)oard (a ship), C)ast, D)rop, E)nter, and so forth. Most of them are so obvious that I rarely need to look at the list of commands that can be called up with H)elp. Movement is with the arrow keys or numberpad, the latter allowing you to move diagonally.

    

Without any trouble, I head east to the castle, enter, and begin looking at things and talking with NPCs.

 

Is it going to offer NPC dialogue or just NPC monologues? 

    

In other words, for NPC interaction, is it going to clone Ultima I-III or Ultima IV and V? The answer, alas, is the former. NPCs mostly give generic lines.

   

But the game doesn't limit NPC monologues to one sentence. They frequently deliver entire paragraphs that the player must scroll, and every so often deliver messages so long that a black screen opens up to contain it all. There aren't many NPCs in the castle's single large level. Here's what they offer:

   

• Guards: "Enjoy your stay, and obey the law!"

• Clerics: "Come join my search for a higher being." 

      

That would be me.

       

• Warriors: "There is no more noble calling than that of a warrior." 

• Swordsmen: "There's no finer weapon than a well-made blade." 

• Andrew the Deft: "Know me as Andrew the Deft, friend." 

• Damian: The Ceremonial Man at Arms. Offers to train me in swordsmanship for 50 gold pieces. That answers one of my questions, at least: skills that you don't take during character creation can be purchased later. 

    

I later forget to return here. I guess I need to start making a list.

      

For services, the castle has a tavern where you can buy food, a bank where you can deposit and withdraw money, and a panel of six guildmasters who oversee the "leveling up" process when you gain enough experience. More on that later.

      

How do secret doors work?  

       

All games, whether iconographic or first-person, tend to offer four answers to this question.

   

1. There are no secret doors.
2. You have to search for them. Success may be certain or dependent on a character skill.
3. You just walk right into them; "secret" doors are in fact illusory walls.
4. You have to solve some kind of puzzle. 

      

Seemed like the obvious place to look.

       

Excelsior uses the #2 approach, with no skill involved. The places that the player must search are pretty obvious. You may have noticed that unlike many Ultima clones, the game does not occlude things that the character would not be able to see from the current position. That plus the fairly large view window means that "secret" areas are sometimes visible in their entirety. Almost right away, I find a secret larder off the tavern. That leads to the next question.

 

Is this the sort of game where you can just take things, or is that wrong?

    

It's amazing how relevant that question remains into the modern age. During the period where this blog was dormant, and I should have been playing old RPGs if I was going to play any RPGs at all, I admit I downloaded Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (short review: like the "Scrollslike" approach; annoyed by the authors' irreverent, nonsensical use of Arthurian characters and themes). Almost right away, you're confronted with the question of whether it's okay to take this head of cabbage from the kitchen. You often don't know that a game has some kind of crime and bounty system until you screw around and find out.

         

No one seems to be bothered.

          

In this case, I grab sacks of food, hold my breath, and wait for the guards to snap to attention and start streaming towards me. They don't, so I guess I'm okay. The guards' lack of response automatically answers one of my follow-up questions: "Are any of the things I'm not supposed to steal technically key plot items that I'm required to steal, thus subsequently requiring me to slaughter dozens of castle guards?" You never forget your first RPG.

 

I also naturally check my alignment after the little heist, but it doesn't seem to have budged on the scale. 

      

What kind of king do we have here? 

     

That's another question that coincidentally echoes in Tainted Grail. If this is a boring Ultima clone, the king will be a benevolent Lord British-like character who sets me off on the main quest. Here, King Valkery seems more of an affable tyrant. He greets me with a "Welcome, commoner!" but says he's too busy considering a 30% tax increase to talk to me.

     

At least I didn't get a big exposition dump about virtue.

      

It's the king's mage who sets off the main quest. He has one of those multi-screen dialogues. As I (the character) speak to him, I recognize him as one of the Elder Fixers on the Great Council. He's the one who sent a warning about the problems the world is facing. He doesn't tell me much about said problems, but instead suggests that I find three mystical amulets which will help develop my attributes. He names three towns where I can find the amulets or at least leads on the amulets: North Blagsell, Roaldia, and Embiscule.

       

Part of a long encounter with the king's mage.

        

What sort of equipment system does the game offer?

    

The answer: much closer to Ultima V than the earlier games in the series. You can dual-wield weapons, for one thing. Instead of just one item of "armor," you can equip a helmet, gloves, shields, boots, and a torso item. On the negative side, there are no statistics available; you just have to assume that items that cost more are better.

    

I find a dagger and wooden shield in a secret area of the castle, but I naturally want better stuff, so I head out of the castle and west to the town of Oooblyae. The town has a tavern, a provisioner (torches, shovels, lanterns), a weapon shop, an armor shop, a spell shop, and a healer. I buy cloth armor and a shortsword.

        

Selections in the armor shop.

       

For NPCs in Oooblyae, one of them repeats that there's an amulet for each major attribute. Another tells me that there's a cartographer who can "aid me in locating a multitude of different places" in Castle Infinitum to the southwest. A third is proud of her pet duck that she's trained, and indeed you can visit the duck in a small pond in the town's center.

 

In an Ultima game, that would be a mantra.

       

What kind of combat system are we looking at?

        

This question has nothing to do with the duck. I could have segued that better. As you explore the land, enemies spawn randomly across the landscape and then head directly for the character. At Level 1, these enemies include gremlins, goblins, and kobolds. 

       

Things get out of hand.

      

Combat mostly uses the early Ultima approach. There's no separate screen. You just hit A)ttack or C)ast (if you have an offensive spell) and specify the direction. After combat, though, we find a more Ultima V approach in that enemies can drop multiple things, and just about anything otherwise found in the game—gold, food, weapons, armor, torches, and so forth—might be part of the NPC loot.

    

Combat is a lot harder than I would have expected. Multiple enemies can spawn at once and surround you. You miss a lot at Level 1, and they hit hard. I was killed in my first couple of battles with goblins. You can try to "escape" into a town, but the enemies remain on the map waiting for you when you emerge. That leads to the next question:

   

How can I reliably heal myself?

    

This is again a question that transcends Ultima clones specifically. The new player is always looking for a sense of what the damage/heal cycle is going to be. At one end of the spectrum, there are games that essentially restore you to full health after each battle, so that you only ever have to worry about one battle at a time. At the other extreme are games for which it is impossible to heal without some kind of resource, making the accumulation of battles as important as the individual battle.

   

The player usually seeks some kind of infinite resource that "breaks" this cycle. For instance, there are many games in which health regeneration does not happen automatically, but spell point restoration does (again, we see a parallel with Tainted Grail), so as long as you have a healing spell, you have an infinite resource. If health and mana regeneration both rely on food, potions, or other resources, the game becomes a lot harder. 

    

I can't have too many rounds like this.

     

Excelsior was very difficult in its early stages. There is no infinite resource. Health does not regenerate automatically. Healers and inns cost more money than the player makes from even several battles. For a while, I couldn't get out of a downward spiral in which I kept losing hit points in battle and hardly making enough money to compensate.

   

Fortunately, the game has a healing spell, and magic points do regenerate automatically (and quickly), but it costs 50 gold pieces for a spellbook and another 25 for the spell. I eventually got to a point where I was trapped in Oooblyae because I was down to 5 hit points; there were three enemies waiting for me outside; and I had no money. Unable to recover from this, I had to re-start the game and make the spell my priority.

     

How does the magic system work? 

    

Even Ultima has so many answers to this question that there's no common style across the series. The first two Ultimas made spells inventory items that you bought and used individually. Ultima III introduced the "pool of mana" approach, and the rest of the games built on that buy adding first the need for reagents (Ultima IV), then the need to know the syllables associated with each spell (Ultima V), and then the need to purchase the spell first (Ultima VI and beyond).

     

Excelsior's approach is to make you buy a spellbook to hold all your spells, then buy each spell once. After that, you can cast your spells infinite times. The game gives each spell a two-letter code that you type when casting it, but it's not quite the same as the Ultima syllable system. "Anti-Pain" (AP) costs just a couple of mana points, so even though I started the game with only three, I could cast it, walk around, cast it again, and ultimately get back to full health as long as I could get to the safety of a town.

         

I buy my first spell.

         

But Excelsior has a wrinkle that I've only really seen in one other game that I can recall: Thalion's Dragonflight (1990). Each spell is given an alignment, and the spell costs less the closer the character is to its alignment. Moreover, as you cast spells, your alignment slowly shifts towards the alignment of the spells you're casting. In my case, "Anti-Pain" is on the "good" side of the scale, but only a few ticks above neutral. Thus, as I healed myself, I gradually became more "evil." I'm not sure how much sense that makes philosophically.

        

All I wanted to do is stop the bleeding.

        

Anyway, "Anti-Pain" still didn't protect me much on long journeys between cities, so I decided to spend a little time grinding around Oooblyae, at least until I had the best equipment the city had to offer.

   

How does character development work?

    

Same as Ultima III and beyond: Experience and leveling. The Guildmasters take the place of Lord British as the principal agent of leveling. Gaining a level conveys more hit points and magic points; spells become more powerful; and there's a hint that glowing orbs found in each castle (behind a maze of secret doors, in the case of the Orb of Strength in Castle Excelsior) will increase attributes once the character has the associated amulet. You may recall that Ultima V had glowing balls in the dungeons that served a similar purpose.

       

These guys remind me of the "review board" of Skara Brae (cf. The Bard's Tale).

        

For now, the increased magic points and hit points were enough to make me feel a bit safer, and I was happy to see that the number of hit points cured by "Anti-Pain" also increased. 

    

Enemies scale to meet the character's level. At Level 2, I started encountering hobgoblins, gnolls, and mummies. So far, none of them seem to have any special attacks or inflict status effects. After some experimentation, I decide that having two weapons (providing two attacks per round) is more valuable than the additional defensive value of a wooden shield.

      

Not yet, anyway.

           

As I stabilize at Level 3 and prepare to set out around the land, I have two final questions:

   

How big a problem is food going to be?

    

Not much of a problem at all, it seems. It depletes slowly and is replenished cheaply. You often find a few dozen meals on slain enemies. As Hour 3 approaches, I'm still working off the initial allotment. No prolonged period stealing fish and chips for this fixer.

 

How am I going to navigate?    

    

Poorly, perhaps. The game did not come with a world map, and so far, there's no hint of any coordinate system. I feel like any top-down game ought to offer one or the other, ideally both. For now, I don't think I'll map, but I may have to do so if the world is large or complicated.

       

Perhaps there isn't just one world.

       

I would normally follow the coast in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern, but an NPC mentioned a cartographer in Castle Infinitum. If the game does have a coordinate system, it's probably to be found there. Off we go into another world.

   

Time so far: 3 hours