So I've been replaying WoX for the first time in a little over a decade (I believe this is my fourth playthrough overall, discounting incomplete starts). I'm roughly 2/3 of the way through Clouds, and I have barely touched Darkside at all, so I still have quite a way to go.
Some thoughts:
-Red Dwarf Mines aren't as bad as I remembered. They're definitely the weakest dungeon in terms of design/layout/art, but it's also much more apparent to me that you're meant to come and go while exploring the overworld, and not just bruteforce your way through the deep mines.
-Exploration remains a genre-high for me. Few games can rival WoX's sense of grandeur and openness. It's legitimately exciting to gain new traversal skills/spells, and the game never holds you by the hand to show you where you can go and what you can do. Unfortunately, even 10+ years after playing the game, meta-knowledge does dampen this (which brings me to the next point).
-Going to Darkside early completely breaks Clouds, much more so than I remembered. Getting 100,000 xp from a fucking copy-protection puzzle (potentially at level 1) just utterly trivializes the first 1/3 of Clouds. Same with getting mountaineering, swimming, or pathfinding at level 1. I get that they were trying to allow players who bought V but not IV a chance to skill up, but the implementation leaves much to be desired.
-I forgot how many spells serve utilitarian/traversal purposes. Levitate, Jump, Walk on Water, teleport, etc.; the spellbook is very PNP DND, and that's awesome, more games should learn from this.
-The UI, although inarguably ahead of its time, leaves something to be desired. I think a lot of the time that people are singing the praises of WoX's UI, what they really mean is that it has an excellent control scheme and a slightly better than average UI. The game plays very fluidly (especially with a numpad) once you know all the keyboard shortcuts, but the actual UI elements outside of the animated gargoyles (the item menu, the unannotatable map, the awful char gen/party deletion at NG) are cumbersome as fuck. Ultima Underworld had an overall superior UI IMO (I know the'yre different kinds of games).
-Combat remains as underwhelming as always. It's fast, so it's completely tolerable, but as a result some of the more combat heavy dungeons encourage cheesey behavior (rest-spam, Lloyd's Beacon spam) a bit much for my taste. Of particular note are the dungeons which inflict the insane status (which I forgot was uncurable outside of temples before Mandate of Heaven). It's not rage-inducing, but it is tedious.
-General obfuscation of stats. I know, I know, I can go to the smith and identify items, or I can learn the identify monster spell, and it's a cool nod to PNP roots, but in practice it's just not fun in a crpg. I want to be able to make quick and concise decisions about the optimal course of action/equipment and not waste time casting spells. Maybe I've just gotten acclimated to the popamole tendencies of the modern world, but I don't think so; WoX is basically the popamole of its era after all.
I'm excited to get to Darkside, which from memory is largely a straight-up improvement over Clouds in terms of content. Currently in Clouds I have the Northern Sphinx, Darzog's Tower, the Volcano, and the Golem Dungeon all open to me, so I'm not too far from getting into the good stuff. I'll try and weigh in with thoughts again after another 20 hours.
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