Linguistic Dragon has found time to pen another missive chronicling his ongoing journey through Ultima 3. This time around, rather than aimlessly exploring the world, he set about finding all the clues and pieces of information he could, to better understand how to progress through the plot of the game:

I’d already run around Yew, Devil Guard, Britain and Lord British’s Castle to see what the townsfolk there had to say, but with my new ship I thought I’d explore the islands, so Fawn was my next stop. There I was told a bit about an invocation I need to learn, and that I’d need to ‘pray’ in order to find it. From there I headed over to Death Gulch, and learned that guards could be bribed – a fact I’d later learn in Moon, but when a guard tells me he can be bribed, what else am I going to do? (Sheesh, no wonder I need to work at becoming the Avatar. Bribing guards, killing clerics for experience in Yew… got a lot of guilt to work off by this point.)

Anyway, the Montors revealed to me that seeking the Jester in castle fire might be a good idea – I took this to mean the Castle on the isle of Fire, as in Exodus’ home, which meant that I probably wouldn’t get to follow up on this for a while, but when I got my hands on some keys and started poking around Lord British’s prison in his castle, what did I find but a jester in the middle of a field of fire! I can only imagine what jokes he told to deserve such a punishment. But he told me where Dawn was located, which was very useful information to know, so I thanked him and winced as I burned my party again on the way back from talking to him.

And, in fact, the game seems to be growing on him:

I enjoyed this part of the game a lot, running from town to town trying to find all the little nooks and crannies to make sure I wrested every possible clue out of the townsfolk. I remember bribing the guards in Grey so I could cut through all the thieves in the tavern because I expected there to be something behind them all and that it’d be easier to just fight them rather than try to manuever around them – only to find it was just the guild behind them. But this feels a lot more interesting than the same thing did in Ultima II, partly because there’s more “dialogue” that’s actually relevent to the game rather than just throwaway gags, and partly because the clues are less… oblique. Some of them are obscure enough to leave me guessing somewhat (like the jester in fire), but not so much that I just roll my eyes in frustration. It’s a good balance, and I think at this point I can definitively say this is the game where the series hit its stride. Now that I’ve actually taken the time to start exploring the game in depth, I can easily see why it’s a favorite that holds fond memories for many. It’s putting me in mind of my first run of Ultima IV all those years ago, and in a good way.

His next goal, it would seem, is to reach Ambrosia, for which he’ll need a significant sum of cash. I, for one, look forward to reading about the perhaps unorthodox ways he might go about obtaining such treasure.