WIZARDRY: PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD
only started replaying this cos knight of diamonds requires importing a party from the first game and I lost my dos saves when I switched to linux, but ended up sticking it thru to the end regardless. went with the psx version this time around and it’s not bad. largely faithful, looks great as long as you don’t cast a light spell, and doesn’t seem to have the attribute loss bug on level up. the inclusion of an unlimited automap ruins anything related to spinners, teleports, or dark tiles, but it’s optional so whatever. personally think having a notebook full of hideous maps where everything but the stair-to-stair thruline's impossibly jumbled and illegible's one of the strong points of the genre, but I understand this is open to debate
despite planning to go as fast as possible I took the opportunity to build a decent party this time instead of slumming it with mono-classed fighter-fighter-priest-thief-mage-mage like usual. multi-classed both my mages from fighters to get them over the critical 100hp hump, and brought thief into a ninja for the first time which was cute. mostly wanted to see if it was as good as it is in the later games, and yeah it’s cool to regularly proc decapitations even if you can’t hide yet. might’ve been better to do fighter→thief→ninja, but my wizardry theorycrafting starts and ends at “high health good” so who knows
anyway.. still sick. biggest takeaway this time around is that you should not skip the back half of the game (5-6-7-8) just cos the blue ribbon elevator lets you do it. any time you get the primitive urge to mash the confirm button in the murphy cubby or some hallway directly beside a warp/elevator.. do anything else instead. draw a map. get petrified. kill the red dragon. find some fucked up gear. do an ill advised multi-class. equip a cursed item. lose some levels. classic era wizardry lives and dies on the push and pull of its exploration so it’ll always be more rewarding to lean into that stuff than away from it. this isn’t to say there’s never a good time to smoke the ghost, but this is a game where you can roll up to the last boss under-leveled, get a preemptive strike, decapitate him on the first turn, and then fumble the getaway by warping into solid stone and telefragging your entire party. you gotta live a little. die a little. lose track of the corpses a little