Ultima IX

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Ultima IX: Ascension (1999) is the ninth and final installment in the Ultima series of role playing games.

The Avatar is called to Britannia one last time, where he discovers a series of monoliths have risen all across the kingdom, and the locals are acting very strangely indeed. It turns out that these towers are the doing of the Guardian, whose realm, Pagan, the Avatar has recently escaped from. It's down to you to defeat the Guardian once and for all... by making a Heroic Sacrifice.

Tropes used in Ultima IX include:

• Back from the Dead: Sir Dupre.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Almost all of the 8 companions have been corrupted by the Guardian and turned into members of his Wyrmguard, serving as the bosses of several of the Glyph Column dungeons (the only exceptions are one who was considered too weak by the Guardian to be worth bothering with, one who was stuck in the Ethereal Void at the time, and one who was busy being dead). The Avatar can either redeem them with a Puzzle Boss fight related to their respective virtue, or just straight up kill them with hacking and slashing.
• Costume Copycat: One of these can be found in a hut outside Britain, claiming to be the Avatar's biggest fan.
• Crate Expectations
• Cross Player: Averted. Previous games in the series allowed you to choose which gender you want the avatar to be, and some of them even gave you a choice of faces for each. Ultima VIII did away with this, and Ultima IX continues making the Avatar purely and irrefutably male. While the game packaging on previous games in the series nearly always illustrated the Avatar as a "him", meaning it was only ever a Purely Aesthetic Gender choice anyway, it was still a slap in the face to female players.
• Dummied Out: Large sections of the game were hacked out of the finished product. Many of these missing areas are still present in the game code, and enterprising hackers have discovered ways to access them.
• Flaming Sword: While its incredibly useful for seeing in dark areas, its actually... not that powerful a weapon, really.
• Game Breaking Bug: More than a few of them too, even after patching.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality
• Grand Finale: This game was intended to be the grand cumulation of the entire series, but suffered serious Executive Meddling by Electronic Arts during development. Lets just say that many fans consider the final product to be something of a letdown.
• Grid Inventory: The only game in the series that adopts this approach, after previously using either text or freeform inventories.
• Heroic Sacrifice
• Hit and Run Tactics: As with the previous entry in the series, this is often the optimal way to win battles, since you no longer have a party and enemies are often too stupid to try pursuing you more than a few feet.
• Idiot Hero: The Avatar comes across as one, due to seemingly knowing absolutely nothing, even basic facts, about the world he's explored and been the savior of for the past dozen games. While his dialogue was obviously scripted this way to avoid Continuity Lock Out for new gamers who haven't played any of the other games, it makes him come across as a complete moron (earlier games handled this much better with As You Know dialogue instead of giving the Avatar a sudden onset case of complete amnesia).
• In Name Only: For many in the Ultima fan community.
• Loony Fan: See Costume Copycat above.
• Lord British Postulate: The trope namer returns, invulnerable to attack... unless you made a poisoned loaf of bread on Earth and feed it to him. Then he drops like a brick.
• 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."
• Optional Sexual Encounter:
  • In Buccaneer's Den, a prostitute will offer you a good time. Taking her up on it leaves you with less gold, and it also hurts your Karma Meter. Resist the temptation, Avatar!
  • In one cut-scene, Raven makes sure the Avatar has a non-optional sexual encounter.
• Polygon Ceiling/Video Game 3D Leap: This was the first game in the main series to be 3D. It encounters problems with this, as the game world, which was massive in Ultima VII, has had to be reduced to the size of a shoebox.
• Putting the Band Back Together: Averted. Most of the "team" from the previous games are present in this one, but unlike other games in the series (Ultima Underworld and Ultima VIII: Pagan excepted), you can't actually get any of them to come with you.
• Railroading: You're given only a small amount of freedom up until you've cleansed the first shrine, and still forced into a very specific sequence of storyline events throughout the game. The previous three games tended to do this a little bit as well, but you still had a lot of freedom to act once you'd gotten out of the first major area.
  • If you've played the other games, you probably know the correct words to activate the shrines... except that the game will reject the correct word until you've done the relevant quest to discover the word.
• Retcon:
  • Probably the main reason (other than the bugs and the simplistic gameplay) why this game is so widely hated in the Ultima community. While every other Ultima game retconned some lore from its predecessors (mostly stuff added for flavor), they can't even compare to the sheer number of continuity errors and deliberate retcons in this game. This website in particular was dedicated to listing all the inconsistencies in the Ultima games, and there are about as many pages about Ultima IX (if not more) on that site as there are pages about all other Ultima games taken together.
  • The biggest is that the previous game is entirely about getting back to Britannia to stop the Guardian's invasion, finally gaining the power to construct your own black gate and make the journey only to find that the world has already fallen and Smash to Black. This game starts with the Avatar home on Earth with no idea the Guardian had even returned.
• Sequence Breaking: Using the Avatar's normal jumping abilities, and a little bit of trial and error, its actually possible to scale whole mountains, and therefore skip two-thirds of the game.
• Series Continuity Error: As seen above under Retcon, Ultima IX contains a nigh-uncountable number of these.
• Suddenly Voiced: Everybody has actual voices in this one. Most noticably the Avatar himself, who in the previous games was always a Heroic Mime.
• Thriving Ghost Town
• Took a Level In Dumbass: The Avatar has forgotten practically everything that he experienced in the previous games. See Idiot Hero above.
• Welcome to Corneria
• Wretched Hive: Buccaneer's Den, of course. Where else?
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Averted. It's the first game in the entire Ultima series where none of the characters speak like this.