Review: Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom (SNES)

In this review, we look for secret doors in the SNES game, Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom. We find out how well this RPG game plays.

This game was released in 1994 and is a port from the 1988 PC game.

We have a fair bit of experience with this game now. First, we tried Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord for the NES. That game flopped for us. Next up is Wizardry: Knight of Diamonds – The Second Scenario. That game barely scraped by with a passable score. After that, we skipped ahead a little and played Wizardry: The Return of Werdna – The Fourth Scenario. That game flopped quite badly for us. With not a lot of luck with this series so far, we decided to try one more time with this series with the next game in the series.

There is a plot in this game, though it is largely confined to information outside of the game itself. Like all but one game in the series, you start off with a Castle that has your basic amenities. Situated below is the maze known as the Maelstrom. You take your party and go down to explore the depths below.

Other features in the castle include a tavern where you can rearrange your party members and, frequently, divvy the gold evenly. Then there is the inn where you can rest. You can choose from a variety of accommodations. This ranges from the free stables all the way up to a luxurious suite. Of course, the more luxurious, the more you pay for each night. Each hit point requires a day of rest, so healing can cost a lot of gold. Of course, the inn also doubles as the place where you level up. To level up, you need to rest somewhere. Of course, to recover, you need to pay at least 10 gold for the cot for every hit point you need to recover. Additionally, you can rest to recover you manna for your spellcasters.

Making yet another return to this series is Boltac’s trading post. This is where you can buy, identify, and sell items and equipment among other things. You do start off with very basic equipment, but you really do need something better if you plan on getting very far in this game. What is very notable is the fact that items, for the first time I’ve seen in this series, are divided up into types. So, instead of one long list of items, the items are divided into armour, weapons, shields, and more. This is definitely a much needed improvement. Even for a game of its time, this does sound like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for compliments, but considering the history of this series that we’re familiar with, we have to give credit where credit is due.

There are, of course, ways you can create characters for your party. In fact, you have a nice variety of races and classes to choose from as well. So, you do have a good number of ways of building up your party. Ideally, you’ll want a variety of fighting classes and spellcasters. You’ll also want at least one character that can pick locks and disarm chests, though. Most commonly, this will fall on the thief class, but there is apparently another class that can fill this role as well. Regardless, you’ll be able to fill your party with up to 6 characters, so there is room to play around with multiple classes here.

Finally, there is the Temple of Cant. If any of your characters get poisoned, killed, or in otherwise need of healing, then this is the place to go if your healing spells aren’t able to heal your character up. Of course, relying on this feature can leave you with much less gold. So, ideally, you’ll want to avoid this whenever possible, but otherwise, it can be a place of last resort when all else fails.

As for the dungeon itself, we do note that, while walls, floors, and ceilings are all the same texture for each level, different levels feature slightly different looks. So, in that regard, the game does manage to get another bare minimum improvement here. Of course, unless you are hardcore into being able to complete every game, there is actually a good possibility you won’t experience more than two of these looks.

Like previous games, there is no map system. So, you have three options for exploration:

1. Gradually move your way out from the entrance as you memorize the dungeon
2. Hand draw the map out on graph paper as you explore
3. Just grab a map off the Internet and be done with it. After all, it’s 1994. How does this game not have a map system of some sort yet anyway?

While exploring, you’ll also need to tap a button to open doors. Shoulder buttons allow you to move sideways. You can inspect your characters to cast spells or put on equipment while in “camp” mode.

As expected, you’ll have various encounters that can trigger a fight sequence. You can encounter random battles that can happy at any time, anywhere. Sometimes, even just turning can trigger a random encounter. Alternatively, there are fixed encounter locations that respawn every one or two visits to the dungeon itself. Either way, the battle sequences are turned based. You’ll want your fighters in front because they will be the ones within reach of being able to fight. Characters at the end of the list will not be in range. Luckily, those characters don’t take much melee damage that often, so they are ideal for spellcasters. Set your action for each character, direct attacks at groups of enemies if there are more than one group in the battle, and hope for the best.

If you are victorious in the fight, the enemies can either drop treasure or drop a chest. Chests are where your lockpicking character comes into play. You can inspect a chest for a trap. If you do find one, then you can attempt to disarm that trap. Sometimes, disarming fails which requires additional attempts. Other times, you’ll successfully disarm the track and gain access to the contents inside. Sometimes, however, you’ll accidentally trip any number of different traps. Any one can have anywhere between annoying consequences to dire consequences. So, you’ll want to disarm as many as you can along the way. Note that some chests are not trapped and can simply be opened.

As you venture deeper, you can encounter different features of the maze. This includes dark rooms that require you to feel your way around, pits that cause damage, chutes that send you down a level (often a fatal thing to happen), messages that may or may not give you hints, or even NPCs to interact with. Also along the way, you might be able to discover a secret door or hidden items in the area. They aren’t found often, but they do exist. You can also encounter locked doors and even keys along the way.

One thing you’ll probably notice is the cryptic names given to spells. Like previous games in this series, each spell has a name that can be deciphered by looking up the spell names or simply using trial and error to figure out what each spell does. Dios, for instance, heals a character. There are no descriptions of what the spells do in-game.

One final note is the fact that there are, apparently, 8 levels in this game. Given how this game plays, that is actually a lot of game to play through if you want to beat it.

For me, I have to keep in mind the fact that this was released in the same year as Breath of Fire II, Final Fantasy III (which is actually the 6th instalment of that series), and System Shock. By this point in time, RPG games made it clear what things like spells do and dungeons either had maps or were straight forward enough that getting lost wasn’t a problem most of the time. Those two aspects alone makes this game horribly outdated. It’s one thing to design it this badly in the 80’s (because there wasn’t many RPG games at the time and bad design was more forgiven by players), but this is actually nearing the end of the SNES era. This game is just not even acceptable for the mid 90’s.

What’s more is that the difficulty is still cranked up quite a bit. You have to fight a lot to train up your characters. At the same time, you never know when a random encounter is going to suddenly come around and kill you off. These encounters can be monsters you seemingly dispatched with ease. Sometimes, it’s just a random encounter of an enemy you hadn’t encountered before that seemingly takes you out unexpectedly. So, not only is the learning curve exceedingly steep, but the difficulty can randomly spike as well when you least expect it.

To make matters worse is the fact that the game saves your every move. So, if something terrible happens to you, the game saves, so you can’t actually go back to a previous save if you met a terrible fate unexpectedly. It’s staggering to see that this feature continue to be used even as other games have long since made it standard that players can save whenever they like (sometimes, it’s at specific locations, but otherwise, you can save whenever). So, the game is very gamer unfriendly in that regard as well.

While the difficulty has been tamed down a bit since the previous game, and the trading post finally getting a basic redesign, there are so many critical flaws in this game that makes this downright not fun to play. There is no map system to help players out that I’m aware of, no explanation of what spells do, no statistics to tell you what melee weapons can do, random difficulty spikes, and autosaving so mistakes are permanent. Add in an exceedingly steep learning curve and this game gets high on the games to avoid list.

Graphics do not fare much better here. While it is nice to see first person perspectives in a game that predates the N64 and Playstation, this game still lags in terms of quality. One way to look at this is the fact that Might and Magic V: Darkside of Xeen was released a year earlier. That game had numerous different decorations throughout the overworld settings and dungeon settings. This game’s dungeon is downright barren by comparison. As a result, it makes it much easier to get lost because all the walls, floors, and ceilings are so similar everywhere you go. The best feature are the sprites that represent enemies. To be fair, they do look OK. However, everything else just looks downright ugly by comparison. Effects in this game are virtually non-existent. So, a fail as far as I’m concerned.

Audio, for me, is barely passable. The music really carried this game on this front as there was a splash of music everywhere. However, sound effects are downright minimal to non-existent. So much more could have been added for a nice level of pop. I don’t even expect ambient sounds (though that would have been nice), but different sounds to better indicate what is going on would have been nice. I’ll give this part a pass, but somewhat begrudgingly.

Overall, this game does so much to do the bare minimum for players. What’s left is a badly designed game that is outdated by years upon release. The learning curve is almost a cliff, the difficulty is random and frustrating, the navigation system of the mazes is non-existent, and, what’s more, this game is just plain not fun. Graphics, while first person perspective, doesn’t do much and the audio is barely passable. All in all, a game to avoid.

Overall
Furthest point in game: Found the silver key. All characters except the mage (level 4) were up to level 5. Cleric and thief got killed during one of the enemy encounters involving the skeletons and pale warriors.

General gameplay: 8/25
Replay value: 5/10
Graphics: 4/10
Audio: 3/5

Overall rating: 40%

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.