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Wizardry

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  • Anti-Climax Boss:
    • The Dark Savant is a rather underwhelming final battle for the Dark Savant trilogy. He isn't totally helpless, as he has powerful magic and summoned enemies, but having a party of at least six high-level adventures and a freaking dragon helping you out really stacks the final battle in your favor.
    • From Wizardry IV we have Kadorto, the final boss of the evil ending and the Golden Ending, which amounts to a drawn-out cutscene/inventory check.
  • Awesome Music: Both renditions of the Battle Theme in the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine CD version of the first and second game are pure, concentrated awesome. Are they faithful to the original battle theme? Not in the slightest. Are they still insanely blood-pumping and catchy? God yes. Many people have said these songs would be right at home in a Mega Man game, and for damn good reason.
  • Breather Level: In Wizardry II, the third level of the dungeon in the PC version and its remakes. There are fewer encounters, the monsters are no tougher than the ones on the second level, almost all of the fixed encounters are easily avoidable, and there's a way to teleport back to town (albeit without giving you the option to say no). The boss, the Magic Sword, is also a less brutal encounter than that of the previous boss, the Magic Shield.
  • Catharsis Factor: Whether or not the final battle itself is good, most fans agree that finally putting down the Dark Savant after his countless horrible deeds is highly satisfying.
  • Demonic Spiders: Potentially any monster in enough numbers or if you're unlucky, but some enemies from 6, 7 or 8 really take the cake. Some especially notable examples include:
    • With enemy ninjas in the early games in the series, there was a chance their attacks could be an instant kill to a party member.
    • Rat enemies are this early on due to being able to inflict the “Disease” status ailment, which is essentially poison but with the added caveat of draining your experience and being much harder to cure. Once you gain the ability to cure disease, they become Goddamned Bats instead.
    • Fairies, mages who try to stay as far away from you as possible whilst spamming spells both to hurt you and heal each other.
    • All plant and vine enemies, they are never very strong but always have the ability to easily inflict some sort of status element.
    • Unicorns, who are similar to fairies but with the additional problem of being really tanky in contrast to the fairy’s Glass Cannon.
  • Even Better Sequel: Wizardry 8 is widely considered a great improvement over the good but often frustratingly cheap (and narratively incoherent) Wizardry VII, and is often outright declared the best game in the whole franchise. Being arguably the most fair game in the series probably helps.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Although fairly well-received at home, the series was absolutely HUGE in Japan, with graphically enhanced ports developed for the various Japanese consoles. In fact, due to a quirk of the Japanese licensing, the Japanese Wizardry games have survived the American parent company's death — Wizardry Gaiden: Prisoners of the Battles came out 6 years after Sir-Tech collapsed, and was the tip of the iceberg. To give an idea of the series' popularity, both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest cite Wizardry as influences, Shin Megami Tensei's early games had a lot of obvious Wiz IV inspiration, and Etrian Odyssey and 7th Dragon, among many other games, are full-blown Spiritual Successors.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • In VI and VII, the ninja comes awfully close to being this. In the last game the class is still stupidly powerful, but is now balanced by the fact it now takes almost half the game for it to reach its full potential.
    • The Gadgeteer class in 8. They are classed as non-magic users, who have the fastest leveling curve. Thing is, they do have access to some magic spells by their ability to merge items (assuming you know where to find them) into gadgets. This includes Heal All, Ressurection and Asphyxiation. What's more, they only require stamina to use them, instead of MP, which are much harder to recover. Sure, you need a high level of Gadgeteer and points in Engineering to create better stuff, but that shouldn't be a problem given their leveling curve. And that's not taking into an account their Omnigun, which can shoot pretty much everything once your Gadgeteer is maxed out. To top it all off they also have roguish abilities, being able to pick locks and disarm traps. It is no wonder most guides for the game recommend having a gadgeteer in the party.
  • Goddamned Bats: And rats, and strange viney things. While they increase in power and continue to allow you to gain experience, they drop no gold or useful items, because they're bats, rats and vines.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In Wizardry IV, Werdna has outlived Trebor (who pursues him as a ghost for most of the plot); with Andrew C. Greenberg's passing in August 2024, Robert Woodhead has outlived him.
  • It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The series in general has faced criticism for being unforgiving and cheap, but Wizardry IV is especially infamous for its steep difficulty, and was apparently the worst-selling product Sir-Tech ever published.
  • Memetic Mutation: The keyboard-breakingly obscene difficulty of Wizardry IV has effectively become a hallmark of the franchise. If there's someone familiar with the stories, you can rest assured that they'll rattle off the tales of horror that inevitably interests someone else and begins the process anew.
  • Nintendo Hard:
    • Though the series predates Nintendo games by a few years. Made infinitely worse as Save Scumming was impossible — the game automatically saved after every button press. Teleported into that wall? You just lost your entire party, no loading possible. Start over.note 
    • IV is on another level compared to the first three games and V. You face ninjas who can kill you instantly, mages who happily blow away your entire army with a single spell, thieves who will steal Plot Coupon items and run away (although you can hunt them down), and you have little for defense but a small Mook army (the same Mooks that are expendable in the other games) and a finite book of spells. All while being chased by a hostile spectre through confusing and unmappable non-euclidean mazes and having to solve fiendishly hard puzzles that render the game Unwinnable if you make the slightest mistake. While being killed by heroes. Did we mention that said spectre can walk through walls, stalks you relentlessly, and kills you instantly and automatically if it catches up to you? Also, you can save anywhere, which sounds great... but loading a save causes every hero group on the level to respawn. Generally, between you and the magic circle you need to heal and resummon monsters. Which means that the game can easily become unwinnable as a result of you saving your game.
    • The Dark Savant trilogy may be a bit easier than the ones that had come before, but they'll still cheerfully tear off your buttocks and wear them as a hat. In case it hasn't been made clear by now, Wizardry is one of the most hardcore PC RPG franchises of all time.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • With III, traversing the entire dungeon and finishing the game requires you to have at least one good character and one evil character supported by other characters who are neutral or match their alignment and are able to at least get through all the levels of the dungeon accessible only to party members of that alignment and neutral characters. In effect, this means you may have to manage two parties, one all evil/neutral and one all good/neutral, or create and level up opposite alignment characters to swap in. If instead you try to go with just one party you then have to carefully manage the partially random mechanics for changing party member alignments, all in a game where good and evil characters will not stay in the same party once you exit the dungeon. Worse, if you go the two party or the changing party members route, you also have to contend with the fact that enemies in III tend to become stingy with experience points after a certain point.
    • In VII, resting. In order to heal your party by resting, you had to spend several real-time minutes waiting for in-game time to pass after hitting the "rest" button. And you might also be ambushed while sleeping.
    • Character creation. If you want your character to be of a certain class, you need to have enough bonus points, with the required amount depending on your race and gender. Bonus points are given in random amount after you choose your character's name, gender and race, and if you don't have enough to choose your desired class, there is no back button so you still have to allocate all your bonus points and skill points (which can be a lot), and possibly select your starting spells. Some of the fancier classes require truly massive amounts of bonus points, so it can take you around one hour to get enough points to select them. Merely starting the game can take hours of preparation.
    • Teleporting into solid rock, either on your own accord or via a "Teleporter" trap in treasure chests, resulted in the total loss of your party.
    • In Wizardry VII, that NPC parties can get map pieces before you can. This is loathed for two reasons. One, the dungeons where the maps are found are left undisturbed, meaning you still have to go through all the fights and puzzles, only to end up with an empty chest at the end. Two, most of the maps have vital clues for solving the other puzzles in the game, and one particular map is a key item that you must have to complete the game. So a first-time player who takes too long (allowing NPCs to grab most of the maps) can easily be reduced to Guide Dang It! if they don't want to hunt down wandering NPCs all over the game world.
    • In Wizardry 8, some of the recruitable character have locations they absolutely refuse to travel with you to, forcing you to release them from your service to proceed. The only way to get around this is to either make them fall asleep or unconscious, or have already set a portal inside such locations and teleport to them. However, circumventing this will make the characters whine constantly about leaving and suffer MASSIVE penalties to their stats. It gets rather silly if, for example, you manage to bring a high-level Madras (a Trynnie Gadgeteer) who's perfectly capable of kicking ass with the rest of your party to the Rapax territory. Vi Domina, a Human Valkyrie, also refuses to go with you to locations that are related to the Dark Savant, despite having a vested interest in his defeat.
  • That One Boss:
    • The Magic Shield from Wizardry II. High resistance to both magic and physical attacks might be expected, but it also does devastating physical attacks, doing far more damage than any monster you've fought so far. It could likely take out some if not any of your party members with one hit. It certainly doesn't help that it comes at the end of a dungeon level that requires a long path with plenty of fixed monster encounters. Unless they're overpowered, even a party with respectably high levels imported from I will struggle to survive. Arguably it's the toughest boss in the game, and it's only on the second floor of the dungeon!
    • Nessie from Wizardry 8, a huge and terrifying water dragon with both devastating physical attacks and powerful spells. Making matters worse you have no access to fire magic, which contains some of the most powerful offensive spells in the game, since you are underwater. The one saving grace is that Nessie is a big easy-to-hit target.
  • That One Level: In III, much of the third floor of the dungeon is filled up with corridors that close up behind you so you can't turn around with items you have to collect and a difficult-to-find exit hidden all around the area. Also this floor has a pretty sizable number of enemies that attack in large numbers or cause poison, paralysis, and level loss with fixed encounters in many spots you'll have to cross.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable: An infamous instance in Wizardry VII involves the Legend map, which is necessary to complete the game. Like all the maps, Legend can end up in the hands of an NPC party, including the Rattkin parties. However, finishing the final Rattkin quest causes them (and their NPCs) to leave the planet. If they happen to have the Legend map when you do this, then this key item is gone for good, and you can't win the game.
  • Woobie Species: The Trynnie in Wizardry 8 are a race of squirrel people who are constantly in danger of being wiped out by the Always Chaotic Evil Rapax. They can be shifty merchants at times, but are mostly friendly and helpful making you really feel for them. Even more tragic is that the Trynnie lost their ancestral home ages ago, which lead to their weakening and subsequent move to an new home where they are further abused by a race of greedy rat people who are trying to steal everything from them. You can help the Trynnie eliminate the rat mafia and make their home a more peaceful place. Also, in the Golden Ending your party becomes gods who can basically "rewrite" the universe. Some of the things you do are make the Rapax nicer and give the Trynnie their ancestral home back.

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