Wizardry Long Live Wizardry! (And The All-New Games By Ex-Wizardry Developers)

[Celerity]

...You were level 7 on the 5th floor? Well shit, no wonder you're getting rekt. I got about that high on the second... not grinding either, just mapping the entire thing and killing anything that got in my way.

Large enemy groups are a thing in a lot of the older games and anything based on them. Dark Spire loved 4x9 encounters. Of course if you knew that you just made literally everyone in your party half Mage (Samurai, Druid...) and spammed AoE spells.

 

[aweigh]

no, i mean b7f of course.

 

[Celerity]

Oh. Nevermind. Well the fountain still negates a lot of the surprise fuck yous. I've never seen a res from it fail, it doesn't cost Vit either.

 

[aweigh]

what courtier says about elminage expanding on the formula is so true. a big part of the reason i have liked wiz 5 so much is because it is mechanically closest to the near perfection found in Starfish's elminage and wizardry empire games.

those japs found all of the best ways possible to expand on the almost 30+ year old mechanics from wizardries 1 through 5, cherry-pick the best bits from wizardry 6 and 7 and seamlessly insert their own innovations into the wizardry classic formula.

i'm still waiting for computer parts to arrive so i haven't had a chance to resume any of the games i was playing; atm i'm using an old laptop and i can't connect my keyboard to it as the keyboard is ps/2 and i don't enjoy using the laptop's keyboard for gaming.

btw, the odin sword is the best sword in wizardry 5, a drop only equippable by a lord class. it's quite incredible how dedicated these japanese devs are to preserving the wizardry heritage. i love it. it feels very rewarding to go backwards through the catalog.

one of the main things that kept me from ranking elminage: original anywhere near gothic were the drops. by the time i reached the dragon's fang dungeon, which is the last story dungeon, i was still using the helm splitter sword(s). perhaps i was simply unlucky with the drops. i've been itching to replay elminage: original lately.

wizardry empires 2 feels and plays great. i managed to map out the three floors of the grotto but i couldn't continue due to the untranslated door-riddles. it's basically proto-Elminage. hell, they even use the same undead monsters sprites that are used in elminage! talk about recycling art assets. starfish wizardry fans been beating up the same zombie sprites for 15 years hehe.

right now i would say the best wizardry games are the elminage series of games, seconded by wizardry 3 and wizardry 5.

wizardry 5 is the pinnacle of classic wizardry and the closest thing you'll find to a Starfish-like wizardry gaming experience, while wizardry 3 is simply wizardry 1 + 2 rolled up into one game with massively better dungeons. i've yet to play through wizardry 7 but wizardry 6 was pretty good as it still maintained somewhat similar dungeon design philosophy but with the added crap Bradley threw in; as for wizardry 8 i don't think i can ever go back to it and honestly enjoy it ever again. it's so ass-backwards primitive and casual to me now. wizardry 8 is even less mechanically complex than wizardry 6!

i'm hoping 7 will be closer to 6 than to 8, but i don't see myself playing it until well after i've played through even the game boy wizardries.

 

[Celerity]

Seems like Elminage and the other recent ones have really stingy droprates. Like 1% of anything you actually want, rest junk.

I remember the best being Muramasa, though both were similar power.

 

[aweigh]

btw, what company was it that made the generation XTH: code hazard game? that's another playthrough left hanging... if for whatever reason the HDD doesn't work on the new mobo (don't see any reason why it shouldn't but you never know) i don't think i have the will-power to start it up again.

is it the same company that made class of heroes? kadokawa? i enjoyed all that i played of Code Hazard a LOT but the over-reliance on the crafting which can only be done back at the base really snowballed until i found myself spending half of my play time sorting through crap and crafting crap so i could then craft the next tier of crap. yes the system is very enjoyable but... jesus christ it's made for autists. i'd rather spend my time inside a dungeon than wading through menus for 20 minutes every time i return back to base.

i haven't played CoH 1, only CoH 2, but if it's the same company as Generation XTH i hope they return to the more classic wizardry formula: CoH 2 has vastly improved crafting but vastly inferior dungeon design and battle system. IMO of course. the game is still GOOD. ironically even though i prefer Generation XTH to CoH 2 i'd probably start over CoH 2 before i start over GXTH: CH simply because you spend more time dungeon delving than menu-wading.

 

[Courtier]

Team Muramasa. Their games:

If you want really low treasure-to-junk ratio, play the PS3 games. In Elminage drops are drawn from tables per area, which are divided into common and rare items. You randomly get a few from either, mostly common. Something to note is that in Original, every loop (playthrough) the rare item drop rate increases, and in Gothic you can increase it with the Hero's Book of Secrets (defeat every Floor Master*).

*Except the last one
Edit: To clarify, Team Muramasa is a department of Experience inc.

 

[aweigh]

well, celerity, one curious thing about elminage: gothic is that it's really two games in one. there's the normal game and then there's ibag's tower.

ibag's tower will EASILY take 50-100 hours of play time to complete which is like 1.5x the time it'll take you to finish the story dungeons and the two post-game dungeons combined.

by the time you reach ibag's tower your party will probably be around levels 70-100 depending on how much you grinded, but you'll end up around level 250-300 when you finish judging from Courtier's party and from my own floor 10 party.

also another "funny" thing is that half (if not more!) of the entire drop table of gear in elminage: gothic is found inside ibag's tower. while it absolutely 100% has a LOT more gear for every class and race than elminage: original during the story dungeons and that is indisputable you won't find even half of the possible equipment for most classes until you start the first of the post-game dungeons, the cave of the ancient soldier.

that's when they REALLY kick shit into high gear. the dungeons get bigger (although still restricted to 20x20 per screen, unfortunately) and they get trickier and longer and the enemies change completely and get smarter and the drops become better and more common. i remember the very first knee-jerk reaction i posted on the elminage: gothic thread once i reached the first post-game dungeon was simply that i was having way more fun with the game 100 hours in than i had ever had before and it still holds true for me.

the systems in elminage: gothic really come into their own in the post-game and in ibag's tower such as the ore smithing and enchanting and all of the crap you thought you wouldn't ever use, such as the ninja's unique skill to create a replica of himself that acts as a PC-controlled 7th party member or the possibility of changing the race of one of your characters to devilish to better employ the over-abundance of cursed gear found in the post-game; or how the valkyrie's class mastery ability of being able to equip a 2-handed spear in 1 hand bolsters her raw physical damage output to ridiculous levels, or how some classes that were lackluster in the normal dungeons suddenly become incredibly powerful in the post-game due to how the enemy A.I. changes (such as the Hunter). it is very rewarding for the player and the game feels ever-evolving.

(the Hunter's ability to attack before the enemy becomes one of the strongest class skills in ibag's tower since it is the only way to possibly eliminate an enemy before they insta-decapitate half your party in the opening round, and his pursuit ability which was merely a novelty before the post-game becomes a life-saver when you need to kill an enemy before they get a second or third round on you)

 

[aweigh]

yeah that type of loot-by-floor is present in all the wizardry games, except i think it's only "get drop or not-get-drop". that's one of the biggest things i realized i enjoyed about the elminage games, and subsequently from the wizardry games: that loot isn't tied to monsters, but to areas/floors. it's such a simple design decision that vastly improves on many of the jrpgish gripes one usually has with battling specific monsters over and over for a drop. it amazes me that this simple decision for itemization isn't utilized by other rpg's.

it also makes the player want to wade into every floor of every dungeon looking for those phat drops. ATM i don't have a ps3 to play LoLS but i will eventually. i'm literally planning on buying a used ps3 soon specifically to play LoLS. i haven't done something like that in years and years.

everything you've written about LoLS sounds great, especially what you wrote about the post game. sounds like everything i wished Tales of the Forsaken Land was.

as for the Muramasa studio: how many of their games can be played in english? gxth: code hazard for windows pc, demon gaze for the vita and operation abyss for the vita? from what i've read here on the codex though it sounds like both demon gaze and operation abyss were disappointing. have they fallen victim to the decline?

 

[Celerity]

Most of the true Wizardrys have loot by floor, with a few better loot tables on exceptionally hard enemies for the level. A lot of the remakes, like Forsaken Land do it by creature type. It's also based on individual creature, a Maelific drops better than a Greater Demon.

 

[Courtier]

LoLs is not all that deep unfortunately, just two ten-level dungeons without the DLC. Operation Abyss is indeed a little disappointing to me so far, because of some changes from GenXth (e.g. multiclassing taken out...), and arbitrary level cap.

I am replaying Demon Gaze right now and it is great. The Wiz mechanics are simplified, it's rather easy, but the game is very enjoyable overall. The characters are endearing and the story is good, you have to earn your party members one by one and the art/voice selection is great. It's just got a lot of charm to it. For example in story scenes, your party members are sometimes mentioned and described doing all sorts of stuff. You can check your characters' rooms at the inn and read a quip about them having a drink or reading a book or something, and there's lines for furniture you give them too. Fights are really quick, exploration is mach-7 speed. There are no teleport spells, but you can tap a square even several maps away(!), and you will autowalk towards it (taking event tiles/dark/one way corridors into account). No other crawlers I have played have had this feature - EO autowalk is just tedious symbol placement.

Half the game you can autobattle through, especially when you start to grind equipment and level up your gear, but there are sudden difficulty spikes at several points. Speaking of equipment enhancing, it's really rewarding. It's like the CoH/GenXth alchemy, but without needing to carry around a hundred different materials. You just throw another item of the same type in the blender, and use the essence to add some levels to your gear. You can only get new equipment (besides the base store inventory) from using gems at Demon Circles, which spawns an encounter of a difficulty depending on the gems used, giving you the same number in random gear. All of it is just really smooth and fun.

About fanservice: Most of the CG are completely optional, requiring you to tediously hunt dozens of McGuffins using treasure maps. Only a handful of pantsu are seen throughout the game and played for laughs, and it's not even close to Moero Chronicles/Dungeon Travelers level.

 

[Celerity]

Speaking of Elminage, I think I should pause and grind an Alchemist. I'm still early and I already see myself really benefiting from item crafting especially since I have 2 items that are not common vendor things, one is a 1 off 2 handed sword, and the other is random fire elemental shoes.

 

[Siveon]

I wanted to like Demon Gaze, but I just couldn't. Oddly enough for the reasons you mentioned. Encounters were shit, after about an hour or so you could just spam the auto button like nobody's business. Dungeon design just placed a bunch of damage tiles you had to constantly heal for (with a infinitely usable magic staff, that made it kinda pointless). Crafting can hardly be called crafting, and more like just mashing the same crap loot you get from the Demon Circles together. Which you would have to use to get any decent loot because you won't really find much just exploring. I think the only good portions was the boss battles, which are way too few and far between imo.

The story wasn't bad, but even Dungeon Travelers 2 had more witty writing. Ofc Demon Gaze wasn't DT2 in levels of fanservice (and had much much better monster design due to the fact some of it was lifted from earlier Experience/Muramasa games in the first place), but at least DT2 had more challenging encounters and actual character builds.

Even as a stripped down husk of its former self I found Operation Abyss to be more entertaining. The dungeons were still interesting to navigate, bullshit story prompts aside, and the crafting - while cumbersome with pointless restrictions, still had some depth to it. Okay, maybe not depth, but it was at least more than just adding +1's to your weapon. Hell, I think out of all the Vita dungeon crawls, DT2 might come out on top (for now) for not having pointless crafting in the first place. Good 'ol fashioned unidentified loot, just the way I like it (granted, DG has that too, but most of 'em come from those Demon Circles anyway). And the difficulty is more evened out.

I'm not saying Demon Gaze is the shittiest Dungeon Crawl ever, no. It's just not mechanically interesting enough to keep my interest (stopped at 4 dungeons, with 2 of the bosses killed). You guys really want to make me grind my teeth on Elminage Gothic, though.

 

[Dorarnae]

elminage <3

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

I might be wrong but it seems that nobody mentioned the first two Megami Tensei Games (before Shin) and their SNES remake Kyūyaku Megami Tensei which is available in English. I didn't play the first two games but the remake seems to be as much of a dungeon crawler as the SMT games so I think it deserves a spot.

 

[Celerity]

Lightning Strike. Pursuit.

 

[aweigh]

siveon you should REALLY do yourself a favor and play elminage gothic. it'll hook you worse than heroin. i appreciate the game more and more as time passes; the dark and moody atmosphere and the sparse dialog and NPCs have really grown on me. i really like that it doesn't have any lulz stuff in it like other wizardry games (blade cuisinart's, ship in bottle, "moat monsters", horrible NPCs like Gobbledeegook, the laughing kettle, iron-nose, etc, etc). It's serious all the way through.

i have that initial playthrough paused in floor 10 of ibag's tower with around 200 hours clocked, maybe a few hours less than that, and a 2nd playthrough i started because i want to do a completionist run with 50 hours clocked. my 2nd playthrough party is/was all humans for maximum class-changing optimization, and unlike my first party i was re-rolling/re-loading every level-up for maximized HP gains so they're gonna be much better than the 1st party when they reach ibag's.

 

[aweigh]

so i've been sinking my teeth into the ps1 version of wiz5 and i gotta say it plays better than the snes version. the graphics are horrendous and the monster sprites are a crime against humanity but it features a lot of subtle interface tweaks that make playing it much more enjoyable such as being able to straf left and right and being able to cycle between party members while inside the menus.

the cursor memory is also much better and it even remembers per-character spell casting cursor placement outside of battle. mechanically i find the encounter rate more aggressive (you can even roll an encounter by just opening and exiting a menu window) and big group encounters seem more common than in the snes version, which is probably due to memory issues.

maps are the same as the snes version, which are the same as the ibm pc version. another major improvement is that the ps1 version features keyword-dialog with NPCs allowing you to select the keywords and asking the NPCs about the subject; the snes version merely spammed a wall-of-text on you when you selected "talk" with an NPC.

i've found that the NPC's in the ps1 version have MUCH more to say to the player and what they have to say is much more interesting. obviously this must be their unedited dialog in full. i've started to rethink my opinion on the wiz 5 npc's already as the snes version npc's seemed made absolutely no sense whatsoever with their cut dialog text.

the translation is also better as there is no nintendo of america editing present: items/weapons/gear's names are the same as in the ibm pc version and are not named in the silly manner they are in the snes version; other little details like the bottle of rum being titled as such, for example.

btw, the ps1 remakes of wiz 4 and wiz 5 (the new age of llylgamyn disc) was developed by what would later become Starfish studios. the first thing that made go look this up was the sound of a horse neighing wen you go to sleep in the stables!

tl;dr the wiz 5 ps1 version is the definitive one, aside from the original: but it features terrible low-poly dungeons and worse sprite-art than the snes version. i know, i know... the original was freaking white lines in comparison but bad aesthetics are bad aesthetics regardless.

edit: the wizardry 1-2-3 snes cartridge was developed 5 years AFTER the snes version of wizardry 5 was published and it was coded by an entirely different team which is why they're so faithful to the original versions as opposed to the liberties taken in translation with wiz 5. also that's why the wiz 1-2-3 snes cartridge features such amazing sprite art and such sleek menu interfaces as the cartridge was one of the last snes cartridges ever made.

the dungeon and monster sprite art in the snes wiz 1-2-3 remakes are just beautiful.

 

[aweigh]

hohoho one very very interesting tidbit i have just discovered that might please those pursuing a definitively authentic recreation of the first three wizardry games (and who doesn't want that eh)

unlike almost every single version of the games that have appeared on systems after the Apple II / C64 / IBM era which do not implement the original games' pseudo iron-man saving system (the games would save after every tile and there was only one save file); turns out the PS1 and Sega Saturn discs of "Age of Llylgamyn", which contain Wizardry 1-2-3 respectively, actually do this very same thing.

the PS1 / SS discs of "New Age of Llylgamyn", which caontain Wizardry 4-5, _do not_. the collections were made by different studios.

it's mostly a moot point anyway as anyone who plays these versions will be doing so on an emulator nowadays with the availability of save-states, and besides that the japs weren't THAT hard-core as the "Age of Llylgamyn" disc allows saving to the ps1/ss memory card so that kind of defeats the entire purpose anyway.

but of course any iron-man type of difficulty pretty much depends entirely on the willingness of the player to engage with its rules and challenges but i find this detail interesting nonetheless. even with the original versions on the Apple II and the IBM pc you could still save-scum to your heart's content using floppy's so whatever.

i found a forum called fullmotionvideo.free.fr with a sub-forum full of die-hard weeabos that are more monocled than your average weeabo: they collect and share PC-Engine / FM Towns / Japanese IBM PC / Japanese Windows PC emulators and games instead of playing such low-brow non-monocled stuff as dirty jap consoles; one of their dudes did a semi-complete translation patch on the Windows PC (japanese windows) version of the Age of Llylgamyn and New Age of Llylgamyn remakes (!).

don't get too excited though seems the japanese windows versions are inferior to the ps1/ss discs with the only notable improvements being double the resolution of the ps1/ss version (the japanese windows pc versions are rendered in 640x480 producing cleaner and crisper text and vastly superior sprite art) but that's pretty much it: the graphical viewport is only 1/4 of the screen and the soundtracks are horrible MIDI affairs that don't compare to either the PS1/ss orchestral arrangements or even to the SNES versions soundchip and according to the people in that forum seems like everybody who tried playtesting the english-patched ISO's reported repeatable corrupted saves. (corrupted saves in wizardry? uhhh no thanks).

there is also a sega saturn and a playstation 1 remake of Wizardry 7: crusaders of the dark savant for those curious, heh, and yeah it looks like ASS. no english translation unfortunately.

check this out:
IBM PC / Windows PC version of Wiz7

Sega Saturn version (who made the WISE decision to retain the 2D sprit art!!!!!!!!!!)

...and now, feast your eyeballs on the ps1 version done by yet another completely different studio than the two dev houses behind the previous llylgamyn discs... seriously i'm not kidding git ready for dis shit:





ready?




...ok

i told ya



what, you want more? jesus

 

[Dorarnae]

eventually I'll play Wizardry 7 on ps1 but right now I am playing elminage 3 (shouldn't be too hard/long because I can't resist breaking the game...).

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

You want some hardcore dungeon crawling, eh? Look what appeared in my mailbox the other day.

Spoiler

http://shinjuforest.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-corridors-of-carmine.html

Try not to shit your pants while playing this game. Also (unfortunately) PC-98 version is reported as 'unplayable' on emulators.

 

[aweigh]

holy shit that looks awesome. wat game is that

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

holy shit that looks awesome. wat game is that

According to youtube movies linked above it's called Carmine or Carmine 88.

BTW. You didn't comment on adding first 2 Megaten games (not SMT) and thier SNES remake to the list.

 

[Courtier]

eventually I'll play Wizardry 7 on ps1 but right now I am playing elminage 3 (shouldn't be too hard/long because I can't resist breaking the game...).

Dude, you're the man. You have no idea how much stuff I found out just by watching your videos, even before you had to change channels (?). It's part of what got me into Elminage and blobbers in general. Welcome to the Codex! We are one of the few bastions of DRPG lovers besides the Parakeetman threads on NeoFAG.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

holy shit that looks awesome. wat game is that

According to youtube movies linked above it's called Carmine or Carmine 88.

Indeed, that's Carmine.
PC-88 version is inferior in every possible way, but it has no emulation issues, so unless you want to play a game with borked graphics and broken hit detection, stick to Sharp X1/PC-88 version.
Unless you're ready to dive into Project EGG and pay some hard-earned cash for a downloadable version with a custom emulator.