Welcome to The World of Wizardry
The first installment of the Wizardry franchise, The Proving Ground of The Mad Overlord, was released for the Apple II home computer in the September of 1981. At 14,000 lines of code, it was the most complex digital game program the world had ever seen.
Developed by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead of Cornell University, this was the penultimate electronic gaming experience of its day. Modern game enthusiasts may find little to recommend the original porting of the game, outside of the extreme challenge that it represents. The interface is largely text-based, with ten percent of the screen comprising a first-person view of the dungeon. The dungeon itself is a featureless grid-work of white lines on black space, providing no means by which the player may orient themselves (This is called a wire-frame dungeon, and was a staple feature of these early RPGs). Players must either memorize, or be prepared to look up, the text commands for launching spells and disarming traps. Similarly, players must either memorize, or be prepared to chart, the dungeon itself.
The game originally shipped with grid paper, encouraging users to draw their own maps as they explore the Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord.
There is no in-game map, and there are no landmarks. Every wall, every door, every room, look the exact fucking same. Whats more, there are teleportation traps that will move you about at random, mocking your paltry attempts to penetrate further into the labyrinth.
The teleportation spell might help, but it is in the highest spell tier, strictly end-game, and if you teleport to the wrong location, it might leave your entire party encased in a stone wall forever. Imagine spending countless hours building your characters out, grinding for experience and treasure, choosing the right moment to withdraw from the dungeon in order to escape with everyone’s lives in tact, only to lose all of that in the very last stretch because you picked the wrong location on the map to teleport to.
In ‘Wizardry’, players face severe, often permanent, consequences for their miscalculations. If a character dies, they may be resurrected at the Temple of Cant, but the resurrection process doesn’t come with any guarantees. It might restore life; it might also turn the corpse to ash, rendering the character dead forever.
If an entire party dies in the dungeon, a player may hire a new party of adventurers at Gilgamesh’s Tavern to go down into the dungeon, fetch out their corpses, and bring them to the Temple of Cant, where the player would then hope for the best. At any but the earliest stages, this would be about the same as starting the game over again. Good luck getting a level one party down to where your level five characters died.
Given the investment of time and effort that goes into building characters able to survive in the dungeon for any length, the grief of losing them to misadventure, or a disastrous ambush of vampires, is a real thing. It is only fitting that the OVA based on The Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord is permeated with emotional and physical violence; these are the essence of ‘Wizardry’. I hope you like grindcore, because that’s what this game is for. Grinding. To the core. Welcome to ‘Wizardry’, where the pain is the reward. Prepare to get blood on the dungeon floor.
Blood on the Dungeon Floor
In case you didn’t already know, the acronym OVA breaks out into ‘original video animation’, and refers to a genre of japanese animated film intended to forgo theatrical release to be sold directly to the consuming public.
‘Wizardry’ OVA is pretty light fare when compared to the violent anime it would have appeared alongside in 1994. None the less, they really lean into the gruesome realities of medieval combat in a way that makes the desperation of being outmatched by supernatural enemies in the furthest reaches of a deep dungeon feel genuine.
When I first saw it, I had dropped right in on the most intense part:
Our heroes are losing in their fight against the warrior who wields the Demon Blade Muramasa, Randy. Randy is the wizard Sheer’s lover, but Randy doesn’t recognize Sheer anymore. His mind has been erased. Randy is but a puppet moving on strings pulled by the powerful vampire who sits at the right hand of the dark wizard Werdna. Randy aims a devestating blow at Sheer; Shin’s intervention rescues Sheer from certain annihilation, but costs him his arm. With Shin rapidly losing blood, Sheer acts decisively and unleashes the most powerful spell in the Wizardry universe on the same lover who she had come into the dungeon searching for. Randy burns up in the radiant plasmic fires of Tiltowait, Sheer collapses in grief, and the healer Joeza re-attaches Shin’s arm.
‘Wizardry’ pulls back the veil of habitual sanitization from JRPG gaming franchises to show fantasy nerds what it really means to live and die by the sword. At first, I thought that I was watching an OVA inspired by the first Final Fantasy game. When I saw the Wizard accompanied by his Vampire Lord at the bottom of the dungeon, I was sure that ‘Wizardry OVA’ was riffing on the first Final Fantasy game:
In Final Fantasy I (1987), you meet the Vampire as a mini-boss before proceeding to the deepest level of the Cave of Earth, where you fight the Lich.
In Wizardry OVA (1991), our heroes must defeat a vampire lord before they can strive against the Wizard.
Final Fantasy 1 is just Wizardry Lite
In the original distribution of Final Fantasy I, progress is made by a series of near-misses and close calls. You will run into a dungeon, make it down one level, retreat with two dead characters and eight potions left, then get caught by nine zombies in a swamp which paralyze your remaining team members and slowly drink their life. It can be truly agonizing. Few anime have brought home the reality of what it must have been like to undertake the journey of the Warriors of Light like ‘Wizardry’. Beneath the low resolution 16 bit graphics, all that grinding for gold and experience could only mean one thing: Stacking bodies. The Warriors of Light surf the swells of heroism on a rising tide of spilled blood, much of it their own.
Here I was thinking that Hironobu Sakaguchi was the first to adapt the Dungeons and Dragons rules system into a digital emulation. I was wrong. So wrong. The first Dragon Quest game had been released a year before Final Fantasy, in 1986. But even Dragon Quest had a precursor; the ‘Wizardry‘ electronic gaming franchise had been a hit in Japan since 1981. Before looking into this anime, I had never heard of Wizardry at all.
Even before ‘Wizardry‘, though, dedicated and resourceful nerds had been writing and playing Dungeons and Dragons emulations on mainframe computers. There was Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979), Oubliette (1977), Moria (1975), and more. So many more. See here and here.
Werdna Is a Dick
The eponymous Mad Overlord referred to in the title of the first Wizardry game is King Trebor, who was once the wise and benevolent ruler of Llylgamyn. The wizard Werdna has stolen the amulet which protected the King from diabolical forces, and created a maze beneath the king’s castle in which to hide himself and the amulet. This is a weird set-up from the beginning; why would the wizard create his labyrinth of horrors directly beneath the seat of his enemy?
Well, its because Werdna is a dick. This is exactly the kind of thing Werdna would do. Werdna is the kind of guy that will force you to set your own boyfriend on fire. Werdna and Trebor used to be tight, but Werdna decided that ultimate power over life and death and all the legions of hell were more valuable to him than friendship. What better place for Werdna to gloat about his victory over all that is holy and just than directly beneath the Kings’ feet? No wonder Trebor is mad.
The dungeons beneath Castle Llylgamyn are regarded in the OVA as an extension of the devious mind of Werdna; anyone who has experienced them knows that the dungeons are, like the man who spawned them, total assholes. Because Werdna is such a dick, I propose using the word ‘Wizardry’ to refer to generally dickish behavior. For example, you eat someones chicken strips, and they ask, ‘why did you eat my chicken strips?’. You just look at them and say, ‘Wizardry, bitch’.
‘Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna‘ was released in 1987, and inverted the play pattern of the Wizardry franchise. With Werdna’s defeat at the end of The Proving Ground of The Mad Overlord, his soul was imprisoned on the 10th level of the dungeon beneath Castle Llylgamyn. In The Return of Werdna, the Wizard’s soul has awoken. You play as the disempowered Wizard, groping up through the terminal darkness to recover your lost arcane power. Sending wave after wave of monsters out to clash with the champions of the kingdom in the dungeons above, your ultimate goal is to one day burst out of the labyrinth to overrun the human world. This situation is directly referenced in the OVA, in the form of an eerie prophecy:
The Wizardry OVA is loaded with hilarious riffs like this that show familiarity with and respect for the source material. Someone over at Dungeon Fantastic who has both played the 1981 Wizardry game and seen the 1994 OVA made a list of ways in which the anime and the game lined up:
– a blue ribbon to operate the elevators? Of course!
– entering the dungeon, then buffing right away? Can’t cast spells in town.
– Casting Mahalito? All the time, as soon as you get it.
– Someone’s a ninja? Yes, but it’s a tough class to qualify for.
– Muramasa blade? Only samurai could use it; I had samurai but never found the sword.
– planning a delve as a raid straight to level 9, clearing it out, and then coming back up – and doing that day in, day out? It’s how I leveled. I never spent any time on levels 6-8′
In the game, the Mad King has thrown a gauntlet before the adventurers of the land; anyone who dares to retrieve the amulet from the cold, dead hands of the Wizard shall become a member of the King’s elite personal guard. That’s why its called, ‘The Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord‘. Werdna’s Dungeon is a place where you prove yourself worthy to be permitted into the Mad Overlord’s service.
In the OVA, an entire economy has developed around Werdna’s dungeon; the dungeon contains monsters, and the monsters protect rooms full of treasure. The adventurers gathered at Gilgamesh’s Tavern are soldiers of fortune, who fight and kill and risk death for a paycheck. Their skirmishes against the forces of darkness are not motivated by valor. No one is particularly interested in the Quest of the Amulet; King Trebor can go fuck himself.
It isn’t until Joeza the Healer shows up to let us know whats really at stake that venturing into the eye of the storm to confront the Wizard is even a thought. If Werdna manages to break The Seal of A Thousand Years that is stored in the amulet, the sage tells us, then this world will perish into nothing and darkness will loom forever. This sounds pretty serious.
Everything goes about how you’d expect. Our heroes are driven to the point of death. Miracles happen. Evil is vanquished and the day is won, but at a cost no one is prepared to pay. The people at the Temple of Cant fail us, because it wouldn’t be ‘Wizardry’ if they didn’t. That’s why it’s called the Temple of Cant. Because they *Cant* do their fucking job right. Get it? Like I said, this film is hilarious. I love it.
Wizardry Gaiden
The original ‘Wizardry’ titles (The Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord, The Knight of Diamonds, and The Legacy of Llylgamyn) were released on Nintendo in Japan in 1987; internationally in 1991. Was the ‘Wizardry’ OVA part of a mass marketing campaign? The stars of the ‘Wizardry’ franchise have sunk so low in the west that it would take an algorithm-recommended OVA from 1991 to inform me of its existence, twenty-three years after the last state-side ‘Wizardry’ title was released. The franchise is a great deal more popular in Japan, with thirty-nine spin-offs and sequels to date released under the umbrella of ‘Wizardry Gaiden’. For reference, there are only eight ‘Wizardry’ titles in the original Sir-Tech catalog.
‘Gaiden’ is a japanese word which means ‘side story’, ‘tale’, or ‘anecdote’. Here is a gaiden for you: Ninja Gaiden was once a popular platform gaming franchise. ‘Ninja’ is a playable class in ‘Wizardry’. There is a ninja in Wizardry OVA, and his name is Hawkwind. I only know of one other Hawkwind, and its the influential English psychadelic prog-rock troupe from the 70’s featuring Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, who collaborated with fantasy author Michael Moorcock on the album Warrior At the Edge of Time. We briefly touched on Michael Moorcock in our Yoshitaka Amano retrospective. Yes, I typed all this just to loop you back into another Dungeonposting article. Wizardry, bitch.
