Wizard Wars: Walking Through

The game is easy enough that the death screen is rare.

As a long time connoisseur of CRPG walkthroughs (see my September 2010 posting), I've always been interested in creating one. (Before I started this blog, I used to use them liberally during gameplay, and I still like to read them after I've finished.) But every time I thought to create one for a game I particularly liked, I would find out that someone like Andrew Schultz had already beaten me to it. Now, at last, I've reached a game--Wizard Wars--that has nothing online. No walkthroughs, no let's plays, not even a significant user review. The best we have is an old 1989 article from QuestBusters that Xyzzy Magic linked me to. And while it seems to have a lot of spoilers (I stopped reading), it's still not a proper walkthrough.

So I fired up Notepad and began my text file as I played Wizard Wars. Here's what I've discovered: writing a walkthrough is hard, even for an absurdly simple game like this.

A good walkthrough is exhaustive, which means that I have to do everything there is to do in the game. I've got to visit each of the 30 territories in the first dimension multiple times, making sure I don't miss anything. (It's hard, but not impossible, to miss something when your only options are "Search for Item" and "Search for Inhabitants.") Then I have to catalog each monster, noting both the statistics that are on the surface (hit points and armor points) as well as those on which I have to perform measures of central tendency and dispersion (average damage, average hit rate). After the monsters, I have to try to figure out what all these items do. I've got a bunch of stuff--brass cup, broken sword, platinum bracelet, rocksalt--that seems to serve no purpose. At least not yet.

My mysterious inventory.

Just when I start to feel like I'm developing a solid list of territories and encounters, something hits me: What if the game randomizes some of its encounters on every new game? Now I've got to play it at least one more time to makes sure I encounter the same things in the same places on the second go. Bloody hell.

"Chet," I can hear you all sighing. "Why are you wasting time on this game? Wizardry V is next, and we know you're sneaking off to spend time with Skyrim." And you would be correct. But Wizard Wars is too easy to give up on. When I say "too easy," I mean first that the encounters (at least so far) have been very one-sided, with my wizard blasting his way through every sort of foe, but I also mean that it's too easy in terms of knowing precisely what to do next. Twenty feet to the left of where I'm typing this is a nice long couch upon which currently rests a dormant Xbox controller that, if I press the power button, will launch Skyrim. Yet if I were to abandon Wizard Wars for Skyrim, I'd have to bring up my enormous quest list and figure out which of 49 active quests to embark on next. In modern CRPGs, you're almost paralyzed with indecision. Thus, there's something refreshingly rote about Wizard Wars, at least in the first dimension. You visit each territory one-by-one, search for...you know what? This is easier as a flow chart.

Click to expand.

This isn't to say there were no special encounters in the first dimension. I found a few, but they took multiple visits and only revealed themselves after defeating several random enemies, so it's going to be a long process of searching five or six times before I'm confident I picked up everything. For instance, in territory #30, Raknor, I found some cat people who needed help opening a chest:




The full encounter reads:

Aimex has been the ruler of a cat-like people who have existed since Mazeus created the dimensions. In their keeping is a large iron-bound chest containing a sacred book. In this book lies all the knowledge of this race and its entire history. Long ago, a magical enchantment was cast upon the chest's lock to safeguard the book. Since then, no one has been able to unlock the chest. Worse, no one knows what happened to the mage who enchanted the lock. There is only one way in which the chest may be unlocked and that is with the help of Agien's Magical Lockpick. Aimex says that in return for opening the chest, he will give you an item that has been in his possession for quite some time.

At the time, I didn't have such a lockpick, but I later discovered it while searching for items on another map:




When I took it back to the cat people, they were suitably grateful and gave me a scroll with the "Fear" spell--the second spell I've obtained. (There's an option to "create spells" on the main screen, but I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work.)

Some of the other territories featured encounters with unique enemies, or bits of advice from sages. Here are a few related screen shots:

Ultimately, I'm not sure what it all adds up to. The main purpose of the first dimension seems to be to develop your character sufficiently so he can survive the second dimension. When Temeres hit 200 wisdom points (he starts with 100), the game gave the second dimension to me as an option. It turns out to be wholly unlike the first, featuring a 3-D maze full of random encounters.




Unless they've done something extraordinarily creative here, I can't imagine an old mapping pro like me having a lot of trouble here.

Unless Wizard Wars offers anything groundbreaking between now and its end, I won't waste your time with more drivel on this game; I'll just give you the "won!" posting at the end. In the meantime, I might take one more diversion into Skyrim since several of my readers said they wouldn't mind another take on it.