Ultima: Runes of Virtue II (SNES) Playthrough
201A playthrough of FCI's 1994 action-RPG for the Super Nintendo, Ultima: Runes of Virtue II.
Played through as Mariah on the medium difficulty level. I also went through all of the optional dungeons.
The Ultima series is best remembered today for its eight (....okay fine, nine if you really must count Ascension) mainline installments for computers, but several spinoffs appeared in the 1990s.
Many of these games were adapted for dedicated games consoles with varying degrees of success. Quest of the Avatar, for example, knocked it out park on the Master System and the NES. Others, like Warriors of Destiny and The Black Gate, were unmitigated disasters.
The two Runes of Virtue games, however, carry the distinction of being the only Ultima games designed specifically for a console. In fact, they're the only games in the series to never officially appear on computers.
The pair was developed in-house by Origin itself for the Nintendo Game Boy. The first appeared in 1991 and the second in 1993, both published by FCI. The Super Nintendo port of Runes of Virtue II showed up about a year after the Game Boy version was released, finally hitting store shelves in the Fall of 1994.
The Runes of Virtue games were notable for the way they eschewed the series' traditional RPG-style of play for something a bit more puzzle-oriented. The combat is action-based, the minimalist storyline is shunted to the sidelines, and they both support co-op play through the Game Boy's link cable.
I bought the Game Boy version on a whim back in 1994, and it was of those rare instances where I felt like I had unwittingly stumbled into something that was truly great. I wouldn't have ever intentionally sought it out, but Runes of Virtue II quickly became one of my favorite Game Boy games. I really appreciated the difficulty of its puzzles - it feels like somebody took Lolo and Zelda and ran them head-first into one another like they were Matchbox cars.
The game begins with the Black Knight having grown bored with hanging out at The Great Stygian Abyss. He decides that kidnapping the mayors of Britannia's eight cities of virtue might be a fun way to pass the time, and since Lord British is better at delegating dangerous tasks than he is at playing the hero himself, he summons the Avatar to combat this new threat. The mayors have been stowed away in caves across the land, and the Avatar has to rescue them all before he takes on the Black Knight in the final showdown.
On the surface, the Super Nintendo version appears to be a faithful port. The world, towns, and dungeons retain their original layouts, most of the puzzles are still solved in the same ways, and the inventory system is identical. But, it won't take long for anyone familiar with the original game to notice just how different an experience Runes of Virtue II on the SNES really is.
The Game Boy game's graphics were a bit spartan on account of the machine's low-resolution monochromatic display, but it looked clean. The top-down JRPG-style graphics allowed a screen full of enemies, items, and obstacles to be easily parsed at a glance.
The SNES version, however, attempts to overhaul the look with disastrous results. The maps are 1:1 representations of the originals, but it appears as if the resolution of each tile has been doubled to allow for more visual detail. The rub here lies in how the SNES's standard 256x224 display resolution is not double that of the Game Boy's 160x144 display, and the screen crunch that this change introduces is a huge detriment to the gameplay overall. The limited visibility makes many of the game's puzzles and battles far more difficult and frustrating than they should be, and in some cases, forces you to rely on blind luck.
When you consider that this was done in the name of improving the presentation... well, just look at it. It's completely hideous. It's the Elephant Man of Super Nintendo games.
The sprites are unbelievably ugly, the colors clash in all sorts of unpleasant ways, and what is up with the viewing angle? Perspective does not work like... that. The larger tiles also make the controls feel too slippery and loose, and the later dungeons suffer from horrible framerate issues that can severely impact playability. Everything about it is just so off-putting.
The multiplayer is also gone, though the single dungeon that relied on having two players in the Game Boy game has been changed to account for the difference.
At least the music isn't half bad. I don't like these renditions of the tunes nearly as much as the originals, but they sound fine.
As much as I love Runes of Virtue II, the SNES port is not the way to play it. There's just too much working against it for me to recommend it when the original Game Boy cart plugged into a Super Game Boy offers so much better of an experience overall.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.