The magic torches are lit, the monsters are ravenous, and the kingdom is waiting for a new hero. Experience the legendary Wizardry series’ modern rebirth as you traverse perilous dungeons and take on hordes of fantastic enemies. Are you up to the challenge?
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Probably the worst Wizardry clone on the market.
play off and on, ran into some crashes which lost progress, so game on pause.
By far the worst first person dungeon crawler I have played. It keeps the most tedious and frustrating aspects of these games without any of the parts that make them interesting. It's so much worse and with fewer QOL features and character customization options than Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land, which came out 10 years before this!
Beat this back on the PS3, but ended up getting a copy on Steam to give it another go. This game does not live up to repeat playthroughs (at least for me). It's very bare bones in its nature and you find out quickly that the simplest solutions to problems is often brute force tactics. I don't mean to just attack over and over with characters, though.
You'll notice shortly after you get through making your party (the usual rigamarole of rerolling until you get the bonus points you like, only with the complication of not knowing what stats are needed to choose particular classes) that you're way too poor to afford anything. The good news? You don't need 90% of it. Buy your top floor maps, buy some vulneraries just for the beginning, and then gain a few levels.
Sooner or later, you start picking up equipment with your levels and (assuming you started with a Bishop) you'll be pooling in money that you COULD spend on other stuff...or you could just save in case you really need it. For my party, I bought one katana and one claymore after a time and never spent another dime on anything other than resting at the inn or reviving characters.
If you keep saving money, you can burn that money at the temple with the "Tithe" command to get EXP instead. Those levels will come nicely early on and you'll be smashing enemies left and right while making headway in the dungeons as you figure out the intricacies of each level.
And then the monsters finally stop playing around. This starts probably around Shiin's Dungeon Level 4 with Dark Crusaders. If you brought a Bishop with you and you're high enough to have learned Magic Wall, fights are still pretty manageable. Without Magic Wall, you'll learn very quickly how susceptible you are to a lot of problems, be it status effects or just mass damage spells coming through unblocked.
Thankfully, you can save at any time -- though there's only one save slot, so be careful that you don't inadvertently save after your healer bites it if you want to explore (or worse, lose your mage too and have to walk back out). This means that if you do end up in a bad scenario, just close your game and reopen it (really useful on later floors when the enemies might be worth the experience but not worth the hassle that comes with them). You can also just run but later floors have enemies that will often make running an absolute chore, so you might end up doing a mixture of these tactics to make forward progress.
And that's the brute force -- slogging through fights after practically every doorway you pass through, resetting until you don't get annihilated on the lower floors while you try to complete the story. Advice for completing the story: just check GameFAQs because depending on when you initiate certain quests, the main story will open up for you well after you've already made progress beyond the floors you needed to be on for earlier portions of the story.
There's no markers or indicators as to where you need to be going for each aspect of the story quest beyond knowing which floor to go to for the first two story quests. The final quest has you hit certain places on the third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and tenth floors of Shiin's Dungeon, I believe. I didn't even activate that quest until I had already mapped the first eight floors, so without any indicators, my choices were an FAQ or simply retreading EVERY SINGLE STEP of each floor of those dungeons until you run into the next flag for the quest.
There are two different final bosses you can fight in Shiin's Dungeon (the Dungeon of Trials that acts as a companion has no final boss normally) for the main quest, but with only one save slot, that means you need to do a runthrough at least twice to see both fights unless you can manage to hit all those flags I mentioned in ONE shot and beat the boss in one try. Otherwise, any save after you hit the first flag(s) in the last story quest locks you into a specific final boss based on the choices you made prior to saving.
It's not a bad game, but it's a lot of sideways design decisions that will make you raise an eyebrow a few times and it wears its late-80's/early-90's mask poorly, as you can see lots of cases where it's simply going through the motions of trying to replicate that old-school feel and instead just creating frustration without warrant.
I still had fun, though...and I completed Human Female's Scenario (in order to "beat the game", you have to complete every race/gender combinations' scenarios...good luck).
Get it on sale if you're digging for a dungeon crawler on Steam. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better.
You'll notice shortly after you get through making your party (the usual rigamarole of rerolling until you get the bonus points you like, only with the complication of not knowing what stats are needed to choose particular classes) that you're way too poor to afford anything. The good news? You don't need 90% of it. Buy your top floor maps, buy some vulneraries just for the beginning, and then gain a few levels.
Sooner or later, you start picking up equipment with your levels and (assuming you started with a Bishop) you'll be pooling in money that you COULD spend on other stuff...or you could just save in case you really need it. For my party, I bought one katana and one claymore after a time and never spent another dime on anything other than resting at the inn or reviving characters.
If you keep saving money, you can burn that money at the temple with the "Tithe" command to get EXP instead. Those levels will come nicely early on and you'll be smashing enemies left and right while making headway in the dungeons as you figure out the intricacies of each level.
And then the monsters finally stop playing around. This starts probably around Shiin's Dungeon Level 4 with Dark Crusaders. If you brought a Bishop with you and you're high enough to have learned Magic Wall, fights are still pretty manageable. Without Magic Wall, you'll learn very quickly how susceptible you are to a lot of problems, be it status effects or just mass damage spells coming through unblocked.
Thankfully, you can save at any time -- though there's only one save slot, so be careful that you don't inadvertently save after your healer bites it if you want to explore (or worse, lose your mage too and have to walk back out). This means that if you do end up in a bad scenario, just close your game and reopen it (really useful on later floors when the enemies might be worth the experience but not worth the hassle that comes with them). You can also just run but later floors have enemies that will often make running an absolute chore, so you might end up doing a mixture of these tactics to make forward progress.
And that's the brute force -- slogging through fights after practically every doorway you pass through, resetting until you don't get annihilated on the lower floors while you try to complete the story. Advice for completing the story: just check GameFAQs because depending on when you initiate certain quests, the main story will open up for you well after you've already made progress beyond the floors you needed to be on for earlier portions of the story.
There's no markers or indicators as to where you need to be going for each aspect of the story quest beyond knowing which floor to go to for the first two story quests. The final quest has you hit certain places on the third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and tenth floors of Shiin's Dungeon, I believe. I didn't even activate that quest until I had already mapped the first eight floors, so without any indicators, my choices were an FAQ or simply retreading EVERY SINGLE STEP of each floor of those dungeons until you run into the next flag for the quest.
There are two different final bosses you can fight in Shiin's Dungeon (the Dungeon of Trials that acts as a companion has no final boss normally) for the main quest, but with only one save slot, that means you need to do a runthrough at least twice to see both fights unless you can manage to hit all those flags I mentioned in ONE shot and beat the boss in one try. Otherwise, any save after you hit the first flag(s) in the last story quest locks you into a specific final boss based on the choices you made prior to saving.
It's not a bad game, but it's a lot of sideways design decisions that will make you raise an eyebrow a few times and it wears its late-80's/early-90's mask poorly, as you can see lots of cases where it's simply going through the motions of trying to replicate that old-school feel and instead just creating frustration without warrant.
I still had fun, though...and I completed Human Female's Scenario (in order to "beat the game", you have to complete every race/gender combinations' scenarios...good luck).
Get it on sale if you're digging for a dungeon crawler on Steam. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better.