I’m going to try to get a bit of sleep now but I scratched my itch. The Dryad hair quest took me to an ogre’s lair a short bit NW of Khriszan and finally! a dungeon! The ogre is drunk and sleeping but you can sneak around and get the key you need, then escape, without waking him, but I went ahead and woke him up for a challenge. The biggest difference between the ogre and the null bugs/chitrachs is that there’s only one of him and although he’s strong, war curse + the front line attacking every turn + the priest casting Protection then healing every turn took him down after a bit with only the mage dying (and he was the least useful character, even as a damage magnet). So I guess I’m at the right level.

One reason FF Tactics may not have taken this time is that in 1998, it was the first game of that sort I had played (not counting Shining Force 2 at an elementary school friend’s house). You fought on an isometric grid battlefield using melee and ranged attacks and spells/abilities. Well guess what, that’s the same battle mechanic (in an extremely rudimentary form) in Ultima 3-5 and Avernum; the main difference is the jobs system (which I preferred in FF3 and 5) and terrain effects). Tactics takes it to the nth degree, but battle has never been my favorite part of games like this; to be honest the dungeon crawling and completing quests in Avernum and the dungeons are in Ultima, so FF Tactics is not only not new and unique, with a plot you actually have to pay attention to, but it’s the apotheosis of my least favorite part of RPGs like this.

Honestly I can’t say Ultima 3 and 4 would have much to offer you besides historical value. I played them quite young (middle school), before I had much experience with CRPGs, so I was blind to their flaws and embryonism (to coin a word) compared to what came after. More obviously, the interface is a pain in the ass, having to memorize what all 26 keys do – Klimb and Descend stairs or ladders are separate keys, and confusingly, Quit saves but doesn’t quit (you have to Alt-Enter for that and kill the window manually; the Q dates from the Apple II days when everything was booted off a floppy disk and you shut off the computer to end the program, so Quit saves the game as the last thing you do before shutting down. There is no way to close the program without hard killing it) Also, the spell mechanic is easily the weakest part of those Ultima games – you buy and mix reagents to prepare spell charges, but you have to look up or write down the mixtures (to make a charge of a heal spell you mix garlic and ginseng, I remember that). To cast a spell, you pressed Mage or Priest and then A-H (I think it was H), in an unintuitive way. You just had to remember which spell F was or what letter heal was. Magic, however, isn’t very useful outside of dungeons except for healing. (Nonetheless, I’ve beaten both those games.)

Ultima V is quite a bit more sophisticated – the Revolver to Ultima IV’s Rubber Soul.