There isn’t much information about this game, at least not in english, at least not found by the search engines. Only enough for you to finish it and work around its bad mechanics and unfixed bugs. It’s not like they had fifteen years to patch a game any indie university student can create by themselves solo working on the weekends and publish it on Steam.
Wizardry has not only influenced the gaming, but also created some genres from the scratch. There are earlier and contemporary to it similar games, but being the one that made the thing widely known and popular also deserves some recognition. Even if it happened by an accident, or is a result of a good reviewer’s work.
The first generation of CRPGs was mostly fanarts inspired by DnD rules for the gameplay and the available movies and books for the setting. The second generation of CRPGs was the commercial products. But they were still made by the first generation of developers. And the first generation convergently ended up creating the same design paradigm. The player was screwed. The arcade side was driven by pure greed. The console side was overseen by the arcade people and they didn’t want their tiny games to be beaten in just 15 minutes or less. Meanwhile the PC side was created by amateurs with no experience.
Remember that time when you made a board game as a kid, and put in torture mechanics, and stacked everything against the player, thinking yourself to be cool and smart, and this situation to be funny?
You know how fan-made projects (and glorified licensed fan add-ons) are almost always annoying garbage made only for other fans and are impenetrable for casuals? Even when the first-gen devs weren’t immature babies cackling at player’s misfortune, they were making games for the inner circle, balancing them to be more challenging, not to be completable by an average sane person. Before the later generations of game devs started to work for the audience and its satisfaction, the first generation was making these troll childish games, no matter which intentions they started with.
At 18 Lord British created Akalabeth: World of Doom, in their early 20s Woodhead and Greenberg made the first Wizardry. Back then these were commercial products for a small market, they took it over entirely. But these days no one remembers… That one new pirate game, but the other pirate game, the a-a-a one, not the corsair one… Less than half a year after its release. Back then Wizardry reigned for a decade, being ported to newer and to alternative platforms. It still was one of the biggest IPs even in my time.
One way or another Wizardry ended up in nihon, where as an invasive species it completely ate the young of the native japanese RPGs. Like yamato conquered jomon, who conquered ainu before that, Wizardry-style party-rows-menus gameplay replaced the bump combat system of Dragon Slayer and the likes. The paradigm, that was very big before Wizardry-style invaded, and has almost disappeared after.
Nihonese nation is so conservative, that in damn 50 years since Wizardry, most nihonese developers still stick to the 1981’s guns and don’t move from there even a centimetre. Wizardy was extremely influential, just like the first homo X who took a stick to bash a skull of his neighbour. But while the whole rest of the world already has nukes, nihon is still immensely proud of a stick they copied from the first homo X. Everything you call “JRPG” to separate that sub-genre of press “X” to autobattle archaic garbage random encounter no-gameplay games, from fat western modern seeneemahteek action “RPG” releases, and fat western CRPGs — is just direct clones of the first Wizardry, with very minor changes, like gluing a kinetic visual novel on top, since Wizardry doesn’t have a real story.
Wizardry thought so much of it, it decided to make nihon its residence. The IP managed to survive up until the eighth game in the west. And while it was one of the cultural cornerstones of my generation, i don’t know anyone who have played it, and the first time i’ve touched it, it was 18.VIII.2014. I lasted 31 minutes. The market has grew, and CRPGs were not cornering it anymore in the age when the RTS fad has just died down, and the second coming of FPS has came in the form of WW2 spunkgargleweewee onslaught. After releasing one of the most critically acclaimed games of all times, the company that participated in the creation of the PC gaming market, the digital RPGs as a genre, and the so-called “JRPG” as a genre was closed. In the meantime the IP lived with its second wife in the east, producing so many offsprings, they outnumber Calls ofs Duties.
It got so out of hand, they had to semi-reboot the whole thing, and even replace the copyrighted hobbits. Torawareshi Tamashi no Meikyu is a part of that reboot series called Wizardry Renaissance. Originally it came out in 2009 for PS3 and was made from the same assets as the NDS game, but with fewer of them and often of lower quality, despite the bigger resolution. You could buy the original version of the game, and pay more for, basically, every in-game item. Don’t you think that can incentivise the developer to lower the drop rate of those items in the game itself, hm-m-m? Then they dropped a DLC extending the first dungeon, and adding several more quests. A DLC with a new high-level dungeon and new quests. And in the same day a DLC that raises the level-cap to 100. In 2011 it got ported to touchscreens; in 2015 to PS Vita. Finally, it came out for Windows in 2020 as Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls. It already contains the content DLCs, the real-cash item shop is removed, and you get a free DLC Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls – Growth Fruit. So.
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Then h-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o b-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-i, is this a gala day on your street! Party like it’s 1981. Immerse yourself in a time capsule, where basically nothing has changed since the original Wizardy, but some (!) of the textures. The average of the international game industry has matured. The designers started to work for the players, instead of against them. Even the notoriously bad Dark Souls games are way easier than arcade garbage and the first CRPGs.
So they called this series “Renaissance” to pretend that this is nostalgic throwback, and isn’t just a fast super cheap cash-grab with minimum man-hours put into anything. No need to balance the game, when randomness is the core mechanic. This thing copies the original 1981 game almost entirely, only some of the truly worst elements were removed. The only thing that saves Meikyu is the sad lonely solitary save slot with the ability to save anywhere.
So the game is absolutely demented and inexcusable in so many ways. It is pure randomness with no mechanics. There’s barely any story; there’re barely any graphics; there’s barely any gameplay; and the controls just suck.
Like, this is literally first-Wizardry-era game with all the bad decisions. But not all of them related to the difficulty. There are also some quirks which are just weird, and aren’t used anymore. You have the “main” main hero, but it still isn’t main main main. You can create a protagonist for every combination of a gender and a race, or you can create generic adventurers in the guild with the same combinations, but slightly different sprites. And any character that is not currently in the party is available to hire in the guild, so you can have a party of six protagonists. Which doesn’t change anything but the sprite. They still can die die die while being in someone else’s party. Playing the full-house is advantageous only if you want to finish each protagonist’s tiny personal side-quest. And even that is unnecessary, since each next one can just hire the first protagonists high-level party with all the maps and all the spells.
First you create your character by picking a protagonist from the screen with all the available ones. You have the boring options of humans and elves. Gnomes are short, scrawny and horny, with the girls being twice as horny. Their clothes are magic-related. The hobbits are replaced with “porklu”, also short and scrawny, with a gem in the forehead. They have bandit clothes. The female dwarf is a feisty loli, the male dwarf is a three metres high slab of meat.
After picking the sex and the race you roll the bonus points. Most of the rolls are in the range from 1 to 10, but just sometimes you can get some good rolls, my biggest one was 49. Different races have different starting stats, but you can turn any protagonist into any of the classes. By distributing the bonus points you can meet different class requirements, with fighter and mage being the easiest, and ninja requiring ~39 bonus points roll on the race with the biggest stats.
The Steam release gives you Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls – Growth Fruit DLC for free and it allows you to get bonus points once per save file. With it it’s way easier to pick an advanced class for your first character. (You would think) this helps the new players who do not know what to expect. But after you play a number of hours you realize that this is really not necessary, in so many ways. Especially not for your second (and subsequent) character.
Unlike the modern proper deserving dung-crawlers, you just run like a headless chicken in an empty boring labyrinth with no level-design, hoping that you will be randomly attacked by RNG, and then “fight” by pressing (X) many times. And all of that is randomised. You can be attacked by one dead horse to beat after an hour of wandering. Or by a giant pack of 15 enemies, out of which a half can get bored and go away, or the same amount can join in. All you do is just grind your luck and save-load on death. You can resurrect a fallen member with high level magic or in the temple, but i saw people claim that this lowers their vitality “permanently”. So i would advice to save often and just [Alt]+[F4] when someone dies in the early game. Especially considering that the resurrection can fail and damage the carcass. Which can be healed again by even higher level of a spell. And if that fails your high-level goon is lost forever. Press [Alt]+[F4] to pay respects.
You can save out of battle, but you cannot load from in-game. You have to exit to the main menu. You cant open the menu during a battle. Also you need to be very careful not to over-write your only save-file with a bad situation. That’s why [Alt]+[F4] is the safest bet in every bad situation.
In the late game your characters die all the time and it’s basically unavoidable. It’s easier to just resurrect everyone, than to try and find a fight where no one dies. And people say that there’s a cap for the stats, so if that is true, no matter ho many vitality you lose, it will come back with level-ups.
You cannot rest to heal or restore spells, you cannot heal for free. But that’s not a mechanic just an inconvenience. You leave the dungeon, use all your healing spells, then go hobo near the inn for free, which restocks the spells. And that makes the whole paid inn mechanic an atavism. There’s literally no reason there’s no auto-heal when leaving the dungeon. Not in the mechanics, not in the lore — it’s magic.
Leveling is not exciting since you have no involvement in it. You just randomly get some stats. So randomly, that on a level-up they all can go down. Of course there are also enemies that level you down. All the magic is predetermined, there are very few spells and you get all of them anyway. There’s no mana to upgrade, you just can cast 9 times a spell out of four, inside a category. You can get into an epic fight, get a lootbox of the best quality, and pull a 10$ torch out of it, if you even survive. But then again, the shop doesn’t re-stock, so the gold = exp with additional steps. You just spend everything in the temple. The run-away button is near the class-skill button and it has no confirmation. The game has fake mouse controls so it’s super easy to run from a giant fight that you’ve almost won.
And the controls are absolutely insane. It’s a combination of an archaic design paradigm, with archaic GUI, and archaic gamepad button limit. It’s hard to describe with words just how sucky it is to navigate all these archaic nested one-dimensional menus with these fake controls.
Fuck these controls; fuck these dungeons; fuck these graphics; fuck this game.
There’s already no gameplay but the late early game it gets really annoying. You just fight against giant stacks of nuker wizards with your nuker spells. Everyone is hurt, it’s very easy to wipe any second. And all you get for that challenge is a lootbox with a nuke trap, containing nothing. No, literally nothing. But if you are lucky it can have a level 1 early-game item -9 that costs 50g.
During the latest game the magic loses to raw power. It is impossible to memorise all the resistances, or even discover them, and you can’t look them up. Most spells do like 50 damage. But nothing is immune to a sword to the face.
As a party RPG, a true one, the party composition matters. You don’t just pick the characters with good side-stories and personalities.
First of all you need a healer, but better two. Lord has some spells, but that’s not viable. A proper healer can use a +1 range mace, but it’s not any better than a bishop. A bishop has all the spells of a healer and all the spells of a mage. And on top of that the class skill is to block some of the attacks entirely. Two bishops don’t stack their class skill, but one wall can be destroyed before the second bishop gets a turn to erect a new one. I find it hard to find a downside to running three bishops. The mage can skip a turn to deal double the damage at the price of one cast, but in the end-game the cast limit is not an issue anymore. And bishops can identify items, so having a bishop in the party is basically mandatory anyway.
Second, the enemies drop chests, each one is trapped, and there are a couple of doors you have to lock-pick. So having a thief is mandatory. Thief’s class skill is an ability to get infinite range with a melee weapon, while stealing some gold. A ninja is considered to be just a better thief. But ninja requires an ungodly lucky roll during the creation, and it can only be evil.
There are some lord-exclusive end-game weapons, so i think having one lord in a party is good, even if the skill sucks and the spells are limited. Lords can only be good. Good and evil characters don’t work together, so you either have to plan beforehand, or be happy with a thief. The long and tedious workaround is to change someone’s alignment.
You can randomly meet enemies that are friendly, or that are afraid. Attacking them makes you evil, and walking away makes you good. So to get a party with both a lord and a ninja you have to grind those encounters, until one of them becomes neutral, and now you can use both of them.
Samurais are melee fighters that get some of the mage nuke spells. Their ult is attacking an entire row with lowered damage. The skill is okay in the early game, then becomes absolutely useless, until you get an ultimate end-game weapon. Nothing in-between deals more damage than enemies regenerate the same turn.
Starting with the mid-game, lines become pointless. Since both, your dorks and the enemies, have long-reaching weapons.
I dunno, i already have a high level party, and re-classing is annoying, since you lose a half of everything. But if i was starting from scratch and had this knowledge, i’d try one of these:
Samurai Lord Thief
Bishop Bishop Bishop
Samurai Lord Fighter
Bishop Ninja Bishop
The game starts with the chosen protagonist’s quest. For joke reasons, or generic serious ones, all of them ended up in this town and became bums for hire. The other mad overlord has built a proving grounds dungeon right under the city and filled it with monsters, just to test idiots who can’t earn money in any better way. But then he adopted a horny teenager and discovered that there’s already an even worse dungeon under the city. Both he and the girl has disappeared there. After doing some menial tasks, the protagonist is noticed and gets a lead on their main quest. A half of these are pretty convoluted. With their own business finished, the protagonists are called by the king’s son to go and find the original king.
The games doesn’t have a real story, the story is rewritten by your choices, no matter what you do, you did right. Even the “bad” short ending that describes itself as a bad ending, still rewrites the story, making your decision a good one. Believing a sleazy guy doesn’t end the world. And doing that removes much worse possibilities, in case your hero fails the main quest further down the line.
The early quests demand to gather drops from specific enemies. But with this random you can be unlucky and rarely even meet the target creatures. And then the drop rate is super low. You have to just grind for hours for every collection quest. The other type of the quests is to go and visit every tile in the whole dungeon on every floor, because there are no pointers or hints. Some of the quests require you to re-visit the earlier levels without warning. Having a walkthrough open is a must.
By the end of the mid game you unlock teleportation spells, which significantly speeds everything up. No need to waste your time on the elevators, just go to the target tile and when needed teleport back to town. When you play as the consequent protagonists you just hire your previous party and teleport from the goal to the goal.
Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls – Dungeon of Trials Open
This adds five new floors to the Dungeon of Trials and some new quests. Which are even more borked than the original ones. They have trouble triggering, and are not always tracked in the log. I just did what walkthrough says and it worked.
Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls – Limit Free Levels
This increases the level-cap to 99, i think.
Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls – The Red Shadow of the Sister
This adds another dungeon under the city. The Deeper Levels dungeon has six floors and it’s of way higher level than your party after it already finished both previous dungeons. Now is the time to just grind Shiin 9F until you get enough levels, and until you get the cursed weapons. Those are basically necessary.
First two storeys are the same as the main game. But the floors 3-4-5 are a 3-dimensional nightmare labyrinth, almost entirely covered by anti-warp protection. Which is already not fun, but then the quest of this DLC is broken. You need to visit four spots on every floor, and any of them can refuse to trigger, breaking the whole quest-line. 15 years later it is not fixed. But at least there is a work-around. Each time it breaks, you can go farm another cursed weapon for hours, after which the quest gets unstuck. Some unlucky players claim that their quest got broken several times. Mine only once. And all of that while running in the third-dimensional labyrinth with no warp spell. The chain ends with a repeatable big fight against generic enemies of very high levels.
The game also has some very bad achievements. Like, how about killing 50000 enemies? Even after farming crap for hours i have only 7000 kills. In the steam version the total number was lowered to 15000, which also broke the achievement for many players. And then players claim that the last achievement to get all achievements is also broken. Seeing how that non-achievement has significantly lower percentage than the one before that, i think i can believe that. Imagine grinding this game for 900 hours to not get the achievement?
Inside my shell i milk and hate 