SNES-Port of Savage Empire

The port for Savage Empire on the Super Nintendo surely is an odd one. It was released as late as 1995, almost 5 years after the release of the original game. Despite many myths, the game was never translated to English and was only released in Japan, therefore making it impossible to judge the story and contents.

It is possible that Origin decided to scrap the international release after the poor reciption of the SNES-Port of Ultima VII. The reason why this is very likely is, that the SNES-Port of Savage Empire uses exactly the same game engine as the Ultima VII port, down to the little details like the censorship of violence.

It is very curious why Origin did that, since they already had ported the Ultima VI-engine quite faithfully to the SNES with the SNES-Port of Ultima VI, and the original Savage Empire used the Ultima VI-engine.

Changes

 * There is no party. The Avatar travels completely alone.


 * The intro is completely removed.


 * No in-game cutscenes.


 * The Avatar can't be named, he is always called "Avatar". (While the Avatar is always male here, that also was the case in the original)


 * The NPCs have no schedules, the day-night changes are only cosmetical.


 * Vastly reduced interactivity. Only a fraction of the objects can still be used in some way.


 * The overworld is broken up into indoor and outdoor maps.


 * The whole game control sheme was changed and it now plays more action-like, similar to the Zelda games.


 * All of the graphics are redrawn and now look much poorer and more chunky. The detailed character portraits of the original were changed to small ones with poor detail.