Ultima: Warriors of Destiny (NES) Playthrough
156A playthrough of FCI's 1993 role-playing game for the NES, Ultima: Warriors of Destiny.
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, originally released for the Apple II in 1988, was the direct sequel to Quest of the Avatar and the second entry in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy. Five years later, it also became the third and final Ultima game to appear on the NES.
When the NES port was announced, RPG fans had good reason to be excited. The NES versions of Ultima III: Exodus and Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar were well received, and the latter was regarded as one of the best console RPGs of its era. They both took liberties with the source material in how they updated the presentation and streamlined gameplay systems to better suit the limits of the console, but they managed to do so without cannibalizing the essence of the computer games they were based on.
The development of those NES carts was outsourced to Japanese companies (Newtopia for U3, Infinity for U4) through Pony Canyon, but riding high on their successes in the PC space in the late 80s, Origin began bringing the development of console ports in-house. They ended up creating two NES games: Times of Lore, published by Toho in 1991 (https://youtu.be/vziAU8vsBIY), and Ultima: Warriors of Destiny.
Warriors of Destiny begins with the avatar being summoned back to the world of Brittania after its leader, Lord British, goes missing in the underworld. Lord Blackthorn has seized control and now uses his corrupted reinterpretations of the eight virtues to rule with an iron grip, and all the while, the mysterious Shadowlords are sewing seeds of fear and chaos across the land. Sounds like a job for the avatar, alright!
(It's a little unnerving how much that story line parallels a... *ahem* particularly ugly chain of events in recent US history, isn't it?)
Once the intro finishes and you've created your avatar, you're plopped into Britannia and left to forge your own path. The entire world is open to you from the outset, and it's up to you to follow the trail of clues, seek the power of the virtues, and save the day.
It was a promising and ambitious premise for an open-world RPG, and by most accounts, the PC game delivered on its promises. So, given Ultima's previous track record on the NES, it stood to reason that the console version of Ultima V would follow suit. How could it not, especially now that Origin itself had taken the wheel?
Except that it didn't. Warriors of Destiny is an absolute travesty on the NES. The world has been shrunk and oversimplified, Britannia feels barren after huge numbers of NPCs and reams of plot-relevant text were stripped out, and the avatar has Farrah Fawcett hair. The party size was reduced from six characters to four, the magic system was made useless, and the day/night cycle became a glorified egg timer for moongates.
But to be fair, the game's technical issues are so pervasive that they render those other complaints moot. The graphics look straight out of a first-gen NES game and fall somewhere between Bokosuka Wars and Hydlide in terms of quality, despite it coming out nearly a decade later. It's virtually impossible to make out important items, the view is way too zoomed in, the "scrolling" is a juddery mess that lurches the screen around tile-by-tile, and the whole thing runs at 3-4 fps. The controls are infuriatingly unresponsive (sometimes you have to hold a button upwards of half-a-second for it to register!), the menus are cumbersome, and in a seeming attempt to counterbalance the playability issues, the combat presents zero challenge.
The in-game sound, which consists of one 21-second ditty playing on an endless loop, does little to help. There aren't even any sound effects.
And then the game actually has the gall to ask if you're having fun! Seriously, was Origin trying to rub salt in the wound? The game is barely functional. Why would anyone so brazenly antagonize their own customers?
Warriors of Destiny should've been shelved regardless of the resources invested in its production. It seems quite unlikely that the game ever made enough money to justify the permanent stain it left on the series' reputation among console gamers.
I mean, my god. Just... wow.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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