Hot off his playthrough of Ultima 7 for the Super Nintendo, Origin historian Pix has taken a significant step back in time; he’s now playing Ultima 1…the PC98 port. It was a bit of an unplanned thing, actually:

I was hoping to make the next game on here the IIGS version of Ultima 1 but my IIGS needs some repairs doing which are beyond my capabilities so I’ve had to send it off to a professional. I don’t expect I’ll be getting it back too soon so I thought I’d have a quick blast through the PC98 version instead. This port was released in 1988 in Japan and later included with the anex86 emulator on the Japanese Ultima collection which is the version I’m going to be playing. It is almost entirely in Japanese but I was confident this wouldn’t make too much difference as I know my way around Ultima 1 well enough by now.

And…well…it seems he finished it in one go, as well:

I’m a long way from maxed out for this final battle as I’ve just been speeding through this relatively quickly but Mondain falls quite quickly. Once in bat form he does prove to be particularly elusive on the PC98 but I get enough hits in after chasing him round for 5 minutes and am presented with :-

a screen of Japanese which doesn’t mean a whole lot to me followed by some credits.

His overall impression of the game is that it…doesn’t add much to the Ultima 1 experience, and in some ways detracts from it. The graphics are generally brighter and more colourful, but the gameplay doesn’t match that of the original…which is odd given the gulf of time between the original Ultima 1 and the PC98 port.