Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (NES) Playthrough
192A playthrough of Nexoft's 1990 role-playing game for the NES, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
If you'd like to skip the character creation stuff, the game begins at 12:42.
In the world of Wizardry, the great wizard Werdna has stolen a priceless amulet from Trebor, the eponymous "mad overlord," and he has taken refuge in a chamber located at the bottom of a ten-story-deep subterranean labyrinth teeming with monsters. Trebor has offered a huge reward for the return of his amulet, and groups of hopeful adventurers now begin to gather at the castle town near the labyrinth's entrance.
As a cornerstone of the RPG genre, Sir-Tech's Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, originally released for Apple II computers in the fall of 1981, is one of the true pioneers in gaming history. Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and countless other classics owe a huge debt to Wizardry (and Ultima) for laying the foundation.
Unencumbered by a complex story and deep characters, Wizardry represents the purest distillation of a first-person, combat-focused dungeon crawler. After rolling stats to determine the starting classes of your six party members, you're dropped off at the entrance to the labyrinth, and it's up to you to figure out how to proceed from there.
There are plenty of ways to approach the adventure, but Wizardry does not treat players with a light touch, and the game makes that crystal clear from the beginning. Death is an ever-looming specter, and since there's no guaranteed way to revive a fallen party member, everything you do carries weight.
It's easy to stretch your resources too thin, to overestimate your abilities against a tough enemy, or to become hopelessly lost in the depths of the labyrinth, and the punishment for making such mistakes is swift and brutal. Careful planning and keeping tabs on the details are essential to making progress, but the challenge is surmountable with enough dedication.
The NES version, developed by Game Studio and published in the west under Ascii's Nexoft label, remains generally faithful to the original computer game. The layouts of a few floors were changed and the text-based puzzles were axed, but all of the character classes, enemy types, and items are here, and the NES version brings with it a major upgrade to the presentation. This was the first version of Wizardry to feature a soundtrack, and it was the first to sport non-wireframe dungeon graphics.
This port was extremely popular in Japan, and it would've been considered the definitive version of the game in its time had it not been plagued by bugs that severely hamper its playability. The worst of them result in the accuracy and strength of enemy attacks being determined by the enemy's AC rating instead of their target's, making armor and AC-related magic essentially useless. Enemies also mistakenly receive massive stat boosts when occupying certain positions in the attack formation, which tends to have a nasty impact on the late-game difficulty balance. On top of that, there are issues with things like stat growth and moral alignments. These problems can be circumvented to some extent by exploiting the game's autosave system and by creating backups of your save data before leveling up, but they cast a pretty dark shadow over an otherwise good game.
Even with its litany of issues, the NES port of Wizardry is a fun game, and it's one that's arguably more playable than its IBM PC counterpart, but it's still not the ideal way to experience such a classic.
(And if you're interested, check out my Super Nintendo arrangement of the PC Engine version's battle theme! https://youtu.be/4Qd2qvP4mZY)
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