The Stack

So, let’s talk about character creation a little, because that’s something I’ve been doing a lot of. This is something that doesn’t change at all in the first three Wizardry games, because all character creation for the first three games is done in Wizardry 1, even if you’re creating a character to use solely in one of the sequels.

Like most early CRPGs, Wizardry draws heavily from D&D. You’ve got the same four basic character classes (fighter, mage, priest, thief), and a set of six stats that are basically the same as D&D‘s but with different names — the only real difference is that Charisma has been dropped in favor of Luck. In early editions of D&D, stats ranged from 3 to 18 because they were generated by rolling three six-sided dice. Wizardry uses a point-buy system instead, but it still makes 18 the maximum out of sheer conceptual inertia.

The creation process goes like this: First you choose a name, then you choose a race, then you assign points to stats, then you choose a class, then you decide whether to keep the character or throw it away and start over. Aside from the name, which could easily have been made the last step, the mechanics pretty much dictate that it has to go in this order. You need to choose the class after finalizing the stats because the stats determine what classes are available, and you need to assign the stats after choosing the race because the race determines the base stats. Dwarves, for example, always start with Strength 10, IQ 7, Piety 10, Vitality 10, Agility 6, and Luck 6. Hobbits ¹Yes, it’s “hobbit” here, not “halfling”. This game was made before the Tolkien estate’s lawyers became the all-seeing eye of flame that they are today. have the highest total initial stats, which you might think would make them an attractive choice, but in fact it’s mostly in Luck, the least-attractive stat.

Every character class has a requirement of at least 11 in some stat: fighters need 11 Strength, priests need 11 Piety, etc. In addition to the base classes, there’s an odd assortment of specialized classes: Bishop, Samurai, Lord, and Ninja. (Yes, this means you can have dwarven and gnomish samurai, which is an entertaining thing to contemplate.) Samurai are fighter/mages, Lords are fighter/priests (in other words, paladins), and Ninjas are unarmed combat specialists who randomly do instant kills. (I have a habit of thinking of Ninjas as fighter/thieves, which would make a nice symmetry, but it isn’t really accurate.) Bishops are combination priest/mages, with the additional ability to identify items. They’re generally considered weaksauce, because they don’t gain higher spell levels as fast as the pure priests and mages, but I’m finding them tremendously useful at level 1, where they can cast four spells before running out of slots, compared to the normal caster’s two. Presumably because of this early usefulness, Bishops are the one special class you can reliably make as a new level 1 character, with stat requirements of just 11 IQ and 11 Piety. Lords and Ninjas are basically impossible to generate at level 1, and can only be produced by changing a character’s class after a number of stat increases from gaining experience levels — in particular, Ninjas require a 17 in every stat.

Samurai, now. Samurai can be produced at initial creation, but only occasionally. This is because the number of points you get to assign to stats is randomized. From the base stats for dwarves, elves, and gnomes, it takes 18 points to meet the Samurai requirements; getting this many points to spend is rare, but it does happen every once in a while. Furthermore, the randomization is oddly irregular; it usually stays between 5 and 11, but occasionally leaps to 18 or 19, and I’ve even seen a 26 come up. This is a design decision that it would be strange to see today. Random factors are all very well for transient events like combat, but for a single dice-roll to affect a character’s options from the very beginning like this is to invite the player to reroll over and over until they get what they want. This is the problem with random generation that point-buy is usually supposed to solve. So it’s very strange to see a point-buy system that goes to extra effort to bring the problem back. Maybe the authors felt that rerolling characters was an important part of the RPG experience.

Wizardry is one of the foundational CRPGs. There was a time when CRPGs were commonly described as either Ultima-style or Wizardry-style, the former referring to ones with a tile-based movement on a large map (such as Final Fantasy and The Magic Candle), the latter to ones with first-person navigation through grid-based dungeons (such as The Bard’s Tale and Dungeon Master). I myself played the original Wizardry as a child. I remember it took a very long time to complete, and seemed a monumental achievement. (I still have my official certificate of completion tucked away somewhere. I can’t imagine sending off for something like that today.) Of course, back then, the very basics of the genre were yet unfamiliar. Common practices like creating a balanced party and putting the mages in the back row had to be discovered by trial and error.

I didn’t play the immediate sequels when they were new, however. I wound up skipping ahead to Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna, which is more of a direct sequel to Wizardry I than Wizardry II or III is, and didn’t get to trying the others until they were anthologized in 1998. I made an attempt to play through the entire series in order, but got stuck in the middle of Wizardry III when I seemed to run out of dungeon to explore. (I later learned what my problem was; I’ll go into detail later.)

Wizardry II, it turned out, is more like an expansion pack to I than like what we’d recognize as a sequel today — a symptom of the infant games industry still struggling to figure things out. III altered the mechanics and UI quite a bit, but still can’t be run as a completely standalone game, as it provides no way to create characters. They have to be created in Wizardry I and imported, a process that apparently involved swapping multiple floppy disks in and out. Even just playing Wizardry I involved a fair amount of swapping on a single-floppy system, what with its separate diskettes for character and scenario data. The anthology edition was thoughtfully altered to use disk images on the hard drive instead, and to carry out the swapping automatically.

Now, I still have some of the characters that I used to play Wizardry III ten years ago. But I don’t intend to use them, except as emergency support. To get the full experience, I’m creating a brand new party, with brand new characters. And I’m getting them killed a lot. This is part of the experience. Level 1 characters stand little chance of surviving their first encounter, and it takes at least three or so encounters before they get to level 2. And getting killed doesn’t mean resetting to a save point or anything nicely forgiving like that. If your entire party gets killed, you roll up a new party. You do have the ability to recover bodies from where they fell — this is what I mean by “emergency support” — and you can can take them back to town to resurrect them for an exorbitant fee, but even the resurrection spell has a significant chance of failing and rendering them lost forever. (And you don’t get a refund when this happens.) Understand that characters are reduced to level 1 when imported; losing a certain number of your characters is simply part of the plan. So, in contrast to most RPGs today, it’s best not to get too attached to them. I gave up long ago on the idea of giving everyone a distinctive and memorable name; I name my guys in batches like “Fitt”, “Mitt”, “Pitt”, etc. (The initial letter indicates the character class, for greater ease in building a party out of the survivors.)

I really haven’t played much yet, though. Most of today’s game time was spent making preparations: digging out the graph paper, printing up a crib sheet with all the spell descriptions on it, deciding where and how to play it — the game uses a CGA graphics mode that my usual gaming rig doesn’t even support, which forced me to use DOSBox, which made me realize that I might as well be playing it on my Macbook. And of course there was the time spent rolling up all the characters, which can take a while if you’re fussy. So there’s a lot of anticipation going into this. It’s a grand thing, and also a memory of a simpler time, with simpler computer systems.

So, I’ve made it to the end of Mr. Robot. Steam reports that I spend 14.6 hours on it — a solid weekend’s worth of obsessive play. It’s a good length for a game.

I have to admit that I lost the thread of the plot at some point. There was some business about humans downloading their minds into robots, destroying the human body and the robot mind in the process. That much I followed. But eventually one of my ghost companions said something about deciding whether or not to destroy the notes from Earth, and I had no idea what that was about. Or, well, some idea: it’s either about the consciousness-downloading process or the fact that the robots were developing sentience, but I didn’t know which. At any rate, the companion in question, a downloaded human, said that she trusted my judgment on the matter, which was a little uncomfortable, because I had already inadvertently betrayed that trust by not paying attention. I seem to be quite prone to forgetting plots when I’m concentrating mainly on gameplay, provided that the plot is separate enough from the gameplay to allow it.

And that’s too bad, because it seems like there’s a certain amount of actual plot branching in this game. (At the very least, there seems to be one bit that can be got past in two different ways, one involving the death of a fellow robot, one not.) Maybe I’ll make an Achievement run at some point and see just how much variability there is.

Here’s a hard one to classify: it’s a combination of a 3D platformer, with realtime enemy-dodging and Sokoban-like block-pushing elements, and a combat-based RPG. Platformer-mode and RPG-mode are basically separate, with completely different control systems and graphical styles, and don’t have very great effect on each other except on the level of plot. I suppose that a lot of CRPGs (particularly the old ones) have separate style and mechanics for the overland exploration mode and the dungeons or whatever, but here, Platformer-mode could have been a satisfying game in its own right.

The premise is that you’re a general-purpose worker robot on an interstellar colony ship. You can probably guess the initial plot complications: something goes wrong, the colonists aren’t brought out of cryo-sleep, the ship’s main AI seems to have gone mad. (Just in case you might not be expecting this from the start, the authors have named the ship’s AI “HEL 9000”, just one letter off from a 2001 reference. It’s blatant enough to make me wonder if they’re planning on subverting it in a later chapter.) The ship is made of rooms, which are made of tiles, which are viewed from a fixed oblique angle. I almost described it as “isometric perspective”, but inspection of apparent sizes of tiles proves that wrong: it’s just ordinary linear perspective viewed from an unusual vantage point. I suppose it’s easier to do it that way in the age of ubiquitous 3D graphics support. Still, it plays like an isometric platformer, which is to say, it’s sometimes hard to tell where things are spatially, and it takes a while to get used to how the controls work with the diagonal grid lines.

Every once in a while there’s an obstacle that can’t be jumped over or pushed aside, and instead has to be hacked around. Cyberspace is where the RPG stuff comes in: you hack by defeating various software entities in turn-based combat. Cyberspace combat may seem dauntingly complex at first, with lots of unfamiliar concepts to learn, but only until you notice that it’s really just standard fantasy combat with the words changed: “I.C.E.” is weapons, “programs” are spells, “extreme attacks” are limit breaks, etc. There are some interesting character types, such as the “Comms Mech”, which seems to specialize in manipulating “power” (mana): stealing it from enemies, sharing it with friends.

About those friends: Yes, cyberspace is party-based, even though there’s only one of you in Platformer mode. The rest of your party isn’t physically present: it’s the “ghosts” of robot minds that you’ve stored in your own memory, rescuing them when their physical bodies are destroyed. You know how in some RPGs only the leader of your party is visible on the overland map? I think Mr. Robot is the first game I’ve seen that has a reasonable reason for that.

Anyway, just as there are lots of RPGs with a separate overland mode, there are lots of sci-fi games (including some platformers) that have some kind of hacking mini-game. But here, even though the hacking fills a mini-game’s niche in the platformer, it doesn’t feel like one. It’s too elaborate for that, too large a part of the total game experience, and, perhaps most of all, the persistence of state (experience, equipment, and so forth) between hacking sessions seems very non-mini-game-like. Like the platforming part, it could be a full game in its own right. So do the two aspects of Mr. Robot gain anything from being conjoined like this? Well, at the very least, it provides some variety of action. I’ve already put in a couple of multi-hour sessions today, and I can easily imagine either mode becoming tedious if unrelieved.

Well, I found the Fire Card. Due to the twistiness and irregularity of the maps, there were a couple of largish regions I hadn’t noticed before (or possibly had noticed, then abandoned because it was too early in the game for them, then forgotten about.) You can always tell when a region is unexplored, because it’s still littered with loose coins and other treasures like so many Pac-Man dots. Ironically, the reason I found it is that I gave up on looking for it. I took the plunge and started seriously exploring the Shadow Realm instead — the Shadow Realm that Rafi had advised me not to delve into until I had finished exploring the overworld — and it turns out that the Fire Card isn’t optional. You need it in order to obtain the key to a certain locked door. Once this is your primary immediate objective, the location of the Fire Card gets marked on your map. (Mind you, even knowing where it was, I had some difficulty finding the path to it.)

The rest followed smoothly, due in part to all the time I had spent leveling up fairies while unable to progress. Carrots were also a significant factor. That’s the game’s quick-leveling consumable: where Nethack has Potions of Gain Level, where Pokémon has Rare Candy, Zanzarah has Golden Carrots. It’s actually kind of unusual how they work. Instead of granting an experience level, the carrot makes its recipient one experience point short of leveling. You can then earn this point by picking a fight, even with the most inferior foe. This puts a brake on how fast you can abuse it. You can’t just dump fifty carrots on a fairy to turn it from a wimp to a superman. You’d have to fight fifty fights as well. Perhaps because of this, the designers made the carrots a lot more easily available than their equivalents in other games, letting you simply buy as many as you can afford from certain magic shops. They’re expensive, mind you, but by the end, I had a big stack of cash and not much else to spend it on. (Again, this is partly due to the time spent stuck, but that just amplified the effect.)

In the end, there are a couple of fights with the White Druid, including the one I anticipated where he uses light fairies against you. After that, there’s just the Guard. What I didn’t anticipate, but should have, is that the Guard, being a thing of magitech, is defended by a team made entirely of robotic Metal-type fairies. Fortunately, I had three elements in my team that were strong against Metal: Air, Ice, and Energy (which seemed like a good choice for the fifth slot). And so I beat it first try.

And that’s that. The world of Zanzarah is restored to balance, as tends to happen in fantasy worlds when the right thing dies. Without the Guard, all the portals to the human world are open again, presumably meaning that fairies will start attacking people in the street soon. Mind you, by the end, I was far more often the aggressor than they were. There’s a special item for use in power-leveling, a magic horn that you can use to wake up any nearby sleeping wild fairies. (Encounters tend to occur the first time you step on their unmarked trigger spots, but there’s some sort of delay before you can trigger them again. The horn bypasses the delay.) Pity the poor defeated fairies who have given up on violence and decided to sleep out the rest of the crisis, only to have Amy, the alleged hero, deliberately goad them into attacking her just so she can beat them up again. No wonder the humans got kicked out, if this is how their prophesied heroes behave.

Since I have fairies for every single element now, I should probably figure out the ideal combination. See, you can only carry five fairies at a time. Those that aren’t in your inventory at any moment hang out at Amy’s home in London, which is therefore the only place where you can swap different fairies into your inventory. Whenever you go back there, you can see them all fluttering around ¹Actually, it’s kind of unsatisfying how they basically just stay in place and turn to face Amy all the time. I’d rather see them flitting hither and thither on their own business, getting into the kitchen supplies, making mischief, etc., providing a colorful contrast to the first-twenty-minutes-of-The-Wizard-of-Oz decor. One wonders what will happen when Amy’s parents get back from wherever they’ve been for the entire game.

Now, Shadow Elves tend to favor Dark and Chaos-type fairies, but really, they can be armed with any type. Sometimes unexpected types are found roaming wild as well — for example, there are bits of greenery capable of supporting Nature fairies even in the Realm of Clouds. So an ideal loadout has a combination of fairies that’s strong against every element. There are many combinations that do this, but it’s also a good idea to try to have some redundancy, and to minimize the number of elements that each is weak to. It’s notable that those Dark and Chaos types are weak against a lot more elements than they’re strong against. The designers really want you to favor the “good” types.

There are a couple more constraints beyond that. Magic cards, needed to overcome terrain obstacles, can only be used by a fairy of the appropriate element. So if you need to clear thorn bushes, you need a Nature fairy with you, and if you need to smash boulders, you need a Stone-type. Once a bush or boulder is gone, however, it stays gone, so the need for nature and stone is temporary. The Air card lets you ride updrafts, but doing so doesn’t alter the terrain at all, so an Air fairy will likely be in my final pack. Presumably the Fire card also won’t wreak any permanent changes when I find it, but its utility is limited to a single area, the lava caves, while those updrafts are found all over the place, and are sometimes the only way to cross chasms to where you need to go.

So, my final team will have an Air fairy in it. Probably a Light fairy as well, because of the preponderance of Dark and Chaos types in the Shadow Realm, and because there’s only one element that Light is weak against: Psi. Also for that reason I’ll need a Psi fairy. I haven’t had to fight many Light-types yet, but I’m willing to bet that the White Druid has some and that I’ll need to beat him before this is over. That leaves two slots, and the only potential foes not covered are Nature, Air, and Energy. An Ice fairy covers all those gaps, leaving me one slot free for a back-up fairy. Or for whatever I’m trying to power-level at any given moment in order to evolve it and complete my Fairédex (which, despite what I’ve said before, does seem to be completable — some of the “unique” fairies aren’t really.)

My last session was short and uneventful. I made a more thorough exploration of a couple of locations, and I managed to level up a couple of my fairies, and that’s it. It strikes me that this is not a bad way to play RPGs — a little bit of incremental progress now and then, as time allows — but that I haven’t been doing it lately, because of this blog. If I’m committed to writing about each session until I finish the game, I feel every session has to yield something worth writing about. But how many insights can a game like this provoke? Thus, I try to save up my Stack gaming for longer sessions, and on days when I can’t do that, I just play games that are already off the stack, or demos, or free web-based stuff. (Moneysieze has been a particular obsession of mine lately, and I should probably write something about it at some point.)

Thus, to the extent that this blog was meant to be a way to encourage me to finish up older games, it has failed. It is sometimes actually discouraging me from playing them. I’m not sure what to do about this. A modification of the Oath might be in order, or maybe just a shift in attitude.

If it weren’t for that little fink Rafi, I’d still be making progress in this game.

Rafi is the first inhabitant of Zanzarah you meet, and if you keep visiting him (which is optional), he functions as an advisor, telling you at each turn of the plot what your current main objective is. There’s usually an equivalent piece of feedback in the form of an exclamation mark on the place you need to visit next in your in-game world map, but that doesn’t tell you why you need to go there. Rafi does.

Ever since I started playing again, Rafi has had just two pieces of advice. The more important one is that I must go to the Shadowlands to confront the White Druid’s Guard. (It seems to be common knowledge that the Guard resides in the realms of Shadow. Why didn’t anyone remember this when the Shadow Elves came? Zanzarans are a little dopey, I guess.) But also, Rafi tells me to explore everything else first, and, in particular, to try to find the Fire Card, which will allow me to explore the game’s lava caves without dying.

It seems like good advice. A fire-themed dungeon is exactly what I need to round out my roster of fairies, as I have only one Fire-type at the moment. The problem is that I have no idea where this card is. My only clue is that it was owned by the Dwarves at one point, but they lost it. Supposedly I can find it by exploring the land’s secrets, but I’ve pretty much run out of secrets to explore.

My stance here is kind of unreasonable, really. If I find I need a Fire fairy, I do in fact already have one. And it’s not like venturing into the Shadows will prevent me from coming back to the fire areas later. There’s a teleport-to-checkpoints system that’s pretty basic to the game, and it’s always worked in the few sallies below I’ve made so far. But Rafi, blast him, has ideas about what order I should do things in, and I’m really not inclined to argue with the guy. Doing things out of order in a CRPG generally just means abnormally high difficulty for a while, followed by abnormal lack of difficulty when you go back.

I have a couple of corrections to my last post. The Guard (not Guardian) is specifically the thing that keeps humans out of Zanzarah. Its malfunctioning is the reason that the elements are out of balance. The White Druid knows this, but was trying to keep it secret, because he knows that if anyone else knew, they’d try to turn it off, and he thinks that insane fairies are a small price to pay for keeping Zanzarah protected from grubby humans and their chain stores and jazz music. Well, it’s not like he has to endure the consequences personally. He lives in the clouds. (This is one of those moments where I sincerely wonder if the authors intended the symbolism or if it’s just a happy coincidence.) And the missing dwarf king, Quinlin, who was framed for the whole tribulation? Held captive by the Druid, to keep him from talking. Quinlin knows all about the Guard, because he helped build it.

Now, you’re reading that recap as a neat little chunk of text. For me, recovering the information involved revisiting a bunch of locations, some infested with wild fairies. Fortunately, I’m at a stage of the game where I wanted to revisit places anyway. I have a bunch of fairies that need to level, and a bunch of tools for opening up secret areas that I couldn’t get to the first time round. This is part of how this sort of game extends play time, and how much you enjoy it depends on how much you enjoy executing this kind of diligent thoroughness.

In fact, I’ll go a step farther than that and say that exercising diligence is probably a big part of the reason that people find CRPGs enjoyable. Or, at any rate, the reason that the sort of person who finds CRPGs enjoyable finds them enjoyable. Not everyone does. But tastes differ. I’ve seen it claimed that, by and large, the activities people enjoy are the ones that exercise the skill they’re good at. This seemed possibly backwards to me — isn’t it that people become good at the things they enjoy doing, because they’re so much more motivated to practice them than the things they don’t enjoy? Regardless, there’s a correlation between skills and pleasure. Solving puzzles is a skill, and there are entire genres of puzzle-game for the people who are good at it. Tactical decision-making, precise timing, quick reflexes ¹Does it make sense to separate timing from reflexes in this list? I think it does. Reflexes are what you need in a two-player fighting game, to react to the opponent’s moves the instant they’re launched. Timing is what you need in a Mario-style platformer: everything is deterministic, and the same sequence of moves performed in the same way will work every time, provided you can execute them just right. , spotting visual patterns: all skills with games to appeal to them. Diligence is a skill. But it’s not a skill that requires a great deal of brainpower or physical coordination, and for that reason games that appeal to it are denigrated by those who enjoy exercising those skills more.

So, let’s get back to this. I think I’m approaching the end, partly because I’m running out of new fairy elements to acquire, but mainly because Rafi, the helpful goblin NPC who you can always talk to to find out what you’re supposed to do next in order to advance the plot, basically told me that at this point I should finish up any side-quests I’d been putting off. It’s been a while since I played, so I think it’s a good idea to refresh my memory about the plot. I am by now fuzzy on many of the details, and writing down everything I remember will help me to clarify what I need to re-learn.

As you may recall, the realm of Zanzarah was menaced by some great unknown evil, which produced an invasion by Shadow Elves ¹Not Dark Elves, as I had previously stated. A trivial distinction, perhaps, but there’s at least one possibly-symbolic difference of connotation: a shadow has to be cast by something, and is ultimately produced by light. , hostile wild fairies, and roadblocks of various sorts such as large rocks and thorn bushes. (In grand Zelda tradition, plot-crucial battles often yield the tool necessary to overcome one type of obstacle.) A prophecy told of a human hero that would rectify things, so Rafi went and arbitrarily brought Amy into Zanzarah, apparently figuring that one human is as good as another. After some acts of heroism in the Elf and Goblin territories, she was advised to consult with the powerful White Druid, who no one had seen in some time. The White Druid turned out to be in the Realm of Clouds, a floating land of marble ruins, home only to wild air-type fairies and some Shadow Elves that had got there somehow.

The White Druid appears to be human. (Apart from Amy, he’s the only person in Zanzarah who’s more than four feet tall.) This is strange, because there are quite explicitly no humans in the land of Zanzarah. There used to be humans, but they were supposedly all driven out ages ago for acting like dicks. Perhaps the other Zanzarans don’t know he’s human? Like I said, he’s been isolated in the Cloud Realm for some time.

The White Druid showed me an arena where there was a Shadow Elf boss fight. The pre-battle banter implied that the Shadow Elves were in league with the dwarves, and the loot included a staff known to belong to the dwarf ruler. Already this seemed suspicious to me, but the news got out quickly (I’m not sure how), and there was an immediate call among the public to punish the traitorous dwarf king and probably expel his entire race, just like they did to the humans. The dwarves, of course, pleaded with the prophecied hero to help them prove their innocence, and shortly afterward Rafi expressed the opinion that the White Druid himself framed them.

Now, here’s the bit that I’m particularly fuzzy on: There’s an entity called the Guardian. It may be the end boss, the Sauron to the White Druid’s Saruman. Apparently it was created to protect Zanzarah, but it’s gone haywire, and is the real source of all the problems. In particular, it decided that maintaining the status quo requires preventing the prophecy of the human hero from coming true, and created all those roadblocks specifically to retard Amy’s progress. So it’s one of those self-fulfilling things, because these safeguards against the Prophecy are the only reason Amy’s there in the first place. To make it even more circular, the Prophecy was apparently invented specifically to give Rafi an excuse to keep in contact with the Human world just in case something went wrong with the Guardian. Or something like that.

If the Guardian is in fact the end boss, it’s not clear to me whether it has fairies under its control or whether I’d be fighting it directly. The latter would be kind of strange, because the game has no combat mechanics for anything other than fairy duels, and the few pictures I’ve seen of the Guardian so far make it look more like some kind of weird clockwork apparatus. But then, the fairies themselves have been getting stranger and more monstrous at this point. The abandoned dwarven workshops have artificial robotic fairies, which can be captured like any wild fairy, and then upgraded; after two upgrades, you have a robotic fairy torso on the body of a metal scorpion. In the more advanced forest areas, there’s a new Nature-type that’s half-whelk, half-jabberwock. It gave me quite a start when I first saw it.