A mysterious being contacts you, the Avatar, menacing with a drastic change to the land of Britannia and, again, a gate is opened to carry you back to the kingdom, where nobody has summoned you as after two hundred years of peace the land is entering into a new age of illumination.

Here with this game the Ultima saga reached its best. Good graphics, with many animations and special effects; an interesting, and huge for the time, world to explore; and a good and immersive interface.

The objects go beyond simple decoration and battle use, many are useable just for realism and depth, you may flip a coin, open windows, fill buckets or make bread. Even the ones used when fighting are fun, like throwing a used diaper to you enemies, or blowing them with a gunpowder keg. And all this variety doesn't mean an overwhelming quantity of equipment, there is only a bunch of armours and weapons, and even fewer magical ones, just one kind of magical armour and a few magical weapons, but with distinctive qualities.

And the most distinctive one brings a big novelty to the series, the expansion. The Forge of Virtue raises from the sea a new isle, with a big and interesting, and dangerous, dungeon where are keept dangerous leftovers from the past and the lost test of the three principles. The awards for completing, that may be somewhat unbalancing, include the creation of the powerful black sword, hosting a demon which, if feed, will lent its powers.

But as fights are not a big part of the game the unbalance is not very noticeable. As in the previous one, your companions will act by themselves, following a simple pattern you mark to them. Being now in real time and not having a good way to see the condition of the party, it may also mean that they run to their death and leave their body lost in the forest, but more easily they will run away, even yelling and throwing the backpack and what they have in their hands, or fall uncounscious.

The game's dept can be seen continuously, on the weather system, in the characters that get angry, and may leave you, if you act unvirtuously, in the possibility of doing a job, in all the references it keeps from previous, and next, games, in the need to eat, in the many places that exist just for being explored and even in the choice you have at the end of the game.

Dialogs and quests, which keep being the main part of the game, have been improved. Characters speak better, say more interesting things, give lore and not just talk the minimum necessary for your mission and even react to the presence of another character. The quests are variated, and with a thinner line separating what is good and what is bad, but in exchange there are not many side quests. It should be noted that the main quest can be done in disorder, so knowing what to do you may even jump quickly to the end of the game but not knowing what to do you may end lost on it.

And also, as usual, the manual is something interesting to be read, not only for the copy protection, but for being the best one, wrote as if it was the handbook of the newly created fellowship. Who is the fellowship? Well, I have not talked of the story for a good reason, the main point of the game is discovering what's going on.


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