Ultima Reborn



Ultima Reborn was an unannounced spin-off Ultima game for the Nintendo DS, developed and cancelled in 2008.

The game was to be, as project designer and lead artist Stephane Belin wrote, “a reboot of Ultima IV on Nintendo DS. The idea was to make a brand new interpretation of my favorite game of all time. I wanted to shine a completely new light on the Ultima universe, while keeping all the great core values of the original game. [We] wanted to make it on NDS which cruelly lacked of good western RPGs. The project was canceled 6 months after the original pitch.”

Concept art and in-game screenshots from the aborted project were subsequently released by Belin and artist Mathieu Latour-Duhaime, showcasing a notable deviation in style from the classic Ultima series. Appearing to draw influences from Japanese RPGs and Howard-esque fantasy, examples of character classes show many females in a risqué manner of dress, with male appearances comparable to such diverse sources as Final Fantasy, Conan the Barbarian, and Roman centurions, among others.

The Classes
To showcase how strange the classes look, here the eight professions and how they would have looked in the game, here in form of the character art.