Wizardry's Incredible Legacy and Influence on RPGs

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord had a nice run in the west with 8 games between 1981 and 1996, but Japan took the Wizardry IP and created more than 4 times the content made in the west between 1991 and 2022. Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Megami Tensei were all greatly influenced by Wizardry. Traces of Wizardry references are found in many other popular Japanese media too.
In this video I very briefly cover the Wizardry series and its influences on the JRPG genre and other media. A full 3D remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord that's in early access on Steam is officially releasing on May 23, 2024.
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Wizardry's Incredible Legacy and Influence on RPGs

[@GaiusIsidoro]

Thank you for watching! I forgot about Wizardry 8 which was released in 2001, so I should have said "8 games from 1981 to 2001" instead of "8 games from 1981 to 1992". I even messed up my subtitle correction.

[@PonderingSai]

Another popular series that was influenced by Wizardry is the King's Field series by none other than FromSoftware! For those that don't know, Kings Field was the first series made by FromSoftware, even before Armored Core (which pre-Souls era these two series would be the 'bread and butter' of the company). So for those of you that like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, you have Wizardry to thank for that as well.

[@johaquila]

Wizardry wasn't actually the first such game. The great achievement of Wizardry was 1) to port this kind of game from computers that only universities could afford to computers that normal people had at home (specifically the Apple II), and 2) to make it fit into two floppy disks. Wizardry was a clone of _Oubliette_, a 1977 game for the PLATO computer system of the University of Illinois. Oubliette was visually very similar to Wizardry and had a similar dungeon structure with 10 levels, but it had far more character classes and no main quest.

[@Pomguo]

No mention of Etrian Odyssey, the king of Wizardry spiritual successors!

[@JM_Traslo]

One thing that is interesting is how many games of basically the same vein as Wizardry/M&M don't do well as indies on steam. I was looking it up on game-stats and even the re-releases of Wizardry games (e.g. 6/7/8) outperform modern tiles like Amberland. I wonder how much of it is brand recognition versus a dislike of people diverging from the classics

[@BainesMkII]

I've been reading the English localization of Blade & Bastard, and its a pretty good fantasy series. Unlike some adaptations, it doesn't require you to know anything about the source material. It also remains faithful to the feeling of the source material without being slavish in presenting the details. It doesn't use game/lit-rpg elements (stat screens, hp, etc). It is a serious fantasy world setting that just happens to have Wizardry elements and mechanics, like the spells being Wizardry spells, the dungeon, or how the church can (sometimes) bring dead adventurers back to life for a fee.

[@roguerifter9724]

Its odd how long it took me to start playing the Wizardry games. I didn't play any until mid 92. I started with the sixth game if memory serves and it was one of the first WRPGs I played at home, and might be the first I played at home on a PC without at least starting a run elsewhere. Because I was eight when my dad went back to college and got our first PC so before that all my PC game playing was at his oldest friend's house and I at least started many WRPGs there and beat a few.

[@mister_milkman]

To this day people still falsely believe the series is japanese and that turn based games are jrpgs