A look back at: Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land

Yeah, I still had one more Wizardry game to play, and it's the PS2 one by Atlus. When I played it, I just sort of eased in with my familiarity with the series at this point and it went quite well. Of course, what else could you expect? It's still turn-based, rows, character classes, enemy formation, first-person dungeon crawling. I get super annoyed with some enemies each time, especially those with the instant kill attacks. Real nasty when you consider the "failed resurrection = ash, then lost forever". Thankfully, since this game came out after Wizardry 8, the main hallmarks of no grid-based movement as well as preset encounters instead of random encounters made the experience more welcoming.

But hey! Combination attacks and even combination defenses! This is actually kinda cool for the Wizardry series and the combos aren't actually that detrimental compared to attacking by yourself. The defensive combos really do help in keeping out of trouble. MP is kinda like early Final Fantasy or other Wizardry games, plus spells each have interesting uses, but those Magic Stones are proving quite useful in some ways to get spells. There's also the Trust value, which is actually a lot more interesting to utilize given the personalities and certain alignments and actions. This actually can hamper the game if not used properly!

Arguably the best way to play this game is with a predominantly good-aligned party. No evil characters in general, mostly good characters like a good-aligned Kyo or Hina as well as some neutral characters. It's interesting that there's predefined characters with great stats to add to your character roster in addition to the usual "create your character" stuff, makes the games much more interesting in retrospect. Of course, evil characters do get some of the better equipment, but you generally still do better with a good/neutral party overall. The plot is fairly weird, since literally everyone died in a technical sense, and the main character experiences some odd flashbacks and such, but it fits a tragic, medieval mold quite well.