#sir-tech

Realms of Arkania: Star Trail/Jagged Alliance

I just finished playing the entire Wizardry series by Sir-Tech, ending with ascension to the status of Cosmic Lords at the end of Wizardry 8.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord (SNES)

Developed/Published by: Sir-tech Software / Media Factory Released: 1/06/1999 Completed: 29/07/2021 Completion: Killed Werna and got back to town. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

So as I mentioned a ways back in my Deadline write-up, my “catalogue your retro games and play them chronologically because the structure will mean you actually play them” system ended up with “add in all the games you’d like to play too, even if you don’t actually own them” to ensure I never get past some point in the middle of the 80s.

At least partially, it’s the fault of other people who write excellently and entertainingly on retro games and game history. You end up reading The Digital Antiquarian, and then he links The CRPG Addict, and then you’re like “oh, this guy has a chronological list of RPGs” and then you remember you were planning on playing Shin Megami Tensei III cos you just got it on Switch, and you think “you know, before I play a JRPG, I should really play what is arguably the foundational RPG” and that’s how you end up playing Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Now, I’m not totally insane. Or I am, maybe. Because I’ve skipped other creaky RPGs like Akalabeth because they’re just so dusty, and if the only way to play Wizardry was in its Apple II or even its DOS form I’d be quite happy to do the Drake “no” meme to this, but unfortunately Drake “yes” meme to downloading a fan translation of the hyper-rare “download to a cartridge from a kiosk in the late 90s” Wizardry collection for Super Famicom and playing it in an emulator with a lovely CRT filter on and a SNES Mini controller.

“Why tho,” you might ask? Well, because after a cursory googlin’ it seemed like that would be the most pleasant way to play a grindy, dusty-ass RPG: get some nice 90s pixel art (nicer for sure than the contemporary Saturn and Playstation releases) the translation and Wizardry basically controls like a JRPG anyway so it only makes sense.

“But what about intent, tho,” you definitely ask. I mean I did just bang on about how I made sure to play MULE in the best, most accurate-to-designer’s-intent way possible. I mean I didn’t try any of the attempts to update MULE with modern graphics (or even mention them). Well (and I’m already aware how weak an excuse this is going to seem…) what is the intent with Wizardry at this point? It was ported tens of times, with subtle and not-so subtle differences. Here, we’ve got probably the most playable version of the game with only one huge difference: the maps. Which I didn’t realize until I got to the respective floors.

You see, Wizardry is a game originally made for a system with a tiny amount of memory, and it results in one of the most interesting aspects of the design: the first four floors actually have, like stuff to do in them (pick up objects! Use them to get places! Fight a mid-dungeon boss fight!) and then they basically ran out of memory, so the next floors are basically just there to grind battles on and map out if you’re interested. For some reason, when it got ported to Famicom, someone either thought “those maps are rubbish” or they did them and then lost their work or something, and so they dashed off new ones that are even more annoying.

But whither intent? If you’re keeping score, the generally advised way to play Wizardry is to grind on level 1 and 2 until you’re a beast, beat the mini-boss and then grind level 9 and 10 until you’re an ultra-beast and then smack Werdna to death. In fact, because of the way Wizardry works, it’s kinda dumb to play it the way you’d play any other RPG, because there’s no benefit at all to putting yourself at risk.

The way Wizardry works: basically, it’s just the most hilariously brutal nonsense. You make up your party (who are children made of jelly) and send them into the dungeon. If someone gets killed (which is hilariously possible; once you get past the second level, ninjas who can decapitate--aka instant kill--your heroes show up) you have to drag their corpse back to town and pay an eye-watering cost to bring them back to life (which some of the time doesn’t work, turning them into dust, which is even more dangerous.)

If everyone dies, you have to make another party, train them up, and get them to the point where they can get to the corpses. If they die? Bye bye original party. [Dark Souls klaxon goes off]. So as a result, with instakills and level-draining enemies all over the place, the most sensible thing to do is to play as boringly and as conservatively as possible--unless you’re cheating.

Something that actually kind of blows my mind about Wizardry is that it’s famously an early game that had a ton of playtesting due to its protracted development (famously when compared against even later games like Ultima IV, which were just pushed out as soon as they were more-or-less done.) But I really do wonder who the playtesters were that they considered this insanely brutal nonsense to be not just passable but I assume good.

Wizardry, for example, is an early maze-mapper, which is quite (unusually) helpful in mentioning that the mazes are on 20x20 grids. But they wrap! Making it harder to map and easier to mess up, and from the very first level you have to deal with warps and even an entire dark area that (frankly bullshitty) isn’t lit by your magic (which does make invisible doors show up so at least it’s not useless--another thing that’s everywhere.) I suppose most of the playtesters were already well familiar with the style thanks to playing things like Oubliette, but there’s absolutely no consideration that for almost the entire audience this would be their first experience of anything like this, resulting in a game where you make a party (without any sense of what you’re doing) immediately get lost and murdered. It’s stunning that people persevered, but spending $$$ on a big fancy box does things to you.

The playtesting, I suspect, ended up with the game getting some really weird patches to the difficulty, such as a small number of enemies giving loads of experience compared to others, and some rare weapons and armour that make things way easier if you can grind to find them because almost all the weapon and armour is useless.

I also assume the playtesters did all sorts of cheating because (back to intent) it’s kind of absurd to imagine anyone playing this “for real” even at the time. Yanking the disk out when dying or whatever didn’t work, but I’m sure people were backing up their disks all over the shop (some quick googling assures me this was possible) not least because levelling up sometimes lead to your heroes losing points!

Anyway, when I went into this, I decided to give it the ol’ college try. I made up my party (me, a smooth, neutral, Elf Samurai) added the cast of the Fast & Furious franchise (Dom a dwarf, obviously) and decided I’d only reload on a party death or if levelling up lead to a stat decrease (because that’s bollocks.) And it mostly worked… though a lot of luck, because I was so careful I never really hit any level drain enemies (which I still don’t understand: they cost you levels, but do they take the same amount of experience away? So it’s ultimately just a grind punishment? Or is it something else?).

The thing is though… it’s a bit boring. You can slowly work your way down the levels (I didn’t map them 100%, I just dawdled around them till bored/seen enough of the “content”) which should give you enough to survive level 9/10. But the game has an elevator in it for a reason, because the end game is literally just “grind till you can survive against the final boss” but the grind is tedious (and difficult) unless you work out quickly that the only enemies you actually want to fight are frost giants and Will o’ the Wisps, who give 10 to 20 times the amount of experience as anyone else for unclear reasons.

So after literally hours of grinding I said bollocks to it and started just save-stating before every encounter to make sure I triggered one or the other. Do I feel shame? No, because I did this after spending literally an entire night grinding levels 9 and 10 for real. I was good.

And in the process of doing so I unlocked the best weapon and best armour meaning I beat Werdna’s ass handily… even though I had to do it twice because the first time only I survived, and with a full inventory I couldn’t get his amulet so the game just chucked me out in an unwinnable state. I can say one thing for the SNES port… it’s faithful in the ways that count.

Anyway. Wizardry is boring, but it’s not not interesting. As many people will point out, everything in Japanese RPGS from the way menus work to job switching to literally even just the way they name spells in Final Fantasy all stem from this game, which is honestly bananas. It’s a bit like learning Latin, in that suddenly you see the building blocks of everything you’ve taken for granted. Except it’s also a bit like learning Latin in that you feel like you’re being beaten with a cane in the 1920s the entire time, so, you know… it’s maybe not worth it.

Will I ever play it again? Nope, and no more of this series for me thanks.

Final Thought: Alright, so you’ve read this and you’ve decided you want to play Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord to prove you’re a billy big bollocks. Here’s the hot tips you came here for:

Character creation is tedious but re-roll and re-roll. Alignment doesn’t really matter but no evil and good on the same team and you have to choose before you roll, so you probably want good unless you’re going to try and roll for a Ninja.

Don’t try and roll for a Ninja. If you want a Lord (you probably do) just re-roll until you get one (this will suck). Because in this first Wizardry (it might change on later ones?) as soon as you re-spec you go back to racial minimum stats which is just death. I wanted Dom to be a Lord, but by the time he was even at the stats that could make that work the game was practically over.

But yeah, Samurai, Samurai/Lord/Fighter, Priest, Bishop, Mage, Thief. That’s the choice, unless you really want to spend forever trying to get a Hobbit Ninja.

Find Murphy’s Ghost on the first level and fight him and basically only him until you’re bored out of your mind.

See how far you can get from there, levels 3 and 4 are brutal, but you can play it “properly” working your way down if you like. But otherwise, just beeline to the battle on level 4 that unlocks the next elevator (it’s pretty close to the first elevator; to be honest, taking stairs is for suckers, it’s useless). If you can win the battle on level 4, see if you’re able to grind level 9.

Grind level 9 and 10, ignore everything else. 10 is the most forgiving level because you’re always basically 2 warps away from the town. This is the actual game, in that you’ll spend most of your time there unless you’re willing to save-state your way into Frost Giants and Will O’ The Wisps: Grinding level 10.

If you fight a special Japanese enemy on level 10, hurrah! You might get the best sword in the game, which you’re going to want.

You might also find the piece of armour that you really wanted a Lord for! But it’s cool, because anyone carrying, Lord or not, it gets one of the special things about it (on the SNES, anyway.) I had two and sold one before I realized.

Outside of that the weapons and armour are barely worth thinking about. Upgrade to anything clearly better which will happen shockingly rarely (on SNES they all have obfuscating names, and their sell values have nothing to do with how good they are, insanely.) Sell the other stuff but you don’t need money because…

Just have your healers sleep in the stables, heal in the dungeon then go back to the stables to sleep again. You’re not a sucker.

Fight Werdna once you have the highest level of mage spells and use the spell he’s going to use to kill you every time against him and his vampire pals (what’s the deal with him hanging out with vampires anyway.) I mean really the game is almost solely about levelling up your mage to be able to quickly take down Werdna and his entourage...

If you die? Reload. If you get level drained? Reload. If you get a bad stat change on a level up? Reload. It’s 2021.

‘Wizardy: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord - ‘General’s Warning’’

[NES] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [1991]

Video Games & Computer Entertainment, April 1991 (#27)

Scanned by marktrade, via The Internet Archive