[Ok, it's mostly a review of Wizardry 6 which I've finished, and then an explanation of why I'm not gonna play Wizardry 7 and might try Wizardry 8]

I feel people are gonna be misled by all the gushing praise, so here's a bit more down to earth take on these games:

Wizardry 6

I tried this game last year (2012) with great interest given all the good things that were said about it. I found the graphics and especially sound (PC Speaker, garbled when in DOSBox) to be cringe-worthy, and that's from someone who plays Dwarf Fortress without tileset. However I got nicely around that by finding a translated SNES version of the game with much nicer (if rather lacking in breasts - you'll know what I mean if you try the DOS version) graphics and infinitely better sound and music, all of which are true to the original. Oh, and an automap ;) .

Initially I was pretty engrossed with the game's atmosphere and the RPG mechanics. The descriptions of various rooms in the castle are incredibly poetic and fired up my imagination in a way few games today do. Your six character party is fun to manage and combat is challenging and interesting.

Unfortunately disappointment and boredom started to creep in rather early. Some characters and locations are just silly and don't really fit with the plot, and it gets much worse as you get out of the initial, athmospheric castle. What do pirates, amazons, the river styx, Alice in Wonderland stuff and dwarves have in common? That's right, Wizardry 6. I really got the feel that the devs were unable to create rich lore for this game and filled it with random and not even subtle fantasy and mythological references. (Note that this was much, much worse in Wizardry 1-5 which were utterly absurd hodge-podges but at least had the merit of being hilarious. Llamas in togas? Of course!)

On top of that, as good as the combat is I couldn't help but get bored of it when going through the huge, featureless and more or less maze-like dungeons in the game. If figuring out a dark multi-floor maze or finding the occasional secret button or item combination is your description of the ultimate RPG experience, then you're gonna be in heaven. Me? I found that the interesting encounters were just streched too thin by a lot of filler which as I mentioned above didn't make any sense half of the time.

The RPG mechanics get a lot of praise and I found them initially interesting, but they are very exploitable: for instance it's easy for all your characters to learn the hide skill, something monsters can't counter (I heard Wiz8 dealt with that). Also, given enough grinding all your characters can be both powerful spellcasters and warriors, something most guides online actually encourage you to do. My characters were most interesting mid-game when they were specialized, but by the end I was casting three Nuclear Blasts a turn. It was pretty handy to get through the end-game fights and their instakill tendencies, but it also felt boring. I ended up slightly disappointed.

The slightly different endings and the feature of transferring your party from one game to the next sounds nice in theory (doesn't work with SNES version but can be emulated with the savegame editor). Personally I only felt it put pressure on me to read spoilers to find all the items that you can't find in subsequent games, but then I had remorse because it might make me overpowered in the next game. It might be a nice element if you're gonna replay this game several times and find all the stuff yourself, but there's not a chance in Hell that I'm gonna go through those generic dungeons again.

Overall verdict: some nice story elements and good combat drowned into exceedingly bland dungeon-crawling and a hodge-podge universe.

Wizardry 7 (what I've heard about it)

I read quite a few reviews of this one after finishing Wizardry 6 through bitter determination. I didn't want to go through more genericness and boredom! Unfortunately what I read made me cringe. The fantasy universe sounds slightly more coherent and has a nice sci-fi vibe, but Wiz7 is several times as huge as Wiz6, especially if you take into account that it's completely free-roaming. You actually have to rely more or less on luck to advance the story, as important NPCs wander around the map just like you. That means a lot of backtracking through filler dungeons and is exactly what I wanted to avoid. The story is also alledgedly not as well put together as in Wiz6. Definitely not for me!

(They also got more politically correct along the way: no more pixelated bare-breasted women in this game. Oh noes or Yay, depending on your sensibilities.)

Wizardy 8 (what I've heard about it)
Having been burned by #6 and its discrepancy from the gushing praise I had heard, and driven away by reviews from #7 since I knew exactly how to read between the lines how the game would really be, I haven't touched Wiz8 yet. However from what I've read the RPG mechanics are better balanced with characters unable to be complete Jack-of-all-trades, and I think I've heard that the universe and dungeons are better. I'll give it a try eventually, but not with the same enthusiasm, that's for sure.

Note: I encourage people to do their own research about Wizardry 7 and 8, especially since people in the replies below have disputed some of the facts I relayed. Still, if you have the same "gamer profile" as me I hope you found the result of my research useful.

First off, this isn't really a take on the Wizardry series, but rather a take on Wizardry 6. Which I will admit is the weakest of the final trilogy. I also have an issue with this line... This is simply not true. There are no important NPCs that wander around the map. All of the important NPCs are fixed and do not wander... or they only start wandering after they've ceased being important. There is no luck required to complete the game, apart from the *LEGEND* map which is generally relatively easy to find. Even if somebody gets to it before you, that's what Lore, Rumors, and the Locate Person spell are for. One of the best things about 7 is that you basically CAN'T get stuck.

So just to be clear here;
You didn’t actually finish the game right because that’s the way it reads to me?

... I do agree that new players should start with Wizardry 8 and then if they liked it try 7 next because the older games were written for an audience that was more UM hard core.

The hodgepodge of random nonsense is pretty typical of Western RPGs of this era. You'll find the same kind of aesthetic in Might & Magic and in the early Ultima games, where it's just, "Oh, look, suddenly it's a robot. Now there's a dragon. Now it's a thinly-veiled Star Trek reference. Let's shoot orcs with a laser gun!"

I've been playing Wizardry 6 during the last couple days, and I agree that it can get pretty boring.

It finally got me to try Wizardy 1, and I have to say I'm enjoying that one a lot. I rolled a sweet party and you are always guaranteed an encounter when going through certain doors. The combat is faster and the leveling is simple.

Here is my down to earth review of your review:
It's not a review of the whole series if you only played Wizardry 6.

I finished all endings of Wizardry 6.

Also what made you think that quoting my whole post is a good idea? Please edit your post. Yet somehow most people fail to mention this when they "sell" the game to other on forums or in the GOG.com review section. Yeah, it's really a review of the first one and my take on the rest of the series, from the info I've gathered. The title isn't accurate but can't change it now.

My review of your review of my review: your review is short. You seem to not realize that a long text isn't written in one shot and you can reorganize it or change your mind along the way, occasionally messing it up.

In the case of the first level, not always; sometimes the well runs dry on those two rooms near the entrance of the maze. Fortunately, returning to the castle and then re-entering the maze seems to reset them.

The only guaranteed fixed encounter on Level 1 would be Murphy's Ghost, an optional boss-type battle that is relatively easy (albeit time-consuming) for even low-level characters and yields large amounts of EXP. You have to go a bit out of your way to find it though; it's not exactly in a location you'd stumble across blindly on your first play-through. (Hint: Look for a secret door at the end of a long hallway, and expect a teleport trap on the other side.)

What can I say, dude? It's the genre. This is western stat-based RPGs prior to about 1995. Either they're direct D&D licensed products - and even some of those are pretty silly - or they're like this. They're entirely in the spirit, it should be said, of the tabletop RPGs they're based on from that era - lots of numbers to crunch, dungeons to explore and monsters to fight, but stories that waver between "generic" and "non-existent".

If you were buying an 80s platformer I wouldn't feel the need to tell you it's in 2D and you'll have limited lives. If you were buying a two-player fighting game I wouldn't bother to point out that there's no story worth mentioning and you'll need a friend to really enjoy it. This is the genre.

Genre mish-mashing is also fairly commonplace in modern-day CRPGs (and fantasy generally), to the point that it isn't necessarily considered noteworthy anymore.


That these sorts of early games began crossing genres the way they did when they did is one of the things that helped western fantasy break out of the tropes established by writers like Tolkien, Vance, Moorcock, et al, and gain the diversity that it now has.

Yeah, I should have said pretty much guaranteed every time you re-enter the maze from the castle. That's what I was doing.

I haven't found Murphy's Ghost, but I did walk through a wall and end up teleported some place with 5 doors and 2 statues. Somehow, I guess through luck (not many encounters) and mapping, managed to find my way back to the castle.

It's been a while since I've played it, but aren't a lot of the weirdness (bar the sci-fi ending) in Wizardry 6 explainable by the Cosmic Forge being used?

The bigger problem is that the dungeon graphics doesn't really change in the different areas, which is disappointing. But it's an old RPG that had to fit on an Amiga whilst having quite a lot of text. So I personally accept that, but can see other people might not be as forgiving.

My take is that it is what it is. A game that's loosely Wizardry, but pushes everything further and tries to tell a story that begins in the fantasy trope, and ends up that it's all a bigger story involving other races and the big-bad Dark Savant. Highly tongue-in-cheek -- especially compared to Ultima VII -- and fun to the right people. Just a pity the respawn rate is so high!

Thanks for the tip. I did find that statue, but decided not to touch it. Didn't want to risk a wipe since I had no idea where I was in the level at the time.

Digging Wizard 6 now that I made a better party and figured out how the skill system works.

Yeah 6 is pretty good if you ask me, the early going is tough though, I must of lost my thief and one of my mages at least twice before I finally got them to level 2/3 after that I been cleaning house except for those horrible moments when one of my guy's botch a roll and their spells backfires nothing worse then your guys eating a botched level 3 magic missile or sleep spell in the middle of a strong fight. Well okay there are worse things but early on it's pretty bad..Oh and on thing about lock picking since people get confused the higher your skullduggery the easier it is to land on green for the tumblers as they pop up more often and so making it seem like the switching between red and green is slower, granted that is only for locks that are not out of your current level of expertise. Also don't enter the door marked with a spade till your at least around level 3 or 5 as their is a set encounter with a nasty Zombie in that room who will mop the floor with you if you're not skilled enough faster than you can say Eric Roberts.