Wizardry 6 is one of the most tightly designed RPGs, with no excess fat. Every place is just as big as it needs to be and the main hub of the game is successfully reused throughout the games lifetime. Every major area feels unique and different, there’s no repetition, and there’s no major city full of NPCs that break your routine of dungeon crawling and killing monsters, instead its all tightly interwoven.
Wizardry 7 is everything but this. It’s a massive, sprawling world full of cities, minor and major dungeons and lots and lots of wilderness that would feel empty, were it not for the almost insane amount of combat around every corner. Before I managed to beat the game I had a few failed attempts, owning both to the size of the game and the obtrusiveness of some of the puzzles.
It’s not just the world that got mega-sized, the number of spells increased, the NPC interaction got reworked and there are now autonomous NPC parties that hunt for major puzzles pieces just as you do, often even stealing them right before your nose. What follows is usually a hunt for the NPCs themselves, either to buy their pieces for ridiculous amounts of money or just to murder them over the goods.
Everything in Wizardry 7 is bigger, upgraded and a clear attempt to break with the past. Wizardry 6 was most of the time still conventional fantasy, the sequel has a heavy strain of science fiction woven into its structure. Even the monsters show that approach, though in many cases it feels more like a new name and maybe skin-color was slapped on conventional races.
You have orc, dwarf, elf lookalikes, instead of human skeletons you have minotaur skeletons (even when there’s no living minotaur in the entire world), you have alien races running around that are basically anthropomorphized humans (rhinos and spiders). You still use swords and arrow, but shock lances, muskets and even a phaser can be found.
Sometimes Wizardry 7 is way too much quantity over quality and when you add in puzzles that are designed to be as obscure and opaque as possible, it seems like a recipe for frustration. Which it is, but not always.
Despite these flaws, its strengths far surpass any of them. The moment-to-moment gameplay, moving one square to another, exploring and mapping the world, fighting countless battles against fauna and flora, getting new items and gear, is just damn fun.
It’s a gameplay loop you find in almost all of the best RPGs, but it’s so damn refined in Wizardry that few games come as close. And the size of the game is something that works both against and for it. You rarely run out of new things to do, and even when a puzzle stops you going further in one place, you can and are actually supposed to go somewhere else and try something different.
Unlike Wizardry 6, which had a highly linear structure, you can tackle a large part of the game from the get-go in any order you want to, only constrained by the monsters you’ll face. The stories of people who played the game are ridiculously different in the early game stage. Some went the north-west route first, bypassing Orkogre Castle, allying themselves with the T’Rang in Nyctalinth and trying and often failing at conquering the Tower of Dane. Other went to Munkhamara first, going with the Umpani and trying to solve the Witch mountain’s puzzles. Depending on the order you visit various places, the dungeons feel either way too easy, just right or too damn hard.
That said, the early part of the game in the North feels the strongest to me. It has the strengths of most of RPGs early stage gameplay, where you have to slowly build up your characters and gear and try to get a grip on the world. Once you get the boat and can travel the Sea of Sorrow, few places of interest remain. There are large parts of wilderness cut-off to the side of the sea that feel like there should be something there, but it’s just more empty wilderness. The dragon mountain caves are nice, but the City in the Sky feels small, empty and devoid of points of interest (and it has aggravating invisible walls).
The game does end on a high note, with the Chambers of Gorrors as a better final testing ground than even the boss fight with the Dark Savant and the dungeon below the chamber, which is among my favorite dungeons in any blobber with its complex teleport routes that defeat simple mapping.
Wizardry 7 is a game with lots of moving pieces, and while not everything works and some stuff I personally hated (most of the puzzles, the funhouse dungeon, the cliffhanger ending), some stuff I wished worked better (NPC parties are a great idea, but the implementation feels lacking), there’s just so much about it to love (it even manages to use purple prose almost everywhere and make it feel deeply profound) and come back to, that it’s sad that there haven’t been any games that followed its mold (except Grimoire, but that’s a different story) and expand on it.
The Entropy Pump 