| Ultima VII - The Black Gate
My FAVORITE Ultima. It's very interactive with the world. I once created a list of what you can do in Ultima VII. Please look if you like.
The story was, of course, far superior than anything. And still is better than most (including Ultima VIII). It's the opening of Guardian Trilogy (Quad or Pent?) and the Guardian is the ULTIMATE BADGUY, too BAD to be rarely seen in any games. Goodguys are less impressive... Lord British is aged and a bit awkward (sorry :) and a few reliable people will be anyway... hush hush <g>. Begin with the serial murder, revealing mysteries of Fellowship, actions around Yew lead to Alagner and the road continues to Skara Brae which is now haunted. (wow. It used to be Spiritual town, do you remember?) Hey, I feel like I need to play it through from scratch!
Also those sub-plots are great. Events and stories not directly related in completing the game (racial problems in Vesper, drug problems in Paws, somwhat funny incident in Jhelom, etc) are more than plenty and they're FUN. You can play it for very long without feeling like you have seen everything. It's an evolutional RPG, especially it was at 1992. I played a few years later though.
One last thing, I want to add the fact that I mostly learned English with it. Japanese edition hasn't come out at last, and I played it first when I obtained my first PC compatible. I was pretty hopeless in reading English at the time but the games was very attractive to me and I was immersed. When I completed, playing it and translating the messages like hell, I got well gained my English knowledge. I collected all texts in the game later and found that it was almost a megabyte. Huh<g>
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