An incredible leap over Ultima IV
Ultima V is a thoroughly impressive game. It takes everything Ultima IV brought to the table and polishes it many times over.
Unlike Ultima IV there is actually a story in this one, one of total chaos to boot. Lord British is gone, Blackthorn is reigning supreme and the shadowlords are running amok. Throughout the game there is that heavy feeling of oppressiveness which is really well done for a 1988 game. The fact that the early game is incredibly tough contributes greatly to this feeling; early on you have no idea what you're supposed to do and feel very lost. Help is hard to get because everyone is scared of Blackthorn, the guards who are enforcing the new laws or the shadowlords themselves. The general gameplay is pretty similar to the previous game. You need to talk to people, gather hints, solve clues, find objects and solve the game. At first the amount of speech is overwhelming but you soon find out that it is only a facade, they don't really talk more than in Ultima IV they just pad out what they are saying more. The text is also much better written and lively which makes the hint gathering portion of the game much more enjoyable.
It's still not perfect though. Although the dialogue is much better written, it is incredibly dry. I don't think I've ever felt a hint of an emotion while playing this game. There's a part where you go down the underworld and talk to a shipwrecked captain. He tells you his story of having killed his shipmates while under the influence of the shards, causing them to become the shadowlords. Now in a modern game that would have been an absolutely gripping confession, but in Ultima V it is said so blandly that it didn't elicit much of an emotional response from me. The whole game is like that, total lack of emotional involvement. This truly drags the story down a couple of notches. There is also a lack of reaction to your accomplishments. No one notices that you've killed the shadowlords, no one compliments you on a job well done. Without the shadowlords Blackthorn should go back to normal, and even if Lord British had been lost forever Britannia could have strived under a new ruler or the council. Still no one notices that the shadowlords are gone, it is sort of a bummer.
This game also introduced night cycles. It is a good idea however it can be a pain sometimes. Simply put, nothing happens during the night. Very few NPC's are awake during that time, so the only thing you can do yourself is sleep. I've played this game for 7 months and 6 days of in game time and most of it was spent sleeping to skip the nights. The concept is good but it needs to be executed better in the future. The world of Britannia is much richer in this game. The castle of Lord British has suburbs and there's keeps and huts scattered throughout the land. This makes traveling more fun than it used to be because you're always stumbling on something new. The dungeons are greatly improved. Most of these improvements are graphical; dungeons are now fully detailed, each sporting a different look than the next. They also feel less maze like, but that could be an illusion stemming from the fact that the added clarity of the graphics makes them easier to navigate. At the bottom of the dungeons there is a new landmass called the underworld. It has the same exact proportions than the overworld and is quite fun to go through. The monsters are really tough and come at you often. You also don't see much around you down there and everything is hilly so you often have to follow a set path. It definitely feels different but to me that was one of the strongest part of the game, I loved going down there.
So far I've only been heaping praise on the game so why the 7.5? Well obviously this game is old. The graphics are good, I sort of like them. At this point you could say that they are "simple but clean". However, this is the fifth game in the series that has been using the same overall graphics engine and it is starting to wear thin. Luckily it is also the last. I'm tired of all that black!
The battles are better than in Ultima IV but they're also somewhat more annoying. In Ultima IV everything was way too easy, monsters were simply XP fodder, it was a contest of who can kill what faster. There was absolutely no challenge to the battles. Think about it, near the end of the game my party was put to sleep for about 30 minutes by reapers, and the surrounding monsters weren't able to finish us off since they couldn't hit us even while we were sleeping. If something like that happened in Ultima V, my whole party would be dead within 20 seconds. That is a good thing.
But there is also some bad. Your characters are incredibly inaccurate and they often hit your own party members rather than the monsters. I could understand at level 1, but level 8? How can a maxed out level 8 avatar throw his magic axe sideways, hitting his teammate, instead of forward? It seems to get worse when everyone is crammed closely with the monsters, it's not uncommon for your party to be hitting each other more often than the monsters.
Even when they're not hitting each other they might miss like crazy. At one point my 29 DEX avatar missed a mongbat like 6 times in a row. Just imagine how much the other party members were missing. A reason for might be to focus on magical spells. Simply put, magic is devastating. I don't want to imagine how hard the last dungeon would have been without eight level spells.
The music in Ultima V is absolutely astounding. Granted I am using the music patch for the PC version, you'd have to be an idiot to play the game without it. The music has none of the problems found in the previous games. It doesn't feel repetitive like in Ultima III and the songs are great across the board unlike Ultima IV. Ultima V also marks the introduction of the traditional Ultima soundtrack with 'stones' and the like which is quite pleasant. Overall I loved the music.
To me, Ultima V is the first truly great Ultima. At least by today's standards :)