Wizardry Long Live Wizardry! (And The All-New Games By Ex-Wizardry Developers) - UPDATED: MARCH/07/2016

was trying some hdmi cable for my psp...forgot how dark elminage gothic is on psp, can't see shit...

 

I have Stranger in the Sword City at 5 hours now. I am glad I didnt review this sooner, as the review would have been scathing. The tutorial was awfull and the layout of M.O. Metal was cancer. Also people talk way too much.
But the longer I played the game just kept piling on mechanics which make sense for a game of this type, until it became fun. Lineage Crystal hunting and a Visual Novel Dating Simulator (?!) are as good a reason as any to delve into labyrinths. I really like hunting the lineage type monsters, as it allows a more open structure where you have a choice of different labyrinths to tackle all of the time. Ambushing and mimic rerolling as a loot progression is neat aswell, especially as it makes chests and traps a lot more meaningfull.
The labyrinths got better aswell, although there were still some questionable layouts. Who uses spinners in a game with auto mapping? That is just frustrating. And on the main path you have to take half a dozen times before the first warp stone no less. Also there is six of them.
The art is really good on type a and atrocious on type b. Nice of the game to let me choose, as I think type B is the newer "updated" art.
Combat is formulaic up to now, but not unfun. I just tend to do the same thing every combat and it works.
Class system is a lot more basic than Elminage, but the life point system makes for a better revival system. It forced me to change up my group quite a bit already and keep rotating units occassionally, which adds some meaning to the shallow classes.
Its alright, I still like Elminage a lot more tho. And the tutorial is really annoying and takes 2-3 hours easily.

 

To round up the trio of recomendations I got, I will review Operation Abyss at 2-3 hours now, since the game hasnt done anything new in a while and I am fairly certain it is done with introducing its mechanics.
To start with the good, this is the fastest of the three games. Holding input speeds up everything to ridiculous degrees, you breeze by battles in seconds, you can do the same for the dialogue. You will need this feature, there are a lot of battles in this. The encounter rate isnt super high, but enemies love to chain encounter you. I already had a 6 encounter chain in the first real dungeon.
The Ui is a bit ugly but slick and fast.
Enemy designs are absolutely amazing, there are rabbits which are slurping juice from a cut of foot with a straw as random ecnounters. Higher level rabbits have the foot be in a fancy shoe and they have a knife in their mouth. The hobtroll is a fatty in a pink sweatsuit. Its so gross and so weird, I dig it.

The coolest feature this has are the classes, they are based on the bloodlines of historic personalities. My Knight has blood from Siegfried Drachentöter and Jeanne d'Arc, my Alchemist has blood of Da Vinci. Apart from the fluff the classes are robust, but there is no incentive to multiclass and no incentive to put a mage in the front lines afaik. This means my party of 3 melees 1 archer and 2 casters plays a little binary. The Alchemist in this game is the class that does secret door spotting, chest defusing etc, so he is must have.

Neutral is the character creation. The game features a robust visual customisation system with loads of options, but most of them are ugly. I had to spam random and do some fixing for minutes per character to get a team that mostly doenst look like inbred
mongrels. But all equipment shows up visuallly on characters which is a really cool feature. Since this game is japanese however most gear will make your female fighters look like sluts. This together with the highly weeb artstyle will probably be a dealbreaker for all who are not weeb trash.
Neutral aswell was the labyrinth layout. Very much copy and paste, but it has teleporters, spinners, dark areas etc without abusing any of them in an annoying way. Mostly unexciting.

What annoyed me is how easy this game is. Random encounters in the dungeon pose no threat to you. This game is so tame I literally did not spend gold to heal yet. Leveling up for 1 gp per level at full xp is completely enough to keep your party alive, since even a front liner will only be hit 2-4 times for 8-12 damage with 100 hp in a level up worths of xp trash mobs.

Overall it is good for idling while listening to a podcast or sth. The game can be resolved super fast and doesnt really need your attention. That is not really what I am searching for in a blobber but it is fine for what it is. The OST is good, as is for most JRPGs, but not good enough for me to keep the sound on.

And the Oscar goes tooo...
Eminage Gothic is the game I will be playing the next few weeks with SotsC thrown in when I have a craving for weeb shit. I will keep this on the hard drive when I want to play something while hearing a particularily boring zoom lecture.

 

Yeah the Operation Abyss remake was made easier. You can check out the original Generation Xth: Code Hazard on PC with english fan-translation instead and have a better time, though unfortunately the 2nd part was never translated and is only available via the Remake.

Elminage and SotC are way better anyway, regardless of which version we're talking about ^_^

 

Judging from Screenshots the original game is much prettier aswell. Idk what went wrong there. But it wasnt good enough to truly bother, especially as I have Etrian Odyssey Nexus and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey still uncompleted as excellent anime blobbers.


At 10 hours in Elminage Gothic I reached the second big dungeon in the Grotto. The first random encounter in there is 2 Lizardmen and 3 Missionaries which immediatly made me their bitch. How good it feels to play a hard RPG again. I survived by the skin of my teeth and spent all my gold to ressurect. Also my Flamberge broke on my first time using it and repairing it is an insane 11000 gp. But I managed to recruit one of those Lizardmen next to my Orc summon, which has served me excellently in the Caves, so now the second dungeon is my bitch.

I am a bit disappointed the shop inventory didnt expand. I expected there to be new merchandise after unlocking each new dungeon so GP keeps its meaning and I could at least buy chainmail equipment for all of my frontline. Best system I have seen by far here is Etrian Odyssey, but this game seems to have much more emphasis on chest loot. Alchemy is still cool, my Fighter reached AC 0 by now with Devils Iron upgrades. Also in a few levels he will satisfy the stats for Samurai, pretty excited for that. I turned my Servant into a cleric, Servant seems to be much better as a finishing class since it passes nothing on with multiclassing.

Renaming Spells is a wonderfull feature that not enough games have. I renamed all spells to the german naming scheme for Final Fantasy spells since that on is familiar to me and always evokes Nostalgia. Feira > Vita, Feirima > Vitra, Balad > Feuer, Balados > Feura and so on.

This game just keeps on being excellent, that 62% approval on Steam is a crime.

 

etrian odyssey nexus... ugh I think it's the worst etrian in the series

 

I have played only 4,5 and Nexus up to now. From those I like Nexus the most. 19 classes instead of 7-10, an insane amount of content and force and break is good. But I can see why a purely best of/mashup game would be disappointing for someone who has played all games in the series.

 

it's more how each class complement each other is kinda boring, the sub class thing was not necessary. and some force/break are kinda broken.
but I think what I hate the most is how many floors/dungeon there is, I don't find the dungeon design in etrian to be very exciting. With previous game, 25-30 floors was ok but in this one about 60 floors? I just wanted it to end at one point.
also dragon respawn after a number of step was dumb, you just had to find a room with no encounter and walk around...
game felt like a cash grab to me.

 

HOW TO MAKE WIZARDRY 7 FASTER, I"M LOSING MY MIND OVER THIS SLOW-ASS JANK

 

Truth, for me is its main flaw. The combat is good itself but the controls are horrific.

Imagine a Wiz. 7 remake like the SNES Wiz. 6 one.

 

Do you run it in DosBox? You can change the cycle speed in DosBox. This makes games faster but absolutely shredders the audio. Came across this by accident when Darklands or Albion launched itself on triple speed by default.

https://www.dosgamers.com/dos/dosbox-dos-emulator/game-speed

 

Turn off the music and sound in-game. It will get rid of that 10 second fanfare at the start of battles and NPC encounters.

 

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-wizardry-series-thread.80585/page-283#post-6718939

General RPG Wizardry Thread in a nutshell.

 

finished Class of heroes 1 main quest today. entering each character commands during combat is slow....that game should of never been done, wizardry xth 2 is superior. considering that CoH use the same maps and other things, they did a lazy job with the game.