Wizardry Gaiden (Cohost backup)

 I just beat Wizardry Gaiden I's second dungeon for the first time and thought I'd take the opportunity to rave about the game.

—

Wizardry Gaiden I: Suffering of the Queen (ウィザードリィ外伝I ～女王の受難～), released for Game Boy in 1991 and fan-translated in 2014, is an absolutely masterful DRPG. Maybe that isn't a surprise—looking at Mobygames, much of the team, including the director, had previously worked on NES ports of the original trilogy.

Gaiden I's biggest strength is its dungeon design, which compares favorably to every other DRPG I've played, including the first few floors of the original Wizardry. Each floor is not just a different layout but a different kind of layout: 1F's apartment complex gives way to 2F's outline of a yet-unenterable fortress, which yields in turn to 3F's long L-shaped monster condo. 4F is a tricky teleporter maze, 5F is a rambling cavern full of dark patches, and 6F is another teleporter maze (OK,). Then a dimensional rift takes you to the second dungeon, where you start on the fifth floor and progress upwards: the initial floor is a monster-packed fortress situated in a cavern, a breather floor before the three-floor teleporter maze that must be very nearly fully explored to teleport to the first floor, a giant ritual circle where the final boss awaits. (A bonus floor with super-powerful monsters lies behind a locked door on the fifth floor.) But don't take my word for it—take a look at my maps:

(full map gallery)

Yes, Gaiden I all but demands that you keep a paper map. You can bring up an ingame map by casting the first-level mage spell MAP1, but it doesn't show anything besides floors, walls, and stairs; you have to cast the spell again every time you want to look at it; and you can't splitscreen it with the first-person interface, which is a navigational nightmare. Initially, you simply don't have enough spell charges to cast it every time you need to orient yourself; by the time you do, there are too many teleporters for it to suffice.

For better or for worse, by the time you enter the second dungeon your Mage (you better have one) will have learned WARP, a spell that lets you teleport to any previously-explored tile. This makes navigating the multifloor teleporter maze almost too easy: you don't need to pore over your maps and puzzle out a path to that branch you haven't explored; you can just cast WARP and go straight there.

Other highlights: chutes can drop you down a floor, potentially leaving you out of your depth and searching for a way up; and secret doors, unlike in later games, can only be found by intuiting their locations and searching the correct wall (later games have a chance to show a popup when you pass by one).

The UI is ridiculously sleek for a Game Boy game, though inventory management is typically painful: each character has a separate inventory, trading is one-way (if John is giving items to Jim, Jim can't give an item back without backing out of the menu), Bishops can only identify items they themselves hold, and pressing B when selecting a target for a spell displays the message "Oops" and uses up the cast. Monster sprites are excellent, and the official guide includes the illustrations they were based on. There are even CGs!

Combat is basic and non-spellcasters have very few options, but the stakes make it engaging: reviving a dead character runs the risk of turning them to ash instead, and reviving an ashed character risks permanently killing them (!). And if your whole party is wiped, you don't get a game over: you return to the town screen, but your slain party remains on the exact square where it died until you retrieve it with another. Compounding all this is the fact that Wizardry autosaves after every battle and has no save slots; you can dodge this by savestating or turning the power off before the game saves, but if you're attempting an honest ironman playthrough, you're going to have to play cautiously and raise a backup party to save you when—not if, when—you wipe.

Late in the first dungeon, the game starts throwing huge packs of spellcasters at you, often multiple groups in one encounter: more than once I encountered three samurai, six sorceresses, and a wizard. This is a problem because spellcasters have access to powerful party-wide damage and status effects. They're relatively fragile, but if even a handful get a turn off, you can be wiped out in an instant: your party isn't surviving six casts of Blaze. Mercifully, they can't cast spells in the first round when they surprise you (nor can you against they), but if you try to flee and fail, you're toast. Enemies with breath attacks, another source of party-wide damage, tend to appear in smaller groups, but they can act in the surprise round; more than once, a gang of them toasted my mage before I could do anything. This is where the game goes from punishing to simply unfair: sometimes, you get wiped and there's nothing you can do about it, which is tragic in a game where wipes are so time-consuming to recover from. The second dungeon's enemies aren't easy, but spellcasters never again appear in the same numbers.

Items are obtained from chests dropped by enemies. There's a store, but its selection doesn't expand as the game goes on; besides some basic starter equipment, it only ever stocks the items you sell to it, and only in the quantity you sell, making it more of an extremely expensive warehouse than anything. Its real service is identifying items, albeit at an exorbitant fee—raising a bishop is the difference between having all the money in the world and being dead broke forever. Items are initially straightforward upgrades, but by the third floor many of them have interesting properties: dealing extra damage to specific types of enemies, like beasts or insects; preventing the equipped character from being targeted by the same; or being usable outside of battle for a special effect (at the risk, or certainty, of breaking the item). A few items let you change your characters' classes: the Thieves' Knife turns scrubby Thieves into godlike Ninjas, and the Ring of Metamorphosis lets any character become a Lord (think Final Fantasy 1's Paladin). (You can also change a character's class at the Training Grounds, but they need to meet its stat requirements and the downsides are steep: they age a few years, their stats are reset to the minimum the class allows, and their level goes back to 1.) Stumbling on one of these items is really, really exciting in a way no other game's random drops are.2

The bonus floor represents a sort of postgame, but there's no superboss to challenge. Your final objective is to collect and sell one of every item, thereby filling out the shop's stock. Personally, I dipped out as soon as my map of the floor was done. If I'd persevered, I'd have been rewarded with the Book of Nature, which allows one to transfer their characters to the sequel (!), but I don't want to steamroll Gaiden II anyway.

Wizardry Gaiden I is a great game, whether you ironman it or play with savestates. My last run, which I abandoned at the start of the second dungeon, was ironman; this run was anything but. Give it a shot!

1 Also known as DUMAPIC; the fan translation replaces the magic words with Final Fantasy-esque functional names. MAHALITO becomes FLAME, MALOR becomes WARP, and TILTOWAIT becomes NUCLEAR.
2 One of my other favorites is the Sword of Jinn, an incredibly powerful sword that can only be equipped by... mages, who have terrible health and are a lock for the back row, from which melee weapons like swords can't be used.