YMMV / Ultima IX

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Considering there's at least one Loony Fan running around wearing the same outfit, who's to say that the Idiot Hero protagonist really is the actual Avatar?
  • Since the opening of the game blatantly contradicts the ending of the previous game, and that the Avatar had not been to Earth since the start of Ultima VII, maybe the Time Lord unwittingly called upon some random guy who had moved in to the Avatar's house after he had been missing for years in Earth time?
• Audience-Alienating Ending: Ultima IX is infamous for having a plot built out of Continuity Snarl to the point the game starts with one that contradicts the entire ending of the previous game and goes on to contradict the entirety of not only Ultima VIII, but the entire rest of the series as well (especially VI, VII, VII Part 2, and Underworld). Long time fans of the franchise ended up rejecting this game entirely, effectively making this game the death knell for series and causing one of the most important and influential games series of all time to fall into relative obscurity.
• Awesome Music: The music in the game is one aspect of which people rarely have anything bad to say. Particularly worthy of mention is that each town of virtue has their own theme, with two variants. Before the corresponding shrine is cleansed, the theme sounds subtly sinister or melancholic, and after cleansing it turns brighter.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The revelation of the Guardian as the evil that was purged from the Avatar in Ultima IV, rather than the fusion of the Shadowlords as originally planned. Not only does this deviate away from the motif of Mondain's Villainous Legacy,^note The Shadowlords were born from the fragments of Mondain's Gem of Immortality but it also contradicts the Shadowlord of Hatred's statement that "No soul in life can be purged completely of virtue or vice."
  • To say nothing of the notion that, far from saving people in Ultima IV, the Avatar doomed whole dimensions by creating the Guardian.
  • This directly contradicts the Guardian's established past at least on one occasion: In the Serpent Isle expansion The Silver Seed you learn about three witches following the Guardian during a period of time that takes place between Ultima I and Ultima IV.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans pretend it never happened, and some are working on their own version of the game using other engines.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The revelation that The Guardian originated from the evil purged from the Avatar in Ultima IV was disliked by fans for giving the idea it would have been better for one not to become the Avatar. In contrast, the original idea that The Guardian came from the fusion of the Shadowlords is more warmly received as not only gets rid of the issue linked to the canon reveal but also ties with Mondain, who had served the role as Greater-Scope Villain in previous Ultima games.
• Fridge Brilliance: The Avatar not knowing what a paladin is makes sense when you consider that "paladin" only really existed as a character class, rather than a dedicated organization, in earlier games.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • An absolutely hilarious bug that occurs sometimes you kill an enemy has their corpse rapidly moving back an forth across the ground. A reliable place for this seems to be the guards in the above ground section of Wrong.
  • One small sidequest which grants you karma (and in turn increases your mana pool) consists of finding a ring and a bracelet robbed from a grave and returning them. Due to an apparent design oversight, there is one merchant in the game who sells an endless supply of duplicates of the bracelet, in the same town the grave is in, providing an easy boost of karma.
  • Firing arrows at some parts of the invisible wall surrounding the Isle of Avatar will cause the arrows to suddenly scale up to the size of tree trunks when they hit the wall.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "Your knowledge of the land shall be great!"
• Memetic Mutation: Many, courtesy of Spoony.
  • "What's a paladin?"^note The Avatar asks this despite the fact that his best friend and closest comrade since Ultima IV, Sir Dupre, who made a Heroic Sacrifice in the Avatar's place in Ultima VII Part 2, was a Paladin. And in this game, the player's own class at the start of the game could be a Paladin.
  • "Your knowledge of the land shall be great!"^note If you pick ranger as your starting class, the fortuneteller at the start of the game says this when telling you to go to Britannia, but the Avatar proves an Idiot Hero who is ignorant of the most fundamental concepts of the world lore.
  • "The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom?"^note The Avatar doesn't know what the Codex is, despite the fact that finding it was the very thing that made him the Avatar in the first place, it was pivotal to the plot of the middle trilogy of games, and is one of the most critical pieces of lore in the series. Spoony - with little to no exaggeration - compared it to the Pope not knowing what the Bible is.
  • "I'm not entirely sure."^note Lord British doesn't know what the cause of Britannia's troubles are, despite the fact that the columns around the land are Obviously Evil, and the Tapestry of Ages, a relic recorded as manifesting images of the Avatar's future adventures, depicts the Avatar facing the Guardian's fortress with one of the columns nearby.
• Narm Charm: Some of the voice acting.
  • "Want To Party???"
    • "Surrrrrrrrrre, let's go!"
  • "What's a [thing that he should know from the previous games]?"
• Nightmare Fuel: There's an especially grisly Easter Egg at the start of the game where repeatedly opening and closing the freezer in the Avatar's apartment kitchen will reveal a bloody ribcage hanging inside, with a severed head on a spike underneath it.
• Obvious Beta: The bugginess of the game is legendary. One humorous game review magazine (Games Accelerator) posted a fatal error message as one of their screenshots for the game instead of a shot of the gameplay, with a caption, "Lord British and Electronic Arts defeat you with the ultimate foe."
• So Bad, It's Good: Especially if you abuse glitches and bugs to complete the game practically backwards.
• That One Sidequest: The lighthouse sidequest, which requires you to search all of Britannia to find four gems in order to finish a set of lighthouses commissioned by Lord British. Such a lengthy, difficult quest isn't actually all that uncommon for this series; however, the prior Ultima games gave you much better rewards than the 100 gold pieces — an amount that you can easily get right at the start of the game if you're prepared to put the time into battling the tougher enemies — that you get for completing this quest. There isn't even any indication that you have completed the quest - the gold is just dumped into your purse as soon as you place the last gem, and it's entirely possible you won't even notice.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The storyline that original lead developer Bob White created for the game before getting lured away by Ion Storm is widely regarded to be vastly superior to the hackjob storyline that the finished game ended up with.
• Villain Decay:
  • The Guardian, previously an unknown demonic force, is revealed here to be the darker aspect of the Avatar himself, expunged from him when he went through the Quest of the Avatar in Ultima IV.
  • In Ultima V, Blackthorn was simply a dupe of the Shadowlords, warped by their magic but not inherently evil himself. Subsequent games strongly suggested he was undergoing a Redemption Quest all his own. Ultima IX has him suddenly evil again, with no clear motivation.