A look back at: Wizardry: Legacy of Llylgamyn

 

ONE MORE BEFORE YEARS END!

Well I'll actually review Wizardry III on New Years Day itself, but wow do I find myself comfortable with this series at the moment. Sure, there's the grinding and the pain in the ass encounters, but I think I got the hang of it all. Anyways, Wizardry III is yet another stupid little sequel with not much in plot and all about standard RPG gameplay. No real changes overall, still gets the whole schpeel with character creation, equipment, enemies, first-person dungeon crawling, weird names. Gotta admit, even though I played the Deep Dungeon mini-franchise before this, it's Wizardry that is significantly more comfortable. Maybe it's all about the setups?

So first game was about creating a party and getting an amulet from a powerful wizard. Second game is about finding a bunch of knight equipment and being worthy of royalty. Third game's plot is about...finding a dragon to prevent natural calamity from striking the kingdom. Kind of the weakest in terms of plot overall, but the gameplay still remains intact. Of course all things considered, if I was playing on a non-NES port I'd actually have to import characters, but it seems after reading a bit more it seems like even if you do import characters they still are at level 1. So much for that! Anyways, I think the biggest issues I had with this gameplay wise were some particularly notable enemies like the Delf Minions and Priests of Fung, both of which can oneshot characters nastily. Not a good grinding place for Murphy's Ghost this time around either. But you know what? Challenge accepted. I was finding myself okay with this one.

Apart from all this, I will say that this is still a very classic RPG, but not in the ways that would wow me, so I am just gonna say it now, but there's no way this series is going to rank high on my eventual RPG rankings posts when I get to them. Maybe that could change, who knows?

Blog Timeline 2020

Yep, still going to do these autobiographical blog posts at the end of each year. Even though this is only the second-to-last day for this year, I may not be able to finish the next Wizardry installment before New Years Day nor do I have anything else planned at the moment. Also because of adding a few things, this is just a blog timeline instead of an RPG timeline now.

So first off, I've been invested heavily in Doom since freakin' middle school, and one of the things I promised when I created this more-or-less crummy blog had to be Doom Musings. I wanted to talk about things that I always found interesting in Doom, whether they were in custom mods or otherwise. As a result, each month of the year I ended up with two blog posts of Doom Musings, one at the start of a month and the other at the halfway part. Needless to say this will continue into 2021, so expect 24 more of these kinds of posts. On the subject of stuff I reviewed, I made a thread on Christmas day documenting each review I made for wads in 2019 and 2020; this is mostly because the beta downloads page on Doomworld hasn't been updated since November 2018. And I went through a lot of mods, most of which were Cacoward winners or were made by otherwise noteworthy authors. As far as I know, Newstuff Chronicles (which usually does this kind of review that I do) is dead, but me and several others are reviewing stuff consistently and that's always a thing.

As for non-game related stuff, what can I say. 2020 is the year of the shitshow, and well that's something that can be interpreted in many different ways. I surprisingly didn't lose my job and got paid-time off for the remaining school year, and even for the next school year I was given a golden opportunity to work virtually. Things are more complicated when students don't participate in virtual group activities though. I managed to complete an online class for teaching disabled students as an added plus. I also got a second job at a different learning site, this one I actually go to in person and wear a mask and social distance and all that. Fairly quaint, but that's going to be good experience and I even get a few rewards on the holiday occasions. One major tragedy was the loss of a great feline friend in late April. Also something I found out with my desktop computer, the USB ports were utterly compromised. There was even one instance in June where I had consistent BSODs over something I have no idea about. But seriously, the USB trouble is far and wide the most annoying thing I've dealt with and it seemed to occur every month after a new Windows Update*. Nowadays I game on my laptop unless I really need better specs.

The lockdown that occurred in March was all I needed to restart on playing of Pokemon ROM hacks. I had kept my save from Light Platinum confidential at that time, which was neat, so I finished that up. Afterwards when it came to selecting a new rom hack, I just sort of went by random pick and by things that could interest me. So Flora Sky was next, then Victory Fire, and from there I paid attention to Wind's hacks and plan to get to Mega Power when I can (still haven't done yet). Played through a few (in)famous hacks in AshGray, Snakewood, two Dark Rising games, as well as a semi-obscure one called Grass Jewel and a double-pack known as Altair and Sirius. Not to forget Resolute as well. So my 5th rom hack to my 14th this year. Well done I'd say on my end. Even better, I have decided to become a member of PokeCommunity as well, creating walkthroughs for some of the ones I played that don't have written walkthroughs yet (Victory Fire, Resolute, AshGray, Dark Rising 2, Grass Jewel, Snakewood, Altair and Sirius).

Best ROM hack I played this year: Pokemon Gaia

Funny enough, I still haven't completed it yet, so I haven't made a review. However, this has the largest mon selection available, the graphics work well (even though not super-substantial), and the story and evil team are quite interesting. Even better is that it's not one of those rom hacks that goes the uber-hard route. I may end up completing it next year, but I'm seriously impressed with the entire thing.

Alright time to reminisce on the RPGs I played this year. First up, I was still with Dragon Quest VI and only managed to finish it at the midpoint of January. Yes, these games are getting longer. I surprisingly went through La Pucelle Tactics pretty fast too, despite it being a Nippon Ichi title. Two NES Silva Saga games followed, then Seiken Densetsu 3, all finished in the month of February. March saw 5 RPGs tackled, all of which were more or less small titles like the Ranma 1/2 RPG, Silva Saga 2, Ys III, Deep Dungeon 4 (finishing a franchise), and Bahamut Lagoon. Princess Crown was finished at the beginning of April, but Dragon Quest VII, the epicly long adventure Dragon Quest, took the entire month. My goal was to finish it before the end though, and I succeeded. Usually I tend to take breaks between RPGs, so May was more or less a breather month, having taken week long breaks, but the next two RPGs I finished, which was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya, were quickly done away with.

June saw absolutely NO RPGs finished, but on the 4th of July, I finally managed to complete Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, after spending more than a month grinding and checking out post-game content. Following that was the peculiar PS2 game Orphen: Scion of Sorcery along with another SaGa game, both were surprisingly quick to deal with. This was also the segment where I played a lot of sequels I never got to. Much of August was spent raging at Grandia III, which sucked, but at least that's another franchise down. And the latter half of August and beginning days of September was done with another bad sequel in Wild Arms 4. I then rethreaded through Final Fantasy II but on a remake of the game before spending the rest of the month and the first bits of October with Tales of Eternia. Mystic Ark was also completed that month. As my next game was a Dragon Quest game, I invested more time in it to ensure I would beat it fast enough, which had me postponing my Pokemon Altair and Sirius rom hack playthrough just so I wouldn't waste the entire month on a Dragon Quest game. Gotta say that's impressive, having to go through three of the longest Dragon Quest titles like that.

Oddly, I spent way more time on Lufia: The Ruins of Lore than I did Dragon Quest VIII, probably because I was losing steam, but I managed to beat it on December 1. My goal for December was to finish a long-awaited game, Super Mario RPG, before Christmas. I overplayed that hand, having beating it in a single week. With that, I considered the year a successful endeavor in RPG reviewing, but I surely wasn't done. Although the Wizardry series is going to be grinding, I stayed my hand with them and got at least two games done. With that in mind, the total number of RPGs played this year was a whopping 27. This is two above the previous year's number of 25. Quarantine does sure make me play a whole lot of stuff, doesn't it?

Best RPG played in 2020: Bahamut Lagoon
Honorable mentions: Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

Honestly I fell in love with Bahamut Lagoon. It was a perfect treasure of a Japan-only strategy RPG and proved to be better than Final Fantasy Tactics. It falls just short of my Top 10 RPGs on my countdown, but it was fantastic. I spent a lot of time with Disgaea and loved much of it too, and it's just under Bahamut Lagoon for similar reasons. And yeah, I enjoyed The Thousand Yaer Door, even though the Mario RPGs end up the easiest and some of the most simple, this storyline was worthwhile.

Let's hope that 2021 is a much better year, both in productivity and in general.

*Hey Microsoft, quit rushing your damn updates onto users. This is how you lose your respect when things go wrong.

A look back at: Wizardry: The Knight of Diamonds

 

Amazing how the year STILL isn't over yet and I still rummage through another RPG before year's end. And yes, I'm going through the Wizardry series all the way through before doing anything else. This probably means that my 145th review won't actually be a Final Fantasy game. I am running out of those by the way, and I don't plan to play past X when I get to that.

But in any case, Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds has you once again in a dungeon-crawling RPG aspect, able to create and customize a party of six and do all the things you could do in the original Wizardry. Only this time the premise is different, there's these armor pieces you need to collect in order to gain access to a certain staff needed to win the game, and there's actually no really big boss to tangle with. That's assuming you don't actually count those magic armor pieces. And wow, they are TOUGH. I mean Wizardry already has unforgiving difficulty, but again I gotta grind Murphy's Ghosts like mad in order to get to battling just the Magic Armor. Well, the armor is the first, so it's the weakest, but it has more HP than the others despite its weak attack, so it takes a while. At least the armor piece battles give off more experience than other enemies, so it's worthwhile to grind on at least the armor. The sword though? That things almost guaranteed to insta-kill characters every attack it gets, making it the nastiest encounter overall. The gauntlets with their magic abilities (and yes there's two) can easily wipe out the squishy members. So even without a big bad guy this Wizardry still proves tough, if not tougher than the first game.

Doom Musings: Overview of The Worst Wad Cacoward

Happy new year 2021. It feels like the moment something bad, anything bad, happens this year people will immediately whine on social media saying 2021 is the worst year ever even though it has only just begun. Of course, this is a stale joke and all but who cares right? New year, new time to do stuff like reminisce on old years or be a better person. Then again, look at what 2020 has done to the world. It has given us the worst year ever for multiple reasons that we all already know and don't need a real refresher on.

So on the subject of "worst" let's look at a part of the Doom community that is considered long forgotten, the "Worst Wad" cacoward. For about 7 years of the early cacowards the "worst wad" was given to the absolute worst of the bad lot, the ones that are outright terrible for any number of reasons. Why was it discontinued? That will be covered soon, but of course I'd like to offer my thoughts on the losers of each award.

First up is a project I never bothered to play: Doom: Rampage Edition. Apparently it was quite hyped, but turned out to be an extreme disappointment. Imagine a megawad where you get to play as a Doom monster, not to mention those who are familiar with the Rampage game franchise may be drawn in. So what went wrong? Well, why can your playable baron of hell use weapons? What's with the bloated file size filled with MP3's (illegal may I add)? What's with the lame maps? Where's the Rampage elements? And then you have the fact that whoever the author was, they were in the category of "shut up my creation is a masterpiece you can't criticize it" kind of person. This truly deserved the notion of a worst wad for all of these reasons.

Next, in 2005, we see that the worst wad is given to the large complex of 1994 wads, which honestly is quite a bad thing to put for the worst wad already. It shows that there really wasn't a 2005 release that was considered "worst" in any way. Furthermore, it gives a disservice to the actually good 1994 releases like the TiC releases and UAC_DEAD. I guess the writers at the time just didn't know what to really put here.

The next worst wad award culminated in some of the funniest drama I've ever seen preserved in a Doomworld thread ever. Nazi Auferstehung was sent to the site Doom Wad Station (my first site for downloading wads I may add) and proved to be Doom: Rampage Edition 2.0. It's got a premise (resurrected Nazi stuff), bloated file size due to illegal MP3s, an author with a strange and unusual attitude, and not only are the maps lame as hell, they were made in Slige! Not to mention the author put in copies of the Doom 2 IWAD, also illegal. The drama that succeeded the release was hilarious. What kind of person pretends to be mentally disabled and post by pressing enter every few words?

In 2007 the award was given to Glassyman for his contributions that deal with Gamarra. I've actually played these wads, and yes they are terrible. Glassyman seemed to make these off of some strange fanfiction he wrote about this dude named Gamarra that is his buddy or something. The "Gamarra's story" wads, strangely enough, are just simply bad 1994 quality wads with oversized rooms, stupidly long lifts, skinny corridors, and just all-around bad design. But afterwards this guy makes "Gamarra's Soul Story", which seems to not only be an extended fanfiction of Gamarra after you actually kill the guy, but Gamarra's Soul serves as a "take that, critics" moment, as Glassyman makes the player attack the forum users who have "wronged" him. Not only is it childish, but it portrays a number of respectable forum users as childish. So the worst thing about the Gamarra stuff is how it went from being lame 1994 stuff to just outright being insultive of the critics.

Arguably the most infamous worst wad recipient was UAC Military Nightmare in 2008. It's hard to tell what's the absolute worst thing about it. Let's see. The numerous one-off wads inspired by and even preceding UAC Military Nightmare? The purposely impossible boss battles? The vulgar messages thrown around? Perhaps it's the enhanced scripting that screws with game settings and renames the character? I'd say it's the fact that this, and many of its children that basically are made for Aquarius199 videos nowadays, all start out as if they were actually decently-made wads. But then they delve into the stupid crap, with vulgar threats, thrusting the player around a penis-shaped room with the SOMEMONG texture, and the fact that these are all made for nothing more than attention. I'll go back to these in just a moment.

2009 saw the worst wad go to...a detail guide. Apparently, this guide, made by a somewhat controversial ZDoom author, ended up being described as being way too much for a guide on detailing stuff. Players and critics are the most fickle bunch of people I see, as you never know what they want to see in Doom WADs. I don't think this guide is even used anymore. A lot of the time, most mappers, like myself when I used to map, either use their own judgments or they get their design decisions from how famous and well-recieved Doom WADs do it.

The final worst wad recipient went to a Zdoom weapon and enemy wad that I think is in perpetual development. Æon's of Death, as it's called, is one of a plethora of randomizer mods that randomize the enemies and weapons, and in this case, the notion is that all of them come from well-known first-person shooters. I've never played this, though I've played something similar called Classic Rivalry which had a similar sort of thing. It looks like when writing the worst wad write-up Scuba Steve was trying to piece things together when examining it, which, well, that's probably not a good idea when you're dealing with something that's essentially a randomizer. I really don't think Æon's of Death deserves to be the worst when compared to much worse randomizers, and there was in fact a reason to play it in some retrospect, at least to see what it actually contains and if it could be used in multiple mapsets. And yeah, there's videos where people played famous mapsets with Æon's of Death, so there you go.

After 2010, the worst wad was discontinued, for quite a number of reasons. What happened? Well, first of all there's the apparent rush of "Terrywads" that followed in the footsteps of UACMN, all with the whole "look at this it's good but it trolls you hahaha" attitude, plus the odd and apparent notion that they somehow WANT to be recognized as the next worst wads. That along with Doomguy 2000's contributions, which are loosely similar to Terrywads, but with direct intention to be seen as worst (looking at 1x1box.wad). The other main reason has to be that it was considered to not be appropriate to acknowledge crap anymore, basically. Other than the terrywads and such, why award something that is low-effort as worst? And there you have it, the tainted legacy of the worst wad. I'm personally glad it was removed because now it serves no appropriate purpose. If there ever was another one of these, it would have to be unintentionally terrible or perhaps had a load of things that no one was expecting or wanting.

A look back at: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

 

The history of just about every JRPG franchise I've played to date can date back to an RPG series that is in fact not made in Japan, the Wizardry series. Think about how Final Fantasy 1 starts out with having you pick your characters and classes. Think about how the first few SaGa (Final Fantasy Legend) games have you selecting a race. Think about how Dragon Quest 3 was the first of its franchise to have you selecting personality and stat increases. All of those have its origins in Wizardry's character creation system. Select a race (human, elf, dwarf, etc), select a role (fighter, mage, thief, etc), and even select an alignment (good, neutral, evil), something that rarely if ever shows up in future RPGs and then select stat bonuses and boom, character done. Neat stuff!

Think about how Phantasy Star 1's dungeons were. Think about every single game in the Deep Dungeon franchise, as well as Shining in the Darkness. The first-person dungeon-crawling perspective for these RPGs most likely originated here. Think about how many, many old RPGs have unforgiving difficulty, then amplify it up to eleven and you have Wizardry I's difficulty. It's quite insane. You want to run from enemies, hoping and praying they don't ambush you. You have to worry about teleporting into a different part of a dungeon (or worse, into a wall getting a game over). You have to deal with chests that can be booby-trapped. You have to return to an inn to not only recover, but to gain levels, something that can easily be forgotten. You have to worry about certain character classes being only in certain alignments, meaning good and evil can never work together. You have to remember the spell names, and extra care with revival spells because it has a chance of turning a dead character into ashes, and failing again can mean the character is permanently gone. You have to make sure to map everything since it's so easy to get lost. You have to watch out for dark areas or magic-sealed areas.

There's just a lot to remember when playing Wizardry, and it's certainly going to take a grinding toll. Much of my time was just finding a place to power level, against a monster known as Murphy's Ghost, an enemy that wields a lot of experience yet only has a weak attack and nothing else, going back and forth between where it is and the castle to get characters up in levels and spells and such. Simple sure doesn't mean easy in any way, and many hours were spent until I was strong enough, and lucky enough, to battle and defeat WERDNA.

Doom Musings: The 2020 Cacowards and what I've been doing to help

PLEASE NOTE: the new Blogger system is kinda retarded because it makes all my published posts on like the earliest date that I post them. I always try to release these Doom Musings posts at the start of every month or the halfway point (the 15th in other words, or the 14th in the case of February).

Ah, the Cacowards. These are the Doom mods that are the most revered in the community each year, you get at least ten grand prize winners and a whole slew of runner-ups, honorable mentions, and one-off mentions, plus the different categories and the stupid in-jokes*. This year, once again, was a solid, solid list of Doom WADs, in the one year that was so dreadful all around. Consider it the most positive thing that has happened this year, at least for me whenever I'm not busy doing something else.

On Doomworld I've been doing reviews of just about every single new WAD that gets released, and usually I tangle with the marathons known as megawads, and boy howdy, there's just no end to them! I must have counted almost 30 different megawads, some of them may actually have been releases containing two megawads. It was in fact me who coined the idea that 2020 was the true "year of the megawad", even though it was back in 2011 that the term was in fact first coined. That being said, 2020 has more than three times (at least) the megawads that 2011 has, so it really is the true year of megawads by far. And I did my part listing, as well as reviewing, each megawad I could find this year. It of course got notice in a special feature as it was backed by a lot, and I mean a lot, of truth.

You know, one of the things I'll admit is that I dream of actually being one of the chief Cacoward writers. Describing something in detailed writing isn't going to pay much in bills, but I really don't care, it's a passion I have and I've already done this multiple times with game reviews, ROM hack walkthroughs, and of course, these blog posts. Every new Cacowards I witness the writing style of the writers get considerably more empathetic, more passionate, more eloquent. I strive for that kind of writing. I want to write detailed like these people but not to the effect that it feels like excessive nitpicking. I try to avoid this unless it's about finding bugs though. But in any case, one day I might end up one of the writers, as I've slowly tried my best to continue refining my writing style to make it someday.

In all seriousness, the Cacowards this year are great as always. The best thing is that I've played most of the wads already, so I really don't need to go over most of them once again unless I got bored or something. Right now I'll be checking out some of the stuff I didn't get to, and maybe even go back to some of the stuff I didn't get to in 2019 or 2018 that I still have yet to see! Real glad for the shoutout to my refined list of Top 25 secrets by the way, even if I wasn't mentioned.

*seriously I really don't think Mordeth will ever be released.

A look back at: Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

 

Just one week and I'm already done with an RPG? Wow, I definitely invested my time in RPGs this year. I guess this being a very easy Mario RPG helped matters too. I didn't bother with sidequests, which means I missed out on battling Culex and such, but eh, I really wanted to beat the game before Christmas time comes. There's quite a lot of charm to Super Mario RPG, one of the most revered games on the SNES and in the RPG genre as a whole. Surely it must be great!

Except that I wasn't really as impressed with this game. As a seasoned RPG player, much of it feels quite average when it comes to the gameplay. Personally, I find this to be quite overrated as it is. While games such as Chrono Trigger are overrated and excellent Super Mario RPG is overrated and...average, leaning on above average. Just take out the Mario assets and take out the humor and you have a fairly linear and average RPG that the die hard RPG fans will play and then move on to something else.

It's honestly thanks to the Mario assets, their familiarity, and the always ever-present humor which makes the game slightly above average. The turn-based battle system would have been super boring if it weren't for the "Timed Hits", or as we probably know by now, Action Commands or other such terms. Mario RPGs are good with this kinda thing, not penalizing you too severely for messing them up. The storyline bobs and weaves between finding seven stars, which of course becomes a major gimmick in the two first Paper Mario games, not to mention the enemy variety in the game straddles between unique and interesting and familiar Mario fauna.

Make no question, even a novice RPG player can breeze through Super Mario RPG even if some of the bosses can beat the crap outta them. The locations and storyline are well-made, the idea of having Mario, Bowser, and Toadstool (Peach of course) all allied against a common enemy is a true selling point, and the gimmicks and puzzles can be quite interesting, along with the harder sidequests. Geno has become a fan-favorite character for loads of reasons, and although Mallow is the least popular party member, he at least makes up for it with what he can do in battle. Timed hits can turn hard bosses into easy ones. It's just that on the surface, without any of the positives the game wouldn't have much glory to it.

A look back at: Lufia: The Ruins of Lore

 

Finally I close out an RPG franchise, well, it's not one of the more famous ones, but I highly rate Lufia 2 and there's not much else to really say about it other than its great. Every other game though? Either average to mediocre (this and The Legend Returns) or bad (first game). So it's kinda hard for me to say what I really think of The Ruins of Lore. The story is easy to forget, because there's a lot to actually do in the game away from the story you just sort of forget what you're doing at times. Bringing in a job system and making it Final Fantasy-like with regards to skill learning seems great, but then I have to battle an awful lot just to get the skills or to master the job. The magic oriented ones, specifically the bishop, seem to take 500 battles to just master. And you really want specific skills like Fury, Chance Hit, Divine Ray, Heal All, and Valor, so you'd be spending some time grinding.

Frankly though the game does feel relatively easy to compensate. Enemies tend to not have a lot of health, and that goes for the whole game. A good hit-all skill can win most battles. And even better, it's incredibly easy to surprise most enemies, since all you gotta do is attack them where they don't look. Only some fixed encounters can't be done this way, but there does exist the Tear Gas skill for those who are either tired of the encounters or doesn't want to fight any.

Not only does the game take a page from Final Fantasy, but a page from Pokemon too. Now you can actually capture monsters with "discs" which work best when they are weak, but some of these guys can't even be captured. Plus there's a few sidequests early on in the Ancient Cave, plus equipment for the monsters you catch and use in battle. Oh and speaking of, I never bothered with the Ancient Cave again. I especially don't like the idea of going in solo (although you can capture a monster to bring) as well as the possibility of losing the items you bring when you lose in there.

The game's plot is helping this priestess stop the beast, while a familiar nation invades everyone. Although of course, that nation is run under the actual bad guy who deposed of the good in it of course. I hate how Eldin is a silent protagonist, as the series has never actually had one throughout and it feels weird to see ellipses in places or other characters talking for him. I do appreciate the little tools each character uses on the field. Other than that, mostly cookie-cutter stuff, with a few homages like Dekar and the locations brightening up my mood a bit.