Blood on the Dungeon Floor: Wizardry OVA (1994)
The acronym OVA stands for ‘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.
The OVA model gave producers near-unlimited freedom to experiment: any and every niche had become a viable market. Soon enough, the three B’s of Western B-side horror— BLOOD, BREASTS, AND BEASTS— found their way into the anime format.
Wizardry OVA is pretty light fare when compared to the ultra-violent OVA’s it would have appeared alongside in 1994; shit like Genocyber, L.I.L.Y. C.A.T, Wicked City, even Akira— but Wizardry leans 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 of the film:
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 the Tiltowait spell; Sheer collapses in grief; and the healer Joeza re-attaches Shin’s arm like nothing had ever happened.
No such luck for Randy.
‘Wizardry‘ pulls back the sanitized veil from JRPG gaming franchises oriented toward children to show fantasy nerds what it really means to live and die by the sword.
At first, I thought I was watching an OVA inspired by the first Final Fantasy game; a game where I died drowning in a pool of my own blood again and again, humiliated by dungeon monsters— just like in Wizardry OVA. 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 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 of Final Fantasy, 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, creator of the franchise and director of the first five Final Fantasy titles, 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. As much as Final Fantasy was Square Studio’s answer to Dragon Quest by domestic competitor Enix, Final Fantasy was also the Japanese console market’s answer to ‘Wizardry’, an American PC franchise that had been tormenting players since 1981.
But even before the days of ‘Wizardry‘, dedicated and resourceful nerds were writing and playing Dungeons and Dragons emulations on fucking mainframe computers.
There was Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979), Oubliette (1977), Moria (1975), and more. So many more. See here and here.
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 there are no guarantees: the resurrection process might restore life; it might also turn the corpse to ash, rendering the character dead forever.
If a party dies in the dungeon, the player may hire a new party of adventurers at Gilgamesh’s Tavern to go down into the dungeon and fetch their corpses out to bring 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 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.
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. Werdna is the kind of guy that will force you to set your own boyfriend on fire. This is exactly the kind of thing Werdna would do.
Werdna and King Trebor used to be tight, but Werdna decided that wielding 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 than directly beneath the Kings’ feet? No wonder King 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, where it is phrased as an eerie prophecy:
The Wizardry OVA is loaded with hilarious riffs like this,demonstrating its creators’ 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 deep cuts in the anime that line up with the original game:
- 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'
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 first three Wizardry titles were released on Nintendo in Japan in 1987, the same year Final Fantasy 1 debuted. Internationally, Wizardry hit consoles in 1991.
Was the Wizardry OVA from 1994 part of a mass marketing campaign spurred on by the wildfire ignited by Final Fantasy 1?
The stars of the Wizardry franchise have sunk so low in the West that it would take a bout of light research into an algorithm-recommended and decades-old OVA uploaded to YouTube to inform me of its existence.
The franchise remains hugely popular in Japan, with thirty-nine Wizardry spin-offs and sequels released to date under the umbrella ‘Wizardry Gaiden’; for contrast, there were only eight Wizardry titles in the original Sir-Tech catalog.
‘Gaiden’ means ‘side story’, ‘tale’, or ‘anecdote’. Here is a Gaiden for you—
Ninja Gaiden was a popular franchise in the early days of platform gaming. Ninja is a playable class in Wizardry. The ninja in Wizardry OVA is named Hawkwind.
There was an influential English psychedelic prog-rock troupe from the 70’s featuring Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead called Hawkwind. Their album ‘Space Ritual’ fused synthed-out progressive rock, the space age, and the occult. At the time it was weird and different, groundbreaking even, but how I feel about prog rock is that it’s like what the score to a cocaine binge would sound like.
Hawkwind also collaborated with fantasy author Michael Moorcock on their album Warrior At The Edge of Time.
We briefly touched on the career of Michael Moorcock in our Yoshitaka Amano retrospective.
Yes, I typed all this just to loop you back into another Dungeonposting article. Wizardry, bitch.
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