At least it's not NFTs this time: The new Wizardry RPG is a gacha game

(Image credit: Drecom)

Back in 1981, the original Wizardry, subtitled Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, was the first party-based CRPG. It was a hit both in the west and Japan, where it even had its own anime. The series it inspired has recently been revived, and the results are a bit of a mixed bag. There's a faithful remake of the original, sure. There's also a blockchain abomination with Minecraft-looking characters, who are also NFTs.

And there's a gacha game. Wizardry Variants Daphne, originally released on mobile and now available on Steam, plays like an OG dungeon-crawl blobber. It's first-person with grid-based movement, your entire party traveling with you in a blob as you explore dungeons full of hobgoblins and open trapped treasure chests. But among the things you collect in those dungeons are the bones of lost adventurers you can revive, and who come from a random selection complete with rarity tiers. Also there are about a dozen currencies, and season passes.

The dungeon crawling part is fine. There's a story, with voice actors like Doug Cockle from The Witcher doing their best, that's all about a missing king and the Lord of the Abyss. But mostly it's about clicking on goblins and casting spells with names like MASOLOTU.

You may like

You do get to see your party members as they attack, and when they do a cool hair-flick walk after each victory, and a bunch of them look like they stepped out of Genshin Impact. (I mean early Genshin Impact, not whatever this is.)

While I'm sure someone out there has already spent $500 trying to pull some obscene catgirl monstrosity, playing for free seems easy enough. Though there is an energy mechanic called Fortitude, and if you try to revive someone with less than 50 Fortitude twice there's a chance they'll die permanently. Which frankly is less punishing than the original game, where dead characters could turn to ash if resurrection went wrong, and which overwrote your save automatically so you couldn't go back and try again.

The aforementioned anime is probably a better way to get your nostalgia fix. A lot of it comes directly from the game, like the adventurers hanging out in Gilgamesh's tavern, a villain called Werdna with a magic amulet and a vampire lord sidekick, a dungeon elevator for travel between floors, and so on. Looking back, it's easy to see how influential Wizardry was on both the CRPGs and JRPGs that came later—as well as on Delicious in Dungeon.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.