Help me identify this NES RPG

When I was about 6 years old I remember playing this RPG for the original NES. I’d love to play it again, but for the life of me I can’t remember the title. Here’s what I remember:

  1. It had the typical square-by-square movement, top-down view with graphics typical of that generation of RPGs.
  2. You start by walking around town. When you attack something, it went into a battle screen much like Final Fantasy 1.
  3. You could attack anyone in town if you wanted, however they sometimes represented more than one enemy. For example. you could attack the king. In the battle view, he would be one really strong king unit. If you attacked a city guard, however, in the battle view he would show up as 8-10 different guard units.
  4. It was too complicated for my 6-year old self to figure out, so it was likely very plot or text heavy.

I’m a little fuzzy on the rest of it. Does anyone know what game this was?

Could be the first Ultima game for the NES.

This was my guess. It would have been Ultima III Exodus. There was also an Ultima IV for the NES.

Dragon Warrior was another big RPG for the NES, but I don’t remember whether you had the ability to attack friendlies in it.

It is totally Ultima 3: Exodus. Thanks!!
As an added bonus, I don’t think I ever played the 4th one either, so I’ve now got two games to go through.

Definitely Ultima Exodus. Those games were brutal. I never owned Ultima 5 for the NES, but 3 & 4 I each put a solid year of gameplay into (meaning I played probably 365 total hours). Ultima 3 especially doesn’t give you any breaks. The worst thing you can do in that game (same with 4) is level up, since which enemies you encounter depends on your level, and if you get up to like level 10, every random encounter will be a boss battle - I believe the pirates show up when you get one character to level 4, and after that you can never talk to the king again. Also don’t forget to buy lots of food. The last thing you want to do is be 10 paces away from the food store when your last character starves to death.

Funny but tragic story about Ultima 4 - after putting at least 50 hours into the game, I was finally up to the final dungeon, and I was just about to walk into the final chamber, when the power goes out. When it returns, my game is erased. I immediately traded the game away to a friend and never wanted to look at it again. Sometime in college, I revisited it, gave it ANOTHER 50 hours or so, and finally did finish it. After that, I did what to this date is the only technical study I’ve ever done of a video game. I figured out a bunch of ways to manipulate the game into giving you all the avatar points you need…I was intending to post the guide onto GameFAQS, but never did quite get it finished up. You can become an avatar in that game simply by talking to the right people over and over and giving the correct answer. I recall that the treemonster in the castle dungeon was one of them.

In my opinion as a casual gamer, Ultima 4 was the best 2D top-down-view RPG (I’m sure there must be some name for it) I’ve ever played. I liked it better than any of the early Final Fantasies, much more than Dragon Warrior, and about as much as Chrono Trigger. Ultima 3 was VERY frustrating, especially those goddamned dungeons/caves/whatever. I remember graphing all the caves and their eight levels (I think) by hand with graph paper. Really, really difficult and time-consuming game, and it took me a good 60-80 hours to finish it. (Well, “difficult” in the sense that it didn’t give you any second chances and if you screwed up, you screwed up. I was about 13 when I played it, but I do remember calling the Ultima helpline to figure out something about the moongates.)

I never got into Ultima V, because I didn’t like the interface. I was so used to the Ultima 3/4/Dragon Warrior/Final Fantasy gameplay, that Ultima V threw me off.

It was the ability to mess with NPCs. I think that was one of the first games to feature that.

Ultima 3 isn’t really that great. Brilliant for its day but its day was 1983. Ultima 4 is when the series really starts taking off and I think the series hits a peak with the development of a much more detailed world in Ultima 6. Seven is the usual fan favorite and it does have one of the coolest game villain ever (he taunts you constantly through the game) and then a sharp decline with 8 lead to the disaster spoken of in hushed whispers that is U9.

The all NPC’s can die thing was a hold over from the previous Ultimas where you could attack everyone. I regularly cleaned out castles and towns. Lord British is not kill able unless you start a fight with his guards, lure him outside of his throne room, then take a pirate ship found inside the castle map and blow him up with the cannons (this was true in the C64 and PC versions; not sure if its there in the NES one). In U4-6 he’s unkillable and then in 7 they had a way to kill him once again.

I’m pretty sure you could kill him in 6. IIRC, use a glass sword on him while he’s sleeping.

In U5, of course, he wasn’t around to be killed because he was banished to the underworld.

Spoilers tags are “just in case”. It’s nothing plot critical in the u6 spoiler, and in the u5 spoiler is nothing you wouldn’t learn in the intro to the game.