Alucard1191 wrote:Matchstick, you've beaten the original Wizardry? Major props, I could never get past the the floor with all the teleporter traps.
Man, what a test of patience that game was, Alucard. Didn't that teleporter level randomly send the entire party into the castle moat, where they'd all drown? That game took some tinkering at the start, or you were just dead meat. It was all about stats, "re-rolling" when creating characters at the start of the game until you got the party you truly wanted. Also did quite a bit of resetting once characters leveled up within the game, just to ensure they received the best stat boosts possible. You could also reset the game if your party started getting wiped out by a high-level random encounter. Not exactly "fair," but given how unfair the game was to begin with, I feel like any sort of trick you could use to your advantage was valid.
Still took an incredibly long time this way, but in my younger and more fragile years, I was way more patient with this sort of game. I was in junior high, playing D&D at the time, and was looking for a video game to give me that tabletop feel of creating a character and crawling through a dungeon. To that end, Wizardry succeeds, and I had a blast mapping out the dungeon floors as I went along. It also helped a ton that I had the box and manual to go with it. Like Final Fantasy, the manual was invaluable in explaining game terminology and giving you a leg-up at the start.
Don't worry, though, you aren't missing much by not completing it. The ending is just a screen of text against a plain black background, some massive cash for your next playthrough (yeah, right!) and then the credits roll. That's it. Worth playing through if you want a challenge, but if you're looking for a satisfying ending, this is not the game for you!
Oddly enough, Final fantasy's level-up stats are fairly random, as well. Each character receives a random HP bonus at a new level-up, leading to some infamous moments from my childhood where my White or Black Mage would receive 1 or 2 new HP. Once I learned what was going on, I gamed the system a bit by ensuring I saved my game right before the level up occurred. If I didn't like the stats I got, I'd re-load and try again. Sounds lame, I know, but tying to beat the game with a White Wizard who barely has 180 HP, while the two Knights in the group have over 800, leads to some definite balancing issues later on. Game's not much fun if your healer can't even survive the first round of a random late-game battle.