ULTIMA - RUNES OF VIRTUE
For Game Boy
Completed in 28:38
You ever have one of those TASes where, well gosh darnit, you discover something 3/4ths of the way through that require you to start all the way back at the drawing board because an untested assumption turned out to be wrong? So you finish the run anyway in a slightly sloppy way just so you can have a full game reference for the re-do? And then your ambition to make the run is sated because, heck, there's a full game reference I can just watch whenever I want to? And you think well I'll just make the proper final run some other time when I feel like it in a couple weeks or whatever?
That's what happened when I started this run in July of 2017. Almost seven and a half years of "I didn't forget, honey, I'll get around to it, promise" later, I sat my butt down and constructed a proper run.
Ultima - Runes of Virtue is an action game created for the Game Boy and released originally Dec 1991 in Japan, and April 1992 in the US. It takes one of the story elements from Ultima 4, Quest of the Avatar, that being collecting a Rune for each of the eight Virtues of Avatarhood, and expands it into the full quest of this smaller game. This portable, fast-paced action game makes a Zelda-like out of Ultima 4's wRPG gameplay (or the jRPG gameplay of Ultima 4's awesome NES port.) This game has everything I love about the classic monochrome Game Boy paradigm, being a solid pick-up-and-go arcade presentation that can be fun for twenty minutes or a long drive. It also features a powerful scripting system--flipping a lever or stepping on a switch won't always just open a door, sometimes they'll spawn monsters, or move items around, or just completely alter the level you're in! The game levels are incredibly dynamic, creating an incredible amount of unique puzzles inbetween fits of rat-stabbing and skeleton-bashing, and I honestly recommend the game. It makes excellent TAS material, too, as it can create fast-paced and precise gameplay that separates it from the slower, more deliberate gameplay a real player would use. The game is *very* difficult--so difficult, that gaming magazines rated the game kinda poorly just on that alone. Good thing there's now a TAS to show off what it looks like to not lose at the game, I guess!
Starting the Run
At the beginning of the game, you can choose your starting character, your name, and your difficulty. The difficulty setting only affects what happens when you die, and, since there's no useful deathwarping available in any mode, it makes no difference which the TAS chooses, but I chose Hard anyway as a matter of TASing standard. Setting a name only affects the high score table, which to me seems completely worthless but whatever. Character, however, now there's a choice that completely matters!
Shamino the Ranger, representing Spirituality, is the balanced character. He starts with 5HP, 5MP, and medium speed, as well as a nice Throwing Axe.
Mariah the Mage, representing Honesty, is the magical character. She starts with 5HP, 6MP, medium speed, but just a weak melee Dagger.
Dupre the Fighter, representing Honor, is usually a Paladin so maybe they meant Geoff, of Valor? Anyway, he has 6HP, 4MP, a nice melee Sword, and even starting Armor! However, he starts with a -1 in his speed stat, so while the above two are solid picks, Dupre is a terrible choice for a TAS.
IOLO THE BARD, representing Compassion, while weak for regular play, is by far the best choice for a TAS. He begins with high movement speed, a real timesaver! His bow, while weak, allows him to prepare damage to enemies from a distance from the get-go, which also helps. His main weakness is he starts with only 4HP, and taking damage to save time is a huge part of this TAS, so juggling this weak point is always something to keep in mind.
The game begins on the Overworld, which is much much smaller than in most Ultima games, and is far less important. There are shops where you can trade money for items or weapons, like if you want Mariah to have a Bow like Iolo to help out at the beginning or some such thing. In the test run, I hopped into Johann's on the final island to pick up some explosive Oil to skip a puzzle in the final dungeon, but in this final run I was able to locate exactly enough Oil in the other dungeons to do the same skip, meaning I finish the game without entering a single NPC home other than Lord British's castle. Every character starts with an Ankh that provides unlimited, immediate teleportation back to Lord British, and we use it at the end of almost every dungeon as soon as its Rune is found. There are eight Runes, and eight dungeons. Hop to it!
The Path
While the game does have somewhat of an intended order of dungeons, the game is actually pretty open-world. As long as you have the tools necessary to reach a dungeon, you can probably complete it. This means planning the order each dungeon is taken in is very important, and my strategy is simple: Reaching Max Speed ASAP!
See, whenever you collect a Rune, your character gains a level in the stats that match the combination of the Three Principles (Truth, Love, and Courage) that that Rune's Virtue is made up of. Truth increases MP, Courage increases HP, and Love increases Dex, meaning movement speed. By collecting the Runes made up at least partially of Love, (meaning Compassion, Justice, Sacrifice, and Spirituality,) you can move much more quickly through the other dungeons to ultimately save TAS time. There is one catch, however, and that's the catch that ruined my test run:
Stats have a maximum! Iolo reaches maximum movement speed after collecting three Runes of Love. The fourth one will not increase his movement speed at all. In the test run, I had collected the Rune of Spirituality fifth, which had no effect on my speed, and had locked me into doing the final dungeon early, with lower HP and MP stats. Re-ordering the path from the beginning was necessary, and here is what I came up with:
(The number in parentheses is that dungeon's Rune's usual order number, for reference.)
1. Hatred (2)
for the Rune of Compassion. (Love)
For some reason, the game points you here first, and Deceit second, although in most Ultima instances this Rune would come second. Anyway, this dungeon is the smallest for the game, and a good warm-up to what you will see further on.
Six rooms in and we're already meeting a puzzle that shows off the game's scripting: One lever will turn the six X's into pushable Boulders, and the other lever will turn Boulders into Transporter Pads. You're meant to create Boulders, slot them into holes in the wall, and then turn them all in to Transporters so you can collect treasure and a key to exit the room. It's a simple application that eases the player into understanding the level of power that switches and buttons can hold later on in the game.
The final level is another big puzzle, with three barriers you have to open at the same time, but can only do so using secret buttons that can be reached behind secret walls. The Rune is guarded by two Reapers, who can take 9 arrows from the Bow before being defeated. Collecting a Rune instantly refills your HP and MP and ups your stats. Just beyond the Reapers is a ladder that takes the player straight out of the dungeon, but we use the Ankh instead to save time. Leaving on foot can allow the player to take a key from one dungeon to another, but usually for the TAS it's just faster to Ankh out. There is one exception that I'll point out later, though!
2. Deceit (1)
to pick up the Fireball Wand.
Deceit is a unique dungeon, in that you cannot collect both its Rune and the mandatory Fireball Wand in the same run unless you somehow bring a Heart Key from another dungeon. That level of manipulation is not helpful for this TAS, so we just do half the dungeon now, and leave the Rune (which does not grant a speed increase) for later.
This dungeon is loaded with deceitful traps--one NPC is found throughout, called Honest Finn, who always lies. There are many trap squares that teleport you back to the top floor, wasting much time. There is a second Fireball Wand deep in that is completely impossible to obtain, no matter how hard you try. The route is pretty quick if you've played the game before, at least.
At the bottom of our trek, we obtain an actual Fireball Wand. While most spider webs can be destroyed with any weapon, the dark black webs have to be shot down with fire. The player only has direct access to two sources of fireballs: throwable Oil bottles that are consumed on use, and this Wand. It uses a portion of an MP, and does more damage than Iolo's basic Bow, but the fireballs travel very slowly, so it's not used for a lot of combat during the TAS if it's not done at melee range.
3. Injustice (4)
for the Rune of Justice. (Love and Truth)
You aren't meant to be able to reach this dungeon without access to fireballs, hence getting that Fireball Wand first. A mapping oversight makes it possible to get here with the Magic Rope instead, letting us walk on one tile of water and going around the black webs, but the route this TAS takes makes that technique slightly slower after all.
Right at the start of this dungeon, this run uses a quirk of the engine to destroy a Skeleton instantly. You know how in DOOM you can insta-gib an enemy if you teleport directly where they are standing? That applies here, too: Taking an Arrow Transporter and landing on an enemy can immediately destroy it, even one that's usually invincible. In this same room, we also pick up a Food from a chest. Foods and Potions, when used in the inventory screen, refill your HP and MP, respectively. Finding sources of Food that don't take long to collect is very useful in allowing us to take damage and survive, and since we have to jump into the menu to equip different items more and more frequently as the game goes on, it doesn't take much time to heal at convenient moments.
Soon after, the run does some unintended manipulations of Hammers. We duck into a sideroom that has a Hammer and Barrel puzzle that rewards the player with a Boomerang, a throwing weapon that we don't need. We can sneak away with one of the Hammers, though--when consumed, a Hammer can be used to destroy a Barrel, and by bringing an unused Hammer deeper into the dungeon, we can do the steps of a later Hammer puzzle out of order to save time.
Cheating that puzzle also uses an unintended quirk of the game engine: The game only saves the status of the previous room you were in, so if you go back, things stayed the same. Once you enter a third room, however, that first room is deleted, and the second room's status is saved in its place. In this case, we enter a room with a Barrel puzzle and solve it using the Hammer we brought earlier, and then collect this room's Hammer as you can only hold one at a time. We then go two rooms deeper into the dungeon to reset this room to stock state, and then we come *back* to solve the second half of the puzzle from a different angle. Normally you have to go through three other rooms to come back to this room on the east side, but doing it this way allows us to solve the puzzle without going through the full second and third rooms at all, saving time.
4. Cowardice (3)
to pick up the Magic Rope, as well as the Rune of Valor. (Courage)
The first thing we run into in this dungeon is a Gremlin. We've seen them before, but this is the first one that has an unavoidable effect. Gremlins steal a Food if they touch you, so it's a pain to let them run free. Manipulating the amount of Food I have for them to steal is to be kept in mind for the two or three instances where they just can't be evaded.
Evading enemies is a big problem in this dungeon in general--multiple places have Ghosts that don't always want to take the route I want them to take, causing me to have to rewind and do other rooms in different ways that cause enemies to change their RNG rolls, so hopefully a future enemy moves down instead of left, for example. I'm just whining, some of these were seriously irritating.
Another enemy that needs manipulating starts to appear here: Wisps. These little balls of light fire Lightning Bolts at you, and can warp all around the room at instantaneous speed. Usually they conveniently pop out of your way just as soon as they popped into your way, but in this room if you're unlucky they really can block your path and hit you with nasty lightning.
A few rooms later, we pick up the Magic Rope. This item, costing 1MP per use, allows you to walk over one tile of water by making a magic bridge. Magic items use a full MP per use and magic weapons only use about a third of that, so we have to be much more intentional with our uses of the magic items. There are occasional moments where I skip a possible Magic Rope usage because I would not have enough MP uses for later in the dungeons, and using up a Potion wouldn't be quite an option. Also, FYI, using an item always has a wait delay before you can use it again, and this shows the worst with the Magic Rope. Sometimes there's an awkward pause before I can make another bridge, and that's just unavoidable really.
Soon after using bridges to get passed some Rats, I press a switch without even stepping on it. Anytime you can't step on a switch because something has been placed on it, it acts as a lever instead, and you "press" the button without stepping onto the square at all. This is rarely a useful fact, but here, I manipulate a Bat to fly over a Button at the time I go to step on it, which saves time from having to step on and off the Button at all.
Once I collect the Rune, there is a ladder out of the dungeon right nearby. I take this instead of using the Ankh, because, with the Rope and the Wand in hand, I can go directly from this exit over to the next dungeon. This is faster than warping back to Lord British and then travelling back.
5. Selfishness (6)
to pick up the Lightning Amulet, as well as the Rune of Sacrifice. (Love and Courage)
Timing is key in the very first room here. Unfortunately, I just cannot get the timing right with Iolo moving this fast, and time is spent waiting for indestructible Living Boulders to move themselves out of my way. They do not move randomly, so unless I move things into or out of their way, I cannot control their path. So I get stuck a couple times in this room alone. Hrumph.
In the third room, we see the Black Knight. Or at least a projection of him. He is the villain, and the one who stole the Runes and buried them in these dungeons, and he stands here, taunting us, and the only thing that can disrupt his visage is a blast from the Lightning Amulet. Thankfully, it can be found in this very dungeon, so we have to take a side path to collect it before we can get past the Black Knight and down to the Rune.
In the very next room, we run into a half dozen Eep Eeps. They're not technically enemies--they're NPCs that can walk around, and if you try to walk into either the square they're on or the one they're leaving, you'll be stuck going into a dialogue screen. In other words, these creatures are here simply to troll us, and we cannot kill them. All the player can do is try to get around and through them without trying to talk to them. In rooms with stationary Eep Eeps, they usually unlock doors or remove walls if you talk to them, but here, they're just irritants.
The room with the Lightning Amulet as a lever that massively changes the layout of the whole room, and then it's back to the Black Knight and down the ladder. The rest of the dungeon is pretty easy to understand from just watching the run go.
6. Deceit again (1)
for the Rune of Honesty. (Truth)
Now that we have maximum movement speed, we can go collect things we skipped. Having the Magic Rope also lets us get this half of the dungeon done even faster, so waiting until now just to get a max-MP increase is the most reasonable plan. Being an early game dungeon, it's a faster and less complex dungeon than the ones we've done recently. The room with all the buttons explodes whenever you step on a NON-button space, but we set it off a couple times anyway to save time.
7. Dishonor (5)
for the Rune of Honor. (Truth and Courage)
Halfway down, there is a ladder behind a boulder that cannot be reached. I'm so curious to know what happens if you cheat over to it but I haven't made the effort to figure out how yet. The game has multiple silly little red herrings just to tease the player. Cheeky devs!
Otherwise, this dungeon is split into two halves, and like Deceit, one half leads to a magic item. Many dungeons have sidepaths that give weapons or items that we don't need--Items that freeze enemies, or let us slip by them, or armor to let us take more damage safely, but ultimately they're skipped in this run. So skipping seriously half of this dungeon makes it much shorter and less hazardous despite being a backhalf dungeon.
8. Pride (7)
to access the Abyss, as well as the Rune of Spirituality. (Truth, Love, and Courage)
Here's the final stretch. Pride is a unique dungeon, in that the Rune is on the bottom level, but then you want to go back UP to the first level using a different route, to exit the dungeon on the final island. So you have to do this whole dungeon down, this whole dungeon up, and then the whole, massive final dungeon, all in one trip, at least in a speedrun situation. Almost half this TAS's runtime is spent after entering this dungeon, so buckle in.
It starts viciously. The third room of this dungeon is one of the worst to TAS in this whole game. You are required to make three loops around the outside of the room to eventually get the key to the door out, while rats are spawning and living boulders are getting in your way and man doing this room quickly and smoothly is a massive pain. And when I finished, I later had to come back and redo it all over again because I had used too much MP blasting enemies I didn't ultimately need to blast!
And the *very next room* is just as bad! Every time you flip the switch, all the boulders become webs and vice versa, so you have to repeatedly go between the center room and the web/rock hallway, blasting away webs and turning boulders into webs you can blast, back and forth. And every time you cross the swampy corridor, more rats get spawned, nibbling at your ankles and getting in your way, draining your HP and MP over and over. Gloves are off now, not kidding.
A few rooms later is another standout room. The reapers surround a pair of buttons, one of which spawns a barrel when pressed, the other spawns Sea Monsters. The Sea Monsters can blast fire at webs blocking Boulders in your path, but they can't reach the lake on the left without your help. Once you let them clear your path to the northeast of the room, there is a lever that turns all Barrels in the room into water tiles. In other words, in this room you have to create enough Barrels and move them into position so that, once you flip the switch, the Sea Monsters are able to sail to the left side, and then breathe fire on the web over there, allowing you to get by and out to the next level. Very clever puzzles in this game, seriously!
A couple rooms later, we run into our first instance of Magic Boots. Once consumed, this item allows to walk through walls until we leave the room. Super powerful, but you're only allowed to hold one at a time, and they disappear when you leave a dungeon, so the designers are aware of what power they hold. Still, I found a way to abuse the room resetting trick to get an extra set of Boots into the inventory to skip a puzzle in a later room.
The very next room, the corridor with Arrow Transporters, has two secret hallways, one which gives a secret Star Key, that seems to only exist to let you cut a future puzzle short. Thanks, devs! We get it on our third pass through the corridor, since they would have gone into one of our active item slots if we did it sooner. Keys don't have to be "used" to be used, but the Magic Boots do.
Two rooms later is a giant chessboard puzzle. The NPCs tell you the moves they played and you use that to determine which tiles are safe to travel, otherwise you're locked into a massive fight. The following room is in a giant Yin/Yang shape, and holds the Rune. The free HP/MP refill from collecting the Rune is very useful, because now we have to continue crawling up out of the dungeon from here! Thankfully, the final few rooms are actually easier to traverse. Once we're on the surface again, we have the option of unlocking travel back and forth to the mainland, in case you need to get back to the final dungeon easily at this point, but the TAS won't need that, we're going straight in.
9. The Great Stygian Abyss (8)
for the Rune of Humility, which is outside the three Principles and provides no stat boosts if not collected last.
The final gauntlet starts here. The run immediately start with a big ogre-looking enemy that cannot be killed by anything but a magic sword that we never collected. We have to spend a lot of time in this room waiting for the living boulders to move out of our way, so pulling him into the open and dodging him isn't really losing much time anyway.
Many of the dungeon levels in the Abyss are like elemental planes of some time type or other. The second room we enter is a plane of boulders, followed by water, air (swamp?), and fire, before we reach the third floor. It really feels like we're diving into the center of some great powers beyond our scope here. Using the Foods and Potions we collected throughout the world starts to become a pattern here--we will take a lot of damage in short time spans, and use a ton of magic to navigate puzzle rooms or slay dragons in our way.
There is room after room of devious puzzles I could take time to explain one after another. There's a room with a hidden Button that changes where the Teleporter Pad takes you every time you press it, so you have to go back and forth between it and the corners of the level to finally get down to the next room. This room has a checkerboard of Buttons that spawn Rats when pressed--and these Buttons can be pressed by Rats too! This room quickly gets overwhelmed with lag-inducing monsters. Then the following room has the exit to the next floor surrounded by Wizards that you can't hurt! You're supposed to go all around the room to eventually flip a switch that kills these Wizards, but I discovered that the Living Boulder here that shoots reaper-beams at you CAN damage these monsters, so instead of solving the puzzle, I save time by manipulating the Boulder to kill one of the Wizards for me. Room after Room after Room of puzzle.
Two rooms later, and the three Oils I collected in my playthrough finally come to use. The puzzle in this room involves two buttons that turn Webs into Boulders and back. You need to get through the webs to reach the next floor, but the Buttons are in your way, and the Webs will turn into Boulders that you can't destroy. The intended solution is to take a series of Arrow Transporters around the room--you can't move off the Arrows once you're on them, but you can fire a weapon. Take three loops on the Transporters, fire your Arrows at the right time, and you can destroy the Webs from behind, allowing you to walk through just fine. What I discovered, however, is that by using the throwing mechanic of the Oils and the slow firing speed of the Fireball Wand, you can actually destroy the webs from the front, ducking in and out of the corridor, turning Boulders back into Webs just in time for fireballs to pop 'em! Huge timesaver I'd been working towards slowly for the whole run. It requires 3 Oils to do, and there are exactly 3 in the game that don't require going out of my way to collect.
In the room with the little volcanoes, the Mushrooms spawn Heart Keys, and you need four to access a lever that lets you descend to the next floor. The problem is that these particular Mushrooms spawn the Heart Keys in random places, and it's set once you enter the room, so you have to manipulate this room while manipulating previous rooms, in order to not have to go back and forth too much in this one room. You can only hold one of each kind of key at a time, so it's not like you can scoop up four of the keys, you have to unlock each door one at a time.
The final room of the game involves killing two Dragons while a Troll spawns an infinite supply of Wisps, a crazy brawl to top things off here. Going fast enough to keep too many Wisps from spawning makes this a bit easier, and the final Rune is mine and the game is completed! And, yes, if you have missed any of the Runes, you have to Ankh out and then go collect them before the game is over.
The End --What Else is There?
Once all eight Runes are collected, the game immediately ends, and your hero is brought to Lord British to be knighted in celebration of victoriously completing their quest. That's all folks!
The only other thing to say about Ultima-Runes of Virtue is that there is another game mode that can be completed: The 2P Dungeon! This game has a two-player mode, utilizing the Game Boy's Multi-link Cable, to allow two heroes to challenge together a completely unique dungeon, designed for two people working in tandem to complete. I have tested, and Bizhawk's Multi-disk Bundler tool works perfectly for this mode, so TASing this special dungeon is also possible. I don't currently have any plans to do this, but that they did this at all is really cool.
Thanks for reading and watching, have a lovely day.
CoolHandMike: The most current WR speedrun for this game is a full ten minutes slower than this tas despite using almost the same routing. This tas does everything as fast as possible and bypasses unneeded items and shops. While I had a difficult time understanding the labyrinthine mazes the author was able to blast through them at times even with a single heart left. Also impressive that the author decided to improve their previous WIP by about two full minutes from seven years ago.
Accepting this tas to Standard class.
Great job!
CoolHandMike: Replaced with file from despoa fixing cycle count.
CoolHandMike: Changing to Delayed due to possible improvements author wishes to explore.
