Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981)

Look: 7/10 Welp, time for the often-mentioned Wizardry series. Much hype about this game. Plus, surprisingly well-rated for an early videogame. Anyway, cool to see the first-person 3d style dungeon crawling, I bet a lot of people think this did it first, but PLATO RPGs were doing that first-person style before. The sprites for enemies ain't bad, but otherwise this is mostly a text based game. I also liked the nostalgic feeling of returning to PLATO RPGs with the UI. Otherwise, mostly forgettable/functional. Oh, except that beautiful title screen! I'm always a sucker for the flashing text colors of Apple II games like SwordQuest and this.

Play: 6/10 As much as I was disappointed by the original Ultima, I really liked its character creation process. Compared to this type. I usually like the die-sim roll style character creation, but the Ultima method of having a certain amount of points to disperse among the stats felt like the right way to do it going forward. I did like in some of the early PLATO RPGs rolling for stats, but this one was a bit too unforgiving and I am obsessed with starting off as strong as possible heh.. I eventually caved and settled. Anyway, the overall game felt much more like a text game than Dunjonquest or Ultima style RPG. Reallllly not a fan of the shopping process like in the RPGs I've been skipping, maybe I should've done the same with this and Ultima so I can later give them a proper chance. But just not sure if I will ever enjoy these. The character creation and shopping process is the main thing that turned me off from this, I might have better enjoyed the dungeon crawling part if it weren't for already being exhausted by the intro process. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I recognize that this potentially could've blown Ultima out the water for 1981's best CRPG.

Feel: 7/10 Very dank name heh. Lol ironic that Oubliette, one of the more convoluted PLATO RPGs that disappointed me like Avatar did, is the PLATO game specified as having influenced Wizardry >.< Maybe that's why I haven't been clicking with early microcomputer RPGs like Dunjonquest and Ultima--they drew influence from the more complex, usually later PLATO games instead of the rawer, simpler PLATO games like pedit5 and dnd. (Gosh, after saying that, I realize I tend to just dislike the RPGs so far with shopping lol, what the heck I used to love shopping for best weapon etc in later games like Dragon Warriors and Final Fantasys..., but yeah I specifically disliked the PLATO RPGs with a lot of equipment and different stores, compared to the ones where you find or earn your equipment and magic items heh... interesting). Anyway, definitely a classic dungeon crawler feel to this, always nice to have a set goal/final boss like in dnd (considered the first videogame ever with a final boss), but I didn't have the patience or interest to push through there (while, for comparison, I only quit dnd after hours and hours of gameplay and wanted to try again but moved on for sake of the project heh).

Attachment: 8/10 Kinda like Ultima, I can't claim I will forget this game. While I was more impressed with Ultima's more innovative ideas of open world with multiple continents and air car and space travel and time travel etc., this one's harkening back to my favorite RPGs so far, the PLATO RPGs, gives this a soft spot in my heart, despite not being all that fun. Hopefully the later ones will be better. And perhaps some day I will play one of the later ports of this, namely the NES version, since I bet the gameplay is far more tolerable.

NOTE: This version was played using the Llylgamyn Saga PSX game, so this review will be gentler for it.

Wizardry started out very long ago in the mists of 1981, and this game is an interesting, at times agonizing look at emulating the pen-and-paper RPG experience on a computer. Starting off with up to six adventurers of various classes questing down 10 floors of dungeon to grab an amulet from an evil arch-wizard, there's not much to the plot. For the most part the intriguing elements are at the beginning, with silvery demon fog, persnickety ghosts, and trickster mosaics to lead you to your doom, and then most of it gives way to a straightforward dungeon layout.

The game's main mechanics take the RPG format with a very large amount of randomness compared to other RPGs that players might be used to. Spell effects are random, stat increases are random, enemy attacks are random, and the range of values can mean life or death at times (like the dreaded TILTOWAIT). The game is chock filled with traps, whether it be spinning panels, silence rooms, pits of death, or teleporting that ends up in a rock wall or inescapable area. At times the game can just give a nasty roll of the dice.

The other main mechanic is mapping out the area, as the game originally had no way to keep track of map data - this pushed players to create their own maps from paper or mapping programs, but the Llylgamyn Saga remake provides an automap that can save some of the pain. There are times where spinning panels and teleporters can ruin the sense of covering navigation, but map spells and the automap can lead the player back on track.

The visuals in the Llylgamyn Saga version are a massive step up from the simple computer graphics of the original - the fantasy soundtrack is simple but effective, and the Gaze Hounds, Dragon Zombies, Ogre Lords, and other such things have great portraits. The game's dungeons are a little more jazzed up and in 3D polygonal graphics, making them a little easier to navigate as well.

The game can get a little too nasty at times (losing stats, losing levels, losing teams, losing progress) but with careful steps and preparation, they can make their way through this dungeon eventually. Just don't expect for it to be an exciting and epic adventure by the time you reach the evil arch-wizard himself.