hahahhahaha
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Daphny: I’m invincible
Wizardry:
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So I was switching the OS on my Anbernic and … I think I can’t access my Wizardry Gaiden 1 save any more. Hahaha, fuck.
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So of course I just restarted it. I was fooling around with the OS on the 35xxSP because the speaker on this thing is weird and sometimes just makes weird noises depending on which OS I was using. So the new one I tried made some strange ass sounds during WizGaiden, so that had to go.
So here is the current party:
Whoever did the translation for this one had fun with the character naming screen, which normally has 3 alphabets for Japanese (hiragana, katakana, and I would guess common kanji names, but I wouldn’t actually know). Anyhow, for the English version, they made one of them all symbols, and then another is this silly Castlevania font, but there is one problem in that there is no lower case A in that font, hence DAPHNY. If anyone wants to be my Bishop (current just Pope), let me know. Otherwise, we are following conventions from my previous games, so Shrug is a Dwarf Samurai, Tigress is a Hobbit Priest (I await her backstab vigilantly), DAPHNY is my thief who claims they will never die (but I know better), and Rudie is the Elf Mage.
And wouldn’t you know it, on the first floor, I found a hidden door I didn’t know about before. It’s really the first shortcut in the game and will chop down time on my early runs significantly, but it’s hilarious that I just found it, given how much of this silly game I have played.
So yeah, maybe back on my bullshit.
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I saw that and my first thought was ‘oh it autocorrected to DAPHNY for the handheld like it does everyone’s phones’
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So I won an ebay auction for a beat to shit copy of Wizardy II: The Knight of Diamonds for the NES and it showed up today. I fully expected the battery to be dead but it wasn’t, WTF? So unfortunately, if I wanted to start the game new, I would have to delete all the characters on there, so I had to check them out, and I found MOTHERFUCKING ANDY.
HOLY SHIT
A level 22 Ninja? NEUTRAL?!? Ridiculous armor plus WINTER MITTENS? Those stats? And all by age 18? WHAT A FUCKING UNIT. Like I don’t even want to imagine the playclock that led to this character. 5 MILLION EXPERIENCE!!! ANDY, whoever you are, wherever you are, I am not worthy of you, but I had to delete you for the sake of the game. May you never be forgotten.
If I ever get a Ninja, he will be named ANDY in your honor.
There were a couple of other cool characters, but none will be ANDY to me:
Sadly, all of these are now gone, but I will never forget them. Especially not ANDY.
So I got pretty far in the first floor, and it’s just good Wizardry. The NES one can’t import parties from the previous game, so it is balanced around a new party. But yeah, let’s get some of these sprites:
And here’s DINK
And the best enemy I bumped into…THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
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holy shit what a cool get!!
WOW the acquisition of Andy would have been a fuckin tough one, they’d have had to get a Dagger of Thieves which is a stupidly rare drop from tough late-game monsters, and use it to class change a neutral thief who met the obscene stat requirements. and like you pointed out, level 22 at age 18 is fucking ludicrous. Poor Andy slept in the stables for his entire short life. A fitting background for a hardened shinobi 
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The popularity of the bullet journals these days have made making your own maps for games like this so much more convenient. Your own version is very cool.
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bullet journals make wonderful sketchbooks too, having a loose grid is very helpful for scaling & perspective. love a bullet journal
love the illustration of the armor too booji 
my Wiz 1 maps have little doodles of my party (named and designed after my OCs) in the margins it’s fun to like, create your own Nintendo Power guide
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So during the Steam sale, I picked up the DLC expansions for Five Ordeals, and the one of the two I have played so far is really good. In that way that everything Wicardry is, the lineage here is weird. So Five Ordeals is basically Wizardry Gaiden part 8. Wizardry Gaiden started when ASCII licensed the title to make their own spinoff games. For reference, here’s the full Gaiden list:
- Wizardry Gaiden: Suffering of the Queen (1991, GB)
- Wizardry Gaiden II: Curse of the Ancient Emperor (1992, GB)
- Wizardry Gaiden III: Scripture of the Dark (1993, GB)
- Wizardry Gaiden IV: Throb of the Demon’s Heart (1996, SNES)
- Wizardry Dimguil (2000, PS1)
- Wizardry Gaiden: Prisoners of the Battles (2005, PS2)
- Wizardry Gaiden: The Absence of Misericordia (2005, PS2)
- Wizardry: The Five Ordeals (2006, PS2, then PC/Switch)
So the DLC for Five Ordeals is actually the entirety of Prisoners of the Battles (which is what I have been playing) and also the entirety of Absence of Misericordia. Right now, between these official ones with 5 ordeals and fanslations, the only Gaiden game that hasn’t been translated is Dimguil (though there seems to be a team working on that as of last summer and they are making some progress, so yay). So anyhow, yeah, onto the Prisoners of the Battles.
So the basic plot this time is that a young kingdom has been found to have huge deposits of a valuable ore, and so everyone is trying to get into those mines and/or invade the kingdom. So this guy named Hallstein is charged with getting together some troops to take control of the mine. And so that’s where the player comes in, gathering a new party of troops to be trained by Hallstein before being set loose in the mine.
And damn, it is some training! I have spent about 20 hours in the first two dungeons, which are the training levels from Hallstein, and are pretty intense. Lots of good little maze tricks and weirdness, some killer enemies (I just fought one that successfully destroyed Tigress’s weapon, wtf?), and lots of things for the map book.
Mechanically, it’s definitely pre-Cosmic Forge, so none of the extra classes or races beyond Wiz 5, but I don’t mind that at all. There is a need system for making magic weapons, which you can either find in the dungeon or pay the shop to make for you, and remove enchantments as needed. It’s still pretty RNG, but it adds some fun stuff. Also, Shrug, who is a Dwarf Fighter in this one, has become a god:
He just does that now. Like regularly.
Damn I love Wizardry. I do sometimes think it says something about my mental health that I enjoy this cruel shitstorm so much, but whatever. It’s great.
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I am actually making progress in Wizardry 6 and this game is nuts.
The opening few character levels of this game are brutal, but once you get past them, the game is pretty cool. It’s full of silly adventure game logic so I definitely don’t feel bad for looking things up, but man, it’s weird to play Wizardry with a story, even if tonally it is all over the place in the way Wizardry often is. I will write more about it later but right now we got:
- Tigress the Cat Samurai
- Sarah the Dragon Valkyrie
- Shrug the Dwarf Ninja
- Booji the Human Priest
- Rudie the Faerie Mage
- Daphny the Elf Bard
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So damn, this game is really cool, but also takes a bit of getting used to versus the original games (4 excepted). You never leave the “dungeon” in this one, instead exploring a castle of a mad king and queen. You stumble on how gross these people were: (tw: sexual assault) the king has a secret entrance that leads to the bedroom of the 14 year old he had a bastard child with and the queen is apparently super into BDSM, as you find her studded leather bra and a whip (which is actually a super useful weapon for the folks in the back of the squad. There’s also a weird French pirate hiding in one of the towers that just wants his stuffed toy dog back, and another pirate hiding in the basement who I am still trying to find the password to get to. It’s a very weird castle.
So a bit on the backstory on this game: sometime in the past, the king and queen of this realm were evil decadent assholes, and wanted everything, and mostly got it. Eventually, they team up with this evil wizard to find an artifact called THE COSMIC FORGE, which is, I shit you not, a pen that will turn anything you write with it true. Apparently, the three of them used this pen to make life fucking awful for everyone, and do even more evil shit. Eventually though, the king and the wizard realized they didn’t need each other, and fought. Or something. No one really knows, except they all disappeared, and nobody has heard from them since. So now our posse of brave assholes is diving into the castle to find out.
Also we found some black women with spears (the game’s words) in the catacombs under the castle so no idea where that is going, but the early 90s were rough for gaming, so it might not be good. But who knows!
The whole system of the game is different from the originals, and more complicated. There are different skills, some of which you level with usage (weapons) while others you can only add bonus points to when you level up (magic schools). The classes are varied, the magic system is more complicated as well, but it’s mostly really cool.
I will confess, I am using two “cheats”. The first is an automapper, which is basically necessary because the levels are sprawling and vertical in a way that would make drawing a paper map not easy. The second is a thing that skews the die rolls during character generation a little higher than they were in vanilla, which is really just a time saving thing.
Let’s talk about the team all-star right now, and he’s not who I would have expected:
Yeah, it’s fucking Rudie the Faerie Mage. Err, well, now he is a Conjurer, and I am sure mages are very particular about their titles. Thanks to Magic Missile (which hits whol groups), he has almost double the MKS (which the manual specifies means Monster Kill Statistics, and not Marks) of anyone else on the squad. Shrug is in second with 104. So yeah, Rudie, you magical little sprite, you are a fucking beast and I must salute you.
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I managed to skip wiz 6 but I did eventually finish 7, which uses the same basic system. 7 is one of those games that I played on and off for years before eventually beating it. Actually, I think the only wizardry games I’ve finished are 7 and 8. I’ve always wanted to go back to 6.
How are you capturing these GIFS of 6? They look gorgeous. Ugly EGA graphics has always been one of my turn offs for getting into the game, but these CRT filters you’re using look amazing!
I am just running the Steam version, but with the DOSBox file modified to run it through the builting scan2x rendering, windowed, and show the automapper in a separate window. I can probably just copy-paste the DOSBox config here if you want.
To grab the gifs, I just use the stupidly convenient GifCam.exe, which just opens a resizable window that records whatever is under it.
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Ah, I see. “scan2x” rather than “scale2x”. I didn’t know dosbox had that option. Seems like a pretty good scanline implementation to my eye.
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What automapper are you using
I just used the one recommended in this Steam Guide:
It works pretty well and lets you take notes in the maps and such, which I appreciate.
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