Wizardry (ウィザードリィ 狂王の試練場), developed by Game Studio, released by ASCII

The Wizardry series has enjoyed great popularity in Japan, much greater popularity than it ever had in the US. The last original Wizardry game came out in 2001, and by then the series was really coasting on its name value (the last game before that had been 9 years earlier). In Japan, there were roughly 25 Wizardry games released after 2001. CRPGAddict had a good guest blog post covering the history of the series in Japan.

By the time the first Wizardry game was released for the Famicom, the first three games were available for Japanese computers. The Famicom version is largely a faithful adaptation of the computer version — I see a number of sites saying that the maps of the later floors were different but I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of this. I looked at a number of sites (both Japanese and English) and I didn’t see any difference between the maps.

One interesting feature is that you can have the text either in English or Japanese. You can even do it in parts — you can have the monster names in English and the shop names in Japanese (etc). I guess this made the game easy to localize!

The dungeons have improved graphics from the original Apple II version — the full screen maps had already been done in the DOS port but the brick walls are new, I think. There is actually an option to switch it back to the wireframe original.

The Famicom version preserves the brutal nature of the original game, in which party death is permanent — if you get a party wipe you can’t reload a save, you have to start a new party. You can find your old party’s bodies in the dungeon and bring them back for recovery, but this is a difficult process and resurrection can fail. There were a number of ways to get around this regardless of which computer system you were playing on. For the NES, you can just reset the game as long as the battle has not ended yet, and then you can select the “restart an out party” option and you’ll be back before the battle. There is also an option to save your game to the “turbo file” accessory (this can be used to transfer your party to the other Wizardry games, but also just to back up your save).

One big issue with the game is that there is a bug where AC doesn’t work at all (for you or the enemies). This has been fixed with a fan-made patch, I think.

I played the PC version of the game a long time ago, and I’m not going to play it again here. I will instead link to the very detailed playthroughs of the PC version by Data Driven Gamer, and the NES version by Zenic Reverie.

Instead, I will consider Wizardry in the context of the other games up to this point. This is the last game of 1987 and the 44th game in this “early RPGs” sequence. I think the games can be broadly divided into 4 categories and I’ll see if I can pick the best game from each one.

The first are the first person maze games like Wizardry. This also includes the two Deep Dungeon games, Megami Tensei, and I guess Phantasy Star although it’s not quite as traditional a maze-style game as the other ones.

The Deep Dungeon games are just flat out bad. Maybe if you were desperate when they first came out you could struggle through them, but you would have had to deal with the Famicom Disc loading crap on top of the low quality.

As I said when I reviewed it, I think Megami Tensei is quite impressive for the time it came out. Personally I would pick that as the best maze game for 1986-7 but I wouldn’t quibble with someone choosing Phantasy Star if it qualifies.

The second are the Dragon Quest style top down command-battle games. There aren’t too many of these either; even though DQ came out in 1986 it was a while before companies really started copying it. Other than DQ and DQ2, we have Glory of Heracles, Final Fantasy, and Momotaro Densetsu.

The third are top down action/adventure games. This includes Zelda, Hydlide, Adventure of Valkyrie, Magic Bell (Deadly Towers), Esper Dream, Marchen Veil, Seiken Psycho Caliber, Mirai Shinwa Jabas, Scherezade, Kalin no Tsurugi, Light of Indra, Minelvaton Saga, Dragon Scroll, and Outlanders. A lot of these games were shameless Zelda ripoffs or otherwise not very good. If Zelda counts as an early RPG-ish game that’s probably the top here but Esper Dream was a good candidate as well.

The last category are side scrolling action/adventure games. This includes Zelda II, Zombie Hunter, Getsu fuu maden, Chesterfield, Saint Seiya, Majo Densetsu II, Castlevania II, Romancia, Faxanadu and Debias. Some of these games didn’t have much in the way of actual RPG elements and to me none of these really stood out as worth playing (I did mostly skip Getsu fuu maden because it hardly qualified as an RPG but some commenters said it was a good game.

That leaves Cleopatra no Mahou, Zoids, Ultima Exodus, Haja no Fuin, Artelius, and Ginga no Sannin, which are hybrid games or ones that don’t neatly fit into the previous categories. None of those really grabbed me.

I was trying to think of an answer to this question: if I had to choose one of these games to play through to the end, which would I pick? Probably I would go with Momotaro Densetsu (just because it’s a traditional game series), Esper Dream, or Faxanadu (I was pretty far along anyway).

There are 20 games in 1988 so I’ll review them once I play them all. If you want to see the list it’s on the page for the early RPGs.