In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I probably would not have played this game at this time if it wasn't so closely tied to Ultima Underworld II: The Labyrinth of Worlds, the game which actually caught my interest while I was putting together a list of im-sims from over the years to check out as a personal project of sorts, and which apparently takes place between the end of this game and the beginning of its second part, Serpent Isle. Every bit of research I did on the matter indicated that, unlike with the first Ultima Underworld, the plot of II would be nigh-on incomprehensible without prior knowledge of the events and ending of this game; a notion that was accompanied by a generalized perception that "it's never okay to skip Ultima VII". I was already intrigued with the prior experience I had managed to accrue with mainline Ultima titles by this point, so I obliged. My main takeaway from this experience a few dozen hours later is that it definitely feels like a game that came from a time where you could point to a modest portion of a small shelf and readily find all of your games, or at least all of your computer games.

The game can definitely be enjoyed today as what it was conceived to be, and what it was perceived as initially: A massive and massively ambitious organic, living world in which every non-generic enemy NPC has a name, an identity, a role, a schedule, and just about everything you might expect from a person in a genuine, livable world, with a lot of places to explore, stories to unfurl, and secrets to discover— no mean feat for 1992.

Actually navigating this world, however, can be a different story. The unique top-down isometric perspective this game has (which technically debuted in its immediate predecessor, Ultima VI) can be quite disorienting at first, but one quickly gets the hang of the mouse controls used to walk around and interact with things. Within 10 minutes of booting up the game, you'll also see that conversation topics no longer have to be typed in, but can merely be clicked on in order, which makes dialogue trees flow much better. Some more experimental clicking will begin to unveil the specifics of the paper doll system for equipping your party members and checking what they're carrying.

Beyond that, however, I lost count of how many "ultima 7 how to X" searches I did throughout my entire experience with this game; while passing the buck to the manual was a frequent sight, there are loads of answers, even basic ones, that simply cannot be found within that fancy booklet. The inventory system itself seems manageable at first but is actually pretty terrible; as you progress and explore, it's quite unlikely that any companions you recruit will have all the containers necessary to make the most out of their maximum carry weight, as these containers have specific item limits and restrictions that are nigh-on impossible to divine on your own. Keys are also a problem, as none of them are labeled, so unless you make a serious effort to keep track of what is where, chances are that between said lack of labels and the insides of your packs/bags being an admittedly quite realistic mess of stuff rather than any sort of organized grid or list, you'll end up very confused when the time comes to try and open something.

Speaking of keeping tracks of things on your own, you'll definitely have to do that if you want any hope of reaching the end of the story, as there isn't any sort of in-game quest log or notebook you can use for such purposes. That said, following the story threads is mostly not too difficult; one of the main ones (chasing Elizabeth and Abraham) is given to you as part of the tutorial sequence in Trinsic, though the other main quest starter seems like it could be easily missed (either successfully playing The Game with Chuckles the jester for a nudge, or directly getting your fortune told from Margareta at Minoc). Progressing the story really comes down to a series of fetch/playing messenger quests that have you bouncing back and forth between various places and characters, which will quickly have you pining for a way to travel the world quickly and reliably; the series' trademark Moongates are out of wack for plot related reasons, so you'll have to find a different way, whether it be purchasing a vehicle with your own money, getting a ship from Lord British if you've got the Forge of Virtue expansion, finding a rather overpowered magic carpet lying on the ground that you get told about pretty early on, or pilfering the stones of virtue and using recall magic on them to teleport around.

I went for the magic carpet, but the last of these methods leads me into what I came to see as the clunkiest parts of this game, even though they felt integral in preceding titles. Once you first get to Lord British's castle, you'll be able to find some of your old equipment in a modestly hidden stash, including a rather empty looking spellbook. If you let it stay empty, you'll not have a great time later on, even though you won't realize that not having certain spells, like Unlock Magic and Dispel Field, will be a hurdle until you run headlong into it. Not helping matters is the fact that spells can only be acquired from certain people, in certain places, at different prices (money wasn't a huge issue for me though, I found), and that while some spells are mandatory, others are flat-out useless. Casting a spell consumes both mana and reagents, which although cheap and easy on inventory capacity, nonetheless end up feeling like an unnecessary extra limitation, not to mention the need to check which spells consume what specific ones, which also pads things out by necessitating a look at the manual.

I also never found myself using spells during the combat, the other part of this game that left me feeling seriously underwhelmed. Part of this was related to the very certain need for certain tiers of equipment which is in very short and rare supply, a need which only crops up suddenly and conspicuously late into the game. I made it as far as the part of the story that requires you to explore the dungeon Deceit before I decided to start cheating, as any possibility of organic progress ground to a halt for me at that point when I was faced with a gaggle of relentlessly pursuing ghosts which seemed impossible to damage without magic weapons, which I did not have. The boss of said dungeon is also straight up unkillable without a very strong weapon, leading me to speedrun the Forge of Virtue content (which, to summarize, I did not think much of) and come back with the Black Sword. The dungeons though are merely the focal points of how clunky and afterthought-y the combat and character growth ends up feeling in this game. Getting to the max level of 8 is not very hard, but as per Ultima tradition, leveling up alone does nothing to make you stronger, you must instead figure out the best way to spend the level points you gain by doing so. These are no longer spent at shrines (which are now effectively useless), but at trainers, a change which ironically can tend to make the process clunkier; I only ever did so for the Avatar with Menion at Serpent's Hold, who apparently only works as a trainer for a maximum of 2 hours per day, and I didn't even want to try and figure out the best way to do so with the other party members, especially considering that there are more recruitable companions than there are slots in your party, but replacing any of them after you've taken the time to outfit them and use them as your packmules seems not very worthwhile.

As a final gameplay note, let me touch on the dungeons once more. Other than feeling like the place where the clunkiness of the combat and levelling becomes most evident, many of them, particularly the story-centric ones, are outfitted with puzzles of varying obtuseness, some of which can be sussed out by persistent trial and error, some of which are utterly ridiculous. The final story dungeon apparently has an infamous bug that can make it inaccessible, but even though I ran into what seems to be considered the main sign of said bug triggering, I was able to get through no problem. The ending of the game was ironically the only point that may have touched upon any feelings of nostalgia for me, as it led me to finally discover the source of a voice clip that I first heard as a kid in the early 2000s, while playing The Mystery, a very... interesting flash game about venturing into the depths of Hell that was linked from the homepage for the far better known The Mystery of Time and Space. The Mystery is probably lost media by now, but finally determining both where that clip came from and what it actually said (an impossible ask for my wee lad self who barely spoke L2 English, especially with the heavy distortion) was a pretty cool moment.

In summation, I would not say that I regret my time with this game, but I would say that if anyone completely new to this game were to approach it today —even someone such as myself, who has very old man tastes and is willing to be as open-minded and patient with older media as one can be while keeping in mind that one is not willing to dump all of one's free time into one thing, as one might have been a few decades ago when options were quite limited— one should have reasonably tempered expectations. For now, though, the feeling of finally having license to dive into Ultima Underworld II while following my own principles of seriation is quite gratifying.