The Stack

The fourth level — level 7 — is another one that I remember, albeit not well enough to get through it quickly. The Temple of the Dreampainter, it calls itself, and it also tells us that it is a ziggurat. I actually had a hard time understanding what it meant by this, the first time through, because it’s another one of those bits where the content asks us to ignore what’s represented by the visuals and the world model, like the “castle” in Wiz3, but worse. The “ziggurat” consists of a mass of 2×2 rooms in a wedge formation. In other words, the map is a picture of a ziggurat viewed from the side.

To support this notion, you “fall off the ziggurat” if you’re ever outside the wedge and there’s no wall immediately to your south. I emphasize that the direction you fall is southward, not downward; the DUMAPIC spell is unambiguous. It took me a good long time to understand this, that the rationale for this peculiar southward gravitation is that this is a side-view level, simply because it doesn’t actually give us a side view. Wiz3 told us “No, seriously, this stretch of floor is a lake, no matter what it looks like”, and I was able to accept that pretty easily. But “the floor here is actually part of the sky” is a step too far for my liking. It’s easily my least favorite thing the game.

The third level of Wizardry IV — which is to say, level 8, because you start at level 10 and work your way towards the entrance — is the first one that I remember from my first pass at the game. Level 10 is too simple in design to be really memorable, just a series of nested rings with guardians between them. Level 9’s whole deal is that it gives you a winding corridor with a zillion tiny rooms off it, and the only trick is that yes, you really do have to check them all. But level 8 has a gimmick. A message by the stairs down announces it as “death by a thousand cuts”: it looks like a completely open space, but it’s really a minefield — essentially a maze where you have to figure out where the walls are by walking into them and taking damage. Although “walls” is really too strong — you can ignore some of them, right? If you’ve got healers with you, you can take a few mines. But you can’t ignore them completely. So it’s all a big exercise in map-making without relying on visible cues.

More importantly, though, level 8 introduces an element that I misremembered as occurring earlier. Just before the stairs up, there’s a message: “Have you forgotten something?”

This is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in a game. You see that and you immediately start to wonder. Is there something I’ve neglected? Something I failed to realize I should have done in the early levels? Will I have to go back through the minefield? It feels like an accusation, but a maddeningly non-specific one, one that leaves you with no clue how to act on it.

Having been on this ride before, I know that the question “Have you forgotten something?” becomes a repeated motif, like a catchphrase for the game. It’s really directed more at Werdna than at the player. Nonetheless, it still brings a bit of a grue. It comes right when you’re congratulating yourself on your progress, having made it through a difficult challenge, but it isn’t really all that difficult a challenge, is it? Mapping the mines doesn’t take any special insight. It just asks you to be methodical, perhaps for longer than you’d like. This lulls you into a certain state of mind, and the question shocks you awake, shakes you out of your complacency, reminds you that there’s a bigger picture that you’ve been ignoring while your attention was on more immediate concerns. Yes, you have forgotten something. Immersion is forgetting. Time to remember.

Wizardry IV has no experience points.

The portion of the character details UI where XP is normally displayed instead gives the number of keystrokes you have left to finish the game. This is a little alarming, but the limit is large.

What it has instead of XP is exploration. At fixed points in every level of the dungeon, there are pentagrams laid out on the floor. These are your base camps, like a Dark Souls campfire. Standing on a pentagram replenishes your health and spell slots, allows you to summon a fresh set of monsters, and, once per dungeon level, empowers Werdna, permanently granting him more hit points and access to higher-level spells. It’s not the same leveling process as in the previous games. There’s no randomness, no gap levels where you don’t learn spells, no possibility of stats going down. All your stats go up in lockstep, every time you level up. You start in the depths of dungeon level 10 with 8 in every stat; by the time you reach the surface, you’ll have straight 18s.

Thus, there is no grinding. The only benefit you get from killing stuff is that it’s dead now — something that I think even applies to the random encounters with wandering adventurers, who, being individually named, are finite in number. What I’ve said multiple times about how the ideal balance in CRPGs syncs leveling up with exploration? Wizardry IV manages that in the most trivial way, by making you literally explore to find opportunities to level up.

Wizardry IV is the one remaining episode of the series that I’ve played before, and played through to completion, back when I was in college, a few years after its 1987 release. I had skipped over II and III because the premise of IV felt more interesting: it’s the role-reversal episode, putting the player in the role of Werdna, the evil wizard from the first game. Unable to truly kill him, Trebor had his body thrown into a crypt in the lower reaches of a dungeon patrolled by adventurers. When he awakens, weakened from his death, he calls upon his monster allies to help him escape and reclaim the amulet that he and Trebor have been squabbling over all this time.

I had been undecided about whether to call Werdna “evil” above — as far as I can tell, he’s never actually called that in Wizardry I, and the intro text in the Wiz1 manual only describes him as “fanatical”. Really, the only thing suggesting that he’s evil in that game is that he’s hanging out with a bunch of vampires when you kick in the door to his sanctum, and I can imagine good reasons for that. And sure, he stole this amulet from Trebor, but remember that Trebor is called “the Mad Overlord” — not necessarily someone you’d trust with a powerful magical artifact. Anyway, Wizardry IV settles the question right off the bat: the very first sentence is “You are Werdna, the evil wizard.” The intro text in the manual, which is much longer and much better-written than that of the previous episodes, reinforces this by talking about your plans for world domination once you’ve got the amulet back. But it also solidifies our doubts about Trebor, and establishes that he doesn’t have much more claim to the amulet than you do: Trebor and Werdna learned how to get it at more or less the same time, and Trebor beat Werdna to the punch by mere hours.

The viewpoint of the writing carries over into the game, as well: for the first time, we’re getting narration of internal thoughts, like “With a feeling of triumph, you exclaim ‘Free at last!'”, rather than just physical descriptions of the environment. It’s a significant change to the feel of the thing. This game is unlike the other Wizardries up to this point, and not in just the obvious ways.

In fact, according to some of the online resources I’ve looked at while blogging the series, it isn’t even really part of the same series. It’s claimed that the initial Wizardry continuity, the “Llylgamyn saga”, consists of Wizardries 1, 2, 3, and 5, but not 4. This seems strange to me — 4 is a lot more closely connected to 1 than 2 and 3 are. It’s hard to imagine a hard criterion for excluding 4 from the series that doesn’t also exclude 1, or a criterion for including 1 that doesn’t apply to 4 as well. Perhaps it’s because it’s the one episode that wasn’t released in Japan — a lot of the jokes and some of the puzzles rely on untranslatable wordplay and pop culture references. ¹Update: On looking into it further, it looks like what they really mean is that 4 has been left out of various anthology releases for consoles. Which means the translatability issues are probably the main underlying reason. Or perhaps it’s just down to character portability — you can’t import characters into Wiz4, because the only character you can play is Werdna. It could have been fun to import characters so you could encounter them as enemies, though.

That’s one of the notable things about the game, in contrast to the previous episodes: All the enemies are individuals, with unique names, forming a roster similar to the player character roster elsewhere. Your own minions, meanwhile, are nameless, just as they’ve always been. In general, the game is impressively dedicated to turning all the asymmetries of the system backwards, rather than just reskinning it all. Previously, monsters approached you in up to four homogeneous groups; here, you can summon up to three groups of monsters at a time, with Werdna himself occupying the fourth slot. Up to six individual adventurers attack you at a time, and you can only do hand-to-hand attacks against the first three. It even displays the exact same combat UI as the previous games, with the monsters on top and the adventuring party on the bottom, and you have to get used to the idea that the top is your guys now.

Notably, though, this design means you don’t control what your monsters do in battle. They just pick at random from their action set, like monsters have always done. The way you exercise control is by choosing which monsters to summon in the first place. The most essential puzzle in the game is just “How do I make an effective team out of the monster types available to me?” The monsters are all things that appeared in the first three games, and at the beginning of the game, when you don’t have access to the really powerful ones yet, they’re all things you’re used to seeing slaughtered in droves.

Wizardry III is a difficult game — easily the most difficult Wizardry I’ve played, and I’ve played Wizardry IV, the one that has a reputation for extreme difficulty. But that’s a whole different thing. Wizardry IV‘s difficulty is mainly in its puzzles, some of which require specialized knowledge, like the Kabbalah or Monty Python references. And while that sort of riddlery might stop someone cold, I found the game had been written from the same sort of geek culture that I myself was immersed in.

I’ve encountered this mismatch of difficulty assessment elsewhere. Spellbreaker is supposed to be Infocom’s hardest adventure, but I’ve never understood why — all it really takes is an “I wonder what happens if I do this?” mindset and some slight knowledge of classic math puzzles. The coin-op game Sinistar has a reputation for being unusually hard, but I always could last about as long in it as in other games of its type — although in this case I suspect it more signifies that I’m not very good at space shooters in general, so it’s not so much “For me, Sinistar is as easy as these other games” as “For me, these other games are as hard as Sinistar“.

Anyway, the thing that makes Wizardry III particularly difficult isn’t the puzzles, but that it demands patience. Wizardry I let you power-level at the Murphy’s Ghost room, and Wizardry II let you import your overpowered characters from Wizardry I, but if there’s any option like that in Wizardry III, I haven’t found it. You have to level up the slow and risky way. Sure, you get some ability to trade that off, choosing where to grind to make it less slow but more risky, or vice versa. But that means that when things get too slow for your liking, there’s a temptation to take on more risk than you can handle.

Wizardry is one of the foundational CRPGs. There was a time when CRPGs were commonly described as either Ultima-style or Wizardry-style, the former referring to ones with a tile-based movement on a large map (such as Final Fantasy and The Magic Candle), the latter to ones with first-person navigation through grid-based dungeons (such as The Bard’s Tale and Dungeon Master). I myself played the original Wizardry as a child. I remember it took a very long time to complete, and seemed a monumental achievement. (I still have my official certificate of completion tucked away somewhere. I can’t imagine sending off for something like that today.) Of course, back then, the very basics of the genre were yet unfamiliar. Common practices like creating a balanced party and putting the mages in the back row had to be discovered by trial and error.

I didn’t play the immediate sequels when they were new, however. I wound up skipping ahead to Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna, which is more of a direct sequel to Wizardry I than Wizardry II or III is, and didn’t get to trying the others until they were anthologized in 1998. I made an attempt to play through the entire series in order, but got stuck in the middle of Wizardry III when I seemed to run out of dungeon to explore. (I later learned what my problem was; I’ll go into detail later.)

Wizardry II, it turned out, is more like an expansion pack to I than like what we’d recognize as a sequel today — a symptom of the infant games industry still struggling to figure things out. III altered the mechanics and UI quite a bit, but still can’t be run as a completely standalone game, as it provides no way to create characters. They have to be created in Wizardry I and imported, a process that apparently involved swapping multiple floppy disks in and out. Even just playing Wizardry I involved a fair amount of swapping on a single-floppy system, what with its separate diskettes for character and scenario data. The anthology edition was thoughtfully altered to use disk images on the hard drive instead, and to carry out the swapping automatically.

Now, I still have some of the characters that I used to play Wizardry III ten years ago. But I don’t intend to use them, except as emergency support. To get the full experience, I’m creating a brand new party, with brand new characters. And I’m getting them killed a lot. This is part of the experience. Level 1 characters stand little chance of surviving their first encounter, and it takes at least three or so encounters before they get to level 2. And getting killed doesn’t mean resetting to a save point or anything nicely forgiving like that. If your entire party gets killed, you roll up a new party. You do have the ability to recover bodies from where they fell — this is what I mean by “emergency support” — and you can can take them back to town to resurrect them for an exorbitant fee, but even the resurrection spell has a significant chance of failing and rendering them lost forever. (And you don’t get a refund when this happens.) Understand that characters are reduced to level 1 when imported; losing a certain number of your characters is simply part of the plan. So, in contrast to most RPGs today, it’s best not to get too attached to them. I gave up long ago on the idea of giving everyone a distinctive and memorable name; I name my guys in batches like “Fitt”, “Mitt”, “Pitt”, etc. (The initial letter indicates the character class, for greater ease in building a party out of the survivors.)

I really haven’t played much yet, though. Most of today’s game time was spent making preparations: digging out the graph paper, printing up a crib sheet with all the spell descriptions on it, deciding where and how to play it — the game uses a CGA graphics mode that my usual gaming rig doesn’t even support, which forced me to use DOSBox, which made me realize that I might as well be playing it on my Macbook. And of course there was the time spent rolling up all the characters, which can take a while if you’re fussy. So there’s a lot of anticipation going into this. It’s a grand thing, and also a memory of a simpler time, with simpler computer systems.

There comes a point where the world breaks. Kefka reaches the sacred place where magic is kept in balance, and unbalances it. Continents split apart. The sea changes color. Long cutscenes play. The heroes’ airship is smashed like a bowl of eggs, and by the time the player is given control again, a year of gametime has passed. It’s clear that nothing will be the same from this point on.

So naturally my reaction is to immediately restore my last save. Not because I have any plans to prevent this apocalypse, which is clearly an inevitable part of the plot, but because it seems like a lot of doors are closing, and I want to do things in the world as it was while I still have the opportunity. On the most immediate scale, there’s an object near the breakpoint that I didn’t manage to pick up. (The ground splits under you if you approach it by the direct route; I had managed to work out how to get to it, but slipped up when I tried, owing to the Sprint Shoes I was wearing making it hard to control my movement.) Glancing at an online walkthrough to see if it was actually worth getting, I learned that I needed to do something slightly differently in the same scene if I ever wanted the ninja to rejoin my party again.

But even beyond the immediate situation, there are goals I want to pursue in the world as a whole. And here’s another of those false-urgency bits: even though the entire pre-cataclysm scene is built with a sense that you’re rushing to intervene before Kefka does something monstrously wrong, you’re given the opportunity at the last moment to go back to your ship and spend a week or two taking care of business.

The first thing I want to do is get Gau up to speed on the latest monsters. Gau has a special training area, the Veldt, where monsters that you’ve encountered in the rest of game show up. The in-game excuse is that they migrate there when you drive them out of the places where they live, which doesn’t make a lot of sense for the imperial soldiers and security robots, but there it is. You can spend a long time in the Veldt waiting for a particular monster to show up, and the designers have sensibly made it a no-XP zone, like the final areas in FF5. And, like those areas, although you aren’t getting normal XP that lets you level up, you do get the secondary version, Ability Points or Magic Points, which, in this game, lets you learn spells from your equipped Magicite crystals. Joining Gau this time is Strago, the Blue Mage, in the hope that he can learn some new spells from creatures that he never had a chance to observe the first time around, due to joining the party too late. Unlike FF5, where the Blue Mage (or someone with the Blue Mage’s “Learning” skill) had to be the target of an attack in order to learn it, it seems that Strago simply has to observe it. For that reason, I’m pairing him up with his granddaughter Relm, who has the ability to draw pictures of monsters that come to life just long enough to make a single attack. When the monster has an attack that Strago can learn, that usually seems to be the one that Relm produces. Thus, she’s kind of like the Trainer in FF5, in that she forms a natural complement to the Blue Mage, and making them relatives is a bit of a hint at that.

(Something to try in my next session: Can Relm draw the heroes? I hadn’t even thought of trying until now. Most attacks and spells can be directed either way, and there are situations where directing them the wrong way — healing the monsters or attacking the heroes — is actually helpful.)

There are other quests that need completing before the world is torn asunder. If there are any Espers still to be found, I should try to find them. (I almost missed the ones from the auction house. I wonder if the auctioneers know what Magicite does, and that they’re effectively holding a slave auction?) There were a couple of significant-seeming locations that I haven’t found the significance of yet, and which may be destroyed in a year. A minor quest involving delivering letters, which has yet to reach any sort of conclusion. The manual mentions a playable Moogle character, Mog, who isn’t part of my party yet, even though I’ve been through a Moogle den. He was playable briefly during that one tunnel defense scene, so I know he’s around, but Moogles are hard to tell apart when you can’t look at their stats. Maybe he’ll join when I talk to him if there’s an open slot in my party or something.

In the classic Wizardry IV, at the end of the initial level, there’s a sign just before the stairs that says “Have you forgotten something?” — a question that would become a repeated motif in the game, and work into the ending. Seeing it there for the first time was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had in a RPG. Once the question has been posed, it’s hard to stop thinking about it. Have I forgotten something? Is there something else I’m supposed to have done by now? What if I can’t go back? The Final Fantasy games aren’t so cruel that they’d lock you out of victory for failing to notice a pickup, and they sometimes provide eleventh-hour second chances to complete collections. Still, I’d like to do what I can now, before I go to meet my appointment with the irrevocable.