Wizardry II: Won!*

Wizardry: Scenario #2 - The Knight of Diamonds

Sir-Tech Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1982 for Apple II and DOS; 1986 for FM-7 and PC-88; 1987 for PC-88 and Sharp X1; 1988 for Commodore 64; 1990 for Macintosh; 1991 for NES; 2001 for Game Boy Color; 1993 for TurboGrafx CD; 1997 for PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and Windows

Date Started: 9 April 2010
Date Ended: 24 March 2014

Total Hours: 26

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 32
Ranking at Time of Posting: 84/142 (59%)

It was almost four years ago that I first played Wizardry: Scenario #2 - The Knight of Diamonds. The first Wizardry (Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord) was audacious in its demands on the player: extreme difficulty, little character progression, mapping puzzles, and--above all--permadeath. Wizardry II upped the ante by not only featuring all of the same elements but also requiring the player to import characters from the first game. If played "straight," a party slain in Wizardry II was permanently dead and the player--I'm completely serious--would have to win the first Wizardry again (or at least build up the characters to high enough levels in that game) before trying again in II. This is the only game I know whose permadeath requires starting over in an earlier game.

Well, back in 2010, I did play it straight and I died almost right away. Since I wasn't willing to go back and win Proving Grounds again, I gave up on the game after only a few hours and moved on, never expecting to return.
 

But last October, amidst my writings on Wizardry VI and Oubliette--the PLATO game that inspired many of Wizardry's elements--I began to seriously jones for the original Wizardry again. In the last four years, and especially since I've played through the non-DOS games from 1979-1982 that I originally skipped, I've really learned to appreciate how unbelievably good it was for its time. In my opinion, in the entire first half of the 1980s, the only other game that can challenge it is Ultima III. Because I went almost directly from Wizardry to Ultima III in 2010, skipping a horde of non-DOS games in between, I didn't realize the implications of that.

 

In preparation for this post, I had to win Wizardry again with a new party.

Because of these realizations, and because I was a clueless, novice blogger when I first wrote about Wizardry, I wanted to offer a retrospective on Wizardry to coincide with my fourth anniversary. I fired up the game, developed a new party, and began re-experiencing it, this time taking more detailed notes for more in-depth postings than I offered in 2010. When I finally finished the game around Christmas, I had notes enough for about seven entries but no longer had any motivation to write them, and to be honest, I don't know if I ever will. But I also had a successful party ready to try again in Wizardry II. When I saw that completing II would allow me to finish 1982 having won every (reasonably) winnable game up to that point, I decided to give it a try.

This time, I backed up the party; hence, my asterisk in the title. Much like I did with Wizardry V, I also allowed myself to back up the save disk after every playing session and restore party members if they were eradicated. The funny thing was, I didn't need it much. I only restored from the save disk four or five times. The Knight of Diamonds is not easy, but in the ways that it's hard, it's predictably hard. The monsters don't scale in difficulty as dramatically as in Proving Grounds, and I never found myself in a combat in which I was in danger of having everyone eradicated. No single combat in II was anywhere near as difficult as the final battle with Werdna and his allies in I.

Wizardry II is the only direct sequel in this series--in which you play the same characters and they retain their levels--until Wizardry VII. In basic mechanics, it is the same game as the first Wizardry, to the extent that in The Ultimate Wizardry Archives, a description of the game occupies only a single page: the reader is instructed to look at the instructions for the first game for everything but the brief back story. All the spells are the same; even the shop names are the same, although II takes place in a different city (of course, this would also be the case in V).
 

Gilgamesh and Boltac really have a corner on their franchises.

 
The story and quest for Knight of Diamonds are probably the weakest of the series. Basically, the City of Llylgamyn used to be protected by the Staff of Llylgamyn (bestowed by the goddess Gnilda), which prevented evil people from entering the city. Through a dumb loophole, it didn't work on Llylgamyn natives, so a resident named Davalpus staged a coup and slaughtered the royal family. The only survivors, Princess Margda and Prince Alavik, tried to retake the city by retrieving the fabled magic armor of a hero known as the Knight of Diamonds. Wearing the armor, Alavik engaged in combat with Davalpus and killed him, but Davalpus's final curse brought the castle down in ruins, and the Staff, the armor, and Alavik were lost to the depths of the dungeons. Someone needs to get the staff back, which first means retrieving the various pieces of the Knight of Diamonds.

An encounter square on the first level spells out the nature of the quest.

 
Like its predecessor, the game features a series of 20 x 20 dungeon levels, but there are only 6 of them rather than 10. Each level culminates in a battle against an animated piece of the Knight of Diamonds' outfit (a suit of armor, a helm, a pair of gauntlets, a shield, and a sword). Only the battle on Level 1 is very hard. To get to it, you first have to be capable of casting the MALOR (teleport) spell, which requires a mage of at least Level 13. The suit of armor itself is immune to magic and almost impossible to hit, but it doesn't do much damage, so fighting it is a long process of seeing who bleeds out first. The other items are both susceptible to magic and easier to hit.

Fighting the battle to get the first piece of armor.

Characters transfer from the first game with all of their levels, attributes, spells, and gold, but no equipment. This was easy to replenish with the riches I brought, and my gold also helped with occasional resurrections. I had taken two fighters, a thief, a priest, a mage, and a bishop through Wizardry, and I had hoped to change some of the characters to prestige classes (samurai, lord, ninja), but owing to the weird first-game bug by which you often lose attributes when leveling up, no one had the requisite statistics.

Leveling up offers the same blend of gained and lost attributes.

It turned out to be unlikely that any of my level-ups in II would promote me to lord, samurai, or ninja territory. Not only did the dynamic of losing attributes continue, but I only achieved one or two more levels throughout the entire game. By the time you hit Level 13 or 14, you need more than half a million experience points to advance, and combats only tend to deliver a few thousand each. In this way, the game is a little less fun than its predecessor. On the other hand, it features a lot more items that, when equipped and "invoked," will increase attributes and make other character improvements.

Those of you who read my Wizardry postings may remember how much I complained about my thief. In the first three games of the series, thieves and ninjas are the only characters capable of successfully disarming traps, so you really need one if you ever want to open a chest (and you need to open chests if you ever want to find good magic equipment). My thief's blundering, on the other hand, turned out to save me a lot of trouble when I fumbled a teleporter trap early on the final level and got teleported right to Werdna's chambers (recounted in this post).

Kurosawa tries to disarm a trap. It's even odds whether he's even identified the right trap.

Although I had a new thief this time (Kurosawa; I think I wanted to make him a samurai originally), he bungled his job with equal regularity, so I made it a joke to test out unknown items on him in punishment. One of these items, found on Level 4, was called a "Ring of Metamorph." I had Kurosawa equip and invoke it, and I didn't notice any immediate change, so I shrugged and kept adventuring. Only when he started screwing up every trap did I take a closer look and realize that the ring had changed his class to a lord! (Apparently, a neutral-alignment lord is possible if you convert this way.) The good news was that I had a much stronger fighter in the front three ranks; the bad was that I had absolutely no way to reliably disarm traps.

Even a hobbit can, with a little luck, become a lord.

Changing him back to a thief would have re-started him on Level 1. Since I was pretty far into the game, I just lived with it, using CALFO to identify traps and shrugging off their effects if it was something that wouldn't kill me. "Alarms" were always good; they just bring another combat, after which you get the stuff that was in the chest. I didn't mind "Teleporter" traps so much; I'd just re-orient myself and make my way back to where I had been, although I discovered that something about the trap prevents the square from clearing, so I'd have to fight fixed combats a second time.

The six levels of the scenario were filled with navigational obstacles. About one third of Levels 1 and 2 are dark squares that you have to map by feeling your way around in the dark.
 

Imagine how much of a pain it was to map that maze in the dark.

My map of Level 4 shows numerous areas of solid wall.

 
Level 2 featured a sage who demanded 100,000 gold from me. That was no problem. In response, he gave me a spiel that suggested changes to some of the spells in the game, but I didn't really notice any difference. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows what that was about.
 

 
About half of Level 4 (presented as a series of caverns) were solid wall. In I, you could teleport into squares even if you couldn't enter them normally (i.e., through doors), but I learned the hard way that you don't want to try to do that here. You get teleported into rock and the entire party dies. This was responsible for one of my reloads.
 

 
One thing that annoyed me was the presence of traps. I had forgotten that Wizardry features no spell to "levitate" or otherwise avoid pit traps. You can't even detect them. You just blunder into them and suck up the damage. Traps were the cause of a lot of resurrections.

There were a couple of riddles. Level 2 had a long one before the armor battle whose answer, predictably, came out SHIELD. Level 6 had an even longer one whose answer, even more predictably, was THE KNIGHT OF DIAMONDS--and boy, was that definite article necessary. Just KNIGHT OF DIAMONDS caused me to get a "wrong!" and to lose all of the pieces of armor I'd collected. I don't mind admitting I reloaded.
 

Part of a multi-part riddle on the final level.

 
There were only five pieces of the knight's kit, but I had to descend from Level 5 to 6 via a chute and come back up via a set of stairs to get the fifth piece. This battle, with a pair of gauntlets, was essentially the "final battle" of the game, notable because it was extremely easy. There's no one epic final battle against a "big boss" here.
 

The last major fixed battle of the game.

Once I had the four pieces of armor and the sword, I returned to the sorceress Gnilda's altar on the first level. At first, nothing happened, but I figured I needed to combine the items into a single character. Still nothing. Then, I figured out that a message I got on Level 6--"ONE ALONE"--meant that a single character needed to return to Gnilda with the armor. This worked. Gnilda gave me the Staff and made me her champion.
 

Rare bit of trivia: Greenberg and Woodhead named the goddess after their Korean friend, Adli Ng.

 
After that, I returned to the surface and got the winning screen above. At that point, the game let me identify which of the other characters on disk had been in my party and designed them with a "K" symbol for "knight." Gideon, who brought the items to Gnilda, gets a "G" instead. I don't know if these have any effect on the next game or whether they're just status marks.
 

My party leader at game's end. The > symbol means he beat the first game.

 
When I got to the end of my first attempt to play the game, in 2010, I somewhat stupidly remarked that, "Since Wizardry II is the same game as Wizardry, I see no reason not to give it the same overall score." This was a bit lazy of me (and, of course, I was speaking from ignorance since I didn't experience more than a bit of Level 1). They may have the same engine, but they're not the same game. I'd rate I higher in character development and the quality of the main quest but II does much better with equipment, offering a wider variety of magic weapons and armor and special items. Among them, the item I most prized was a "Wand of Mages" that, when invoked, reset my available spells so that my mage had 9 in each level, including priest spells. It only worked a few times, but wow, did it make a difference when spelunking those lower levels.
 

 
I'm going to complete a quick GIMLET without looking at what I gave Wizardry back in 2010:

• 2 points for the game world. The story isn't nearly as interesting as the first game, and nothing of the civil war or the figures involved in it makes their way into the gameplay itself.

• 4 points for character creation and development. For creation, it's still one of the best of the era, offering a full set of attributes, interesting classes of mixed abilities, and an alignment system that prevents mixing good and evil characters. As I said, leveling was very slow in this game, so I never felt I was really getting anywhere with the combats.

• 0 points for NPC interaction. Unfortunately, there still aren't really any. (I'm not going to give a point for the single sage on Level 2.) They wouldn't come until Wizardry V, and then they were stupid.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. There are no scripted encounters aside from the riddles, but there are a few fixed combats. More important, the variety of enemies that you face, and their specific strengths and weaknesses in combat, won't be rivaled until perhaps the "Gold Box" games. You can never just blow through combat--not if you want to avoid being poisoned, petrified, or level-drained. You have to plot a particular strategy against each enemy.

The fire dragon was immune to fire damage but fell quickly against my Sword of Dragon Slaying.

• 6 points for magic and combat. For such a basic system, the Wizardry series does combat exceptionally well. Its major strength is the spell system, where you have just enough spells per level to plot a reasonably successful expedition, but not so many that you can get cocky. I love that first-level spells, like KATINO (sleep) and MANIFO (paralyze), don't stop being useful even against high-level enemies. I love that the priest's "dispell" has a chance, however small, of working against almost any foe. This game delivered more objects that were useful in combat so the rear three characters weren't so useless during times they couldn't cast spells. Overall, the combination of combat options and overall difficulty makes combat wonderfully tense and tactical.

• 6 points for equipment. Except for the Knight of Diamonds' pieces, which you can equip, all the good items appear randomly after combat. As I said, this game increased the variety of items available and their potential uses, which you have to test carefully on some guinea pigs. In the first game, I thought the equipment rewards were a bit paltry; most of my characters ended the game with +1 weapons at best. This one did a much better job.

Some of my bishop's items mid-game. A bishop is still the only character who can identify items.

• 1 point for economy. You get so much money from selling equipment that you never want for gold--not even when you sleep in the most luxurious room at the inn or have to resurrect a character every hour or so. I wish it had done a better job here.

• 2 points for quests. There's a basic main quest with no alternate outcomes, and it really isn't all that interesting.

• 3 points for graphics, sound and interface, and really all of it goes to the interface. The keyboard commands were intuitive enough that I didn't have to think about it for more than a few minutes at the beginning of the game.

• 3 points for gameplay. I dock it a little for being too hard. It was only winnable for me because I allowed backups; no way would I have suffered through multiple creations of characters in the first game whenever my II party suffered a full-party death. The pacing is good, though; it only took me about half the time as its predecessor.

This gives a final score of 32, reasonably lower than the 37 I gave Wizardry. This basically works, and I'm happy to see that most of the categories are consistent. (Though I gave the first game a 1 for NPCs; I have no idea what I was thinking about here.)

To stave off the inevitable questions: no, this doesn't mean that I will make another attempt at Wizardry III; no, it doesn't mean I'm going to eventually win Faery Tale Adventure or whatever other sorry excuse for a game you were hoping I'd revisit. This replay was a product of a specific desire to experience Wizardry again, and it served its purpose. 

Say what you want about Wizardry's descendants--Might & Magic and Dungeon Master are better in many ways--but I've rarely played another game that manages to maintain a sense of tension from beginning to end. If you play without cheating (or even just mildly cheating by allowing periodic backups), it's scary to wander the corridors of the dungeon, never knowing what kind of enemies you'll encounter in the next square, never knowing when a trap is going to halve your hit points, watching your health dwindle as you battle a powerful stack of enemies and trying to decide whether to spend your last seventh-level mage spell on a TILTOWAIT (the most powerful mass-damage spell in the game) or whether to try to save it so you can MALOR your butt to the surface as soon as the battle is over. You sweat playing this game. Wizardry II had me hunched over my keyboard, staring intently at its wireframe graphics in a way that no VGA game of the 1990s can compel.

All right. Diversion over; back to Crusaders of Khazan!