Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress



Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress is the second installment in the Ultima series. It was released on August 24 1982 and published by Sierra Online for the Apple II, IBM-PC and Atari 8-bit. They were the only company that agreed to Garriott's conditions. Later conversations for the C64, Atari ST and Macintosh followed. Graphics and gameplay changed only little from Ultima I, making the game basically the same.

The second installment of the series is also the strangest of them. The game deals with several time episodes of Earth, mixed in with numerous pop-references, science-fiction and travels through the Terran Solar System. The game is also quite buggy and has many areas that are simply empty (some of the planets of the solar system have really nothing on them). This total flipped-out mix of themes looks really odd today, but wasn't that strange in the early 80's. Still, today many consider it the weakest installment of the series.

Despite all its flaws, Ultima II was quite a success in 1982, sold well and made enough money that Richard Garriott could found his own company, Origin Systems, which in the future was the publisher for all the Ultima games developed. Of course, the venture with Sierra had some unwanted results as well, more below.

Included with the game
The release of Ultima II included these things with the game:
 * The Book "The Second Age of Darkness".
 * A cloth map of Earth, together with the codes for the Time Doors.

Differences between the ports
The C64-port has the most colorful graphics of all the ports, while the port for the Atari ST has most comfortable interface where almost everything can be done with the mouse. Compared to this, the PC-Port with its ugly CGA-graphics and complicated interface loses.

The most advanced port is the Japanese version of Ultima II. It includes colourful graphics, a more cinematic ending, and a redone introduction.

The Story
The Player, again as the Stranger, this time hasn't the task to save Sosaria, but instead Earth itself from the Enchantress Minax. Being the lover and apprentice of Mondain, she is quite angry over his death by the Stranger's hand and swears revenge against him/her. Manipulating the timeline to this end, she let Earth die in an atomic holocaust in 2111 - all life on Earth perished in the Aftermath.

The Stranger, having escaped from the changes in the timeline at the last moment, has to decypher the mystery of the Time Gates, which enable time travel, to reach Minax and prevent these horrible events from ever happening. Gathering the only weapon that can kill Minax, the Quicksword Enilno, he/she travels back to the Time of Legends and confronts Minax in her castle to kill her. With her death, the timeline returns to normal, with no one remembering the horrible events that occurred in the changed timeline - all except the Stranger.

Trivia

 * Sierra Online was the only company willing to support Garriott's idea (and spend money on) putting a cloth map into each copy of the game (this was before Origin was founded).


 * Sierra proved unwilling to sell the rights back to Origin for many years; even the original cover art isn't in Origin's hands still. Combined with other difficulties, this all caused the founding of Origin.
 * Although this game was never remade or updated for the PC platform, a little-known upgrade (similar to what was done for Ultima I) was made for the Apple II. It was only released as part of the "Ultima Trilogy" anthology of the first three games, and is extremely rare today.  (Only the Apple version received the update.  The versions of the Trilogy boxset for the PC and Commodore 64 contain the original, unaltered Ultima II for their respective platforms.)
 * Because Origin did not (and still does not) have the rights to the original Ultima II cover art, a stand-in was used for subsequent anthology re-releases of the game, such as in the aforementioned Ultima Trilogy. The stand-in is a cropped version of the original cover for Akalabeth.
 * When the game begins, Lord British will heal you 300 HP for each 50 GP you give him. Later on, after you've become stronger, it drops to 100 HP per contribution.  This is done so as to decrease the likelihood of "rolling over" the HP counter, which will instantly kill your character if it happens.


 * One of the first games (apart from text adventures) ported to the Atari ST.


 * First original release of a Ultima game on more than one system.


 * The last Ultima NOT published by Origin, unless one counts Escape from Mt. Drash.

Upgrades
Ultima II looks really ugly in its original graphics on a IBM-PC. An Ultima II Upgrade Patch exists which not only converts the CGA-graphics to 16-color EGA graphics, but also builds in a frame limiter, fixes a number of bugs and inserts new commands into the game. That way, the game is still playable today.