Wizardry: A Saga of Me Screwing Up

[boojiboy7]

So I have decided that, since I like playing Wizardry-likes so much, I should probably play the original. So I got the SNES version of the original trilogy on Everdrive, and I have been getting my shit wrecked and loving it.

So my starting party was:

• Booji, a Good Human Fighter
• Sarah, a Neutral Human Fighter
• Shrug, a Neutral Dwarf Priest
• Logan, a Neutral Hobbit Thief
• Rudie, a Good Human Mage
• Tigress, a Neutral Human Mage

And we have, as a team, been on a journey. So far, I think everyone on the team has died at least once, with a few of them dying multiple times. It’s all been a lot of fun. Let’s go character by character:

• Booji and Sarah have had a relatively uneventful time, really only falling to the fucking pit on Floor 3 when I was a dumbass. This moment really did wipe out like everyone on the team except Tigress and Logan, because I didn’t get right away that opening the menu would retrigger the pit trap when I left the menu. LOL.
• Shrug has been mostly a champ, somehow getting his stats up to the sweet spot to hit Samurai pretty early, so he made that jump. And mostly just kicked ass. He got a few mage spells, which was useful for being able to check the maps I have been drawing by hand as I play. Currently though, he is double-dead, because that is a thing, but I will get there. I will note that multiclassing in Wizardry makes your characters age quickly, so Shrug is our second eldest member. Who is number one? Read on, dear reader, to find out more.
• Logan, my dude, you are not good at your job. I mean, I guess it’s just statistics, but he’s really good at figuring out what trap is in place, and then setting it off, poisoning or paralyzing himself over and over and over again. There’s a reason I have had to get up to Thief 9 while trying to heal Logan for use. Turns out thieves get their shit rocked a lot. But Logan does it even more. Except, magically, not by the pit of Chris fucking the team over.
• Rudie, you’ve been alright. You are a pure mage, and you sure do make guys explode sometimes. Or at least put them to sleep while other team members make with the murder. Sorry I made you die in the Horrible Pit.

---

You might have noticed we haven’t gotten to someone yet, and there’s a reason for that, because someone has a whole damn saga to her name. I am talking about …

The Saga of Tigress

Tigress, oh Tigress.

Tigress was doing OK as a mage, but then when Shrug got his Samurai wings, we needed a new Priest, and without looking at stats, I just decided Tigress should be a Priest. This was my mistake.

She had just enough stats to do that, though not for long. When you multiclass, the characters keep their known spells, but all stats get reset to their default values. Which meant now that Tigress was a Priest with a really low Piety score. Which meant that she was not a great priest at all. Her healing spells were always low as hell. But she stuck around and levelled up enough that she had some good useful stuff, even if it was always less powerful than it should be.

So the pit happened, and two thirds of the party got wiped, but Tigress made it back to town, even gaining a level on the way, a level which got her the ability to bring people back to life! So she tried this exactly twice. And let me tell you, you should not let someone with a low piety score try to resurrect anyone, because it turns out in Wizardry, you can get more dead than dead. So twice, to Shrug and Rudie, Tigress attempted to resurrect them, and twice she turned them to piles of ashes. This means resurrecting them is going to cost a fuck ton of money.

At a certain point, Tigress got paralyzed, so I decided I should probably raise up a B Squad, so I made Priest X, who died an unfortunate death at a high enough level that I didn’t feel like paying for his revival, and then I made Priesto, who got good enough at his job that Tigress could jump back to her original job, being a mage, but a mage with a pretty decent amount of healing spells that only sorta heal.

She was good at this, but I should’ve read the future in the ashes.

On our last journey into the maze, just outta nowhere, Tigress did it. She turned full heel, got that Evil alignment, and now she can’t join the rest of the team. So now I gotta replace her with Magey, who is nowhere near as powerful. Well played, Tigress. Well played.

So yeah, play Wizardry. Get your shit rocked. It’s great.

[AutomaticTiger]

You gotta be careful with cats, we’re fickle creatures!

[sleepysmiles]

oh my god yes booji yesss

i first played Wizardry I a couple years ago and i quickly fell in love with it and it became one of my favorite games and it started me on my beautiful quest to map videogames. plz let me know if you’d like to see me maps again im sure i showed them off at sbcon '23 but nevertheless

i am currently picking at the Llylgamyn Trilogy again hoping to beat all of them then move onto Wizardry V and then the greater weird Dark Savant Trilogy where your party can be 95% furries. im taking runs at Werdna and he’s completely fucking my shit up every time lol it feels like a very luck-based battle. like if hes entertaining a bunch of vampire lords and you can’t ZILWAN them away in round 1 you’re kinda fucked. And unlike most games i think that’s awesome. Fuck me up wizard man

ive played them as a kinda modern take on the “backup your characters to floppy and reload” difficulty where i have a save state in town that i reload when things go pear-shaped. i like the backup rescue team idea but im less of a fan of the grind a new team every time you get a shitty party wipe (like the couple of times my high-level thief has fucked up untrapping a chest and got us all teleported into a rock wall, leading to what i assume is a very gruesome death) so that’s my chosen compromise. I think it’s a good and challenging game either way, it’s just a difference between “hard” and “ironman” difficulty

Also this playthrough is the first time i reclassed everyone and it feels kinda necessary if you want to survive the later floors. Which you want to do entirely because the random loot drops can be so incredible, i love how these games balance loot & encounters, it’s quietly genius. my samurai Max is wielding a Cuisinart (lol) and they’re shredding ass whenever they get a chance to.

starting a thief as a mage and reclassing them once they get some decent spell levels is my minimum tip, thieves are otherwise kinda useless

THE WIZARD IS IN

[sleepysmiles]

floor 3 is so fucking mean i love that it seems like a puzzle and kind of is but not really the solution is you go “fuck this” and skip around the traps using hidden doors until you find the simple path to the ladder down. And then you realize you can/should just skip the whole floor with the elevator on 1F

[Tuxedo]

Adventuring amateur priests have a much lower chance revival than professional church priests! Do not attempt to resurrect a pile of bones on your own

[boojiboy7]

Priest X follower the Tigress path of darkness, so now I have two evil priests. I will update this more later, but here are my maps for floor one and two:

maps

[AutomaticTiger]

Priest X is just following the way of my Endarkened Wisdom. Soon all shall submit, or tremble before my terrible wisdom, Booji

[boojiboy7]

Oh I know. I’m keeping you both in reserve for the Day of the Darkness.

[boojiboy7]

Wizardry loves to fuck me over. It’s great. I am not joking. It makes every bit of progress feel really good.

So after the betrayal of the Tigress Priest Darkness Squad, I made another priest named Priestly, and with the thoughts of making a priest to eventually turn thief maybe, one named FUUUUUUUU. In addition, with Sarah sidelined, we had the appearance of Slugga and Fighter to help fill in gaps. And well…

well…

Whelp.

We saved up enough money to get Rudie and Shrug back from the Ashen Grave. Rudie came back (for a while), but Shrug. My mad lad samurai. The priests at the temple fucking blew it, and you are buried and gone forever. Later on, Rudie would also get killed again, and those priests fucking blew it again. We are forsaken in this hellish world.

Having truly buried Shrug in mourning, we have no rechristened Slugga as Shrug II, who is currently kicking no small amount of ass. Or was until we started trying to explore floor 4. See, we covered most of 3, which is a shit show and has such a high chance of just murdering you at a seemingly innocent intersection that you really wanna avoid it as much as possible. So we got down to 4 the right way, but then also tried the elevator way, and lemme tell ya, floor 4 is NOT FUCKING AROUND.

Levelling is a lot in this game. Floor 4 knows this and so there is an enemy that LITERALLY JUST TAKES A WHOLE LEVEL FROM YOU SOMETIMES. FUUUCK. So Booji was 10, is now 9. Shrug II was 8, is now 7. Oh yeah, and like everyone else got wrecked on that floor, so we gotta save up and hope the priests don’t fuck up even more.

This is so good.

[hater]

Do not attempt to resurrect a pile of bones on your own

well, that’s just good common sense

[boojiboy7]

Floor 3

Yo, fuck the third floor (in a good way). That shit was brutal, and just a pain in the ass to map as every intersection I didn’t already map, there was a chance it was a pit that might wipe a chunk of the party. You will see in the map below that there are some interesections I just did not map. I may never because fuck the pits. They are, in fact, the pits.

floor 3 map

Personnel Updates

Shrug II remains kicking ass. After losing a level, Booji got offed but not Ashed, thankfully, but Shrug II has stepped up as the team fighter, and is currently leveled past Booji. Meanwhile, Priestly managed to gain enough stats that my girl qualified for Samurai, and while the original samurai was the now buried Shrug the First, that mantle has been taken; however, Sarah remains in the land of the dead for now, so the Priestly became Sarah2.0. FUUUUUUU remains strong as our main Priest now, and is healing people left and right and is really a champ. Love them so much. (Yes, FUUUUUUU is non-binary, because FUUUUUUU is beyond your genders, floating in the land of Holy FUUUUUUU, may they never die (OK, they have died before, but ya know). Rounding out the party is Thievely, Magey, and Mag-Junk, all of whom have obvious jobs, though Mag-Junk is a bit underlevelled right now, so we gotta be careful with that one.

Floor 4

So floor 4 is…a lot? There are basically two different areas of it. One, accessed via the elevator, leads to a monster containment facility and a VIP elevator that I can’t get through the gas room to actually us. The monster containment facility also has one party guarding a particular door that I cannot get past yet, as they rock my shit and steal levels, so we have not gotten too far there. The other area, gotten to via the ladder from Floor 3, is pretty wierd and has lots of tiny rooms, but I did find a ladder to floor 5, which is really confusingly dense in its layout, but did let me get on the VIP elevator, which if I take it up to 4, I can’t get through the gas room from the other side, so that limits its usefulness until I want to start exploring below 5. That will be a while.

[boojiboy7]

Progress is still happening. My party seems to have stabilized in lineup, and anyone getting whacked seems to be less of a problem, as we have money to pay for them now.

Floor 4

Floor 4 was less of a problem than I thought it was, as long as I stay away from the one room that starts with a big encounter that just wrecks all of my people. So that map isn't done yet, and I stand by that. I've moved on for now.

Floor 5

Floor 5 was wild, y'all. It seemed designed to use every single bit of space it could, with some weird one way doors, and one big Problem Room that blocked your ability to use magic for the rest of the time you were on the floor if you entered it, which led to some scary situations, but we made it. So we can now move on to 6.

they don't love you like I love you

Pretty Sprites

So man, the sprites in the SNES version are so good. I eventually found a Japanese site (http://www.pekori.jp/~emonoya/) that is only hosted on the Wayback Machine that has every sprite from every version of every Wizardry game in Japan, and it rules, but look at these lil guys:

Even better are the Unknown versions of these lil guys, which are straight up some heavy metal cover art:

This game is so dark. I love it.

Wizardry Gaiden: Joou no Junan, or The Suffering of the Queen

So because I needed something handheld to play and didn't want to restart the one I was playing on the SNES, I downloaded the translations of the Gameboy Japan only Gaiden games.

The first one is a nice change of pace. The floors are smaller, and there are only 6 of them, so the leveling is made quicker to make up for that. And everything in general is more generous with giving you items and such. It can still sneak up and get you killed, but there is a touch less bullshit. Or maybe I am just getting used to the bullshit of Wizardry. I doubt it though.

Of course I am drawing maps, so here are the first two floors of this as well.

lil game boy maps

[sleepysmiles]

rubbing my forelegs together like a fly whenever this thread updates oohoohooo~

i cant wait to get around to gaiden 3 & 4 which are trad Wizardry but with all the furry races from 6-7-8

[boojiboy7]

The Gaiden 1 translation is pretty fun in a janky old Gameboy way, in that it gives English names to all the wizardry spells, so figuring out what they do is a challenge all over again. It feels very early 90s shitty localization and I don’t know if that was intentional, but it adds to it for me.

[sleepysmiles]

i sorta like that it names the spells after their effects instead but that is ironically less helpful if youve already memorized what like MAHALITO and ZILWAN mean yeah

[boojiboy7]

Yeah, it’s great. It really is like an 80s localization where they maybe just randomly change the spell naming convention. It rules.

[boojiboy7]

I was busy away from the house most of this weekend, but Gaiden Update!!!

I found a permit that let me access more of 3, which let me get an elevator that let me get to more of the first and second floors. The plot is very From Software-esque piece it together from random shit, but it rules. I’ve found a ravaged temple with the grave of saints, which was robbed.

The elevator is the only way to floor 5 that I’ve found, and floor five is kicking my ass. It’s great.

[boojiboy7]

Shirts that I wish were real:

So Gaiden has been rough lately, and I fell victim to the dreaded Priest Turns Evi syndrome. I know why this happens (you can use confirm to step forward, and so I will be mashing it when the menu to choose not to fight a friendly monster pops up, and accidentally confirm it, driving the fragile Priest alignment to the dark side) but damn it is rough. I will persevere.

So I went back to OG and decided “hey, maybe I will just make an evil party” and so I did, but they needed a front line fighter, so I made FIE-VILE, an Evil aligned fighter. Well, he was, until we let one too many friendly monsters walk away, so then he turned Good out of nowhere, and fucked that party composition over. So I am back to building up a new priest to replace the members of the Tigress Priests of the Dark. Wizardry giveth and Wixardry taketh away.

I did get down into floor 6 some, until a pit killed half my party. Giveth. Taketh. Love this goddamn game.

[boojiboy7]

Someone brought this to my attention in discord the other day and it’s amazing:

It is an officially license Japanese Wizardry baseball card game called Wiz Ball and I feel so targeted. SO TARGETED.

[boojiboy7]

So don’t worry everyone, I have continued my trek(s) into the world of Wizardry. But I did take a break to buy a new notebook just for making maps in. Here’s the first three from Wizardry Gaiden:

So let’s just go over what progress has been made.

Wizardry Gaiden: The Suffering of the Queen

So man, this game rules, and it is so easy to feel the influence this had on From Software. I almost wonder if this one even more than the mainline series had a big influence there. It’s the first Japanese original game in the series, and the map is just full of amazing loopbacks that feel incredibly Demons’ Souls 1-1. There is an elevator back to the first floor that you only unlock by getting to it on the third floor, but in order to be able to get to it, you need a Permit, which can sometimes be randomly dropped by enemies wandering the floor, or alternately, you can find a hidden path that will give you one, if you manage to survive the pit in front of it. This game being based on Wizardry 5, it at least has a floatation spell that lets you deal with that pit, but it can still sneak up on you.

So with that permit, you can also gain access to a boss room that, once you beat the boss, warps you back to a new area on Floor 1 that allows you to get a key that makes getting to the elevator a lot easier and quicker. I confess, I didn’t even realize this until I was confirming my map with one online and saw a note about it, and it is ridiculous. That elevator gets you down to floor five, and eventually you need to build a bomb and blow it up on floor 6 to progress, though due to a combination of charmingly simple translation and just bullshit videogame logic, figuring out how to make that bomb is ridiculous. Also, floor 6 will FUCK YOU UP. There are multiple enemies that can just behead your characters. There are Shinobi that will actually poison you and then behead you in one attack, which is some hilarious overkill. Thankfully, my posse at this point was levelled up enough to handle this (getting a level 13 mage and then making him a thief is BEAUTIFUL). And we eventually made it to the BOSS OF THE GAME and kinda just murdered him while we were exploring. Thanks NUCLEAR spell. Except…

Oh shit beating him leads to unlocking a whole other dungeon, instead of you rescuing the princess from him like the game said you were going to do. This shit is wild and I love it.

Seriously, Gaiden is SO GOOD. I can’t stress this enough.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Progress in this game is slow. I got down to floor six before a pit fucked over half my crew, and I had to rebuild a bit to get back here. Now we are back down to 6 with the following crew of badasses:

• Shrug II: A Dwarf fighter who never quite qualified for the Samurai status of his sadly ashed forebear, Shrug II is nevertheless an absolute murder machine, currently chilling at level 11 with 860 goddamn kills to his name already at the age of 16.
• Sarah 2.0: The second oldest member of the party at a ripe old 21, she’s a Dwarf with an interesting path. She started out as a Priest, and did that for a good chunk of time, but her abilities perked up and she hit the Samurai role, so now she is an all arounder, a multitool player with healing, some mage skills, and a badass katana. Level 11 as well, with 514 kills on the board.
• Priesti: Guess what? My dude is a 17 year old Dwarf priest, and he handles his shit. He knows not to try to revive anyone unless we desparately need it (we have not), and he handles his shit very well, with a respectable 178 kills in his 11 levels.
• Logan: That’s right, my boy, a Hobbit thief is back in the game. After spending a good chunk of time exploring the afterlife whilst dorming in the Temple of Cant, he is back with a vengeance, and ready to steal whatever isn’t bolted down and only occasionally set of a trap that maybe maims some of the team. He has no abilities other than theivery, and I am hoping once I get someone else levelled to 13 to have full spell access, they can take over as thief and he can respec into something a bit more murderous. At level 11, still only 86 kills, because capitalism is more important to him than murder. And he’s only 15, so who knows where his Fuck You Pay Me stance will get him?
• MAG-JUNK: Look, sometimes you just need to keep making mages until one of them sticks, and eventually, MAG-JUNK stuck. He’s it level 11, with a cold hard 333 kills to his name, and he has enough firepower to be a machine in the pit. As an elf though, he is pretty fragile, but he’s only 16 years old, so he’s got time.
• BOOJI: Yup, that’s right, the original starter of this whole shitshow is still with us. Sure he has died 3 times. And yes, he started out as a fighter, but his respec into being a level 9 mage has been productive, as he has way more hitpoints than any other human mage would at this point. He is the elder of the crew, coming in at a surprising 23 years of age. He knows he’s close to his AARP card in Wizardry terms, and he’s cool with it.

Yeah, still love this fucking game.

Wizardry The Digital Eclipse Remaster

Curiousity got the best of me this past weekend when it was 15 bucks, and so I picked this up. It’s…weird. Because it is all modern animation and such, it slows things down a bit, and has way too high production value, but there are some really neat things in it. First is that the entire time you play, you can see the original Apple II version just running in a tiny HUD in the bottom right. This is a really cool effect, honestly. Secondly, they added a monster investigation system I kinda like that lets you learn the stats of the enemies by scanning them when you fight. This is nice early on as a Thing For The Back Row to Do before they get useful. I do like that they also let you toggle on and off a lot of the QoL stuff they added, as well as pick the original PC levels or the slightly more complicated console levels. I wasn’t aware there was a difference until the option came up, so good to know. I won’t say this is the best way to play the original game at all, but it’s also pretty decent for what it is.

Wizardry The Five Ordeals

Look, trying to explain the licensing of Wizardry in Japan is fucking impossible at this point. So we have this game, a port of a Wizardry engine from a while back complete with several of its own original quests and a completely functional (if entirely in Japanese) level editor for people to make their own quests, and a community of people that has. It’s hilarious that due to licensing shit, the page on Steam has to note that this game has NO ASSETS from the original games in it. It still has a lot. There is a tutorial quest in the game, but the other 4 quests assume you know what the fuck you are doing, and so they can kinda mop the floor with you early on if you aren’t patient. I haven’t made it too far in this one, but I know I am going to spend a lot of time in it.

Honorary Mention: Elminage Original

So one of the things in Wizardry is tracking who the devs are and where they ended up. You have Experience over doing their thing (Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi is so good and weird and I could spend a lot of time gushing about it, but yeah). But you also have Star Fish, who got started on the Wizardry games with the GBC Wizardry Empire games, and eventually went on to make Elminage for the PSP and eventually PC, and man, this is just Wizardry through and through. Some strange extra classes and mechanics I haven’t messed with too much yet, but this is on my list and already being mapped in the Book of Maps, so it will be played.