only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

a lot of these types of things attempt to sell an experience on the back of ostensibly authentic history and context while hollowing out all the actual history and context, and the best thing I can say about this right off the bat is that it isn't that kind of cynical tourist trap

it's all built like scaffolding directly on top of the original guts and retains almost 1:1 faithfulness while including options to use the famicom maps, swap between several rulesets, or mix and match between them all modularly. you can have the closest approximation of the classic experience, play what's essentially a totally different game altogether, or cherrypick settings to fine tune everything to your personal taste. I think they cleaned up some unintended exploits like ID #9, and there're a few discrepancies with gold management and the combat log, but for the most part everything's as it oughta be while providing a ton of options for anyone who thinks it oughta be different

unfortunately the one exception's a big one: the T)ime function's been disabled completely, removing control over combat speed. this'd be a huge bummer under any circumstances, but when coupled with all the lengthy new combat animations it causes the game's pacing to be permanently stuck on Geological

the game's slow as fuck. you'll literally die of old age in real life faster than your characters will in game. iconic timesaving grinds like murphy's many ghosts and creeping coins become absolute slogs, and any encounter that's fully loaded (especially at low levels) is enough to turn you into a grandparent on the spot. thankfully there's a very dedicated freak on the steam forums who posts about it in every thread so I know the team's heard the criticism by now, but they've already confirmed it won't be solved in 1.0, soo... <throws hands in the air confoundedly>

I also have some minor misgivings about the UI and portraits, but whatever. it doesn't stack up to the apple II's haunted wireframes or the more lavish spritework of the famicom or PSX versions, but it's fine. the soundtrack adds an awful lot to the atmosphere, and the balance between gloomy + goofy is spot on, so it's hard to complain too much. much as I like the more luxuriously gothic interpretations of the series, it's nice to remember wizardry's always been real silly

all in all it's a solid update to what's almost certainly the most important rpg ever made, but until T)ime or an option to disable animations is patched in I can't recommend it quite as strongly as I'd like. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't show up for their rendition of Knight of Diamonds regardless, but I'd have to make sure my living will was in order first lest I crumble to dust before completing it

as with all these things it's not a replacement for the original and never could be (blah blah blah), but as far as the zoomerfication of this shit goes it's pretty close to the perfect model of how to thread the needle gracefully

just keep it moving next time