Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom

"No Luck!"

Wizardry V, hand-in-hand with Obitus, wins my award for "Game That I Tried Most Often to Get Into With Little or No Success". This game, the series and the entire mythos absolutely fascinates me for no real reason. There's an air of mystery, creativity and unexplored magic that I can't really wrap my brain around that compels me to keep giving the game another chance. Featuring an anime series, over 40 titles released in Japan and non-linear dungeon gameplay, Wizardry is a series that just continues to baffle me. The obstacle in my Wizardry V odyssey is that there are certain elements of the gameplay that are utterly repellent, and thus whenever I get too involved in the game I am subsequently turned away by something cruel and stupid.

Like many Super Nintendo titles, I got my start on Wizardry V at the ripe age of 9 years old. The game was full of elements that caught my attention right off the bat. You first make a party of six characters to your liking, ranging from good to evil on the alignment scale, of any race or class. You get to distribute a certain amount of stat points to start your character off on the right track, and the process is quick and simple (meaning you can create an entire fleet of characters if you are so inclined). After that you whisk them off to the ominously-named "Maze", where you will be greeted with a rather foreboding song and a first-person 3D perspective. Interesting enough. The navigation is somewhat intuitive, but all of the walls of the maze look exactly the same and it is very easy to get lost and disoriented. Furthermore, there is no map available to you until your Mage learns the spell "Dumapic". I wouldn't recommend taking any great voyages until this has been accomplished.

Not that you'll have the abilities to anyway. To start the game, even the simplest of encounters will leave your party absolutely devastated. By the way, you absolutely MUST create a Cleric. Must. There is no chance of you completing Wizardry V without at least one in your party. That's because at the beginning of the game you will have to run back up to the Town after every single battle and have your Cleric rest at the Adventurer's Inn in the stables for free so he/she can restore his/her magic points. With that, you can cast Dios on all of your wounded party members until you run out of magic points. Time to go stay at the stables again! Rinse, lather, repeat. If this sounds tedious at all, that's because it is -- this is sadly the quickest and most efficient way of healing, unless you're willing to put down exorbitant amounts of money to actually stay at the normal part of the inn and restore your HP. This process will haunt you until your characters reach maybe Level 3 or 4; thus, the Cleric is a fixture in your party.

If I've managed to make this game sound a little bit difficult to you, I must stress right now that you don't even understand the half of it. As far as I see it, there are two types of difficulty in the video game arena: good difficulty and bad. (Your perceptions may vary.) Good difficulty challenges you at every turn, presenting you with no situations and forcing you to use your brain. Though it can get overwhelming at times, you always feel like you have a chance and can overcome your obstacles. Fire Emblem is a great example of a game with good difficulty. Bad difficulty is just the developers spamming the hell out of frustrating obstacles and issues just to piss the gamer off. Wanderers from Ys III is a game that definitely comes to mind. Wizardry V is another. Enemies can kill even the strongest of party members in 3 or 4 attacks, and since they come in groups of up to 10 you will find your adventurers wilting awfully fast. If that's not bad enough, revival can cost 300 gold just for a Level 1 character...and since you're getting 10 gold a battle, you're gonna be struggling to make ends meet. Paralysis is just as expensive to cure, except worse because it comes completely out of nowhere no matter what your HP are. There are sections of the maze that are inexplicably dark and cannot be lit up. You can't tell if the armor you're about to buy is stronger or weaker than what you're wearing until you actually buy it -- and you can't tell at all for weapons. And I'm not even going to get into the game's oblique puzzles and cryptic lack of direction.

By the way, did I mention that the game has some of the most unintuitive mechanics ever? Managing your characters is a serious pain in the ass. The controls are clunky and unresponsive, and you have to slog through hundreds of menus just to heal your characters or equip an item. The game is graphically cheap, so it uses menus to communicate basically everything -- which cheapens the rest of the game in turn.

For what it's worth, though, you just can't help but keep on going at the game. It's a surprisingly fun and addictive dungeon-crawler, despite the twisted and cruel difficulty. I recently started a new game on emulation, and despite having played for five hours I am still not off the first floor. The only reason I haven't given up in a complete rage is because I refuse to let myself take the game seriously. I suggest you follow the same path. Develop a full cast of oddly-named characters. Don't let yourself used the generic "THIEF1" or "FIGHTER2" that the game has already created for you! Give them personalities, if you want. Imagine them griping at each other as you inch through the brown-walled dungeons, screen after screen after screen. If you want to commit yourself to the game, then you have to have fun. Maybe you're a fan of the dungeon-crawling genre; maybe this brain-bending difficulty and lack of kindness is 'fun' to you. But to us casual gamers, we have to make the fun ourselves, and take what the game gives us in stride. Wizardry V has the mechanics to be a 'fun' game. It's 'fun' to explore a big huge dungeon full of strange characters and spooky monsters. It's 'fun' to create a personalized team of crack maze-men. And -- dare I say it? -- it's 'fun' to be able to laugh at the game's po-faced self-importance, its horrible and repetitive music and its hideous graphics. If you absolutely detest the genre, avoid this game like the plague. Otherwise, I highly recommend that you give it a try, despite itself. You may have...'fun'.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/06/06