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cosmicspear(Originally posted on July 30.)
Otherwise known as "that game for people who thought Ultima 1 was a bit too subdued and logical."
Ultima 2 is the only game in the series that's set on Earth, though strangely enough it also tries to pretend that Ultima 1 took place on Earth (which naturally led to the retcons to make these games be all about one person being particularly messy, but that's another story). After you busted down Mondain's door with your time machine and vaporized him with a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range, his apprentice and lover Minax was understandably a little cheesed off. So she took the only logical course of action, using the power of the mysterious time doors to invade the world's past, present, and future, with the ultimate (successful) goal of eventually destroying society by causing World War III. You're not about to take this lying down, so you set out across time (specifically the five time periods of Pangaea, 1423 BC, 1990 AD, 2112 AD, and the Time of Legends) to find a way to kill her.
Most of Ultima 2 is effectively spent trying to find a way to get past the force field Minax has barring entry into her fortress—you can technically get enough HP to survive it, but it does so much damage you might as well not bother. Getting the ring that can protect you requires you to assemble a list of important items: blue tassles [sic] that allow you to board a ship, skull keys that allow you to board a biplane, brass buttons that allow you to fly a biplane, ankhs that allow you to board a rocket, tri-lithium crystals to serve as rocket fuel, and plenty of keys to let you unlock doors. You'll also want strange coins that can be rubbed to negate time, and there's a few other things you're pretty much guaranteed to pick up along the way that can help.
Where do you get all this stuff? Grinding.
Ultima 2 is probably the ultimate RPG grindfest, with almost all its runtime spent farming various enemies to get the items you need. Most of the stuff you need can only be found by killing thieves, who are annoying because they can also steal stuff from you. So you need to grind to be strong enough to oneshot them first (both by having enough strength to do good damage and having enough agility to use good weapons). Raising your stats for this involves the single silliest method of stat gaining I've ever seen in an RPG: You go to the city of New San Antonio in 1990, find the clerk at the Hotel California (even though you're in Texas...), and given him money, 100 GP at a time, at which point he may or may not say "Alakazam!" and raise one of your stats at random.
Ultima speedrunner organMike describes this and the first game as "Mad Libs RPGs," and given everything I've noted thus far I can't exactly disagree with them.
Anyway, after a bit of experimentation I figured out that the best way to make the money for stat grinding was by going to Lord British's castle, waiting for one of the jesters in the entrance to be far enough down that I'd be able to run before the guards caught me, killing the jester, and leaving and returning to reset the map. This got me money so much faster than farming it the old-fashioned way it isn't even funny. But the point of this grind was to get my stats high enough for a different, even more fruitful grind: Going to the town of Le Jester (found in 1423 BC about where you'd expect Namibia to be) and murdering the one non-hostile thief at the town entrance over and over until I had about 2,000 GP.
Oh yeah, and you're also gonna need to kill some guards at some point because only guards are allowed to carry keys (apparently the skull keys for planes don't count). But once you've got some keys it's fairly trivial to get more since you can use them to get a ship and ships have cannons.
The game pretty much breezes by once the thief grind's done, particularly if you're like me and you already know where to go. You need the biplane to get to the last surviving town in 2112, a Soviet holdout where you can find the world's only source of rockets. And you need the rockets to explore space, because you need to go to Planet X by inputting the correct Xeno, Yako, and Zabo coordinates (which, unlike the ones for every other planet, aren't listed in the manual). You also need to figure out how to land your rocket, which is the single most terrifying thing in the game because you move stupidly fast and if you don't stop on an open grass tile, you're just plain dead. Oh, and you also need to be wearing reflect or power armour when you launch your rocket or you'll explode. Not even kidding.
Anyway, on Planet X you can find a guy who will give you permission to buy the ring, which is sold by an old man standing under a tree (or rather, a sign saying "ATREE") in New San Antonio. Space travel also gives you access to the fastest way to farm money by going to Uranus, where you can find a town called New Jester that's full of jesters who swarm you and can be kited around the town in order to use the tourist ferries in the local lake to kill them all with cannons. You know, as you do.
Also, in most versions (but not the DOS version you're probably playing) you need to find the best weapon, the Quicksword Enilno (because the game was published by Sierra On-Line, get it?) in order to be able to damage Minax.
Ultima 2 is hardly the breezy experience Ultima 1 is. It's rather tedious, really, as you might expect from the fact that my description mentions farming the same specific enemies over and over. It's best as something you run while you have something else going on, honestly. And it does manage to have the same sort of whimsical silliness to it as the first game
Otherwise known as "that game for people who thought Ultima 1 was a bit too subdued and logical."
Ultima 2 is the only game in the series that's set on Earth, though strangely enough it also tries to pretend that Ultima 1 took place on Earth (which naturally led to the retcons to make these games be all about one person being particularly messy, but that's another story). After you busted down Mondain's door with your time machine and vaporized him with a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range, his apprentice and lover Minax was understandably a little cheesed off. So she took the only logical course of action, using the power of the mysterious time doors to invade the world's past, present, and future, with the ultimate (successful) goal of eventually destroying society by causing World War III. You're not about to take this lying down, so you set out across time (specifically the five time periods of Pangaea, 1423 BC, 1990 AD, 2112 AD, and the Time of Legends) to find a way to kill her.
Most of Ultima 2 is effectively spent trying to find a way to get past the force field Minax has barring entry into her fortress—you can technically get enough HP to survive it, but it does so much damage you might as well not bother. Getting the ring that can protect you requires you to assemble a list of important items: blue tassles [sic] that allow you to board a ship, skull keys that allow you to board a biplane, brass buttons that allow you to fly a biplane, ankhs that allow you to board a rocket, tri-lithium crystals to serve as rocket fuel, and plenty of keys to let you unlock doors. You'll also want strange coins that can be rubbed to negate time, and there's a few other things you're pretty much guaranteed to pick up along the way that can help.
Where do you get all this stuff? Grinding.
Ultima 2 is probably the ultimate RPG grindfest, with almost all its runtime spent farming various enemies to get the items you need. Most of the stuff you need can only be found by killing thieves, who are annoying because they can also steal stuff from you. So you need to grind to be strong enough to oneshot them first (both by having enough strength to do good damage and having enough agility to use good weapons). Raising your stats for this involves the single silliest method of stat gaining I've ever seen in an RPG: You go to the city of New San Antonio in 1990, find the clerk at the Hotel California (even though you're in Texas...), and given him money, 100 GP at a time, at which point he may or may not say "Alakazam!" and raise one of your stats at random.
Ultima speedrunner organMike describes this and the first game as "Mad Libs RPGs," and given everything I've noted thus far I can't exactly disagree with them.
Anyway, after a bit of experimentation I figured out that the best way to make the money for stat grinding was by going to Lord British's castle, waiting for one of the jesters in the entrance to be far enough down that I'd be able to run before the guards caught me, killing the jester, and leaving and returning to reset the map. This got me money so much faster than farming it the old-fashioned way it isn't even funny. But the point of this grind was to get my stats high enough for a different, even more fruitful grind: Going to the town of Le Jester (found in 1423 BC about where you'd expect Namibia to be) and murdering the one non-hostile thief at the town entrance over and over until I had about 2,000 GP.
Oh yeah, and you're also gonna need to kill some guards at some point because only guards are allowed to carry keys (apparently the skull keys for planes don't count). But once you've got some keys it's fairly trivial to get more since you can use them to get a ship and ships have cannons.
The game pretty much breezes by once the thief grind's done, particularly if you're like me and you already know where to go. You need the biplane to get to the last surviving town in 2112, a Soviet holdout where you can find the world's only source of rockets. And you need the rockets to explore space, because you need to go to Planet X by inputting the correct Xeno, Yako, and Zabo coordinates (which, unlike the ones for every other planet, aren't listed in the manual). You also need to figure out how to land your rocket, which is the single most terrifying thing in the game because you move stupidly fast and if you don't stop on an open grass tile, you're just plain dead. Oh, and you also need to be wearing reflect or power armour when you launch your rocket or you'll explode. Not even kidding.
Anyway, on Planet X you can find a guy who will give you permission to buy the ring, which is sold by an old man standing under a tree (or rather, a sign saying "ATREE") in New San Antonio. Space travel also gives you access to the fastest way to farm money by going to Uranus, where you can find a town called New Jester that's full of jesters who swarm you and can be kited around the town in order to use the tourist ferries in the local lake to kill them all with cannons. You know, as you do.
Also, in most versions (but not the DOS version you're probably playing) you need to find the best weapon, the Quicksword Enilno (because the game was published by Sierra On-Line, get it?) in order to be able to damage Minax.
Ultima 2 is hardly the breezy experience Ultima 1 is. It's rather tedious, really, as you might expect from the fact that my description mentions farming the same specific enemies over and over. It's best as something you run while you have something else going on, honestly. And it does manage to have the same sort of whimsical silliness to it as the first game
