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Back in 1981, the original Wizardry, subtitled Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, was the first party-based CRPG. It was a hit both in the west and Japan, where it even had its own anime. The series it inspired has recently been revived, and the results are a bit of a mixed bag. There’s a faithful remake of the original, sure. There’s also a blockchain abomination with Minecraft-looking characters, who are also NFTs.
And there’s a gacha game. Wizardry Variants Daphne, originally released on mobile and now available on Steam, plays like an OG dungeon-crawl blobber. It’s first-person with grid-based movement, your entire party traveling with you in a blob as you explore dungeons full of hobgoblins and open trapped treasure chests. But among the things you collect in those dungeons are the bones of lost adventurers you can revive, and who come from a random selection complete with rarity tiers. Also there are about a dozen currencies, and season passes.
The dungeon crawling part is fine. There’s a story, with voice actors like Doug Cockle from The Witcher doing their best, that’s all about a missing king and the Lord of the Abyss. But mostly it’s about clicking on goblins and casting spells with names like MASOLOTU.
You do get to see your party members as they attack, and when they do a cool hair-flick walk after each victory, and a bunch of them look like they stepped out of Genshin Impact. (I mean early Genshin Impact, not whatever this is.)
While I’m sure someone out there has already spent $500 trying to pull some obscene catgirl monstrosity, playing for free seems easy enough. Though there is an energy mechanic called Fortitude, and if you try to revive someone with less than 50 Fortitude twice there’s a chance they’ll die permanently. Which frankly is less punishing than the original game, where dead characters could turn to ash if resurrection went wrong, and which overwrote your save automatically so you couldn’t go back and try again.
The aforementioned anime is probably a better way to get your nostalgia fix. A lot of it comes directly from the game, like the adventurers hanging out in Gilgamesh’s tavern, a villain called Werdna with a magic amulet and a vampire lord sidekick, a dungeon elevator for travel between floors, and so on. Looking back, it’s easy to see how influential Wizardry was on both the CRPGs and JRPGs that came later—as well as on Delicious in Dungeon.
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Kurt Indovina
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