Ultima IX: Ascension (1999) is a video game, the ninth and final installment in the
Ultima series of role playing games.
The Avatar is called to Britannia one last time, where he discovers a series of monoliths have risen all across the kingdom, and the locals are acting very strangely indeed. It turns out that these towers are the doing of the Guardian, whose realm, Pagan, the Avatar has recently escaped from. Its down to you to defeat the Guardian once and for all... by making a
Heroic Sacrifice.
This game provides examples of:
- Back from the Dead — Sir Dupre.
- Costume Copycat — One of these can be found in a hut outside Britain, claiming to be the Avatar's biggest fan.
- Crate Expectations
- Dummied Out — Large sections of the game were hacked out of the finished product. Many of these missing areas are still present in the game code, and enterprising hackers have discovered ways to access them.
- Flaming Sword — While its incredibly useful for seeing in dark areas, its actually... not that powerful a weapon, really.
- Gameplay Ally Immortality
- Game-Breaking Bug — More than a few of them too, even after patching.
- Grid Inventory
- Heroic Sacrifice
- Hit-and-Run Tactics
- In Name Only — For many in the Ultima fan community.
- Loony Fan — See Costume Copycat above.
- Lord British Postulate
- Obvious Beta
- Optional Sexual Encounter — In Buccaneer's Den, a prostitute will offer you a good time. Taking her up on it leaves you with less gold, and it also hurts your Karma Meter. Resist the temptation, Avatar!
- Polygon Ceiling / Video Game 3D Leap — This was the first game in the main series to be 3D. It encounters problems with this, as the game world, which was massive in Ultima VII, has had to be reduced to the size of a shoebox.
- Rail Roading
- Retcon — Probably the main reason (other than the bugs and the simplistic gameplay) why this game is so widely hated in the Ultima community. While every other Ultima game retconned some lore from its predecessors (mostly stuff added for flavor), they can't even compare to the sheer number of continuity errors and deliberate retcons in this game. This website
in particular was dedicated to listing all the inconsistencies in the Ultima games, and there are about as many pages about U9 (if not more) on that site as there are pages about all other Ultima games taken together. - Sequence Breaking — Using the Avatar's normal jumping abilities, and a little bit of trial and error, its actually possible to scale whole mountains, and therefore skip two-thirds of the game.
- Series Continuity Error
- Suddenly Voiced — Everybody has actual voices in this one. Most noticably the Avatar himself, who in the previous games was always a Heroic Mime.
- Thriving Ghost Town
- Welcome to Corneria
- What Could Have Been — There are screenshots in existence of the early build of the game, which would have been viewed from above (like the other games in the series), but still featured enviroments and characters which were rendered in 3D. The decision to rework the entire game engine into effectively being a third person shooter was made by the game publishers because 3D games were popular.
- Wretched Hive — Buccaneer's Den, of course. Where else?
It averts:
- Cross Player — Previous games in the series allowed you to choose which gender you want the avatar to be, and some of them even gave you a choice of faces for each. Ultima VIII did away with this, and IX continues making the Avatar purely and irrefutably male (although, to be completely fair, the game packaging on previous games in the series nearly always illustrated the Avatar as a "him", meaning it was only ever a Purely Aesthetic Gender choice anyway).
- Putting the Band Back Together — Most of the "team" from the previous games are present in this one, but unlike other games in the series (Ultima Underworld and Ultima VIII: Pagan excepted), you can't actually get any of them to come with you.
- Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe — Its the first game in the entire Ultima series where none of the characters speak like this.
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