Wizardry III: Good...Bad...I'm the guy with the MAHALITO

Never gets old.

Irene and I have an annual tradition of watching all three Lord of the Rings films over some Saturday or Sunday in December. This year, because of holiday scheduling and a desire to dig into Dragon Age: Inquisition, we delayed it until last Monday. While I like the tradition, there are only so many times you can watch a film--even if you space out the viewings by a year--before it no longer has anything new to offer. I thus spent most of the 11-hour session playing Wizardry III on the side. It felt oddly comforting, and I realized somewhere around the Battle of Helm's Deep that for three of the past four years, I've been playing a Wizardry game during our LOTR marathon. In 2011, it was Wizardry V, and last year it was the original Wizardry again. On a fourth occasion, I think back in 2010, I was playing Phantasie III. I've started my own sub-tradition within our tradition.

The early Wizardry trilogy is a good series to play with something else going on at the same time. It makes small demands on your conscious mind, especially when you settle in for hours of grinding before moving on to the next dungeon level. There is a case to be made that no truly good game would require this much grinding. While I still like the series for all the reasons I outlined last time, you'll note that none of the first five games get out of the 30s on the final rating. They all straddle the line between "recommended" and "not recommended" (which is around 35-40), which in this case you can interpret as "recommended for players of a particular disposition."

A couple of interesting foes from Level 4. Lions are scary enough as it is, but Lions of HELL?! Damn.

  
My Wizardry III sessions have been relatively predictable since the first post. Leave Llylgamyn for the dungeon. Fight my way through a bunch of fixed combats on Level 1. Get to the stairs to Level 2 with some fraction of my original hit points remaining (obviously, this part got better as I increased levels). If I got unlucky with those fixed encounters, return to the castle immediately via the teleporter right next to the Level 2 stairs. Otherwise, ascend to Level 2, map a few squares, and fight a few combats. When I reach about 1/3 of my original hit points and spell slots, retreat to the stairs and return to the castle.

Wizardry III is much deadlier than its predecessors, however, with a lot more random variability in the difficulty and number of monsters you encounter in both fixed and random combats. About half the time, my plan above failed, and I found myself reloading from my saved backup. I would never get through this game playing it straight.

Suddenly coming upon 13 enemies in an area that normally serves up only 5 or 6. At least I surprised them.

There was a change in cast along the way. I got sick of how useless my thief was in combat (the "hide" and "ambush" system wouldn't come along until Wizardry V), so I decided to go with Delmoko's suggestion of getting rid of the thief entirely and relying on the priest's CALFO spell to identify traps and then either ignore them or suck up the damage. To replace the thief, I grabbed my old thief-turned-lord from Wizardry II, renamed him, and put him at the head of the party.

Well, that lasted a single expedition. Even though I knew I wasn't missing out on a lot of great loot on the first couple of levels, I still hated leaving chests just sitting on the floor. Thus, I rotated the thief back into the party and got rid of the bishop. He now spends his days in the tavern, waiting for my party to return with objects for him to identify. (That system works better here than in Wizardry V, because the whole "you touched it!" dynamic doesn't exist yet.) I mourn the loss of the additional priest and mage spell slots that the bishop offered, but at least I got some more priest slots with my lord. It annoys me that I have to lug someone around whose sole purpose in life is disarming traps, especially since he so often fails at it.

Level 2 so far. I can't get to the blank areas yet.

  
About one-third of Level 2 ended up being inaccessible--I tested every wall for secret doors--so I can only assume that there will be a staircase back down from a higher level or I'll need to wait for the MALOR spell to pick up the rest of it. There is only one special encounter on the level--a riddle whose answer was painfully obvious...

  
...and there was one teleportation square to momentarily confuse mapping. The stairs up from Level 2 went to Level 4 rather than Level 3; I assume that to get to Level 3, I need to use the Level 1 stairs that require an evil party. (More on that in a minute.) I started to map a bit of Level 4, and I thankfully found a second staircase there that returns me to Level 1, on the other side of the "moat" area. While I still can't cross the moat, a nearby staircase teleports me back to the town if the party is the wrong alignment. It's nice to only have to worry about the "out" expedition and not the return.

My party is all Level 7-8 at this point, which means they have little to fear on Level 1. Level 2 is generally safe, but still capable of serving up the occasional battle with multiple large packs of foes just when I've run out of KATINO (sleep) and MAHALITO (fireball) spells. I generally try to run in such cases, but fleeing in this game is insidious because it resets all the fixed encounters on the level. It hardly ever works anyway.

Now that I've achieved a certain level, I can keep LATUMAPIC (identify) and MAPORFIC (protect) going for the entire expedition.

  
My sense is that at some point after Level 4, maybe right after, I'll need some kind of plan for transitioning my party to evil, as at least one level (I'm guessing two, for symmetry) won't allow good characters. The two major options seem to be: 1) create a brand-new evil party and build them up, a thought that fills me with despair; or 2) switch my existing characters to evil by attacking friendly parties. The problem with the latter approach is that friendly parties don't come along very often, and it's not guaranteed that even one party member will change alignment if you attack them.

My ticket to an evil disposition. Later.

  
I probably made things more difficult for myself by creating an almost all-good party in the first place; on the other hand, I don't think the game gave me a "neutral" option when I was importing the characters from Wizardry II. Anyway, since the time commitment isn't trivial with either option, I don't mind spoilers to this question: what is the actual nature of the alignment restrictions on the levels? Does Level 3 kick me out if any of my characters are good, or does it only kick me out if none of them are evil? Would a good/evil mixture be able to visit all levels? (It's normally not possible to combine them both in one party, but there's a trick to get around this.)

Not much else to tell you at this juncture except a bunch of random notes:

• Last time, I suggested that every time you level up, there's an equal chance that each attribute will increase, decrease, or stay the same. On further examination, I don't think this is quite true. While attributes do frequently decrease during leveling (and while I occasionally get a horrible level-up in which all attributes decrease), in general I think the ratio of increases to decreases is about 2:1 or maybe 3:2. My party members are generally better now than they were at Level 1, as evidenced by the fact that both my fighters could transition to samurais if they wanted to.

Occasions like this are as common as the "all loss" screen shot I had in the last post.

• Alas, I'm no closer than ever to becoming a ninja, which requires absurdly high stats--17 in everything. Has anyone ever legitimately made ninja in the DOS versions of one of the first three Wizardry games?

When I created him, he had a very high bonus pool. Despite that, and despite reaching Level 8 already, Lone Wolf needs 2 more strength, 7 more IQ, 6 more piety, and 6 more vitality to be a ninja.

  

• The joy of getting your first MAHALITO in a Wizardry game is akin to the joy of getting your first "Fireball" in a Gold Box game.

• While I still like Excel for mapping, I don't have a good way to depict one-way doors. There are a lot of them on Level 2.

• I've always been mystified by the options to rest at the inn. You need to rest to gain levels, but in doing so, it doesn't matter if you choose the stables, which are free, or the other options, which cost between 10 and 500 gold pieces a week. The only difference the room quality makes is how many hit points you restore per week--from 1 on "a cot" to 10 in the Royal Suite. It works out to between 10 and 50 gold pieces per hit point. In a game where gold is so precious (you need it for resurrections), why would anyone pay to restore hit points, when you can just pop into the dungeon, cast all your DIOS and DIAL spells, and pop back out if you need a refresh? Did loading speeds on the original platforms make it somehow worthwhile for players to just spend the money?

Maybe some players just like the extravagance.

  

• The word "Garian" precedes a number of enemies in the game: Garian raider, Garian priest, Garian guard, and so forth. I'm curious where the name came from. The only citations I can find for "Garia" are a neighborhood of Calcutta, India, and an extinct town in Newfoundland. At least one other enemy, the Bengal tiger, suggests a south Asian theme for some of the monsters. I'll also take theories on the origin of "L'Kbreth."

• I have a love/hate relationship with banshees, an enemy that has appeared on Level 4. On one hand, they die easily and can be "dispelled" in large numbers by my priest, providing solid experience points in both cases. On the other hand, if they manage to get in an attack, they level-drain the character. There is no more annoying effect in RPG-dom than level drain.

The definition of "relief."

• Looking over the list of spells, I realized that never once have I tried a HAMAN (wish) or MAHAMAN (big wish) spell in a Wizardry game. The reason is the one level of experience that it costs to cast it. However, I'm curious about the "selection of possible boons" that they offer. I look forward to trying them when I get those spell levels.

My enjoyment of Wizardry III is heavily influenced by how often I remind myself that I have a list of over 1,000 titles waiting for me. When I don't think about that, I'm actually enjoying myself a surprising amount. Only allowing a backup every 30 minutes still preserves a lot of of the tension, but it doesn't give me an anxiety attack every time I encounter a master ninja. The sense of character progression has been significant (I'm very glad the game started everyone at Level 1 again), and I think perhaps no game does spell balance as well as this series. I love that when I get slightly turned around in the maze, I agonize about whether to spend a spell slot on DUMAPIC.

Probably one or two more posts to finish this up. Happy New Year, everybody! Here's hoping I can finally finish 1990 in 2015.