Video Game / Ultima VII Part II

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Ultima VII Part II: Serpent Isle is a PC game released in 1993 by Origin Systems. It is considered one of the best games in the Ultima series besides its predecessor, Ultima VII.

Though its name would suggest it's a Gaiden Game, or that Ultima VII was so long that it needed to be divided into two games, it's actually neither. It is a stand-alone game that contains events important to the overall series. The only reason it was not officially named Ultima VIII is because Richard Gariott wanted all Ultima games to have different engines; Serpent Isle, however, uses the exact same one as Ultima VII. Thus "Part II" was slapped on.

Eighteen months after the events of Ultima VII, Lord British finds out that the Guardian has sent Batlin to a place called the Serpent Isle. Fearing the worst, he sends the Avatar, Iolo, Shamino, and Dupre after Batlin to find out what they are up to. As the Avatar and his/her companions search for Batlin, they quickly become involved in the Cosmic Horror Story going on behind the scenes.

Like Ultima VII, Ultima VII Part II comes with an Expansion Pack, The Silver Seed. Here, the Avatar uses an amulet to travel back in time to prevent the War of Imbalance from destroying the world.

Ultima VII Part II was also released on DOS, and can be played on modern systems with the fan-made engine, Exult. It is now available to all along with its predecessor over at Good Old Games.

This game has examples of:

• 0% Approval Rating: Lord British is liberally (and sometimes literally) demonized by the denizens of the Isle. Everyone hates him for all sorts of crimes, there's a libelous poem found here and there, and the trial in Fawn has one of your companions almost executed for mentioning British's name (and the trial itself twists the witnesses' words to vilify you and Lord British). All because their ancestors thought the Virtue system was a bit oppressive.
• All in a Row
• Anachronism Stew: Captain Stokes plays pirated software on a computer.
• Anarchy Is Chaos: An unusual case, because here Anarchy is a perversion of Chaos. Ancient Sosarians had a belief system based on Order and Chaos opposing and balancing each other. One of the Chaos virtues—Tolerance—without being balanced by the correspondent Order virtue, Ethicality, turns into a Bane of Anarchy, which leads to many chaotic murders.
• Animalistic Abomination: The three snake gods.
• Apocalyptic Log: There's a lot of these left behind by the Ophidians, like the Hierophant scroll which you get in the hidden cave right at the beginning of the game. Also, there's a very disturbing diary in White Dragon Castle that details how the king brutally tortured everyone to death.
• Arc Number: 3. Three cities, three sets of three virtues, three clans in Monitor, three Great Captains in Fawn, three seats on the Council of Mages...
• Artistic License – Economics:
  • The False Coin spell, being an easy method of making Counterfeit Cash, should be a major threat to the value of currencies so duplicated. The manual attempts to handwave this by claiming the false coins vanish after a while, but... they don't. The game actually has no method whatsoever of distinguishing false coins from real ones.
  • The pikemen at Bull Tower have a curious fixation on the inherent value of raw gold, since they will demand increasing amounts of their regular currency no matter how much you offer, but immediately accept when you offer gold bars, which has a somewhat negligible value (two hundred monetari). This is meant as a measure against Sequence Breaking, as gold bars aren't possible to find until you've advanced the plot some more, but it stands out even so.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • The surviving Ophidians fled through the Wall of Lights when they realized the Imbalance would destroy everything.
  • After his Heroic Sacrifice, Dupre becomes one with the Chaos Serpent.
• Asshole Victim: Batlin is killed by the Guardian, and almost all of the Jerkass NPCs are killed by the banes. Unfortunately, some of the nicer ones, like Alyssand and Gustacio, are also killed.
• Bad Boss: Erstam's assistants often find themselves going to pieces while working for him.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • Explained here, as your items are taken away by a magical storm. If you try and subvert this event by dropping all the affected items then walking to the trigger point for the storm, the results are the same. There are two copies of that starting beach. You begin on one, and are transported to the other one as the Teleport Storm happens.
  • As to why your party is back to level 3, The Black Gate notes that returning to Britannia has the effect of sapping the Avatar's experience, essentially bringing them back to the state they first entered the land in (and also returning their virginity). Possibly the same thing applies to travelling to the Serpent Isle.
• Beauty Is Best: The city of Fawn values the principle of Beauty instead of the traditional Britannian principle of Love.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: The religion of Fawn centers around this. Some of Alyssand's conversations reveal that it also once preached the converse, that goodness equaled beauty.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Gorlab Swamp.
• Chaos Is Evil: Averted in that Chaos is an actual important part of keeping the universe balanced. But this doesn't stop the followers of Order from thinking so anyway. In fact, when the Hierophant of Balance was mysteriously murdered, the followers of Order blamed it on the followers of Chaos with almost no evidence at all. They used this as a excuse to wage a genocidal war on the latter.
• Commonplace Rare: One of the common reagents you use for spellcasting is mandrake, and indeed it can be found and bought in plenty of places. Later in the game, an NPC gives you the task to obtain mandrake. For some reason, only mandrake from one specific location qualifies, all the other mandrake doesn't work; and you can't get to that spot yet (semi-justified in that he wants fresh mandrake, and the stuff you can buy is presumably dried: it doesn't make a difference as a spell reagent, though).
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the previous game, repeatedly tapping a parrot with a mallet will eventually have him tell you coordinates where a treasure was located. Doing it in this game, the parrot eventually says "That will not work this time!"
  • As well as the cause of the impending disaster. It's actually a side effect of events in the third game.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted here, as your characters will complain about the heat in Furnace and lose health if you don't cast Chill on them. But played straight in that you can walk right up to lava pools and not burn.
• Crapsack World: If the magical thunderstorms weren't bad enough, most of the people living on the Serpent Isle are a bunch of bloodthirsty, treacherous, vain assholes.
• Cypher Language: The Ophidian script is a snake-themed geometric cipher similar to the pigpen cipher. It has a 1 to 1 correspondence to the Latin alphabet. Erstam lampshades its non-intuitiveness in the manual, and the presence of the Translation spell also suggests that it is intended to be a cipher rather than an actual alphabet.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Despite being a specialist in death magic, Mortegro is one of the few half-decent people in Moonshade.
• Darker and Edgier: Even more so than even The Black Gate. The inhabitants of Serpent Isle are, for the most part, very petty, vain, and xenophobic, there are teleport storms threatening to bring about the End of the World as We Know It, and you witness several genocides over the course of the game.
• Dead All Along: The ranger you meet in the Mountains of Freedom. Gwenno is also dead, but you get to revive her.
• Debug Room: Claw Island, which you can only get to by teleporting.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Beating Luther's overconfident self into the ground, in Monitor, makes him your eternal friend. (Sadly, he won't join your party, though.)
• Depraved Bisexual: Frigidazzi comes close when she tries to cast a love spell (or rather, a love dance) on the Avatar. She DOES apologize for getting you into trouble and gives you important plot coupons later.
• Dialogue Tree
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: You can go after a guy pirating Origin video games in a sidequest.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Silver Seed Expansion Pack offers some (such as the Ring of Reagents, which allows the player to cast any spell without having to have all the necessary ingredients). You can start it not too long after you arrive in Monitor.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The settlers of Serpent Isle were former citizens of Sosaria who fled in the aftermath of the first three games, after they decided that Lord British's attempts to unite all of the individual feudal kingdoms under a single rule (HIS rule) to be questionable. So they're basically the puritans, leaving to the New World so they can practice their individual beliefs without persecution from the Monarchy. And like those original American colonies, each of the three towns have got historical links based in a place in the 'mother land', named for Britannian towns in fact, even if the citizens themselves are by this stage no longer wish to be subjects of the crown and celebrate their individuality more than the things they share in common.
• Doomed Hometown: When you finally reach Shamino's castle, you find that it's been in ruins for a very long time.
• Dr. Jerk: Delphynia, the healer in Fawn, can come across this way sometimes due to her generally bitter attitude. Justified in that she was thrust into the position of healer with no training after the death of Fawn's previous healer and resents it. Her predecessor Seth was implied to have also been an example.
• Dream Land: You'll be transported here when you enter Gorlab Swamp.
• Easter Egg: An alternate introduction can be accessed by running the command "intro hisss jive". It changes some of the opening subtitles, mostly The Guardian's.
  The Guardian: Batlin! Know that my face is most muppet like! In the event that the Avatar destroys the Black Gate, you must go to the Serpent Isle, there to learn the secret of Acne Medication! Soon I and my horde of muppets will destroy Britannia!
• Endless Corridor: The Mountains of Freedom has one. You have to search for a randomly generating invisible passageway in the right wall.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave:
  • Upon reaching Shamino's Castle, you find out that everyone there died a long time ago.
  • Upon confronting Batlin, nearly everyone on the isle dies after the Banes of Chaos are set loose.
  • When you go back to the Gwani village after the Wall of Lights is opened, you find that Hazard has killed all the Gwani except the chieftain, her mate, and their baby daughter.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even though the mages from Moonshade are largely Jerkasses, even they couldn't abide by Vasculio's cruel, unethical experiments, and sentenced him to death. It didn't work.
• False Flag Operation: The followers of Order blamed the death of the Hierophant of Balance on the followers of Chaos as an excuse to wage a war against them.
• Fetch Quest: Varo leaves, blood moss, mandrakes, etc.
  • 20 Bear Asses: You need "worm hearts" to make Soul Prisms, which are dropped by ice snakes. Thankfully, you can get them from other sources too, such as Frigidazzi's lab.
• Find the Cure:
  • After getting poisoned by Lydia, the party must make a trip to Fawn to get the cure.
  • You also have to get the blood of an Ice Dragon to cure a baby Gwani.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition: The main theme of the game. Fire represents chaos and water (as ice) represents order.
• Forced Transformation: Ale the parrot is actually a shepherd named Edrin who got hit by a Transmutation Storm
• Fur and Loathing: Hazard. Even moreso since he has no problem with wearing the pelts of fully sapient beings. He also prides himself on the fact that every animal he ever skinned, including the sapient Gwani, he skinned alive.
• Gay Option: If your Avatar is female, you can have some Ship Tease with Frigidazzi.
• Genre Shift: Despite being made on the same engine as The Black Gate, the gameplay of Serpent Isle is very different from that of its predecessors, playing more like an Eastern RPG.
• Get on the Boat: Traveling to Moonshade. To reach Erstam's lab, you have to Get On The Turtle.
• Glamour Failure: Simon is actually a Goblin in a human disguise. He is outed by his love for Fawnish Ale, which no one else in Monitor likes.
• Global Currency: Averted here, as each town (including the fortress in the Silver Seed add on) use different currency.
• Great Offscreen War: The Ophidian civil war.
• Guest-Star Party Member:
  • Selina, who joins your party when going to the mint. She suddenly (and suspiciously) leaves when your party is ambushed by a group of hired thugs.
  • Stefano, who joins you in the Mountains of Freedom. He leaves after you break out.
  • Sethys, who you have to take with you to find the Chaos Hierophant^note Assuming you're not exploiting the powder keg factory ghosts glitch. As soon as you exit the Temple of Tolerance, he dies due to being Really Seven Hundred Years Old.
  • Mortegro, who got teleported to the Temple of Tolerance thanks to a storm. As soon as you leave the temple, he gets teleported to an unknown location by a lightning bolt^note Unless you use the Serpent Bond spell to bypass it.
  • Boydon can be this if you're not careful, since he'll perma-die if killed, and will die when the Banes are freed... unless you dismiss him before that happens, and pick him up again afterwards.
  • Petra joins you so you can temporarily switch bodies with her and pass the Test of Discipline (since her body is immune to the acid); after it's done, she'll leave. However, you can pass the test just fine on your own by healing yourself repeatedly, and then pick up Petra - since you don't have to do the test again now, she won't leave.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Averted. The strongest weapons in the game are (in order) an axe, a hammer, and a staff. You do need the Black Sword for the Banes battle, but it does less damage than the one-handed sword!
• Heroic Sacrifice: Dupre sacrifices himself to restore the Chaos Serpent so that the Avatar doesn't have to.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Batlin is killed by the Guardian, whom he was trying to betray.
  • After killing the Chaos Serpent, the Order Serpent became brain dead thanks to the resulting imbalance.
• Hookers and Blow:
  • When the Avatar is in the dream realm, s/he comes across Stefano, who is sitting on a throne surrounded by naked women (some of whom are playing tag). After discussing plot points with the Avatar, Stefano tells him/her to lighten up. If you have a ranged weapon you can kill his dream form and force him to wake up; he is not amused.
  • In addition, Stefano has his own "bachelor pad" full of naked women that you can get to by normal means^note You first have to find Stefano's old house west of Moonshade. You then have to climb up on a large nearby stump by constructing a staircase out of rocks or bread. If you're using Exult, you can identify the stump by making eggs visible. When you climb on the stump, you'll be teleported to a tiny island with money. Walk straight north into the water and through an invisible wall into the mountainside to enter.. It's considered cheating, however, since some future story items can be found in there.
• Hospital Surprise: Played with here. If the Avatar is killed, s/he is teleported to Monk Isle. The monks try to teleport you back to where you were, though they do miss sometimes.
• Hub Level: The "Dark Path" that connects all the Serpent Gates.
• Hypocrite: The people of the Serpent Isle decree Lord British's Virtue system as oppressive and proudly believe they have liberated themselves from it...while all too happily enforcing their own Virtues under threat of death/exile if the people do not comply. Even more egregious, their Virtues also strongly resemble Brittania's.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The ancient Ophidian cities of Spinebreaker and Skullcrusher.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Shal the Fiend from the Silver Seed.
• Informed Flaw: Although the people of Fawn are described as vain and narcissistic by many sources, they don't come across that way from their in-game dialogue. The city's actual flaws are "benevolent" sexism and religious zealotry.
• Insistent Terminology: Mortegro is a Necromage, not a necromancer.
• An Interior Designer Is You: The Dark Path is perfect for this.
• Ironic Name:
  • While Frigidazzi's name fits with her magic specialization, in romantic matters she's anything but frigid.
  • Also the Mountains of Freedom, with the system of caves there serving as a prison.
• Jerkass Gods: The Chaos and Order serpents are more concerned about killing each other and becoming Top God than the universe they're supposed to be sustaining.
• Kangaroo Court: TWICE. One of your companions (Dupre by default) is put on trial in Fawn which is being manipulated by Kylista and Voldin, and the Avatar is put on trial in Moonshade.
• Kill the God: After Exodus kidnapped the Great Earth Serpent, the Order Serpent killed the Chaos Serpent.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: The game practically encourages it. Lampshaded in the Kangaroo Court in Fawn, when the prosecution points this out as suspicious behavior.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear: You can find some disturbing stuff if you look around Rotoluncia's "love cabin."
• Lady Land: Fawn is ostensibly this. Their laws state that the ruler of the city must be female as only women can have "True Beauty", but most of the actual power is held by the male Great Captains.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After saving a game, sometimes a party member will say, "I have a bad feeling..."
• Lethal Lava Land: Furnace and the larger Ophidian ruins.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Like teleport or transmute things. It is explained that these storms are magical, however.
• Lost World: The Serpent Isle was once part of Sosaria, but it disappeared following the events of Ultima I. It remained lost until a group of fleeing Britainians stumbled upon it during the time of Ultima IV.
• Love Potion: Ensorcio freely admits that he used his magic to make another mage's daughter fall in love with him. When his crime was discovered, he was cast out from Moonshade — yet he shows no remorse for his actions.
  Ensorcio: Filbercio hath hopped from bed to bed throughout the city, using every means of coercion possible. But let it be found that poor Ensorcio used magic to catch the favor of an Adept's daughter, and suddenly I am an unspeakable monster!
• Mad Scientist: Erstam the Mad Mage, who is obsessed with immortality. His experiments often include cutting up his own assistants and seeing if he can put them back together again.
• Meaningful Name: Many mages of Moonshade carry names that reflect their characters.
  • The necromage Mortegro takes his name from the Latin root "mort", meaning "death".
  • The ice mage Frigidazzi, has an appropriately "frigid" name.
  • Vasculio, a vampire-like mage who uses blood to sustain himself, shares a common root with "vascular" — an adjective used to describe the system that transports blood throughout the body.
  • The specialist in weather magic, Gustacio, has a name which brings to mind gusts of wind that accompany lightning storms.
  • The philandering and adulterous Torrissio is likely derived from "torrid" — an adjective often used to describe highly charged affairs.
  • Fedabiblio, the headmaster of the mage school and the man who creates a spellbook for the Avatar, takes his name from the Greek "biblion", meaning "paper", "scroll", or book".
  • Ensorcio, who used his powers to charm another mage's daughter, is based on the verb "ensorcell" — to bewitch through magical means.
• Minus World: The "land of the dead" where dead characters are sent. You can get there through the teleport cheat.
• The Mole:
  • Lord Marsten and Spektor give secrets to the Goblins so that they can kill off the Bear and Wolf clan members.
  • Simon is secretly a Goblin spy.
  • Selina is working for Batlin.
• Monster Town: The Goblin and Gwani villages
• Morton's Fork: One of the ways the developers railroad the game's story while still giving the player the illusion of choice. One example is when you have to meet a female mage named Frigidazzi in Moonshade. She offers your character casual sex (regardless of your character's gender), cheating on her husband. Regardless of whether you accept or reject her offer, her husband shows up afterwards, accuses you of seducing his wife, and imprisons you.
• Moving the Goalposts: Trying to pay the fine at Bull Tower will result in the pikemen demanding a sum higher than what you carry. If you come back with enough money to cover their demand, they just demand more, no matter what. This is because you're supposed to go on a little side quest to find gold bars, which they immediately accept. Hilariously, the gold bars aren't that valuable, and certainly don't measure up to the regular money you're likely to have available.
• Muggles: The "Mundanes" of Moonshade.
• No-Gear Level:
  • Subverted several times here. In the places where you are stripped of your inventory, you quickly come across replacements.
  • It's also possible by abusing the Serpent Bond spell to enter some of these areas without losing your gear at all.
• Optional Sexual Encounter: You have a couple here. You can have some in Monitor and with Frigidazzi in Moonshade.
• Order Versus Chaos: The quite literal war between Order and Chaos is the main theme of this game. Your task is to restore balance between these two forces.
• Organ Drops: Animals usually drop meat if they are killed - including a wolf you have to fight early in the game. The deer, for some reason, drop five deer legs.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vasculio. He's not a vampire proper, but an undead wizard who needs blood as one of the raw materials to cast the spells that keep him "alive". However, he does otherwise behave like a traditional vampire, with habits such as sleeping in a coffin, and writing bad emo poetry.
• Permadeath: Boydon, being a Frankenstein-esque reanimated flesh thing, will be irrevocably destroyed if he runs out of Hit Points.
• Pixel Hunt: Happens a lot, especially with finding the Ring of Shal amidst a pile of rubble.
• Plotline Death: Generally a lot of people, but Dupre in particular.
• Polar Penguins: Naturally, lots of penguins are found in the polar regions. Your Magebane sword even gets switched out with one of their eggs. Watch out though, they'll peck you to death!
• Power Glows: Most magic weapons glow. The Helm of Light^note And the Firedoom Staff in the Exult version glows so brightly, it lights up a room (justified, as it was explicitly designed to do just that).
• Precision-Guided Boomerang: Magic Axes and Juggernaut Hammers, as well as regular boomerangs.
• Precursors: The Ophidians — a serpent-worshipping culture that arose after the Serpent Isle was cut off from the rest of Sosaria following the events of Ultima I. Their society crumbled due to infighting during the War of Imbalance, but their ruins, their writings, and a few ghosts yet remain.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Zig Zaged. While the storyline is largely identical regardless of the Avatar's gender, there are over 200 gender-checks in the game's dialogue alone. Oftentimes these checks are just for trivial word substitutions, but some characters' lines are entirely different.
  • The Avatar's gender occasionally even leads to new dialogue choices. When Frigidazzi asks the Avatar to kiss them, male Avatars can choose between "Yes" and "No". Female Avatars get a third choice — "Of course not!"
• Ragnarök-Proofing: Both Shamino's castle and the Castle of the White Dragon are in excellent shape despite having outlasted two burgeoning civilisations.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old:
  • Columna is actually an old woman. If you take away the Comb of Beauty before she dies, she'll go back to her true age.
  • There's also the realization when you find Shamino's old castle, which predates even the Ophidians. Just how old is he, really?
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Played straight with the Wildmen, humanoid enemies with snake heads. Averted with the Great Earth Serpent, who is the Big Good of the game.
• Script Breaking: You can do this by talking to the ghosts at the burnt out factory, providing you're not using any mods that fix that glitch.
• Self-Deprecation: The mocking of Lord British, especially in books.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The resolution to finding Batlin, the whole reason you travel to the island in the first place, ends without you having to do anything. Batlin attempts to use the parts of the Chaos Serpent to become a god and overthrow the Guardian, who won't have any of that and fries him. Exactly what the Guardian's original plan on Serpent Isle is isn't stated either.
• Shop Fodder: Gold nuggets, gold bars, jewelry, and gems. You can also sell leather and metal armor in Monitor.
• Shout-Out:
  • The black "magic orbs" are Magic 8-Balls
  • The killer rabbit in The Mountains of Freedom. His crazy owner also called him "Bugs."
• Significant Anagram: Erstam and everyone related to him is named using an anagram.
  • Erstam ↔ Master
  • Vasel ↔ Slave (This is doubly meaningful, since "vassal" also describes a subordinate person.)
  • Drogeni ↔ Ignored
  • Pothos ↔ To Shop
  • Boydon ↔ No Body
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The northern region of Serpent Isle.
• Stealth Pun:
  • The Sleeping Bull Inn is built on the ruins of an old town, from which it gets its name. The map of Ultima I indicates the town was called Bulldozer.
  • Why is there a pirate playing games on a computer? Because he's a software pirate.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option:
  • When you go to get a tattoo from Lydia, she poisons you. It's pretty obvious that's what she's going to do, since she has a poison dagger in her hand. However, you need to have the tattoo in order to advance.
  • Another example is Frigidazzi. She flirts with you the second she sees you, and it's pretty obvious what she wants to do when she asks you to stop by her house after midnight. And being that she's the Mage Lord's girlfriend, you just KNOW you'll be caught. However, you still have to see her and get caught in order to continue.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As it turns out, not everyone supported Lord British renaming Sosaria after himself and declaring that everyone had to follow the new religion he'd invented.
• Sword of Plot Advancement:
  • The Black Sword is needed to leave the Mountains of Freedom^note You have to set the demon free and to capture the Banes.
  • You need all of the Serpent gear in order to get through Sunrise Isle.
• Take Your Time: Don't worry, the universe won't come apart at the seams THAT quickly...
• A Taste of Power: You start out with good gear only to have it swiped by a magic storm.
• Technically Living Zombie: Boydon was chopped into pieces then put back together, but since he was kept alive the whole time by magical means, he's not undead. He still smells like rotting flesh, however.
• Theme Naming: Each of the three city-states on Serpent Isle has its own theme.
  • Monitor uses vaguely Anglo-Saxon-flavored names, most of which contain double consonants.
  • Fawn mostly uses names ending with -n or -th, or -a for women. Alyssand, easily the kindest and most open-minded person in Fawn, is the only one who doesn't use this naming scheme.
  • Moonshade uses Italian-flavored names, with mages usually having names related to their magical specialty - for example, Gustacio the weather mage and Frigidazzi the ice mage.
• Underground Monkey: Arctic-themed versions of enemies appear in the polar regions, such as ice snakes, Ice Dragons, Ice Trolls, and timberwolves.
• The Unfought: Batlin. He's killed at the Wall of Lights in a cutscene.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The game release was rushed, so there are many bugs left in the game that can break the plot.
  • Supposedly, talking to the factory ghosts way too early could accidentally seal off certain places.
  • Similarly, touching any one of the reused black pillars throughout the game will trigger the Test of Purity - which then drops you off somewhere you're not supposed to be just yet. Not only does this break sequence, it can break the whole game.
• Unobtanium: Stoneheart. It's needed for instant-death spells.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: During the dinner with the Magelord, Rotoluncia suddenly decides she wants to interrogate you and starts flinging explosive spells. Gustacio's response is is to get mildly annoyed and cancel her magic, which just makes her complain and leave in a huff. Coupled with the fact that everyone (including yourself) just continues to sit at the table and enjoy the meal, the whole thing plays out as an embarrassing tantrum rather than magical assault. Admittedly, is is in character for Rotoluncia.
• Unwinnable by Design:
  • The number of plot-critical items in this game is simply crazy, and dropping or consuming one by mistake will leave you stuck forever. By the end of the game your characters' backpacks will be filled with layers upon layers of random items. Things are only made worse by the fact that the game world is still so huge that you're extremely lucky if you even remember where to begin looking for it.
  • The Fawnish ale you picked up by the Goblin hangout is important to the plot because it gets Simon to reveal his true identity. If you drink the ale by accident, you may have to start over or resort to cheating because you can only get the key to the Goblin village by defeating Simon. Casting Vibrate on him will not work, as he only has this key as a Goblin.
  • Inverted with the Fawn trial, which is also a surprising aversion of Holding Out for a Hero. If you don't bother to reset the Oracle before proceeding to the next day of the trial, some local resistance fighters will do everything for you.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There's plenty of opportunities in this game for Evil Avatars.
• Weird Weather: The "teleport storm" at the start that swaps a whole bunch of your most useful items with random junk and causes Iolo to vanish.
• Wham Episode:
  • The event at the Wall of Lights. Batlin dies, your friends get possessed, they run off, and kill generally a lot of people.
  • Dupre's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Who Needs Their Whole Body?: When you first meet Boydon, he's a living head on a table. This doesn't stop him from having a conversation with you.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Invoked. In Furnace, Iolo complains about the snakes and demands to know why Lord British couldn't have sent them to someplace like Daisy Isle instead.
• With This Herring: Averted; Lord British rather sensibly sent you on this mission armed to the teeth with all your loot from the previous game, including the Infinity +1 Sword. Unfortunately, you don't keep it very long.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: In this game, you directly feed the characters with a food item. How full the character is depends on what you feed them. Fruits and vegetables are hardly filling, and it won't be long until the character is hungry again. Meat and cheese, however, are very filling. Just watch out for the characters saying they're hungry when they're actually not.