I love the Sega CD and one of the games that is often recommended for it is Dark Wizard. I am not a huge strategy RPG player, but I figured I would pick this up and play it for a bit... I ended up spending 60-70 hours beating the game and getting many extras!

The main story of Dark Wizard is about as generic as it gets. There is a dark wizard who has taken control of the world and you need to get your forces together to stop him. Each battle takes place on a giant world map and usually spans the terrain between two neighboring cities. With each battle won you unlock more of the world and all the many cities/towns therein.

Many of the towns have little side stories going on in them and these feel so interesting to interact with. There are places where everyone has been turned to stone, a secret ninja village, and a hidden village of elves who are hiding from the world. Most of the story comes from the world building of talking to the people in these places and seeing the effects of the Dark Wizard on their individual communities.

When you start the game you get to choose between 4 different commanders and each of these choices drastically changes both the story and your general strategies in battle. For my playthrough, I chose to play as Robin who is probably the single best unit in the game! She is sooooo strong and her stats increase at such a high rate when she levels. She is neutral aligned which meant that most of my troops were also neutral or lawful. (This matters a little in combat and equipping items) The final thing Robin gets are Ice Dragons... these guys aren't anything to write home about (mostly bc they cant fly) but they are decent troops.

Combat in Dark Wizard is strategy based and set up on a giant hex grid. The player gets to make all their moves and attacks first and then the enemies take their turns. There is almost too much freedom in how you get to set up your armies. Other than a few troop limitations, your commander, and your lieutenant's the world is your oyster... and you will have no idea what to do. You can hire as many units as you feel are necessary and absolutely flood the enemy with your sheer power.... but if you do that then exp will be spread waaaay too thin and there gets to be a point in the game where any amount of weak units will not take down fire dragons or liches.

You also have no idea the directions in which your units will upgrade at the start. When you hire a unit all you choose are their race and their alignment. These things and a few decisions made when they reach certain levels will decide the classes these units can become. Don't get me wrong, after playing the game for 15 hours I LOVED the freedom that the game gave me in terms of both army size and composition... but I mostly spend the first few battles tripping through the dense gameplay systems.

Something that could be seen as both engaging and cryptic is that the strongest units in the game (Griffin Rider, Ninja, Dragon Rider) require your characters to fulfill certain characteristics such as their alignment or their class. You have no way of knowing these requirements until you get to this point in the game and realize that only one troop qualifies for Ninja, even though you wanted a different dude to become your ninja. I like how not everything is handed to me on a silver platter, but I would have liked just a little more preparation.

In order to beat this game you will need to go through some Milon's Secret Castle levels of cryptic s**t. There is NO WAY that you will figure out that you will need to perform a half dozen steps by going to a ton of different villages (some hidden). Then you will get some nondescript items and need to use them in EXACT TILES on certain maps to unlock the final part of the game. There is even more you have to do if you want the true ending (which I did). There really needs to be more clear goals and advice given to the player on what to do. You will have to look up a guide to beat the game... but that's another problem. This game is so obscure that all the guides were written 20+ years ago and some of the information on them is incorrect. I could not find a comprehensive walkthrough that actually listed the things I needed to do in order. SOMEONE PLEASE STEP UP AND GIVE THIS GREAT GAME SOME LOVE BY TAKING THE TIME TO WRITE A MORE DETAILED WALKTHROUGH!!!!!

Despite some of the challenges, Dark Wizard is a great game and is unbelievably deep for something released on the SEGA CD! A single playthrough will take you 40-60 hours and there are 4 vastly different campaigns. I would really recommend any advanced SRPG players to give this a look... but it may be difficult to actually play considering it has never been remade.