MAP NOTEBOOK MAP NOTEBOOK!!! mine is one of my most prized possessions heheh
i rly wanna play Gaiden 3 and 4 at some point after i complete at least 6 just cuz i like the idea of my classic Sir-Tech party of Tolkien knockoffs mingling with my Dark Savant/Bradleyverse party of furries
Oh yeah, I am really hyped to get to Gaiden 3, but itâs gonna be a while. Gaiden 1 is so damn good though.
Iâve been digging around the Internet Archive for Wizardry related stuff, and gathering it here if anyone is interested.
Some really cool stuff in here, like this way too long book about Gaiden covering so much info (itâs all in Japanese, but Iâve been google translating what I feel like). And this copy of all the materials that came with one of the Japanese releases of the original game, which includes this hilarious book of graph paper as the most obvious âno seriously, draw a fucking mapâ clue possible.
I really love how much stuff is out there.
fuck yeah thank you for finding & sharing!!! there is so much fucking sick art in that Gaiden guide
I know! There is so much cool shit in some of those guides.
So one of the things that is fascinating in Wizardry is how different the cultural receptions of it were. In the West, it always was seen as having this joking tone, what with the two main charactersâ names being the two creatorsâ names backwards, and goofy shit like the Cuisinart being a top tier weapon. But in Japan, it has a much more grimdark reception, due in theory to the jokes just not getting localized at all, just literally translated, and a lot of players not even knowing they were supposed to be jokes at all originally. Itâs great because you can even see this in the art made for the manuals for the games. For instance, here is the art of the classes from a manual for the original game:
Itâs cute, light-hearted, cartoon stuff. What is interesting here is that this art is also in the original manual for the Japanese release of the game, but the tone shift still happens pretty quickly. As a counterpoint to the original art, here is the art of the races/classes in the manual for Gaiden:
What also then interests me is that the joking tone sorta just re-emerges in Fromâs games (the Souls games are hilarious, often in the exact same player futility manner that the Wizardry games can be). So even with the shift in art style, it seems that was in common across the players of the game.
Archive also has the OVA that was made of Wizardry 1, if you needed any more evidence of tonal differences. Itâs pretty cool, and the fansubs for it also add in spell descriptions from the game, which is dorky as shit and I love it. Real late 80s/early 90s anime violence hours here.
So much has happened in these games to me that I donât even remember it all, but letâs talk about my adventures in the original game because shit went to shit and continues to and I love it.
Honestly? Wasnât bad, aside from some annoying pits that had a habit of wiping out my party members, and one tile that seemingly turned us in a random direction. Really, not that bad! Donât worry, that wonât last.
Floor 7 can kiss my ass.
Look at that map. I mean, there are a couple of mistakes on it, because there usually are, but it is a monster and a half. Weird usage of the wraparound maps, and a long path in the middle that seemingly just traps you into going into floor 8, which is Hell (see below).
I want you to note that room in the middle with all the Xs, which are the dreaded pits. When I got to it, I could only see 5 of the pits (or what looked like them, you learn not to take chances), and so when I looped around to the other side, I thought "wait, maybe they were guarding something and this door will lead me to what the pits were surrounding. Whelp, they were surrounding another pit, and half my party wiped. And then we got sent to Hell.
I donât have the map of this one yet, but it is confusing as hell. So confusing that I broke down and looked part of it up so I could get my bearings, but not until after my first shitshow there.
See, the wall texture in the SNES version is a mess and makes it hard to tell a lot of what is going on. Plus, there are a lot of Dark Zones, where you canât see shit and you lose whatever light spell you have cast. So you wander around a lot in the dark here, confused as fuck. So when I got here with a party of 3 half dead people, I knew we were fucked. I tried to find my way out and got even more lost, and one more party member dead. So I left that team to fend for itself, and went back to start up the B squad.
B squad is also currently my Evil Squad, as I had so many Evil Priests around that it made sense to roll some neutral teammates for them and see what shit may come. Theyâve struggled a bit, but being evil means that grinding Murphyâs Ghost is a lot easier.
Murphyâs Ghost is an enemy in a sorta strange spot on the first floor who, for that area of the game, is worth a ridiculous amount of XP, and you can just keep summoning him at the shrine over and over again. I think I read somewhere that he is a spirit who collaborated with the Mad Overlord but fucked up, and so was doomed in his afterlife to just keep getting murdered endlessly. Or maybe I made that story up for him. Either way, heâs super useful, and there is a joke in one of the Star Ocean games about him:
So yeah, we got Evil B back to Hell and man this floor is ROUGH. Not the enemies really, most of which we can handle and havenât been too rough, but jesus the walls and the dark zones and the teleporting and the magic fizzling and and andâŚitâs Hell. I love it.
goddd yeah floor 8 is NASTY
there are so many one-way warps into nearly identical crossroads surrounded by dark squares that i screwed up transcribing them at one point, which rendered my map of it too hazardous to use to my eternal consternation. Once youâre in the central area of it you HAVE to find the right warp to get out. the only ladder up (that i ever found) takes you to a section of floor 7 thatâs dead end cut off from the rest of the floor (and leads you inevitably to the room full of deadly pits you spoke of). Oh also there are big swathes of it that are antimagic, and you have no way of knowing where they are without deliberately burning spells!! So you canât even brute force DUMAPIC your way through it bit by bit. Itâs so fucking mean. and i also love it 
OMFG
O
M
F
G
THIS FUCKING GAME
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
OK, letâs go back a bit.
Floor 8 continued to be insane, so I eventually looked up a map for it, and it was more insane than I thought. I have no idea how anyone made it through that without looking up a map.
Thing I did not know: The Console versions have way harder versions of floor 7 and 8. Huh.
So in comparison, 9 was a breeze. Really, just nothing bad at all. So we started 10. And lets get a refresher on who the team that made it here, which is to say TEAM EVIL
OK so floor 10 was going well, and importantly, my two mages hit level 13, which meant they had access to all the spells. We did some exploration on 10, and beat some monsters, and went back to town. Once Bullshit hit 13, I decided to make them a thief, becuase a thief with the full mage library is, definitionally, a badass. OR SO I FUCKING THOUGHT (I thought this because in my Gaiden game, I have one named StickMag who is the fucking champ).
So we go back to floor 10, and a huge fight awaits, and what do we do? We swap out UHHHGGHH for Bullshit as the new thief, and add in Mag Junk to the team as a lower level mage to get the EXP. And we let Bullshit (who we Murphyâs Ghost grinded up to level 6) drop the Nuclear spell on them, and fuck 'em up. So they dropped a chest, and Bullshit inspects it, sees a teleporter trap and IS TOO COCKY. Trap gets set off, and the whole team is sent to PURE ROCK, which is an insta permadeath. No chance to revive them. MOTHERFUCK.
REST IN PEACE
Shadeo, Knavery, FUUUUUUU, MagJunk, and our evil mage-priestess Queen, Tigress.
REST IN PISS
BULLSHIT, you fucking piece of shit.
God this game rules.
Oh also embedded now in the basement rock? about 250K worth of gold, because of course that is what happened.
hahahahahahhaha what a way to live up to the thread title hahahhah
Oh mang, Iâd forgotten how absolutely cruel the original Wizardry could be. I only hope it was as hilarious as it could have been
On the plus side, somehow their corpses made it back to town, just minus some gear, so not a total loss.
reminded me that the artist who redrew all the sprites for Javardry hosts them all for free use
put me in your party booji Iâll never die
Alright. What class? Youâre gonna have to be neutral or evil though to fit in the party.
i want to be EVIL, and always a thief
You are evil and a thief, though I might make you something else eventually, as thieves on their own have limited usefulness. Ideally, Iâd get the dagger to make you a ninja, but I have yet to find one.
