Pix, noted historian of all things Origin Systems, has continued his playthrough of the Super Famicom port of Ultima 6, and continues to have an overall favourable impression of it. That isn’t to say that he hasn’t identified some mild shortcomings:

I expect we all know the U6 story well enough to realise that I shouldn’t really be killing off the gargoyles but there doesn’t appear to be any button I can press to come out of combat mode so it’s not really optional. This isn’t the version to play for the more pacifistic Avatars out there. Coupled with that, there is no means to pick a single party member to control as with the PC Ultima 6 engine games. I always liked that feature of the engine too – it led to some nice little puzzles in the spin-off games but here it’s strictly one for all.

This is all going well enough until with my party safely skiffled I run into a horde of rats. I wasn’t expecting the combat system to kick in at all in this situation but I’m forced to fight them from within the skiff except none of the rest of the party get a turn so my Avatar is single-handed. He eventually beats them down but gets poisoned in the process and doesn’t survive the rest of the trip. I’ll make another attempt at this in part 3 staying further from the shore.

Still, in spite of the troubles chronicled above (the latter of which, especially, can be chalked up to the limitations of the Famicom platform), his view of the game is positive:

…U6 SNES is turning out to be a whole lot better than I’d hoped it would be. There have been compromises to the platform but out of the 4 Nintendo ports I’ve played so far this is easily the one that is most like an original Ultima. It’s got me not wanting to stop playing at any rate and I’m looking forward to gathering the treasure map next.

Let us hope that his enjoyment of it continues! He seems to be updating this series of playthrough articles rather less frequently than with some of the playthroughs he has done in the past…hopefully the result of a busy offline life rather than a sudden disgust with the game being played!