Wizardry Gaiden IV: Throb of the Demon's Heart (1996)

Wizardry Gaiden 4, for SNES

Rating: 6.0/10; Above Average

Not recommended. Walkthrough is required but the only one I could find was not complete.

This is a spin off of the Wizardry series, making this game one of those old school western rpgs that tries to emulate pen and paper D&D by being excessively tedious and user unfriendly. First person dungeon crawling with inadequate navigational aids, frustratingly limited inventory, needing a game encyclopedia to know what stuff does, extremely obtuse puzzles and an almost overwhelming variety of character build options. This game has it all, and firmly falls within "too tedious to play without a walkthrough".

Like most of these games, this one centers around a tavern of adventurers. Use the premade ones or make your own. Make as many as you want because there is nothing stopping you from making backups, mules for storage or even multiple full parties. This is kind of balanced by the expense of reviving the dead and the chance of maybe permanently losing characters. Character creation is quite simple but does rely on random rolling for stats. Nice that the random roll is summarized into a single bonus number. You may need to reroll a few times to qualify for the class you want but if you settle for a low to mid bonus value the game will let that character start at level 3 instead of 1. Stats raise with level ups and reset if you change class so there is little need to fuss over starting rolls. The large variety of races mostly offer different min and max values for stats, though there are a few minor effects. The fairy has the most extreme stat changes as well as severe equipment restrictions and the warrior races are able to use special weapons and armor not available to others. The bonuses and penalties are not so much that you need to min max though; I beat the entire game, including super dungeon, using a party of elves with 1 fairy. It seems like the dracon's breath weapon, which can be used once per battle to hit a group, is better than many magic spells and thus too good. There are a large variety of classes to choose from, including pure casters for each of the 4 magic types, a number of hybrids and 2 elite classes that are impossible to start off as due to high stat requirements. Alignment restrictions also prevent some combinations. There is a distinct lack of magic hybrids though; the bishop is the only class that learns more than 1 school of magic. The valkyrie and lord are both fighter/priest hybrids and there is no reason to have both in the game. Each class is good in its own way and there is class exclusive gear. Class changing allows a character to start over at level 1 as a new class while keeping hp and about half of mana (the magic system uses X castings of each spell level per school). That is enough of a penalty to make never changing class viable while also allowing for a variety of useful builds involving class changing. Leveling up is done at the inn and is randomized like character creation; hp gain, magic and stat gain/loss. It does tend to balance out though, so there is not as much incentive to save scum. In particular hp gain seems to take into account how much hp a character of that class and level should have, giving minimal bonus to a character with too much (like after a class change) or dumping a large bonus to make up for some poor rolls.

Once you have finished with the simple menu based town to create, assemble and outfit your party it is off to the explore screen to choose 1 of the 4 available dungeons. The training grounds can be ignored; your goal is to find the artifact in each of the 3 towers (in case you missed the very basic intro that only plays if you let the title screen idle). The ground floor of each tower features weak enemies for beginning characters with the enemies getting stronger the further you go. The idea is to simultaneously explore all 3 towers but the game does not encourage that with its large labyrinthine floors and tedious navigation. Do they really need to fill out the map with empty rooms and corridors that serve no other purpose than to pad out the game and force more random battles? There is an auto map but using it is far more tedious than it needs to be. One button can be pressed to bring up a mini map of your immediate surroundings but it is too small to be very useful. It also does not help that it cannot be kept open while moving and does not show direction or party facing. In order to view the full map you must cast a mage spell. While certainly not the worst map system it is absolutely ridiculous to lock such a mundane and basic feature behind limited magic. There are also dark areas and light magic/items but they are not related. Light only makes normal areas brighter but to be fair you might need that to see a switch on the wall (the player not the characters). There are plenty of obtuse environmental puzzles involving switches, locked doors, npcs and fetch quests. However if you retrieve the artifact from a tower then it will invade the other 2, disabling most puzzles and killing most npcs. This is an odd design choice because while it does add interesting change it also removes content. I appreciated not having to solve more nonsense puzzles and fetch quests though.

Contrasting with the obnoxious dungeon design and navigation is the combat, which is poorly balanced. As I mentioned previously, each tower has enemies with a similar level of challenge, which means whichever you visit 2nd or 3rd will be comparatively easier, even if you do them simultaneously. Even worse, the dungeon that opens up afterwards has easier enemies than the hardest of the towers, until the last floor with the final boss, which has a massive difficulty spike. And then the boss is easier than the random encounters around it. Then there are 2 optional post game dungeons; the 1st again dumbs down the enemies while the difficulty spike for the last dungeon is so massive that it makes the entire game feel like going from fighting rats and goblins straight to demi gods. The entire combat balance is out of whack and all over the place. Despite this, there are plenty of interesting Japanese themed enemies that are well drawn and provide a breath of fresh air when compared to more traditional monsters. The combat itself is fairly standard turn based menu battles but there are a few notable features. On the good side, each weapon is assigned a range which affects which enemies can be targeted. Your first 3 characters are in the front line while the other 3 are in the back. The first 2 enemy stacks (can be multiple enemies per stack) are considered their front. Short weapons, which are most melee weapons, can only hit the front from the front. Middle weapons, such as pole arms and whips, can hit their front from your back or their back from your front. Long range weapons, bows and the like, can hit anything from anywhere, as can magic. There is also dual wielding for extra weak attacks with weapons light enough to be equipped in the off hand vs the standard shield or 2 handers, so there is a fair bit of tactical depth to equipment selection. Unfortunately the game makes combat far more tedious than it needs to be by obscuring item and magic stats. You can at least tell whether or not a character can use an item from an icon in the inventory, and the shop changes this icon to a letter to represent weapon range. If you want to know exactly what can use the item, where weapons can be equipped and how much AC armor gives then you need to use the identify command, which is unique to the bishop. What?! If you want to know how much damage weapons do you have to try them in battle and figure it out. WTF!? If you want to know about any unique special effects, then good luck with that. Who designed this ridiculousness and thought it was a good idea? If that is not bad enough then all items found in the dungeons (including quest items and keys) are unidentified with generic names like ?sword and ?strange item. Even if it turns out to be a basic low tier weapon or torch. There are plenty of cursed items to mess with you as well. I mean seriously, everyone should be able to identify (based on intelligence or something) and it should clearly display all the basic stats as a bare minimum. Oh and to get these items you have to get past the trapped treasure chests that are the exclusive way to get items from battle. While I did like the feature of identifying the trap by skill or magic and then choosing the correct trap from the disarm list, the traps themselves are far more dangerous than the combat! It got to the point where I groaned every time a chest dropped because of the high chance of something bad happening. Mind I used a ranger instead of a thief. Magic uses gibberish names, and though there is a good description of the spells, those descriptions are not accessible in combat where they are most needed! If you are already familiar with the spells from other Wizardry games then you will be good. For everyone else it will be a struggle like learning a new language. I have never understood the point of making a game MORE tedious with this kind of nonsense instead of giving spells short simple names that accurately describe what they do; like fire1, cure poison, exit, armor down etc. Even better would be to allow players to rename spells. Oh and your characters will not change targets if their target is killed before their attack or spell goes off, just like a NES game. This is a SNES game.

Pro

• Generous autosave, unless you play on mania
• Lots of character build options
• Fairly well balanced classes and class switching mechanic
• Thief is not the only class who can do thieving (but is best at it)
• Good combat system with weapon ranges and rows

Con

• Randomized stat rolls at creation and level up
• Nonsense spell names
• Spell descriptions not available in combat
• Viewing basic item stats is locked behind the bishop, weapon damage is not shown
• Every item, including the basic torch, is unidentified. Only the bishop and shop can identify
• Limited inventory with equipped items taking up space in it
• Changing equipment cycles through every slot; can’t just change 1 thing
• Tedious navigation. Small mini map with no compass and party shown as a dot instead of arrow
• Viewing the map is a magic spell
• Dungeons are huge, confusing and mostly empty
• Repeatable easy battles with good rewards at specific locations for easy grinding
• Some special items to find by searching unremarkable areas
• Many obscure and tedious puzzles
• Party members will waste attacks and spells on nothing if their target dies before their turn
• No cursor memory, which makes healing outside combat very tedious
• Loot comes from often trapped chests dropped by enemies, with no regard to type (mage dropping a bow for example)
• Chest traps are usually more dangerous than combat
• Poorly balanced combat difficulty
• No switching weapons in combat

Beat everything including the optional post game dragon cave. I first read a bit of a character guide to figure out what kind of party to make. I made myself as an elf samurai and got 20 bonus points first roll. Damn, I'll keep that. The rest of the team took some scumming to get good bonus rolls, and the ranger, priest and mage had middling rolls, which let them start off at level 3. The team:

Golden: neutral elf level 29 valkyrie with vulcan hammer, mithril shield, plate of hero, armet, glove of myrdal, silver boots and ring of champion. She also has a gugneir spear and silver hammer.

She started off with a lance so I let her go without a shield for the early game. After that she went 1 handed + shield. She ended with the most hp, 2nd best AC and good damage (but not quite as good as the other warriors). Nearly maxed white magic too and she ruled with labadi (the one that combines harm and self full heal).

Chovus: good elf level 28 samurai with muramasa, kabutowari, plate of daimyo, demonic helm, mitten, sandals and illusion cloak.

He used a leather shield for most of the game but I never did find something better. He had the most hp and great damage for the early to mid game but really fell off at the beginning of the dragon cave due to using that off hand weapon as his only weapon. Then I found a tadeyoshi and went dual wield for respectable damage. By the time I replaced it with that awesome muramasa, he could reliably hit for over 100 damage even without AC debuffs on yet. I mostly used his magic to debuff AC and show the map. Never saw a need to use nukes. I had originally planned to class change him to a lord but decided not to because then no one would be able to use samurai gear.

Valcaria: good elf level 27 monk with saints flail, skull dagger, fire chain, diadem of malor, ninja boots, tekou and illusion robe. Near the end I found 2 fancy bos but the flail seems to be better.

She started with a bo and eventually went dual wield for the rest of the game. A morning star was her best weapon early on until that saints flail, which does an absurd amount of damage. It was surprising just how often she could knock out an enemy with her main weapon and then kill it with her offhand. She was even doing that regularly when I first entered the dragon cave but it never happened vs the later enemies. Best AC of the team. She eventually learned all psionic magic but I did not use most of it. I occasionally used see through wall and most often used the one that buffs AC while lowering that of the enemy.

Aevariel: neutral elf level 29 ranger with sylvan bow, hachimans bow, cat of 9 tails, plate of hope, magic helm, mittens, boots and illusion cloak.

Not sure which of his weapons is the best. All were found in the dragon cave and do good damage. The sylvan bow can only be used by elf rangers and I think it might be the best overall. He did amazing damage for most of the game using a heavy crossbow and later a ranger's bow. He did poorly in the dragon cave with that bow though until finding better stuff. I was going to make Valcaria a thief but the class guide said rangers can do thieving well enough. Eh not quite but it was totally worth it. He did ok with locks and disarming traps but so often misidentified the traps that he set them off anyway. Not a problem with save states but the chest traps were far more dangerous than the combat (except dragon cave). He did passively find a couple secret doors but was not reliable for it. His magic was extremely useful with full heal, group status cure, lower magic resist, attack up, spell reflect and attack down.

Crystal: good faerie level 30 priest with angel stick, faerie robe, faerie cap, sacred slippers and illusion cloak.

So cute. Reminds me of my pixie familiar on Neverwinter Nights, which is in turn based on Navi from Ocarina of time. I usually make my healer an elf but that is only because faerie is not an option. She is a pure support character and used a sling for most of the game. Occasionally she actually hit with it. I have no idea what that angel stick does since she can't attack with it from the back. Mostly used her as a heal bot. She had maxed out white magic and could fling off full heals, harms and group heals like nothing. I probably could have reclassed her to bishop and ended off with the same maxed white magic with mage spells to boot, but the early dragon cave would have been a bit harder.

Celestra: good elf level 31 mage with cat of 9 tails, displacer robe, gold tiara, glass slippers and illusion cloak.

She used a short bow and then a mage bow but she barely ever hit. She could actually do decent damage with that cat in the dragon cave once enemy AC was debuffed. She even got a few killing blows. It was certainly better than the nukes being resisted all the time. She mostly played a support role with AC debuffing, magic protection and the amazing teleport; best spell in the game by far. I could have reclassed her to samurai or bishop and ended off more useful; samurai would have been better I think since that H bow the ranger has can be used by samurai.

I made a bishop to identify stuff and it was mandatory due to the shop option not showing who can equip things. I did the tower of stillness first and fully completed it. It was incredibly tedious to have to use a mage spell to view the map, so you better believe I used save states to conserve castings. I found a cheap repeatable battle that was absurdly easy and gave 1k xp for each. Way more than normal battles, so I grinded everyone to level 9 or 10. I then did the next 2 towers. I tried to play without constantly referring to a walkthrough but I always got annoyed trying to figure out what to do. The walkthrough ended at the ancient cave and boy did that place piss me off. I could not figure out how to get past B4 but I was able to use teleport to bypass the puzzle. Then there was the giant puzzle afterwards. Probably the worst puzzle I have ever seen in a video game. Had a vague idea about sliding blocks around but the puzzle is just far too complex. It really expects you to sit there for hours to figure out how it works? Sorry game my puzzle limit is 5 minutes, after that I search for the solution. After spending time searching online to find it is a rubik's cube, I did try to solve it but really struggled with the obtuse and ponderous mechanics of the game. If I wanted to solve a rubik's cube I would go out and buy one. So back to searching online until I found the solution, which took less than 2 minutes to input. Well those are hours that could have been spent playing a better game.

After the puzzle the combat changed from steamroll auto battle to save state scumming every round. It was tough mainly due to the high damage. Then I found the final boss who was weaker than the random battles. I knew about the post game from the walkthrough and did that. Sanctuary combat was back to easy and the puzzles were not too bad. I did get stuck and tried to find a solution online, but failed. Turned out I did not walk onto a tile with a staff which was part of the puzzle. Then off to the dragon cave. The combat here was insanely difficult. Every enemy can use a breath attack for massive damage (often full party wipe). On top of that they use the best magic, hit hard (sometimes with double attacks that are sure to kill), inflict all kinds of status effects including instant death, and have ridiculously high AC and magic resist. I had to save state scum every round. Other than the first floor enemies that could be knocked out and insta killed, I found the best way to fight was to spam AC debuffs and magic resist debuffs until the priest spell that reduces the enemy to 1-8 hp could land; with both the priest and valkyrie casting that until it lands. Most enemies could be killed in 2 or 3 rounds like that. That is how I killed the final final boss in 4 rounds.

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