In this review, we sleep in the Stables in the NES game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. We find out how well this RPG game plays.
This game was released in 1990. It is a port from the Apple II released in 1981.
In the game itself, there isn’t really much of a storyline. What you do know is that you are a bunch of characters hanging around in a castle and you have one dungeon simply titled “maze”.
Of course, the castle does feature a number of features that will help your characters out. First is Gilgamesh’s Tavern. This is where existing characters are stored whenever they are found outside of the maze. You can also divvy up gold and perform a few other things here.
Next up is the Adventurer’s Inn. In here, you can select a character to go rest. This is probably the first RPG game I’ve ever encountered where you have to allow your characters to rest one at a time despite this being a party based game, but that is how this game handles resting. Of course, the idea of simple resting isn’t enough. In this game, you also have the quality of the rest. The higher the quality of the rest, the more expensive the lodging. For instance, if you rest in the stables, the price is free, however, you only recover magic points here. If you spend a little cash, however, then a character can recover hit points as well while that character stays.
It is worth pointing out at this point that if you have collected enough experience points, you need to rest in order to level up. It doesn’t seem to matter about the quality of rest (I could be wrong on that because I never was able to test it), but after a rest, you are rewarded with your level up and whatever bonuses (or penalties if you can believe it) you incurred at that point.
After that, you have Boltac’s Trading Post. This serves as the all-purpose store in the game. You can buy items, sell items, and identify items you happen to come across in the maze.
Then, there is the Temple of Cant. This is where you can heal your characters if you lack the magical capabilities. For a (very high) price, you can recover your characters normal status. This includes paralyzed, poison, and even death. Now, there is an emphasis on “can” because there is a possibility the healing/resurrection will fail. If you fail to resurrect your character, you will lose that character permanently.
Finally, there is the Edge of Town. This opens up another menu that has even more options.
First up is the Training Grounds. This is where you can create a character or even change a characters class. My understanding is that if you change a characters class, you will incur penalties to the point where you might have been better off just starting a new character. You can also change a characters name while you are here as well.
Next is the Maze. This is where the games sole dungeon is located.
Additionally, you can restart an “out” party which basically recalls the characters in the maze back to the castle. Finally, there is Castle which will return you to the previous menu.
For those of you who played other old RPG games like an earlier Dragon Warrior game, some of these concepts will be fairly familiar. If you are more into more modern games, confronting this cold can be a bit confusing and require some poking around to figure out.
The rest of the game is focused on the dungeon itself. The dungeon is 10 levels deep and movement is, as you would expect, tile based. It is first person perspective which is also pretty impressive for a game of its time.
Of course, once you enter the dungeon, you’ll instantly go into a camp menu instead. You can break camp immediately (which is probably what you’ll do on your first outing) but there are a few things you can do while in camp mode. One feature is the ability to “inspect” a character. While this sounds like you are just looking at a character sheet, this is also where you can cast non-combat spells such as healing spells. This is very important to increasing your chances of survival.
Contrary to what you might think, you can’t actually sleep while camping. It’s very counter-intuitive, but that’s the way this game operates. Still, you can equip items while camping as well, so that gives you a chance to have everything ready to go.
Once you start wandering the maze, you’ll encounter doors. While most games I’ve played pretty much allow you to move through doors with simple movement commands, you need to tap “A” to open them. There are a few other traps found in the dungeon to be aware of as well such as darkness. Of course, the chances of most average players encountering these traps are pretty slim because most will quit long before they see anything other than darkness.
As you can imagine, combat plays a huge role in this game. Encounters are largely random, but do occur more consistently in certain areas of the dungeon. From the start, you’ll likely have an encounter when you open a door that is not at the centre of the maze (think the first three accessible rooms).
There are a number of enemies you can encounter. This includes skeletons, scruffy humanoids, orcs, goblins, and slime’s. Generally, the slime’s are the easier enemies you can encounter, but when you are starting out on level 1, every encounter is still a risky gamble. This is because the game is balanced to make the first few encounters difficult and hard to survive from. So, you’ll be running away a lot at the beginning.
Still, if you defeat a few enemies here and there, you’ll obtain hugely valuable experience points and gold. Sometimes, you’ll even encounter a chest. This is where the thief comes in. Thieves can inspect chests for traps. Traps can include exploding boxes (damages several party members), stunners (induces paralysis), arrows (damages), and poison needles (poisons). So, this can be a high risk thing, but can yield the odd item here and there. Plus, all combat that has a chest at the end will have all the gold locked up in them.
You might think to yourself at this point that this game simply involves a lot of saving and loading until your characters toughen up from a few levels. Surprisingly, this game is designed to thwart use of saving and loading. In this game, the game automatically saves for every single square you wander over. So, if you lose a few characters during a tough fight, you can only load from the point after you lost your characters. In short, a vast majority of mistakes are permanent. So, this is another way this game is designed to be more difficult then it probably should be.
On the plus side, you might think that spell casting is reasonably intuitive at the very least. You’d be wrong on that too. A simple heal spell is not even close to something titled “heal”. The spell for a simple heal spell is called dios. Additionally, wizard spell names are also just as cryptic. For instance, the earliest damage spell is called “halito”. This is a simple fireball damage spell. So, either you are going to look up what all the spells are or you are going to be doing a trial and error run of different spells hoping to figure it out.
Weapons and armour can also be a bit cryptic as well.
Armour can be a bit more easy to explain, though. Each character has what is known as an “armour class” (or “AC”). Ideally, you’ll want a better armour class to better defend themselves. While most games feature a number that indicates how much defence your character gets, in this game, you actually want a lower number. This is because the lower the number, the higher the armour class. Think of it like a race. The ideal placement you want is 1st place (not, say, 5th place). Armour class works kind of similarly (though, apparently, you can even get negative numbers which is even better).
Weapons, however, can be a bit more cryptic. All you get is the ability to see what the prices for weapons are. So, the only hint you have is that if a weapon is more expensive, chances are, it’ll be more useful in combat.
Of course, you might be tempted to think that in-combat has messages that provide a better picture. You’d be partly correct. When you or an enemy attacks, the game does provide a message telling you what is going on. The problem is that the messages flash by so quickly, you don’t really have time to read it even if you know where to train your eyes to get critical information. In the end, you only know if you are successful in the fight or if you had a few characters die on you in the process from a practical standpoint.
At this point, chances are, you know where this review is heading. It’s not really that great of a game.
The first problem that stands out immediately is the incredibly steep and crippling learning curve. So much of this game was clearly designed to make gameplay much more frustrating than it really needed to be. Nothing says a less enjoyable experience quite like feeling you can only half understand the menu’s in the games only safe zone. Then, there is the cryptic spell system where you have to practically learn part of a new language just to get a basic grasp of what is going on. On top of that, some aspects of the game are not even close to being intuitive.
The second big problem is the difficulty curve. I had to restart this game multiple times because of a trap killing a character or an unlucky battle sequence. This in spite of the strategy of sticking as close as possible to the surface, while at the same time, being just far enough away to encounter enemies. This turns out to be an ideal strategy, but has absolutely no promises that you’ll be successful. In fact, being able to buy a Blade of Biting and surviving a few encounters on the second dungeon level felt like a massive accomplishment to me even though it sounds like a miserable fail. Even though I ultimately made progress in the game, I felt entirely unmotivated to continue because the fun was simply gone by that point.
Additionally, the menu’s both in and out of the maze really need a full overhaul to be half way sensible. Why all your non-combat spells are buried in an “inspect” command defies general reason in my view. Encrypting spell names and generally making so much more difficult to understand just strikes me as asinine.
Having said that, there is definitely a workable game underneath all of these glaring problems. There is logic and, once you get past the excessively long trial and error, it is possible to understand the game. So, we are not talking about a broken game so much as a horribly designed one.
Generally speaking, the gameplay in this one just isn’t there. You have a crippling learning curve and a ridiculously steep difficulty curve that relies on chance that you characters survive the first few levels. Even then, you have to fight with some of the more archaic menu systems and a cryptic spell system that really holds this game back. Technically, I can’t say it is a broken game. There is some reasonable underlying logic, but it is buried under such a large pile of problems with this game, it can be difficult to see it. So, with that alone, I don’t recommend this one.
Graphically speaking, there is one big feature that does make this game shine. That is the first person perspective 3D environment. Any game that achieves that at this point in gaming history is already showing off a nice achievement. The enemy designs are also pretty decent, though nothing totally amazing given that they are just still pictures. There is no real animations to speak of and the menus are simply text. So, that does hold this game back by a fair bit. So, a decent effort all around, though an effort with flaws.
Audio is OK. There is some decent music to be found here, though nothing to be excited over. However, there is hardly any sound effects to accompany this. So, a game that is pretty average on this front.
Overall, I simply cannot recommend this game. The crippling learning curve and ridiculous difficulty curve should be enough to turn most gamers off from the get go. Meanwhile, the menus can be pretty cryptic, the equipping items aspect is pretty hit and miss and the spells are practically their own language that you have to decrypt. Graphics are generally decent, and the audio is OK. Still, I’d say that this is a game to pass on in my view.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Purchased a blade of biting, accessed level 2, got lost trying to make my way back and died when cleric’s paralyzed half the party.
General gameplay: 9/25
Replay value: 4/10
Graphics: 7/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 46%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
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