I watched a couple of hours worth of videos on how to build a party and play the game, took some good advice about speeding it up, went in with expectations fairly low based on what I heard about the combat. I'm not disappointed because I didn't think I'd like it, so I guess it's nice to know I was right. The combat is dumb, repetitive, and a mindless slog. For all the options in character creation it feels like there's realistically only a few vaild builds with very superficial differences between them. There is a lot of detail in the character skills but it's not GOOD detail. While some of the options may not have been precisely replicated elsewhere, there isn't enough to make it worth dealing with the garbage elements of the game. The story wasn't enough to grab my interest, the game world felt empty and uninteresting, the interaction with NPCs was severly limited. Yes, you can ask them all kind of things, but they only respond to a limited number of key phrases, so you might as well have a basic dialogue tree. What it comes down to is this: what do you think a cRPG is? If all it is to you is min/maxing characters and combat, well, you can still find better games out there, but the game system here is unique enough that you might enjoy exploring it. If you're like me and a compelling story is a requirement to consider a game a classic, then you're not going to like this game as much as some others who posted reviews here. Wizardry has always lived in MIght and Magic's shadow, and 8 is no exception. To me the best cRPG was Planescape: Torment, purely because of the story. This game doesn't come anywhere close to that, and the combat is not really any better. Complexity does not automatically indicate quality, and all this game's combat has is needless complexity. The tedious, grinding progression is not satisfying at all, and a few kitschy moments can't save this game from being the boring mess that it is.
