Ultima V day 7

I'm back again after that huuuuge post. Honestly that post was too big, I think it scared some of you away!

This one will be shorter. I played a LOT yesterday however what I did was quite simple. I went and got the last two remaining shards and destroyed the shadowlords once and for all. It's simple but it took me a while.

The first thing I did that day is get out of the underworld via Destard. The first room you get into has like 4 dragons and is quite hard, but I managed to put to sleep all four of them. They don't asleep for long though unlike mongbats so I barely had time to kill two before they woke up.







I then worked my way out to Britannia. Since I had so much money at this point, I decided to max out my karma. So I gave 8700 gold pieces to the shrine of compassion and now I am truly an avatar of great value! So much for having to follow the virtues and all that :)








Afterwards I decided to go after the shard of hatred (I think). I have no idea why but I was SURE that it was at the bottom of the dungeon Despise, which is the first dungeon I tried, remember? So I go back to Despise, make my way down quite quickly and start looking for the shard of hatred. I couldn't find it. I looked again and again and no sign of the shard. I did find a weird keep (well actually it's a boat but on the overworld map it looks like a keep) with a wizard called Johne who told me a peculiar story. Seems he got stranded in the underworld way back when and killed his three comrades when he was under the influence of the shards. His comrades then became the shadowlords! Darn!












He also wanted to join me but I was already full so I said no. Natreg seemed to imply that I should take him with me. I'm guessing he has pretty good stats but at that point my two wizards were already close to reaching level 5 and I'm not interesting in having a level 2 or 3 character in my party. Maybe in Lazarus :)

I then looked at my notes and saw that I had entered the wrong dungeon, I had to enter through DECEIT to get the shard of falsehood (oh so I was looking for falsehood not hatred). DARN! I then read that the shard of hatred was below the region of the lost hope bay. But wait, isn't the bay just east of Despise? Maybe I could get there without having to go back up? I went as far east as I could and guess what? I could see grass to the east! And when you see grass, you can blink there!







And so I did and it worked! I took a quick peek at a gem and saw that weird clearing to the north and thought that the shard was surely there. I managed to climb my way through and yep, as I thought, here was the shard.











Next I tried to do the same thing for the shard of falsehood but I was never able to find a spot to blink. After looking for quite a bit of time I had to resign myself to go back up a dungeon. I went north, spotted covetous and decided to give it a go.

Man do I love the dungeons in this game, THEY LOOK GREAT! Covetous looks totally different than the other dungeons! Despise is like a natural cave formation, Hythloth looks like a mine but Covetous is more like a man made crypt. Just take a look at this screenshots and compare them to the other dungeons. This game is crazy for 1988.











The minute I got back to Britannia I headed for Empath Abbey and took care of the shadowlord. Two destroyed, one to go!

I barely took the time to heal and went right back inside a dungeon, this time Deceit. Deceit also looks like Covetous strangely, I'm guessing they were both man made for specific purposes. There's less skeletons though.

The fun thing about Deceit is that there is a hole right in front of the entrance that will take you all the way to the eight floor if you decide to drop in. It hurts a bit but it's worth it.








The eight floor is a bit confusing because there is no visible down ladder when viewing a gem so you need to find it yourself. One interesting note is that it is totally easy to abuse the monsters in those four little rooms you can see on the map. If you enter them via the middle instead of using their extremities, it's easy to place your avatar in such a way that the dragons will constantly try to shoot at your teammates instead of you. Of course their shots get blocked by the pillars of their 'cage' so that allows you to kill them with the avatar. I cleared out all four rooms obviously since I needed the experience to reach level 8.












That room at the bottom of the floor is extremely confusing. You see a down ladder but there's a huge wall blocking off the access. The first thing I did is grab all of the hanging torches but that didn't do squat. Second I stepped on every tile with my avatar and you guessed it, nothing. Third out of desperation I shot at the walls and that still didn't do a thing. Only at the did I throw a random axe at the upper right wall and that worked. I honestly was THAT close to getting the hell out of there. After that it was a simple matter of killing the monsters and hitting the right switches. Whew.










Coming out of Deceit it was easy as hell to guess where the shard was I mean just look at that screenie. And I knew it because the two sisters in cove told me that the shard was on an island in the underworld so there it was. The hard part was learning how to get there but it didn't take me too long.











Getting back up the dungeon was harder than going down since there was no crazy hole to drop through. At this point though I'm pretty good in dungeons so I managed.

Then, you guessed it, I destroyed the third and FINAL shadowlord. YES! I am finally at the endgame point of Ultima V, I can hardly believe it. I think if I had told the me of 10 years ago that I would ever finish Ultima V legit like that he wouldn't have believed me.

I don't think he would have believed me if I told him that I finished Ultima IV legit either :D

Natreg's comment on my last post made me go OH MAN CRAP. I had TOTALLY forgotten about those glass swords! I had learned everything about them in the early game, if you go back a couple of posts you can see me talking about them. Still they had totally left my mind until Natreg reminded me. I immediately went to the spot where I found the white stone in Ultima IV and climbed the mountains. As I thought, there was a grass spot here containing a glass sword. Yes, I said A glass sword. How can there be only one? That doesn't make sense. I left the moutains, thought about it a bit, equipped the glass sword and went back to see if it made others appears ala mystic weapons in Ultima IV. It worked! So I managed to get 7 glass swords that way. Sweet!






Now all there was to do was get ready for the endgame portion. I had so much money that I had no idea what to do with it so I spent it on maxing out my food supply, making a bunch of spells and then buying new reagents, maxing out on torches etc. Basically if I could spend it on something I would. After doing that for a while I felt prepared and headed for Shame.


The first floor was confusing since it's basically an empty room but that last room in Deceit taught me better. I threw my axe everywhere and managed to hit the switches. I was surprised to see rocks in the way though and even more surprised when I realized that I could climb rocks in this game. Kind of useless though :) In general design Shame looks like Hythloth, which means it looks good, like all the other dungeons in the game :)













Shame was quite easy overall and it didn't take me long to get to the underworld. The dungeons in Ultima V are either much easier than the ones in Ultima IV or I am a master of them. Or maybe both!

I went east since the center of the underworld was that way, blinked once to cross the vast area of mountains and oh crap, what the hell is that? I have no freaking idea but it must be what the codex called "the gate to the core of the world". I flew around the island to see if there was a path of non shallow waters to cross through but there wasn't so I just flew over the turbulent waters.










At this point it was about time for me to stop playing but I was incredibly close to reaching level 8 with my avatar so I fought monsters after monsters. Eventually I reached 6400XP and was awarded my eight level by LB but..wait...WAIT, HE GAVE ME A POINT IN INTELLIGENCE! But I'm hardly maxed out in that stat I need points in DEXTERITY! When I saw that I immediately did a quit and load, hoping that the allocation of points was random. But he still gave me a point in INT the second time. CRAP, that really really sucks! I was hoping to have that perfect character like I had in Ultima IV. I am honestly thinking about modifying my save file to give me that 30 in DEX, I think I've earned it. It's unfair to be given a point in a stat you've already maxed dammit.






Oh well. I stopped playing at that point. So next time I play Ultima V, it will be to finish the game!

Btw Natreg, I didn't go talk to that person who knew about moongates since frankly that would be kind of useless to me by now, I'm at the end and I've never used the moongates except to reach the shrine of spirituality.

Get ready for the final post! :)


EDIT: Well I sent my save file to my friend and told him to check out if he could so something about the faulty dex and guess what, he did! Look at that beauty!