Linguistic Dragon has been beset by all manner of real-life events over the last few months, and as such hasn’t had much time to continue blogging his journey through the Ultima games. However, earlier this month, he did find time to recount another portion of his progression through Ultima 2…in which he made it his priority to properly kit out his character so as to best one of the guards in the game:

There were three things I needed to see to in order to ensure I could take down a guard and live to tell the tale – better stats, better weaponry, and better armor. Stats took precedence, and there was a lot of running back and forth into New San Antonio and the Hotel California to bump my stats up to the 40s-50s range. That done, I turned my sights toward a new weapon and a new set of armor – which turned out to be rather expensive, and that was with fair-to-middlin’ charisma! Still, enough time gave me enough money (and a fair few more levels – I know I said this before, but what’s the point to keeping track of levels if they don’t do anything?) to pick up a shiny new phaser and reflect armor!

As it turns out, his plans bore such fruit that it would now seem that no guard in the game is safe:

…I meandered over to Port Boniface to test out my new toys and see if I could slap a guard silly. I felt a little weird doing so, especially as a cleric – I suppose this is part of what makes Ultima IV so poignant, the Stranger ended up doing a lot of questionable things before he became the Avatar, didn’t he. I can’t count how much food I’ve stolen throughout the course of this game, and my guard killcount tally is starting to spike.

Linguistic also had this to say about Ultima 2 as a whole:

It does strike me, however, how… forgettable a lot of Ultima II seems to be. I think a lot of it has to do with how insanely grindy that it feels, and how… well, empty and superfluous the world as a whole feels. I haven’t made my way into space yet (that’s the plan for the next play session, at the very least), but there’s a lot of empty space that doesn’t feel like it has much purpose other than to just Be There.

Full disclosure: Ultima 2 is probably my least-favourite Ultima. So I find the above to be…more or less spot-on.