Ultima IX/YMMV

Ending Aversion: Many Ultima fans regard this as a pretty terrible way to end the series.
- Particularly notable is the description on The Spoony Experiment as "a top contender for the most blundered finale to an epic storyline in the history of fiction."
Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans pretend it never happened, and some are working on their own version of the game using other engines.
Franchise Original Sin: At least a few of the more widely-disliked aspects of the game's storyline — in particular, the Avatar's status as the Titan of Ether being swept under the rug, and Lord Blackthorn being evil again for no adequately explained reason — actually originated with the Bob White plot, even before things went horribly wrong.
Good Bad Bugs: An absolutely hilarious bug that occurs sometimes you kill an enemy has their corpse rapidly moving back an forth across the ground.
- A reliable place for this seems to be the guards in the above ground section of Wrong.
Memetic Mutation: All thanks to Spoony:
- "What's a Paladin?"
- "Your knowledge of the land shall be great!"
- "The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom?"
- "I'm not entirely sure."
Most Annoying Sound: The Avatar randomly whistles. The Avatar randomly coughs. Even turning the voices off doesn't make it go away.
Narm Charm: Some of the voice acting.
- "Want To Party?"
  - ""Surrrrrrrrrre, let's go!"
- "What's a [thing that he should know from the previous games]?"
So Bad It's Good"
- Good Bad Bugs: Wacked-out Ultima 9 shows a whole bunch of them.
That One Sidequest: The lighthouse sidequest, which requires you to search all of Britannia to find four gems in order to finish a set of lighthouses commissioned by Lord British. Such a lengthy, difficult quest isn't actually all that uncommon for this series; however, the prior Ultima games gave you much better rewards than the 100 gold pieces — an amount that you can easily get right at the start of the game if you're prepared to put the time into battling the tougher enemies — that you get for completing this quest.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: If only original lead developer Bob White stayed for the storyline...
Villain Decay: The Guardian, previously an unknown demonic force, is revealed here to be the darker aspect of the Avatar himself, expulged from him when he went through the Quest of the Avatar in Ultima IV.
- If anyone is curious, the original plan by Richard Garriot was that The Guardian was the merging of the three Shadowlords from Ultima V.
- In Ultima V, Blackthorne was simply a dupe of the Shadowlords, warped by their magic but not inherently evil himself. Subsequent games strongly suggested he was undergoing a Redemption Quest all his own. Ultima IX has him suddenly evil again, with no clear motivation.