Character creation
Welcome to
Wizardry I-II-III: Story of Llylgamyn, a SNES remake of the first three Wizardry games featuring much better graphics yet the same old gameplay -- a happy combination. Presumably, it also has the option of importing the party to the next scenario, although I haven't yet tested it out, having only played the DOS version previously.
Naturally, we start with Wizardry I.
The remake is originally in Japanese, but we set everything to English as well as apply the
translation patch. I can only hope there are no game-breaking bugs or anything.
At the start, only
Gilgamesh's Tavern and
Edge of Town are available. The tavern lets you add existing characters to the party and inspect them, but we haven't created any characters yet, so we must go to the Edge of Town first...
...and from there, to
Training Grounds.
Here, all the options are probably self-explanatory except for
Change class. The thing is, when and if a character meets a number of specific stat requirements, he can change his class to any other. Doing so inflicts some penalties...
- You incur a four to seven year age penalty. This is to reflect the fact that you have to retrain in your new profession and it takes some time to untrain you from your other one.
- All of your stats go back to the base stats according to your character's race.
- You lose all experience points and start at zero again.
- You retain all of your hit points previously earned but you go back to level one again.
- If have a character that used some kind of magic, then you receive one spell point per spell that is in your character's books. For example, if you convert from a cleric to a fighter and you knew all spells up to fourth level, then your spell points would be 5/4/4/4.
- If a character changes from a magic using character into a non-magic using character, they may still learn spells. This will happen if they know at least one spell in a level. They will eventually learn the other spells and also raise their spell points accordingly.
...but also allows you to preserve your HP and some of the spells, which can be neat.
As was said earlier, there are 8 classes and 5 races to choose from.
Every race has the basic set of attributes a character from that race starts with:
And every class has its own attribute requirements (which are at the same time the requirements for a class change):
In the SNES version, Wizards are called Bishops and Clerics are called Priests, but all the attribute requirements and base attributes remain the same.
Fighters, Priests, Thieves, and Mages are the basic classes.
Whereas the Bishops, Ninjas, Lord, and Samurai are the elite. (I'm posting the C64 manual stuff since it has the name class names as the SNES version.)
The party I'll be using will be, of course, an
evil game developer party consisting of 2 Fighters, a Thief, a Mage, a Priest, and a Bishop (since only Bishops can identify items). Let's create the first character now.
That'd be me!
Pete and Todd will be a pair of brawny dwarven Fighters merrily killing things together.
After choosing the race and alignment, we roll for the amount of
bonus points you can add to the base attributes, ranging from 0 to 25.
Pete's bonus points are appropriately
popamole, of course. Rolling 25 takes some time, so you can imagine I spent lots of it staring at the character creation screen and re-rolling.
We max out Pete's Strength and Vitality; as a Fighter, he's going to need them.
Todd comes next.
Sup, guys.
I wasn't able to roll the popamole in Todd's case, so he'll have to do with 19 bonus points.
Not fair. *makes a sad face*
At least my Max HP's better than Pete's! And I'm one year older! I'm the boss! *giggles*
Gaider's next.
Gaider the evil Hobbit.
Gaider will be a Thief who'll later change into a Ninja assassin.
But... but... I wanted to be an
elven assassin!
*rolls eyes*
Dave, it's cool, man. You'll get to be a ninja anyway. Just think of that!
I... I think it's alright.
My turn!
Laidlaw will, of course, be responsible for making awesome things happen.
Aaah. Just my specialty. How thoughtful of you.
In other words, he'll be the party's Mage.
2 HP? This is an outrage!
..........
There's no such thing as good and evil, Josh.
So why are you evil then, MCA-sensei?
..........
(Was that a... smile on his face?)
MCA's the Bishop, of course, the only elite class in our party currently.
His HP is kind of low, but it'll improve as he levels up.
Hello.
Sawyer's gonna be the Priest, an apprentice to MCA the Bishop.
He's an Elf because Elves have higher base Int and, if need be, he'll be easily able to switch to a Bishop later.
The party is ready. Well, almost ready...
Gotta buy some gear first.
A Staff of Awesomeness!
A long sword to be killing things with!
A shiny mail to look cool in!
A horse to ride around on!
An assassin's dagger!
..........
And some guns. Hey, Underlord. This game of yours... it has guns, right?
Sorry, I'm afraid you forgot to buy the Gun Runner's Arsenal DLC for only $3,99. And it's too late now. *smirks*
But we've got flails. You'll like those. *smirks again*
We don't have much money, though. More gold wouldn't hurt.
I love gold!
So do I! We have lots of gold at Bethesda.
Is there perhaps a money exploit in this game, as in every other RPG out there?
Sure. But I'll leave it to you to figure it out.
Next time: the first floor.
The first proper update will probably come in a couple of days. I've got some other things to take care of first.
One more thing about class switching. Since we're
playing LARPing an evil party, we normally shouldn't be able to have a Lord or a Samurai. There are some exploits to get around that, but it doesn't really matter; Ninja is the most awesome class of all anyway. Plus I'm still not sure what works and what doesn't in the SNES version, and how quick is your alignment to change from killing/not killing friendlies. Still, I'll be taking suggestions. So if at some point you think it'd be a good thing to turn Todd into, say, a Priest, go ahead and say so.
The time of great classic CRPG crawling has returned to the Playground. Between this and Disciples, this is gonna be a good end of the year.
