I wrote a Wizardry LP years ago (all posted now)

[janitor]

Many years ago, when I was starting to learn Japanese, I played through this DS Wizardry game: Wizardry: Seimei Inochi no Kusabi. or Wizardry: Wedge of Life.

This was part of the Wizardry Renaissance project, which was an attempt to reboot and modernize the franchise to make it successful again.

If there’s a sinking feeling in your gut about what that means, well! You have good senses!

Also the company that did it no longer seems to exist. I can’t even find the webpage for the game anymore. It’s gone. That’s kind of a shame since it had higher res versions of the character portraits and I kind of dug the samurai lady’s art.

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I am prefixing this by saying that I did this many years ago, back in 2011. I was kind of a different person then. Still figured this would be of interest to some people here who want to hear about obscure games and dungeon crawlers.

There are… I think twelve parts? And will cover the first ‘chapter’ of the game, and there isn’t any more and I’m not going back to do more.

Maybe this will motivate me to finish up Oreshika.

---

Since I started studying Japanese in earnest last year, I’ve been trying to play just about anything that’s not in English. I’m also a sucker for dungeon crawlers of any type, whether they’re Wizardry, Might and Magic, Etrian Odyssey, or whatever. So, when I saw that there were DS Wizardry games available only in Japanese, I thought I’d give them a try. I mean, with Etrian Odyssey resurrecting the genre a few years back, I figured that they couldn’t be too bad, right?

This was my first mistake.

I ended up playing “Wizardry ~生命の楔~”, or “Wizardry: Seimei Inochi no Kusabi”, or “Wizardry: Wedge of Life.” Pick a name, I don’t care. I’d like to note that every single time I’ve seen the game’s name romanized, there’s always been a different choice of spellings to use. I think I have the correct one. I chose “Wedge” because I think it’s funny sounding, not because I think it’s accurate.

As soon as I start a new game I find myself in a library, and greeted by a “Mysterious Girl.” As far as I know, she is never given a name. She’s just Mysterious Girl forever. After a bit of the usual introductory nonsense, she walks off for a bit, giving me a prime opportunity steal some books.

I can optionally take a look at an old book that’s just lying around! Clearly this is a game with many interesting branching storylines. Because I’m a good little murderous adventurer with no curiosity, I leave it alone.

And it fucking jumps into my hand of its own accord. As if giving up, I apparently start reading it.

This is the point where you know this game is going to be made of some solid gold Quality[tm].

She comes back and starts babbling on about how it’s a book about a Thief who became a glorious adventurer and blah blah blah who cares. There’s even an option to name him but I’ll leave that alone.

After all, anyone who’s played a Wizardry game before knows that there are no story characters, it’s always just a group of dudes you make at the Adventurer’s Guild to go get killed in hilarious, painful ways. Sometimes they die permanently, causing you to scream and hope you didn’t screw up your savegame in the process! So clearly this Thief is not a playable character. Right?

Meet Kai, the main character of the game. No, you can’t remove him from the party.

Goddammit.

Anyway apparently he’s leaving his orphanage and wants to go into the dungeon to avenge his father and stuff. He doesn’t really speak much, he’s got Japanese Tough Kid Syndrome, where he only speaks in ellipses and all the girls fall over themselves for him anyway.

Kai’s mother thinks he’s kind of a dumbass for this. She’s never really relevant. Googling her name tells me that she’s named after a milk-based soft drink sold in Korea and Japan. The More You Know!

Welcome to town! The music here is insufferable harpsichords. Because I don’t care about anything like having party members or anyone other than having Thief-kun run to his death, I just go straight to the dungeon without a thought. Also, everyplace else is closed, because we have to stick to the script.

This priestly jerk is sitting in the way, not letting anyone enter, especially not these two fine young adventurers.

Meet Kish the Predictably Brash Human Warrior and Alisha the Totally Worrydere Elven Priest. You’d never guess that they join up with Kai! Note how amazingly moe she looks. I’d like to point out that we’re still going for D&D style Priests in this game, so she gets decked out in medium armor and blunt weapons, making her a prime contender for bashing skulls in from the front line.

Since we need permission to go into the dungeon, we take a quick jaunt to the church and meet a priest who is a friend of Kai, who conveniently gives us what we need to move on.

Right. Whatever. We’ll be seeing more of that guy later.

He gave us the golden feather we need to pass into the dungeon, so that’s… helpful, I suppose.

When we get back to the dungeon, there’s three women lined up trying to get in past Priest Uglyface here. Of course, Kish totally sees his chance and tells him they’re with him.

Even though, you know, we’re the ones with the Golden Feather of Passage. Or whatever it is.

He does this a lot.

Let’s see our full party here.

So now we have Satsuki the Totally Awesome Samurai, Cornet the HalflingPorkul Ranger, and Sophie the Very Chesty Mage.

Sophie’s the only actually reasonably smart one, as you’ll discover.

And we’re finally in a dungeon! And can do stuff! It only took half an hour of story! This is clearly the most gameplay-focused Wizardry game yet.

NEXT TIME: we explore the extremely dangerous tutorial floor.

[thecatamites]

i remember reading a letsplay of wizardry iv and it seemed like one of the most genuinely strange and malign games ever constructed, like, the opening puzzle alone where you had to pick the right monster friend and get into fights until it randomly used the magic spell which let you find a secret door, the secret endings where i think you had to have an extracurricular and extremely idiosyncratic knowledge of tarot card meanings and references in order to answer a series of riddles at a door that i can’t believe anyone ever found in the first place. that and the first king’s quest game really drove home to me that like videogame design was not some initially sensible system that became gradually more convoluted with increasing age + cultural insularity so much as wholly private and inscrutable systems of logic which had to be painstakingly translated into comprehensible structures via a painful and decades-long series of revisionist critical skirmishes (game design was invented in 2004 as a way to scare film students) and that the latter project was never really all that successful or complete still remaining kind of just this wishful phantasm that floats over these products without having all that much power to change them. anyway excited to read about the anime one as well

[janitor]

Wizardry 4 rules because it’s the asshole romhack of dungeon crawlers years before that was a real thing.

It’s borderline unplayable and I would never recommend it to anyone, if just because of how absolutely horrible the Cosmic Cube is, but it is extremely cool thematically.

The PSX version is probably the best version of Wiz4, if you have to pick one. There’s a ‘rebalanced’ mode (read: less actively hateful) alongside the original/classic version balance.

[LaurelSoup]

I was really hoping to find a concept album in here.

[creep]

@janitor

Also the company that did it no longer seems to exist. I can’t even find the webpage for the game anymore. It’s gone. That’s kind of a shame since it had higher res versions of the character portraits and I kind of dug the samurai lady’s art.

oh man, did I just totally miss Genterprise going under? They published some interesting stuff, and I guess made some too via an internal development team? This looks like something to sink some time into researching…

oh, right, that Wizardry homepage. You probably saw that the Internet Archive didn’t catch whatever brilliant SWF they had talking about the game, but it looks like it somehow caught some image resources that were stored outside the SWF??
Wayback Machine*
(EDIT: the archive is acting weird so I take absolutely no responsibility if this doesn’t work)

kind of want to pick your mind more on j-wizardry, but I’m actually distracted by Dungeon Master right now. I have limited exposure to the series but it only just recently occurred to me how distinctive the gameplay design was at the time and now I have to grok this tiny cult franchise and the extremely scattered evolutionary tree that followed.

I read that the JP-only Dungeon Master Nexus (SAT) has a bunch of bugs, including one that straight up crashes the game, and that actually put a bittersweet smile on my face. Imagine being a Japanese fan of dungeon crawlers who comes across this remarkable deviation and falls in love, then seeing the series end like that while WIzardry gets a dozen spin-offs.

[janitor]

Oh hey awesome.

i love her

And yeah, I want to play/translate more JP Wizardry if I can.

This was one of the first games I played through while learning JP so I went through it fairly slowly. The plodding pace of a dungeon crawler seemed perfect for reading the story but I really didn’t know what I was in for.

The depths to the “what, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT” well went pretty far down.

[CourierRice]

this narration style really takes me back to that somethingawful style of let’s plays

[janitor]

Again, I wrote this like six years ago originally. Doing some editing to clean it up though, which is more than I did the first time around. Going to try to get through upping one of these a day until I’m out again.

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Last time, we assembled our Dungeons and Dragons party and spent way too long bumbling around instead of hunting down monsters for their delicious loot. This time, we’ve finished the laborious process of entering the dungeon, so finally some real gameplay can start!

Or so you’d think.

“Hm… There are monsters.”

Satsuki takes this samurai thing way too seriously and makes sure to use lots of ~donos and ~degozarus whenever possible, even when noticing that there’s a pair of angry orcs heading this way.

That’s two orcs, believe it or not! Enemies can come in stacks of up to 9 at a time, in classic Wizardry style. For now, these guys are complete chumps so two attacks ends the fight.

Also reappearing from previous titles are dark areas. When you enter a dark area, you can’t see anything, though you can still check your automap for your position so it’s not really that important. Later, we find out that this game has managed to find a way to make these areas completely pointless, but for now entering one just causes a cutscene. The same one. Every time.

“Ah! It’s too dark to see anything!”

After being mystified at the inability to see anything, something that they clearly have absolutely no way to rectify given their adventuring prowess, the party turns around and heads back to explore the dungeon in some other direction.

Suddenly, a trap!

Fearsome, isn’t it? You might notice that it phases in and out in real time. This is actually a gameplay element! If you wait for the trap to stop, well, being a trap for a second you can just walk on through safely as if it wasn’t even there.

Since this is the beginning of the game, you might get the impression that they will do some interesting, real-time things on the map that will force you to hectically run through traps.

…Yeah… it would’ve been nice if they’d done that…

In the interests of science, I’m just going to walk headfirst into the flames several times and see what happens.

“Kai has died.”

Whoopsie!

Mechanically, death in this game is pretty much dead dead. The only ways to get back up are at the temple or with the “Raise Dead” spell, both of which have a percentage chance of failing and turning him to ash.

Unfazed by the immolation of their thief, the party moves onwards through far too many doors in order to find a puzzle!

There’s four doors, each of them has a reading on it. Three are telling the truth, one is lying. The answer is trivially easy to figure out, but the party is of course completely confused.

“Ugh. I’m not good at stuff like this.”

Wait, what? You’re the party’s ranger. Aren’t you supposed to be the resourceful survivalist one? You can even do alchemy, and you can’t even solve a really simple logic puzzle? That’s not much of a confidence booster. At least you’d expect Kish to be pretty bad at anything that isn’t cutting things in half or heavy lifting.

Also note that Kai is, in fact, still dead, but is volunteered to solve it. I like to think Sophie’s just carting him around like it’s Weekend at Bernie’s or something, since he just answers everything with a slightly contemptuous “…” anyway.

After taking the correct door and getting a bronze key, I decide to take the wrong door and see what happens, in the name of science!

“…Oh well. Let’s go back and think it through once more.”

And it’s a teleporter back to town! This is actually pretty helpful since it’s faster to come back from town. Kai apparently missed that part where the puzzle was solved. Or that he’s dead right now.

What was behind the bronze key locked door? Why, another pair of orcs!

Killing them drops a treasure chest, at which point the party helpfully asks the thief to open it for them.

“Woohoo, Kai. It’s your turn!”

BUT HE’S DEAD

Like all Wizardry games, treasure chests are a minigame where you have to disarm the trap or suffer horrible doom.

First you need to investigate it to figure out the trap, and then it has to be disarmed, which has to be done by a Thief or a Ranger.

So, obviously, Cornet has to do it.

And she fails! Predictably.

This being Baby’s First Wizardry game, this doesn’t actually matter 95% of the time and you can just keep trying until it works. On the second attempt it works and we get an unidentified sword out of it.

There’s a plate on the wall up ahead, next to a door, that says you need to knock three times to enter. How do you knock? Well, whatever you’re thinking, it’s wrong. See, this is a DS game, so you have to look at the door and tap the screen three times. This is probably the least offensive of the touch screen gimmicks.

Inside is an old guy who can give us the thing we need to get the authority to go further on in the dungeon. Really, that was our goal all this time. Of course, he needs to test us first, and as with all old guys in jrpgs, he’s secretly a badass.

Kish is, as always, useless and goes down in a single hit.

Fortunately, a new challenger appears!

Holy shit it’s like Dragon Ball up in here. This is actually how it looks in game.

He loses anyway, of course, but the old guy is so impressed at how well a dead thief can fight that he gives us what we want and sends us on our way.

“The party has gained 2000 EXP!”
It’s almost like we’re real adventurers! By the way, if you haven’t noticed, there have been only two real battles up to this point, and they were both scripted events with enemies too weak to actually pose a threat. We automatically go to the inn and rest(for free!), ending the first excursion into the dungeon.
Also Kai’s still dead.

Our friendly innkeep. I don’t even remember her name.

The map so far. It is completely linear.

NEXT TIME: I finally gain full control of the party so I’m going to kick two of these bozos out. Guess which ones!

[janitor]

@CourierRice

this narration style really takes me back to that somethingawful style of let’s plays

tbh i couldn’t take this game seriously at all so that sounds very fitting to the way they did things

this was not an ‘i respect this game and want to show it off’ kind of thing, this was an ‘oh god, why would you do this’ reaction

[janitor]

and now here’s where i discovered that i had the game name’s wrong (a mistake i made again here)

i’ve been editing a lot of the language out of these because apparently i was much, much more of a jerk about six years ago. glad to know i’ve grown as a person since, to be honest.

---

Sometime since yesterday, I found out that there’s actually a pretty hilarious trailer for this game! Most notably, I found out that I had the wrong reading, and it is actually Inochi no Kusabi, which means basically the same thing but just reads differently because of course it does. On the bright side, I was still more correct than GameFAQs is.

Since last time, the party’s dispersed throughout the town and we have to go hoof it about to hunt them all down, otherwise we’re not able to actually do anything. First stop: shopping!

Treasure, treasure, where are you~♪
Aren’t there any good deals~♪

Cornet is entirely too happy.

Now this is a merchant! Look at that big fat happy guy looking to take every last GP you’ve got. And we are going to make him so filthy rich throughout this game.

Satsuki is looking for a very specific lost katana, which unsurprisingly isn’t so easily bought off the shelf at McMordamus’s. Dejected, she goes and leaves for the bar.

‘Torch obtained.’

Seeing Kai come in, he forcibly gives us a torch. This will become important pretty soon, so keep it in mind.

At the temple, we find Alisha and Kish doing nothing of note. Realizing that Kai’s still the walking dead, it’s decided that they need to get him back up and properly human again.

Some say life is worth a lot. Coming back from the dead is apparently worth a measly 10GP. Please note that is several times less than the price of the most basic sword.

Before he can scrape off the burn marks, the game forces you to save first. Why? Because there’s a percentage chance of this failing. If you fail to resurrect a dead character by any mean, they turn to ash. Once that happens, you can only try to bring them back at the temple, for a hell of a lot more than 10 GP, and that also has a chance of failing. If that fails, they’re dead dead dead. Gone for good. Character is completely wiped.

They stress this a lot in the game’s story, over and over. You can die! For good! There’s no going back! You are forced to save! Be afraid! Which would be pretty terrifying, if not for the fact that STORY CHARACTERS CANNOT PERMANENTLY DIE. They are required to show up for cutscenes, even if dead or ashed. They also come up with a nonsense story reason for why this is, later on.

The second thing that keeps it at bay is that the raise dead spell can be done in dungeons, and that does not require a save before trying it, meaning once you get it you can just keep trying and resetting until they’re among the living again as long as you have at least one party member that can attempt.

Admittedly, the basic raise dead spell is… not… great… at this…

With that out of the way, everybody goes to the bar, where there’s a small cutscene where Sophie and party decide that Kai is the leader and gets to call the shots. Why? I have no clue. He’s not much of a leader, he just kinda “…”'s at everyone while they’re all “The thief is the backbone of the party!” They literally say that. Think about that for a bit.

Now that we are in full control of the party, we can finally create proper new original characters Wizardry style, so let’s get to it.

There’s five races to choose from: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Furry Gnomes, and Elementary Schoolers. Those are the only portraits available for use. There are no alternate colors available.

My favorite part is that they all come pre-equipped with weapons, in case you weren’t sure what class to make them.

After picking a race you have to roll for how many bonus points you get, which can be anywhere between 4 and something mid-30s. Since it takes almost no time to reroll bonus points if you get a crappy one, there’s no sense in not just sitting there running the slot machine for a few minutes until you get a ton of points. Once you’ve got that, you can choose your class, which each require a minimum number of bonus points.

We want a Samurai and a Bishop. Bishop’s an easy choice, as Elves are the only class that get a bonus to magic damage, and have a high base agility too. Samurai, on the other hand, work best with Dwarves and Humans. Since I prefer the Human portraits, we go that way.

Meet Moof the sword-swinging Human Samurai(that is totally a sword okay), and AMU the Elven Bishop. Note how their HP is low enough that they are effectively made of wet paper at this time.

If you’re familiar with Wizardry, you may have noticed by now that there is no Alignment stat. That’s because this game doesn’t have one. This game is so faithful to the series, isn’t it?

We get rid of Kish, because he’s a useless musclehead, and Cornet, because she isn’t actually good at anything. But don’t worry, we haven’t seen the last of either of them! I also put a barehanded Alisha in front so we can have some hype Kobold-punching Priestly action.

There’s a good reason to keep some of the stock characters, because they get forced into your party in certain events. Particularly Alisha.

Now that we have a torch, we can go into the dark areas that were stopping our progress earlier. What does the torch do?

It’s still pitch black when you go into the areas, but if you press and hold on the touchscreen, a flashlight pops up and illuminates the area you’re holding. That’s it. The torch never runs out. You can even still move around while doing this, so the entire act of having dark areas is pointless. Especially since you can still navigate entirely by the automap on the top screen without difficulty.

Oh no, the touchscreen gimmicks don’t stop here, don’t worry.

Since the tutorial is over, random battles will show up now, so let’s see what horrible monstrosities we get to loot!

Some truly fearsome enemies. The undead in the upper right are actually the toughest ones, because they take more than one hit to kill. Also note the red blobs in the bottom images: Those are unknown enemies. Without certain skills enemies can sometimes come unidentified in battle, and you just get a generic “This is a blob” or “This is a human” type graphic. This is not really a problem since they’re always really easy to correlate and you generally know all the spawn types after about five minutes.

None of them are actually difficult so we just autobattle our way through the rest of the first floor, getting our Kung Fu Priestess on.

After leveling up in town, the newbies are finally no longer made of paper! Note that I moved Alisha all the way to the back, rather than Sophie’s position which would make more sense normally. There is actually a good reason for this that I’ll get to eventually.

It’s worth nothing that the floor’s layout is a remixed version of Wizardry 1’s first floor:

(src)

They’re clearly trying to homage the original, for better or worse. Where’s Murphy’s Ghost though?

NEXT TIME: The most important part of the dungeon: The Loot System[tm]

[botagel]

I hope the loot system is as good as the loot system in other modern Japanese Wizardry-likes such as the Experience, Inc. games!!!

[VastleCania]

i thought the blobs were carmen sandiego style hats at first and thought to myself

wizardry is pretty alright huh?

[janitor]

@botagel

I hope the loot system is as good as the loot system in other modern Japanese Wizardry-likes such as the Experience, Inc. games!!!

You are going to be in for a treat!!!

---

By popular demand, we head back into the dungeon, where we’re given a Mission from God!

“Defeat all enemies within 3 turns.”

Or Mission from Awful Game Mechanics I guess.

The only battles that can drop items are ones that happen when you go through a door. Which also means that random field enemies will never drop anything ever. Door fights are usually scripted affairs and tend to happen at predictable spots, which means one way of farming is to go back to town, come back, and re-open the same doors you did before. So far, this is very Classic Wizardry style, roughly the same as it was for the original games, but, well.

So, like, on a fight where items can drop, when a character has the Thief class’s Treasure Hunter skill enabled, there is a random chance every turn that you will gain a Mission. Since it’s possible to gain one each turn, you can kill all but one enemy and then sit around defending until one pops up. Best game design. Note that you can wait forever on a random field battle and never get a mission ever, because there is no loot drop. Also best game design.

Completing the given mission successfully upgrades the quality of the loot box you get, and they’re your main goal for doing encounters usually, so you should be going out of your way to do them whenever possible.

See, look at that fancy rusted metallic chest. That’s a big money pull.

Missions tend to come in forms like “defeat all enemies within x turns,” “do not heal,” “do not use fire based attacks,” etc. Some of them are just obnoxious, like “do not use the attack command” or “do not defend”, causing autobattle to fail. And some are just downright impossible, forcing you to give up or mulligan.

And, yes, you can mulligan the missions. A funny thing you can do is that if you get a mission that turns out to be a pain or accidentally fail it, you can run away from the fight and enter the door again to get another battle and also get a different mission most likely.

We’re in full Videogame Abstractions Land here. None of this makes the slightest sense if you stop to think about it. Fortunately, we stopped thinking about anything once we started playing this game.

The first rank Treasure Hunter skill only allows up to one active mission at a time, later on you can get up to three at once, and they’re usually more annoying ones to actually do.

Some new enemies, one of which is already a recolor of an enemy from earlier! And we haven’t even left the first floor yet!

We find the stairs down and open a shortcut back to the main maze. This is a good time to head back to town and check out our loot.

When you find items in a dungeon, they always come unidentified. There’s two ways to identify them: The Bishop’s identification skill or at the shop. Normally in Wizardry games the shop cost is half the value of the item, which is also the sale cost, which means having a Bishop is absolutely necessary if you want to turn a profit. Not in this game, though!

McMordamus only charges slightly more than resurrecting the dead to find out what items actually are.

Remember, your life is worth less than the identity of some random rusty sword you picked up off the ground.

“The robe was a robe.”
“The Katana(kanji) was a Katana(kana).”

Not that this stops him from ripping you off anyway. I love this guy.

You usually come back from dungeon excursions hauling about 30 chunks of loot. The catch? There is absolutely no way to identify in bulk, AND there is a small forced delay every time you identify an item in the store. So you can expect to spend upwards of two minutes sitting there mashing on the button to find out what everything is, which you need to do so you can sell them.

If you’re wondering if the Bishop’s version is faster, I want you to know that it’s actually considerably slower because you have to manually activate the skill every time.

Mordy will buy everything we have and put it on sale himself.

Here’s the fun part: There is absolutely no reason to buy weapons and armor from him past the first hour of this game. None. Zero. Why? Because his stock beyond the most basic equipment is only things you have already sold him! Not only that, they are only there in the amount that you’ve sold him, so you can’t even use it to duplicate Swords of Awesomeness. And he’s selling them for twice the price he bought them from you for, so unless you made a big mistake you don’t want to buy it back.

So what do we actually buy from him? Skills and spells!

Mordamus’s book shop is very well stocked.

In this game you can buy skills, which are class-specific abilities. They come in two categories: Passive skills that work all the time, or active skills that can be used in battle or at the menu. Most skills can be used by up to 3 different classes, though not at the same levels. For example, a skill that a warrior learns at level 3 can’t be used by a samurai until level 7. Things like that. Spells work the same way.

Aside from the aforementioned Treasure Hunter skill, the most important ones to get are the samurai skills: They don’t just have a high-power single target damage skill, they have a passive that has a random chance of completely negating an opponent’s attack and counterattacking. This is the main reason why there are two samurai in the party: They actually tank better than everyone else, in addition to doing the most damage and having mage spells. They are the best class in the game. I’d have three but only if I could kick Kai out of the party.

Kish was given the boot because the Fighter class primarily gets skills that do stuns, rather than damage, and passives that give bonus damage against specific classes/types of enemies. Given that stuns don’t seem to work reliably enough on anything you might actually want to stun, and that you’re better off just killing something flat out when you have the opportunity to use a skill, there is absolutely no reason to have a Fighter over a Samurai ever.

All decked out with slightly better gear, we head down to floor 2 to continue our looting. I mean exploring.

But first! A TRAP

‘A boulder drops from the ceiling, rolling towards Kai and friends amazingly quickly!’

A boulder falls from the ceiling! And it just stays put while this dialogue box telling you about the rock falling from the ceiling is open, making me wonder what the point is.

As soon as you close it, it starts rolling. Rather than having to manually get out of the way, the game helpfully takes control of the party and moves you so that you can watch it sail past harmlessly.

Bye.

This happens once every time you go through the dungeon, though you have to ‘dodge’ manually afterwards.

And no, I don’t know how the giant boulder is being reloaded each time.

I don’t think it even does much damage if it hits your party.

“Ah! That surprised me!”

Sure did, Cornet.

…

Wait a minute.

What the heck is she doing here? I kicked her out of the party! She should be back in town getting drunk!

Similar to how the game doesn’t care if party members are alive, it doesn’t even care if they’re in the party or not to put them in cutscenes.

No, you can’t switch them into the active group even though they’re clearly stalking you. That might make them moderately useful.

Some new enemies. Fearsome.

The theme of this floor is ‘all kinds of new traps.’ The first three, which are physical, lightning, and poison respectively, are exactly like the fire traps from earlier: Just wait until they pass and walk through safely. Why did they even bother with this? What is the point?

“Why?” is a question I ask about this game’s decisions a lot.

NEXT TIME: But what’s the fourth?

(no, i really couldn’t resist adding some jabs at loot boxes in the editing of this piece)

[botagel]

OK, yeah, this is slightly better(?) than the loot system in, say, Demon Gaze. In that game, you sometimes get drops which you can use to summon fights with enemies who will drop actually GOOD treasure at specific locations. The flow is, basically, save your game, then use the relevant item(s) to control the type of drops you want to get, then repeat the fight over and over until you get something actually useful for your party. It’s not at all tedious, and as in this game, the shop inventory is not particularly useful after the very start of the game, as all the drops you get are significantly better.

[janitor]

i wanna point out that there’s useful bonuses for collecting as many varied item types as possible

and there’s four tiers of chests, each with different drop tables in each region, each with unique drops

zzzzzz

[janitor]

And here is part 5, in which I groaned “seriously?” at a very basic UI thing they should have fixed in testing:

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Continuing from the last part, we’re digging around in the second floor admiring all of the completely useless new traps. Seriously, who makes traps you can visibly see ahead of time and can just walk through on regular intervals? They really don’t make dungeons like they used to.

Currently, a wall stands in our way. It’s slightly damaged! WHAT COULD IT MEAN?

‘That wall just now seemed breakable. If there’s a little impact, just maybe…’

Apparently, Satsuki thinks that means we should try to smash it up for a bit de gozaru.

So how do you do that? Mashing buttons doesn’t do anything!

If you remember the earlier part with the old man, there was a gimmick where we needed to knock three times on the door by tapping on the stylus. Does that work here too?

Unfortunately, yes. Yes it does. It’s even three taps.

Also note how clean the floor is afterwards.

‘That door moved on its own!’

Up ahead we find a switch on the floor! If we step on it, that door off in the distance slowly opens for a while.

Naturally, Stalker Cornet is shocked that this can happen. You’ll notice this is a theme: Any time something new happens, she comes along and acts shocked. I want to remind you that she was supposed to be the party’s Ranger, a resourceful survivalist with alchemical knowledge.

Don’t worry, everything will make sense when we meet the actual Alchemist character.

We finish clearing out the second floor, at least as much as we’re able to for right now, so it’s time to head on back to lighten our load.

Unlike the first floor, this bears basically no resemblance to the original game’s second floor.

This is a good time to note that Mordy sells rings for an obnoxiously high price. They each raise one statistic, and you can equip up two rings.

That’s all fine and dandy, but how much does each ring boost a stat by?

One whole point.

And unlike classic Wizardry, this isn’t based on a system were 18 points is maximum, your stats just grow forever.

He never really runs out of ways to rip you off.

I do plan on buying speed rings for everyone, because it’s always better to have a higher chance to go first.

After that it’s time to dive on into the third floor, where we will find oh god no not these things noooo

Welcome to the most annoying battle in the entire game.

If you’ve ever played any Wizardry game before, you’ll recognize the Creeping Coins, as they’re an early game staple ever since the first one. You might also note that there’s a stack of nine of them! They basically never come in groups less than 7 in size. Sure, this means they’re fodder for full-group attacks, but there’s another reason you should try to kill them as soon as you possibly can.

You see, they each have a full-party attack, that will do one(1) point of damage to each character. Because of the way the messages work, you will get one message to indicate that they’re attacking, and then one more message for each party member it hits. Plus yet another message if they miss! So you can get anywhere from 7 to 13 messages every time a full-party attack happens. And each message has a short, unskippable delay on it, no matter how fast you mash.

Did I mention there’s nine of them? So if they all attack, there will be anywhere from 63 to 117 messages to go through. Did I also mention that there’s no automatic text skip? While there’s a button you can hold for cutscenes that will fast forward through the text, there is no similar button for battle messages.

However! There is autobattle, which will go through these messages automatically. But you can only turn it on while you’re still selecting your attacks! It will also skip the next round start and give you about half a second to look at any missions that pop up, so if you want to turn it off you need to do it before the round ends. If you get jumped, though, you’re outta luck.

And that is why Alisha is in the final slot, instead of one of the mages, because she’s the least likely to actually do anything other than the default action.

Later on, we find a fancy silver chest. That’s totally better than the rusted metal ones.

How does completing missions upgrade chests anyway? Thief magic is truly inexplicable.

There’s a bunch of human enemies down here. Notice that you would never in a million years guess what they really are from their shape alone!

I forgot to get a screenshot of the mage dudes, but don’t worry, color swaps will be coming soon enough.

And now what we’re down here for. The guy at the temple sent us on a quest to collect some glowing moss, so that we can supposedly make some sort of amazing medicine for… some reason. He didn’t exactly say what it was for.

At any rate, we need more than one of these, but we’re pretty beat up now so it’s time to go back to town, so the rest will have to wait.

Like every game since Etrian Odyssey, there’s a item like a Warp Wire that transports you back to town whenever you feel like it. Since you can buy them and we’re making plenty of money, may as well just use them up.

Leveling up is completely random. Both of the above screenshots are valid level growths, and you might notice that one is terrible and one is pretty great. This is pretty much Fire Emblem style where each class has a percentage chance of raising each stat every time it’s leveled up, meaning if you’re unlucky you can end up with garbage characters.

This is a Wizardry series staple, though, so it’s not like it’s unique to this game. Though classic Wizardry caps your stats at 18, D&D style.

Selling a Broken Axe for 290GP.

While we’re selling junk, it’s worth noting that cursed weapons are starting to show up. Cursed stuff can’t be taken off once it’s been equipped, but otherwise has no real effect other than being junk. Since you can’t use unidentified items, and identification is never wrong, you will never equip cursed equipment except by accident or masochistic tendencies.

The odd part is that Mordy will pay a ton of cash for them, even though they are completely useless. Sometimes I wonder who he sells them to, but I figure a master merchant like him shouldn’t have any trouble convincing random novice adventurers that they are the Best Weapons Ever.

Bonus: Like all Wizardry games, he also has a curse removal service that he charges for.

Getting better chests usually means we won’t get junk like this, but unfortunately even junk has a purpose later on.

Here’s where the party stands now. Level 7 is when Samurais get two more passive skills: One randomly increases their number of hits in battle and the other makes them randomly do additional fire damage when they attack. Did I mention that they’re the best class in the game? Because they are.

All ready to go again, we hike back down to the third floor.

…

And then Kai failed to disarm a bomb.

(i apparently lost the original png of this so here’s a jpg)

[VastleCania]

@janitor

So if they all attack, there will be anywhere from 63 to 117 messages to go through.

This is incredible.

[janitor]

Part 6: Oh I actually had a png of the explosion after all

---

When we left off last, Kai was trying to disarm a bomb. Emphasis on trying.

Unfortunately, it isn’t even remotely fatal, and does about 15-20 damage to the entire party. Even the made-of-paper bishop survives that.

The damage is directly related to which floor you’re on, so it will eventually ramp up to the point where it will almost kill your weak characters. Almost.

Sheesh. They aren’t even trying with these unknown forms, are they?

I should clarify something from the previous update, just so you don’t think otherwise: When a surprise attack happens, where either you or the enemies get a free turn on the other, no skills or magic are allowed. So if you get jumped by a bunch of coins or mages or whatever, they can’t spam their party-wide attack on you. Similarly, if you get to go first you can’t just go in guns blazing with your mages and skills, either.

This too is a Wizardry stable. Doesn’t stop you from having to deal with the ridiculously slow messages for 9+ attacks though.

‘Mission: Destroy all enemies this turn.’

New enemies, and an impossible mission! Yeah!

Because I didn’t get a good screenshot of it: That is a stack of 5 snakes and one single bat. The problem enemy here as far as doing that mission? The bat, of course.

It has approximately one zillion hit points and does ridiculous damage for no reason. It even criticals often for up to 80 damage. They’re easily the most problematic enemy for the next few floors.

Oh man, a dirty statue. In a dungeon.

There must be like hundreds of these, so any sane adventuring group would just move on.

… So, of course, we stop to clean it!

And it’s a touchscreen minigame! Just rub on the screen a bunch to knock the dirt off.

Why are we doing this? Why does this exist? Are we being guided by the invisible hand of fate to literally cleanse the dungeon as we go? Although, thinking about it, that would explain the clean floor after busting the wall up earlier…

Maybe that’s what Cornet is doing, carrying around the party’s buckets and mops for just such occasions.

“You heard something heavy moving nearby.”

Once we’re done cleaning it, something moves out of the way elsewhere. Why? Does the statue have dirt sensors on it or something? Is this a deity of cleanliness, who rewards those who aaaaaagh I give up this makes no sense.

Actually, looking at it, that statue still seems to be majorly gunked up.

Despite that, we have apparently appeased the Furniture Polish Goddess, so it’s time we move onwards to… yet another lame trap!

Those rocks sure do look familiar.

When we step on that floor tile, there’s a click and the screen shakes for a couple seconds, followed suspiciously by a rolling sound. I wonder what that could be! Nothing actually moves until the animation completely finishes, either, so there’s more than enough warning to get out of the way.

Take one step back and wait for the boulder to hit the wall, where it promptly explodes into a cloud of dust. That it crumbles so easily probably explains why it barely hurts if we actually get hit by it. Giant dustbunny trap is certainly a new one on me.

I know that dungeoneering is a lot like being a janitor for monsters but this is a bit silly.

‘<Alisha> According to what Luca said, the Glowing Moss should only be on this floor. Let’s look everywhere for it.’

Finally, we find the stairs! Since I’m thinking “screw this quest, I just want better loot!” I try to run downstairs.

Unfortunately, the party gangs up on Kai to make sure that doesn’t happen. Look at his expression of contempt, which looks suspiciously like the expression he always has.

Luca would be the priest from town, by the way.

‘<Kish> Oh, here’s some!’
‘<Sophie> This seems like enough. Let’s return to town.’

Because we’ve now run out of dungeon to explore, the moss we need is obviously nearby, and Kish helpfully points it out.

… Kish is stalking us too? I guess Fighters really do have nothing better to do than clean dungeons.

Sophie decides that’s enough and it’s time to go back to town. But first…

There were some really good items to be found on this floor, and it shows. Between her good base stats and the new stuff we’ve gotten, Moof is now doing more damage than anyone else in the party, pretty much guaranteeing that anything she attacks will die very quickly. And Samurais only get even more ridiculous as the game goes on.

Third floor map, or as much as is accessible. Missed a room on the left side for this screenshot, but there’s nothing in there other than another door fight.

Anyway, now that we have all of our clumps of glowy moss, we actually have to do something with it. That’s right, we’re not done yet, they need us to go make this medicine ourselves. Seriously. If I had some Blooming Purple Moss Clumps I wouldn’t need to preprocess it, I’d just scarf it right down!

But, of course, we don’t have anyone who can do that, so it’s time for yet another errand.

So, wait a minute. We started on a quest without everything needed to finish it? We just thought we’d go pick up some moss and magically everything would come together in the end? Someone in this party needs to start doing some actual planning. Kai’s too busy seething contempt to bother, so it has to be someone else.

Fortunately, someone has a plan!

“Yeah! I know! Cornet has a friend, an Alchemist!”

…

Unfortunately, the plan is Cornet’s.

Alisha definitely looks very concerned about this.

And yes, Cornet really does speak in third person.

NEXT TIME: What is that sinking feeling?

[janitor]

Part 7! We’re past the halfway mark!

Hope you liked the story because I’m getting terrible awful no-good flashbacks to this game’s writing.

---

I bring you story time! Because nothing says epic dungeoneering like sitting around yabbering in a bar all day. I’d like to note that you’re seeing about 2% of the dialogue in this game. The cutscenes are ridiculously long for no reason and I find it extremely hard to care about any of these goofs, so you get the abridged version.

Last time, we finished picking up moss on the ground and Cornet suggested we go find her alchemist friend to go help turn it into some medicine. Of course, she’s too busy thinking to actually pay attention to anything, so we have to snap her out of it.

“…Meena~!”

Yelling is always the correct answer to this.

After explaining what’s up, Meena decides there will be no problem whatsoever with making some illicit moss drugs and sets off to make the medicine.

As she is the Absent-Minded Professor archetype of the game, this is of course punctuated by an explosion.

“*cough*… I did it.”
“Obtained miracle medicine.”

I’m not at all sure what’s so miraculous about a drug made of moss that glows in the dark, but hey, I guess there’s a raver somewhere who’d think it’s pretty awesome.

And that would happen to be the grand high priest guy of the temple! Alisha wanted to meet with him, and this is a good a time as any to go deliver it and see if we can’t meet up with him.

“Sorry, your Archbishop is in another temple.” I couldn’t resist.

We drop the drugs off, but it turns out Archbishop Bolaire isn’t hanging around and so we can’t meet him personally at this time. Really, I just think he wants to keep the good stuff for himself.

I wasn’t sure how to romanize his name, so I googled it up and came up with some wine in response. I couldn’t find a reason to argue with that.

We’re told to come back another time, so we head off to the bar do what adventurers do best: PARTY TIME

“*chew chew* … Delicious de gozaru.”

Really, does she have to keep the formality up at all times? Some people just don’t know how to relax.

Turns out everybody is so goshdarn happy at finishing our first real quest that we get a montage of them having a good old time.

I like to think Sophie’s just bemused at Kish being a goof. And Cornet is, as always, annoying the everloving shit out of anyone she can find nearby.

Kai, on the other hand, hangs out after the bar closes for a little talk with Tania. Did I mention she has a name? Because we just found out.

“<Tania> It’s unusual to see you drink like that.”

Look how mildly irritated his expression is at being called out on this. Can’t he just have a drink once in awhile?

I’ve been warming up to Kai as a character up to this point, since he’s mostly just stood around pointing out the blindingly obvious to his teammates and generally looking kinda irritated at all times, which, as the player, is very relatable.

Time to throw all that away with some monologues!

Kai starts talking about how he’s going into the dungeon because his parents were killed in there and he wants to know why / avenge them / whatever the usual shounen lead story is this week. He’s even got a thingamajig from them that he has no idea what it is.

IT’S PAPER

Surprise surprise, that apparently has some sort of special power, and he doesn’t have the slightest clue what it is or what it does. Clearly this means absolutely nothing and will be of no relevance to the plot whatsoever.

And now that we’ve had our exposition done to set some more of Kai’s story, we can just walk away, right?

“And that’s why I don’t want to get anyone else involved.”

Goddammit.

So to put this straight: He’s going into a dungeon with other people to kill pretty much everything in sight, because there’s not much chance of him being able to do it alone, in order to hunt down whatever it was that killed his parents, but he doesn’t want to get anyone else involved in his thirst for revenge.

On what level does this make any sort of consistent sense? He’s even the party leader! They’re already involved just by being around him! Argh!

“Kya~!”

Yeah, guess who was eavesdropping. As you can tell by now, she is the Heroine Character and as such is always going to be doting over the protagonist. Like I said, she gets dumped into the party a lot for ~story reasons~ a lot later.

She stammers for about 4 or 5 dialogue boxes while Kai just kinda stares at her blankly before finally laughing and telling her it isn’t important. Way to play it cool, man.

And for this we head off to the inn and crash for the night. Room and board is free for once!

“Good morning. Seems you had a lot to drink yesterday, didn’t you?”

Seriously, can’t a guy just have a drink once in awhile? Even the innkeep’s getting on our case about this.

Also, she’s apparently named Catria. This is the first point in the game where she is named, even though we’ve seen her about 80 times since the beginning. I guess since we’re now on a first name basis with the innkeep she’ll start giving us a repeat customer discount. Yeah, right.

“<Sophie> Kai. From now on, you’re the leader, so you can give us your orders.”

For some reason, Sophie decides to mark Kai as the designated leader and reminding us that we can boss everyone else around. Again. We already did this awhile ago but it’s doubly official now. What is she planning?

Turns out, she just wanted to introduce us to a new party member! I wonder who it could possibly be!

“<Meena> Ehehe… Hello.”

I like how her in-game portrait looks like she’s in a constant state of falling over, dropping all of her no doubt volatile vials of stuff everywhere. Like she’s going to fight by falling towards opponents and her alchemical stuff gets all over them, causing them to rot, explode, or mutate. That’d actually be pretty awesome right up until she makes something into a ninja turtle.

Too bad she’ll never get any use in-game. Sorry!

Alchemy magic is largely weaker than mage magic with a few exceptions, notably the spells that give a dungeon-wide AC buff. They also cost potions that you have to buy at Mordy’s in order to use, which can get fairly pricy. It’s really hard to justify dedicating an entire character to one in this game, especially early game when you aren’t swimming in GP.

The real purpose of making Kai double dog leader is that we now have 7 story characters in the party and they’ll have to be managed, so Sophie’s just kinda giving Kai a tutorial on how he’ll run the party as he pleases. Despite the fact that we’ve been doing that since we got back from the first excursion and two of them became stalkers.

Don’t worry, everyone still shows up in dungeons even if we don’t bring them along.

And we’re forced to remake the party from scratch for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. Note that it isn’t even leaving the list in the original party configuration, so we have to go fish for them. Argh.

Every decision in this game just makes me want to shout “WHY.”

NEXT TIME: We take a trip back to the temple to see if Bolaire’s done tripping on moss yet.

[janitor]

Discourse ate my post draft so I may or may not bother with getting the next part up tomorrow I don’t know. i have a migraine so i think i’ll pass for a day or two probably.

I hope you are enjoying this! The game is not so much bad as it is… what were they even thinking?

Honestly though: Actually really like the character portraits, cheesecakey as some of them are, and wish I knew who the artist was. Did not pay attention to the game’s credit roll when I played it, maybe I’ll look again sometime.