"Did the resurrection fail? Then your hero is GONE, and you CANNOT go back to your last save!"

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a classic old-school role-playing game with turn-based combat, set in a first-person perspective dungeon maze with ten floors. Wizardry was originally created for the computer; then it was adapted for the NES. The adaptation sacrificed (almost?) none of the original's brutally unforgiving difficulty.

Which is why I hate it. And I consider myself a connoisseur of old-school RPGs that (almost?) everyone else hates. I loved Beyond the Beyond, but Wizardry has earned my eternal contempt.

Gameplay: 2/10

Wizardry's basic gameplay is just Dragon Quest, with a handful of Dungeons and Dragons elements thrown in. You roll up party members from scratch, pick the classes you want, and head into the game's only dungeon. (Technically there is an alignment system of Good, Neutral, or Evil, but in practice it matters very little). Combat is entirely turn-based and menu-driven. You navigate the ten-floor dungeon maze in first-person perspective, one square at a time. Drawing maps on graph paper and taking notes is virtually required, unless you print out maps from online.

So far so good; many excellent pioneer CRPGs have used this basic formula, including the Might & Magic series, the Bard's Tale series, and Dragon Wars. What sets Wizardry apart from them - and NOT in a good way - is its utterly merciless difficulty.

If your party members die, there is a sizeable chance they will be gone forever.

You can try to resurrect them, but that may fail and then they are GONE. You CANNOT go back to your last save with them still alive; the game somehow autosaves constantly, and doesn't keep multiple save files. If a party member dies and you reload, you're still in the middle of the dungeon with a dead party member. If resurrecting him fails, then all the hours you spent leveling and training that poor dead guy were wasted.

Oh, and if your whole party dies? Then their dead bodies are in the dungeon, and the only way to get their corpses back is to roll up a new party from scratch and painstakingly level them up. They might be able to retrieve some of your dead party's equipment, maybe.

Oh, and if you try to use the teleport spell and accidentally teleport your party into solid rock? Then they're all gone forever and so is all the stuff they carried. Yeah. Wizardry isn't quite a roguelike, but it is the closest I've seen a standard RPG come to one.

Compounding this is that when you reach the 4th level or so of the dungeon, you will start to run into monsters that instantly kill your characters ("BOB is decapitated!"). If these monsters happen to ambush you, they can instantly kill one or more of your characters before you can do anything, and we're back to all your exhaustive level grinding being for nothing.

I love old school RPGs. I love mapping. I mapped out every square of dungeon levels 1-4 up to the part where you get ambushed by insta-death ninjas. They kept killing my heroes. I rolled up more heroes, even started naming them after numbers out of exasperation, and spent hours running back and forth to grind levels. It just wasn't enough. I finally had to give up in frustration, which is now being vented in this review 20 years later.

It should be noted that one can cheat character death in the NES version by hitting the RESET button just as one of your heroes is killed in battle. But I say that if you're fighting every battle with your finger hovering over the RESET button, something is severely wrong with the game.

Graphics: 7/10

Very, very simple. You see a maze stretching before you while you navigate, and you see a colorful picture of whatever monster is trying to kick your ass. That's all. There is no real animation, but by the standards of the time (and the technical limitations of the NES) the graphics are decent. They're even a notable improvement over the earliest incarnations of Wizardry on the computer.

Music: 6/10

Passable, especially given the limitations of the NES, but the random battle theme gets old fast.

Story: 2/10

Almost nonexistent. In Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the mad overlord has charged you to go into his Proving Grounds and fetch his amulet. Get to it.

There are a few messages scrawled here and there in the maze, mostly wry clues to its puzzles. But that's all.

Summary:

Is Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord worth playing?

Gaaah! Not unless you REALLY like obnoxiously difficult old-school RPGs. Keep in mind that Wizardry is far above and beyond other games of its ilk in terms of "fake difficulty" - permanently killing off your party members (without even the option of going back to your last save!) is just plain cheap.

And what if you happen to like roguelike RPGs? Wizardry is worse than a typical roguelike in that most roguelikes don't expect you to obsessively grind, or meticulously map, or balance and equip a full party, and combat in most roguelikes is quick.

Wizardry's most notable saving grace is that it was a trailblazer for other games of its kind - perhaps its most hateful aspects can be forgiven, when one thinks of the many other, better games that it inspired. But, should you actually play this accursed thing again? Without studying a FAQ to utterly exploit every angle that allows one to match the AI's cheapness with equally cheap hidden tricks (therefore defeating any point to playing the game in the first place)? Why, by all that is good and holy, why?

Wizardry might be remotely playable with help from a FAQ, with printed-out maps, and with one's finger on the RESET button to save the party's lives during any fight with a one-hit-you-die ninja. But, is this your idea of fun? Is it really?

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 09/22/10

Game Release: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (US, July 1990)