The Stack

When I took up the frightening task of exploring the sixth and final level, with its new and unfamiliar monsters like berzerkers and cyclopes ¹The game doesn’t seem to ever make a group of more than one cyclops, which is reasonable for a giant, but more importantly means they didn’t have to decide how to pluralize the word., I was relieved to find that all my preparations had put me in a good position for it. I was ready. Even the dragon L’kbreth, guardian of the Orb of Earithin, acknowledged my worthiness when I met her surprisingly early in my explorations.

The one thing I didn’t have that I was reluctant to go into the endgame without was a character who could cast TILTOWAIT, the ultimate direct-damage spell — something mages can pick up early as experience level 13, but here I had a level 15 mage, my highest-level character, and they still hadn’t managed it. But they finally, belatedly got it on reaching level 16 while exploring the maze.

The maze on level 6 strikes me as being patterned on something like a fruit tree: a small but straight trunk leads to L’kbreth, and after that it goes into a tangle of branches, dotted with isolated 3×3 sections accessible only through extra-secret doors. One of these apples contains the Orb. A couple of others have decoys, but you can tell the one with the real orb because it starts with an especially tough fixed encounter against an Arch Demon and some Fiends. This was the only place I needed to use TILTOWAIT, and even there, I held off for a couple of rounds out of a sense that I had been doing so well without it that it would be a shame to start now. I could only cast it so many times, so maybe I should save it for a confrontation that’s more climactic? But this was in fact the final boss fight. It just didn’t feel climactic because it was so incidental. In the previous two games, when I fought the final boss, I had gone into the dungeon with the specific purpose of seeking them out and defeating them. I didn’t even know the Arch Demon was there.

That’s because the real final boss is the maze itself. It’s a big contrast to Wizardry I, which basically led you by the nose, not letting you get lost. Here in Wizardry III, you’re expected to map the place out (without using DUMAPIC!) enough to notice the voids. And since the desire to make maps was the whole impetus for this month-long Wizardry binge, that suited me fine.

One last peculiar thing: Just as the game ends without a satisfyingly climactic boss fight, so too does it end without a satisfying resolution to its premise. Retrieving the Orb doesn’t end the cataclysms. It just lets the sages in Llylgamyn gather more information about them. Will we see this resolved on-screen, or will it just happen between episodes? Well, apparently we’ve got one more direct sequel. We’ll find out when we get to Wizardry V.

(Not Wizardry IV? Oh, that’s not a sequel to Wizardry III. It’s a sequel to Wizardry I. I’ll talk more about it in my next post.)