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

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Thac0

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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.
 

aweigh

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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 ^_^
 
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Thac0

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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.

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.
 
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Thac0

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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.
 

Dorarnae

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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.
 

Empary

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

Matador

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HOW TO MAKE WIZARDRY 7 FASTER, I"M LOSING MY MIND OFFER 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.
 

Matador

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Unparalleled dumbing down and destroying multiclassing is your dream about party building? OK. Wiz 8 is a clear decline in party building compare to any entry on the series.

Destroying the shitty "multiclassing" was a good thing. I can only speak for Wiz 6-7, but those games don't even have party building or class systems, and neither do they have multiclassing. They have checklists. No matter what you pick at the start, you then proceed to ride the class switch rollercoaster until you have six fightermagethieves with 100 in all the relevant skills, and finally settle for a class that has access to whatever OP gear you have at hand. You can play those games ten times and you'll end up with the same characters. You can play Wiz8 ten times and you'll always end up with something different.

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

General RPG Wizardry Thread in a nutshell.
 

Dorarnae

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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.
 

Ventidius

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After watching that I'm even more hyped for this game. Really digging the way the enemies "wobble", seems like a great compromise between slower fully-rendered enemy models and the faster but less life-like static sprites that Wiz-likes typically use.
 

Dorarnae

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yeah it looks good overall, I am maybe just a bit worried about the music, I get the feeling it won't be as good as labyrinth cross blood or stranger of sword city.
 
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Thac0

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Call me a casual but hidden doors are the bane of my existance.
They are good map design when you can spot them purely by looking at the uncovered map and a pleasant surprise when you stumble across them randomly, but when you need to brute force your head against every square to hunt for them or consult a guide because story progression is locked behind a secret door thats bad design.

Holy shit that passage at 25 minutes+ looks somewhat frustrating but probably palatable as the level makes it very clear that there could be secret doors here everywhere.
 

Matador

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Call me a casual but hidden doors are the bane of my existance.
They are good map design when you can spot them purely by looking at the uncovered map and a pleasant surprise when you stumble across them randomly, but when you need to brute force your head against every square to hunt for them or consult a guide because story progression is locked behind a secret door thats bad design.

Holy shit that passage at 25 minutes+ looks somewhat frustrating but probably palatable as the level makes it very clear that there could be secret doors here everywhere.

In Wizardry 1-3 you just needed to expend resources to see them. Casting Milwa or Lomilwa spell.

I think that was good design. Bumping into them also worked.
 
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Thac0

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Call me a casual but hidden doors are the bane of my existance.
They are good map design when you can spot them purely by looking at the uncovered map and a pleasant surprise when you stumble across them randomly, but when you need to brute force your head against every square to hunt for them or consult a guide because story progression is locked behind a secret door thats bad design.

Holy shit that passage at 25 minutes+ looks somewhat frustrating but probably palatable as the level makes it very clear that there could be secret doors here everywhere.

In Wizardry 1-3 you just needed to expend resources to see them. Casting Milwa or Lomilwa spell.

I think that was good design. Bumping into them also worked.

At that point secret doors pretty much become a class feature of the priest, which is also fine for me. As long as you dont put story progression behind them, because that makes parties without a priest miserable on the first run (then again, who runs Wizardry without divine spells?)
 

Casual Hero

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Man, the Japanese give Wizardry the justice it deserves. I'm doing a deep dive looking through old Japanese fan-sites (using Google Translate) and forums dedicated to Wizardry, and it provides some really cool perspectives that I never thought about.
Tbh, they are more incline than the Codex on most days.
SMISxxw.png
 
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Thac0

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All JRPGs are in some way descendants of either Ultima or Wizardry.



This guy makes an imo excellent write up on the historical origin of the JRPG, even if his final point is a bit thin.
Dragon Warrior/Quest and Final Fantasy take directly after Ultima, Wizardry likes are still alive today.

I think this, together with the absence of World of Warcraft in the east, is the reason they never had an rpg decline like the west.
 

Viata

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Man, the Japanese give Wizardry the justice it deserves. I'm doing a deep dive looking through old Japanese fan-sites (using Google Translate) and forums dedicated to Wizardry, and it provides some really cool perspectives that I never thought about.
Tbh, they are more incline than the Codex on most days.
SMISxxw.png
Enjoy: https://archive.org/search.php?quer...atype:"texts"&and[]=languageSorter:"Japanese"
In fact, look at this beautiful motherfucker:
https://archive.org/stream/wizardrysatpages72dpi/WizardrySAT_Pages_300dpi#mode/2up
 

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