A look back at: Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom

 

I've been doing Wizardry on and off for some time and to be frank, it is getting boring right about now. With this said, I still do possess the drive to go through these games despite all the grinding and the annoyances of powerful enemy attacks and what not. This is of course, in between all of my rom hack reviewing and my new reviewing of platformer games. I alos decided to check this one out on its SNES port, probably because on a personal standpoint, SNES emulation is somehow a lot more fun.

So seeing a few reviews, it's obviously way different than that previous fourth game which had spiced things up considerably, but it retains the aspects that the first three games have. So a lot of that fun customization stuff is there, although it's going to be a bunch of brand new characters created this time around, so no importing. Not that that would be possible between consoles of course. But despite this, and the subtle improvements to graphics and all, I just don't really see a lot of fun to it. There could have been more to the gameplay in this game. That's generally what makes RPG sequel games a little more interesting each time, but Wizardry V just feels like more of the same thing those last three games did.

Yes, I do think sequel games should have substantial improvements to make them seem like better games. It is what can make an entire series shine. While the first two sequels get a pass, especially given a few different plot points, V doesn't really get that kind of pass in my opinion. This game's plot feels like a combination of the first three games' plots all at once. First you seek out some seer (like in III, except that was a dragon), then you appease Card Lords by finding respective suits (similar to II's plot), then you battle an evil magician at the end (similar to I). It's sort of cute but cuteness isn't really the thing to save an RPG sequel from being a bit bland.