Ultima: Exodus

North American NES box.

Ultima: Exodus is a role-playing game originally developed by Origin Systems. This port was developed by Newtopia Planning and first released in Japan by Pony Canyon on the Famicom on 1987-10-09, then for the MSX2 in 1988, and later in February 1989 in North America on the NES by FCI. This is a port of Ultima III: Exodus, and while the game is similar enough that it should be on the original game's page, I have such a history with it, it warrants its own page. The MSX2 port is nearly the same as the Famicom version, just with a slightly different color palette and sound due to the different hardware. This game was heavily advertised in Japan; the soundtrack was composed by a pop musician and released on vinyl, cassette, and CD, a single was released featuring the vocals of a pop singer who had an in-game cameo, several extensive hint books were made, and even comics and game books were written to introduce the Ultima series to the Japanese audience.

I first played this game after renting it from a video store around 1989 and loved it. I remember reading the poorly printed replacement manual that came with the game and seeing that there was "dragon armor," which I thought was so cool. Later, my step-brother brought his copy when he visited, and I played it more. I accidentally erased his save game file, and my brother and I tried to rush through the game to get back all the stuff he had, but were unable to, he was very mad. But we kept playing, and I amassed a lot of gold and raised each of the characters to level 5. This unleashed the pirates, and we made it to Ambrosia. I found a shrine, and, teasingly, my step-brother told me to try and donate all my gold to see what happened. I obeyed, but since I didn't see any benefit, I felt betrayed by him. Only later did I realize I was on the right path.

That winter, I asked for the game for Christmas, and got it. It was a used copy which didn't have the manual, but it did come with a nice transparent purple plastic case, which fit with the game's graphic art. I played it a lot, but didn't get very far into the story because the game has very little in-game direction. Later, my brother and I found a copy of the hint book at a Toys 'R Us, and he bought it for me. With it, I was able to get a lot farther and even max out the level of my party. However, as the hint book reveals, you have to grind like crazy to get far into the game, and after getting about two thirds through the story, I got sick of grinding and gave up. Years later, having gotten tired of it being a game that I really loved, and sunk hundreds of hours into, but couldn't beat, I sat down and spent even more hours grinding out gold and buying my stats (I ran the game at 2x speed in an emulator), and then finally beat it on 2017-07-08.

Status

I own a complete-in-box copy of the game and a loose copy. I have beaten it.

Review

• Overall: 4/10
• Best Version: NES

Good

• For the time, the graphics are pretty good, certainly better than any of the PC-based Ultima ports.
• The game music is extremely well composed, having been written by professional Tsugutoshi Goto.
• Hiding portions of the map that your character's can't see, while not very attractive to look at, is certainly more realistic than seeing through walls and roofs, which was common in most RPGs of the day.
• The amount of effort Pony Canyon put into marketing the game was amazing. Multiple professionally made hint books, a manga, a game book, a soundtrack on CD, cassette, and record, and more.
• There is a wide variety of classes and races which make it very easy to customize a party to your play style.
• The spell list has a good amount of variation. There are attack spells for singular and multiple targets, spells for getting around in the dungeons, disarming traps, healing, resurrection, and so forth.
• There is nice variety to the layout of the towns; each focuses on a particular terrain, and it's impressive to see varying age groups among the NPCs.
• Having wind that affects how fast the ship can move in various directions was a nice touch.

Bad

• The game engine moves too slowly. I found the game to be much more playable when run at double speed in an emulator.
• The content of the towns are very redundant. Most of them have the same shops as each other, so they could be removed altogether. Also, most of the NPC dialogue is useless banter: "it's a good day for washing," "it's too late to play Ultima," etc. Some of the dialogue contains clues, but the majority of the clues are either unhelpful: "find the shrines," or incorrect: "dig here!"
• Experience is poorly correlated to the difficulty of the monster. A full mob of skeletons can be defeated in a single round with a free Undead spell, yielding 32 XP, while a full mob of demons, who will leave your whole party injured and poisoned, only gives 64 XP. Also, the amount of XP needed to level up isn't exponential; it always take 100 XP to get to the next level, so you reach your level cap at only 2500 XP.
• Gold is entirely random, and far too little is rewarded for difficult battles. There is a 50/50 chance that a single goblin will be carrying more gold than a pair of dragons!
• Combat, though tactically superior to most RPGs of the time, is dreadfully slow.
• Weapons are poorly factored. Weapons of a higher power level only do marginally better damage. Ranged weapons usually do the same amount of damage as melee weapons, but you have many chances to hit before the monsters can hit back, so the only reason to use a melee weapon is if the class can't use a ranged one.
• Enemies can attack diagonally, but you cannot, even if your character is wielding a pole-arm.
• If you pick the wrong menu item in combat, you have to forfeit your turn, you can't undo the menu option. While this is more realistic, it's annoying to deal with in a game.
• While most of the monsters in a group have different sprites, they're essentially clones of each other. For example, titans, giants, and golems are all identical in combat.
• I don't care for the 3D dungeons because you can't tell where the enemies are, there are WAY too many traps, the layouts are ridiculous. And, like towns, their content is mostly redundant and half of them could be eliminated.
• Turning on a trapped square in a dungeon makes you hit the same trap again.
• There are a couple game breaking bugs, but mercifully, they're rarely encountered.

Ugly

• The game requires an obscene amount of grinding. You have to grind monsters to get XP to raise levels, but levels only increase your maximum HP, not your stats. To raise stats, you must grind gold and donate 100 GP for a single stat increase at a shrine. Getting a single character to their optimal stats costs about 20,000 GP (about 400 battles). But before you can tackle that, you have to equip your party with about 10,000 GP in weapons and armor, and buy food and healing along the way. All that grinding takes literal days to do.
• Recovering HP after major combat takes forever. Inns don't heal your characters, they only save your game. Characters max out at 2550 HP. There is only one healing spell which gives a paltry 25-50 HP and affects only a single character. A tent heals 100 HP per character, but has a 100 GP price tag. Some hospitals will heal a character to full, but it costs 200 GP each, and there are only a couple in the game.
• Although the manual gives detailed instructions for how to play the game, neither it nor the in-game characters give you useful direction for how to progress the story which causes a lot of aimless wandering

Media

Box Art

• 

  The original Japanese box is pretty great. It shows the fighter, cleric, thief, and wizard in cartoon style, in a dark realm, fighting monsters. Although, some of the monsters don't fit the game, the art is quite good and my favorite.

• 

  This is the MSX2 box. It uses the same art as the Famicom, but replaces the background with a boring red field.

• 

  The North American art is the same scene, only painted in a more Western style. The characters aren't as emotive, and the cleric looks more like a sissy, but it's still competently painted.

Documentation

• Ultima - Exodus - NES - Manual.pdf

  Game manual.

• 

  Japanese game manual. It's a shame ours wasn't this good.

• 

  Hint Book.

• 

  Nintendo Power, part 1.

• 

  Nintendo Power, part 2.

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  Nintendo Power, part 3.

• 

  Perfect Solution Japanese hint book.

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  Perfect Solution Technique Japanese hint book.

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  Perfect Solution Technique (Revision) Japanese hint book.

• 

  Perfect Guidebook to Overcome Ultima: Exodus (Japanese).

• 

  Exodus Strike Back game book.

• AHB - 31 - Ultima - Kingdom of Britannia Crisis.pdf

  Adventure Hero's Books - Ultima: Kingdom of Britannia Crisis.

• 

  Ultima: Exodus manga.

• 

  Advertisement.

Maps

• 

  Sosaria.

• 

  Sosaria, with labels.

• 

  Lord British's Castle.

• 

  Royal City.

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  Gray.

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  Moon.

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  Yew.

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  Devil Guard.

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  Montor West.

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  Montor East.

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  Fawn.

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  Death Gulch.

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  Dawn.

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  Ambrosia.

• 

  Shrines.

• 

  Exodus's Castle.

Maps with details can be found here: mikesrpgcenter.com/ultima3.

Graphics

• 

  Sprite sheet - Player icons.

• 

  Sprite sheet - Player characters.

• 

  Sprite sheet - NPCs.

• 

  Sprite sheet - Monsters.

• 

  Sprite sheet - Unused.

Videos

• youtube.com/watch?v=busg7ktmwDw - Commercial.
• youtube.com/watch?v=aY4jsHZf3Yk - Speed run.

Credits

The original game doesn't have credits.

Role	Names
Original Designer	Richard Garriott
Producers	Masaichiro Hirano, Yasuo Hattori
Directors	Kunihiko Kagawa, Junichi Ishii
Coordinators	Kouji Ichikawa, Masuko Mori
Chief Programmer (NES)	Takaaki Ushiki
Programmers (NES)	Yoshihiko Nakazawa, Tomohiro Hori, Naoki Koga, Saeko Suda
Programmers (MSX2)	Hiroyuki Fujiwara, Satoru Miki
Character Designer	Atsushi Fujimori
Words Arrangement (Dialogue?)	Yasushi Akimoto
Music Composer	Tsugutoshi Goto
Illustrator	Tadashi Tsukada
Sales Promotion	Mutsuko Arata
Special Thanks	Aya Nishitani, Saburo Yamada, Yasuhiro Kawashima, Kono Production

Titles

Language	Native	Transliteration	Translation
English	Ultima: Exodus
Japanese	ウルティマ 恐怖のエクソダス	Urutima: Kyofu no Ekusodasu	Ultima: Fear of Exodus

Links

• mobygames.com/game/nes/exodus-ultima-iii - MobyGames (NES).
• mobygames.com/game/msx/exodus-ultima-iii - MobyGames (MSX).
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_III:_Exodus - Wikipedia.
• gamefaqs.com/nes/587740-ultima-exodus - GameFAQs.
• vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Ultima:_Exodus_(NES) - Music.
• thealmightyguru.com/Games/Hacking/Wiki/index.php/Ultima:_Exodus - NES Hacker Database.