Wizardry

veggies kind of thing.

Like this one, Wizardry 7.

Yeah.

I mean, there's another Wizardry game we possibly need to play for this podcast, and it's going to be a bit...

It's going to hurt.

It's going to hurt.

Yeah, that was on the PC.

So I think Wizardry, the Proving Grounds of Mad Overlord was the first Wizardry installment.

That later went to console, quite a bit later actually.

Initially it was on the Apple, I mean it was Apple 2 Plus.

Thank you.

it was a dungeon stepper.

And I mean, it's interesting too, because if you asked me like, how old were you when you played Atari Adventure and how old were you when you played Wizardry? I'd say, oh, it'd be like at least five years apart.

But then I looked at the dates, I'm like, oh my God, it was only probably a couple of years.

Why did you both decide to have a character carry

on? We were actually inspired by the Wizardry games.

and the Wizardry series started out doing that between the first and second game and then they discovered they were in trouble because the first game your character got so powerful that they couldn't really do the second game right and by the third game they sort of started from scratch.

because they couldn't keep building because they just were too powerful.

So they had to revise it.

Even if we don't really know what they are, we'll just put the RPG label on something.

So the real RPGs kind of came along and Final Fantasy drew a lot of from Wizardry.

I want to say the NES port, Famicom port of Wizardry hit around the same time as Final Fantasy as well.

But things like the class upgrades, I'm pretty sure that the original Wizardry had prestige upgrades.

I could be mistaken.

But anyway, it's kind of a mix of Wizardry and Ultima.

And you know, then throws in kind of its own little bits and pieces.

But it's very different from

In terms of myself, as I, I said to the boys, I put myself into a wee bit of a K hole with these, uh, dungeon crawler games.

We will, we'll get into it in the, the middle of the episode, I think, but McCormick's been playing Tale of the Forsaken Land, uh, a Wizardry game on the PS2.

Yep.

And I played through that as well, and then I started playing through its, like, Japan only fucking, uh, sequel with a translation patch and all this.

And as I said to them, I was li- lying in my bed at night thinking about Wizardry dungeons and stuff, and I just thought, "You need to get off the junk here." [laughs] Like, unplug, unplug Wizardry and go for a walk.

So, um-

You were just seeing that, like, first person dungeon view when you close your eyes, like, you know, a moz, little moz and a, a monster in the middle.

Nae afro, nae party.

It's not all of that important in the grand scheme of things.

I do want to talk a little more about Karuizawa Yukai Annai, which is also a fairly obscure game, but is also a fascinating game because this is the one that Horii is designing all by himself at the time when he is still making adventure games, but has discovered Ultima and Wizardry.

The interesting thing about this one is it's mostly a standard adventure game like Portopia, like Hokkaido.

It has the menu selection of verbs.

It's not heavily skewed in that direction, but it definitely has it.

When you complete one of those encounters, you level up, your stats go up, and you can fight a slightly stronger thug, and you have to go around defeating all these thugs, and there's a bit of an order to it because the thugs have differing strengths, so you have to figure out which order you should defeat them in.

But it basically becomes a primitive Ultima-style RPG at the end, showing that Horii is already thinking in the direction of, "You know what I really want to make is an RPG." Because let me tell you, Jeffrey, he, as well as Nakamura and Torishima and other people he works with, have all become fascinated with Ultima and Wizardry and with the idea of RPGs.

Several of them have been interviewed.