Computer role-playing games can have a lot of things going for them. Some of them may have amazing character building options, letting you decide everything from how skilled your character is with a glaive-guisarme to what zodiac sign they are. Others may have incredible crafting systems that let you fashion items of amazing power from the various bits of scrap metal and bat guano you’ve gathered on your journey. Some have dialog options that let you play anything from a silver-tongued devil to a bone-headed lug barely capable of stringing a few words together.

Really, though, when you get right down to it, what most of us are really looking for in a CRPG is some rock-solid combat.

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As we’ve seen before, sequels can drop the ball in a lot of ways. Sometimes they stray too far from the gameplay that defined their predecessors; sometimes they take a beloved game world and manage to completely bungle it. Sometimes, though, sequels can be the victim of bad timing. In this installment, we’ll look at a game that slipped into the cracks of a transitional moment in gaming, and suffered for it. Had it come out a few years earlier, or a few years later, things could have been very different. It’s not a bad game, ultimately, but compared to its lofty predecessors, it falls flat.

But first, let’s look at the original(s)!

The Original: Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant

As you might have guessed from the number of times I referred to it when looking back on “games that got things right,” Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant is one of my favorite CRPGs of all-time. The Wizardry series as a whole is one of the most venerable in all of CRPGdom, stretching all the way back to the original Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord in 1980. That game is among one of the first RPGs to come out for home computers, and was the very first to use a party-based system.

Over the following decades, the fundamentals set forth in Wizardry were passed down to each of its descendants, creating games that – while not identical – were clearly of the same lineage. Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge was the starting point of the series’ second “story arc,” and updated many of the underlying systems from their previous versions. New races and classes were added, along with new skills and the division of magic into several schools. Yet, even with those changes, the fundamentals would still feel very familiar to anyone already involved with the series.

Wizardry VI also marked the first time in the series that players could not import a party from the previous game. That being said – as the start of a new arc – depending on the choices the player made in VI, they could import a winning party to VII and start the game in three very different situations (new players started in a fourth location). Most of your party’s abilities and items came with them, and it gave experienced players an option to jump right into the thick of things.

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There comes a point in most RPGs where the player, upon opening their inventory screen and looking at the piles of things within, sits back and ponders to themselves “what do I do with all of this?”  Perhaps it is a stockpile of old weapons that have since been replaced, or bags full of different pieces of animal bone and other knick-knacks that were once destined for the crafting screen; in any case, you’ve got a list full of things and a lot of decisions to make.

There was a time, in the early days of JRPGs, when it was quite simple: if you got a new weapon, you could sell the old one and be done with it.  This held true through your Final Fantasies and Dragon Warriors for many years.  Sure, there might be a time when you’d decide to hold on to a Fire or Ice sword just to have around in case of the appropriate elemental enemy, but for the most part your choice was clear: old equipment was destined for the “used” bin at the local weapon shoppe.  For other items, like Potions, the system was also pretty clear: as soon as you started getting “Hi Potions” or “Super Potions” or whatever, it was time to stop buying the old ones.

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The hillside is rough; bare rock protrudes through the ground between patches of scrubby grass.  Despite this, the trees grow thick here, their roots sunk deep into tilted earth, holding on with all their might.  From below, it looked like finding a safe path upward was impossible, but a thorough search revealed a narrow but well-worn animal trail winding a convoluted path towards the top.  The climb is slow, but the top grows ever closer.

With a final burst of energy, you reach the crown and are taken aback by what lay before you – a lake, as blue as the sky above, stretches from just below you towards the forest on the distant hills.  In the center of the lake stands a lone island, ringed with trees, and in the center of that island stands a shrine of whitest stone, its columns radiant in the noonday sun.  From the road below, you would have had no idea such a place existed, but now it beckons to you from across the calm water.

Looks like it’s time for a swim.

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