Progress on the battlefront!

Thanks to Andrew Schultz's guide, I'm plowing my way through Ultima: Warriors of Destiny now. Once you get used to the controls and the general layout of the land, this game isn't so bad. I dreaded it for years, but now that I've gotten into it pretty far, most of that fear is gone. It also helps to have a great guide written for it that lets you know where stuff is, otherwise I would probably still be clueless.

So I'd say I'm over half way through this right now. I've collected almost, if not all, of the mantras and words of power. I've gotten 2 of the gem shards that help you defeat the Shadowlords. The bulk of this I have done between last night and this morning. This is not your typical RPG, where you need to constantly defeat monsters and level-up. In fact, it is more of a scavenger hunt, where you have to talk to people to open up other conversations elsewhere. You just need to know who to talk to and where to find them.

Also, you don't need to keep upgrading your weapons, as there is one place in the Underworld where you just come upon this huge stash of the most powerful weapons in the game. If you know where this is, it helps save you a ton of Gold, since you can just pick these up and equip your characters with them. Gold is another story, as you do not get it from defeating enemies, but must find it lying around, mostly in dungeons.

Not your typical RPG at all. I can see why I never read reviews or anything about this game, as it is so hard to get in to, but once you have a sense of what the hell to do, thanks to Schultz's guide, the whole world opens up to you. I remember feeling this sense of being lost in the game Super Pitfall, which is why I decided to write a guide for that years ago, but that game was an action platformer and was 10x easier to FAQ than Ultima: Warriors of Destiny must have been.

If I continue to get time to play this, it could go down in the next couple days...I usually jinx my ass when I say something like that, but looking ahead in the guide it looks like I only have to worry about which gem shard to use on a particular shadowlord (they are all titled 'gem shard' even though they look different from one another, but you have to use the right one on the right shadowlord) and also have to worry about which items to drop from my inventory, as you can only carry 36 items (non-equipped items), which seems like a lot, but there are a ton of different items in the game that are useful. I figure if I carry enough reagents to make spells, I can get rid of some of the potions, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

With any luck, I will be down to 8 games left very soon.....