So, I grew up in a heavy RPG family. My dad ran D&D campaigns for us as kids (until an incident soured the game forever for us) and my brother and him would play games like Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
For those of you not in the know, Wizardry started off as a simplistic RPG for (I think) the Apple II computers, trying to capture the experience of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. You get to create the characters, roll for stats, and buy weapons that don’t explicitly tell you what good or bad they do. The armor class runs on the negative system, set up in the first renditions of D&D: The lower your AC, the better. This seems counter intuitive to most RPGs in the sense that Higher usually = Better. It was a first person dungeon crawler, with some tongue-in-cheek humor and interesting incidents and traps. (I.E. Your party has been teleported to the 13th floor of a rock.)
The thing that sets apart the game from others in the genre is that your characters can die. Cheaply and permanantly. Take the samurai enemies you fight. They have an attack that can instantly behead your characters. The trap I mentioned above is another example. (Even worse because you usually find that one on the lower levels of the dungeon, before you fight the end boss) You can ressurect your deceased characters by having a Cleric in your party that has the right spell, but he can botch it. There is a temple in the game that will revive your characters for a high fee. But the catch is, is that you have to have them in your party. Which is the biggest catch in the game: if your entire party dies in the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, then that’s where they stay. Another party can find them, if you remember where you died, and carry them back to the village, provided you have room in your roster.
Another fun thing, all the spells are in latin. Or at least not clearly labled like Heal or Cura. You’ve got spells like Di, Dial, Dialma (healing spells). Badi, Badial, Badialma (attack spells) and Dialko (which cures paralysis) and Latumapic (which heals poison).
Flash back to today. Feeling a little nostalgic, I started getting back into Wizardry and I tracked down the Wizardry for the SNES, called Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom. The gameplay is fundamentally the same. The graphics are much better than the NES version, but there isn’t too much of a difference because battles usually follow the Dragon Warrior style, where you never actually see your characters.
I love the game so dearly, but there’s a fundamental problem with it: no one else has played it, apparently. The game is a huge maze, including quests and countless NPCs you’ll find in the dungeon itself. Clearly, this would be the poster child for why Walkthroughs and FAQs and Map Sites exsist. But since most of those are fan-contributed and moderated, there exsists surprisingly little on the game. No real Cheat codes, only three Game Genie Codes (all of which could reverse the polarity of your cartridge), and only one walkthrough. The contents of that walkthrough promise everything you’d want, but never deliver. Entire sections are missing (like item lists and Game Genie Codes) and the entire walkthrough consists of three “quests” and the end-game scenario, which assumes you’ve already collected the 8 necessary pieces that trigger the end-game scenario. Even maps are scarce. I’ve only found one collection of maps on the internet, and that is for the PC version. And there are some acute differences between the SNES maps and the PC maps, as I have found out the hard way.
The game itself lends itself to certain frustrations. Like when my party of around level 10 (which is about the range of 30 or 40 in most other games) died, it required me to create a “search party”… which I had to level up to around 10 again in order to collect my fallen first party. By the time I collected them, the search party was so powerful, there wasn’t any reason for me to use the original party.
But the game itself is really fun. Character creation is simultaneously the most exciting and boring process in the game. You have a full range of characters you can choose from, Human, Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit, and Gnome. In order to create a class for your character, they need some basic stats (and the right alignment). You’ll find yourself rolling and rerolling (which involves creating a brand new character each time) to get a good roll. The average is about 10 extra points to add, which is enough to create a simple class like a fighter, or a theif, or cleric or mage. But the rolls can get as high as 60 points, which will allow you to max out the basic starting stats for your character and allow for more advanced classes like the Cleric-similar “Lord” class, the Red Mage-Similar “Samurai” class, the Warlock-Similar "Wizard class (who can identify items), and the Evil and stealthy “Ninja” class.
(The best roll I’ve ever gotten was a 48, in which I could make my Hobbit a Lord. I named him Killbo.)
Has anyone else played this game, and if so, does anyone have any help they could offer me? My party is strong enough to wander the first and second floors without much hassle, but 3rd floor can (and has) killed party members before, and beyond that just gets scary.