You might remember, back in December, when I covered the recently released Wizardry: The Five Ordeals. I had mentioned that the story text in the main game had yet to be translated, outside of a few of the curated fan-made scenarios. Well, the first of the five ordeals got an English translation last week, and I’ve been playing that.
The first ordeal, Traveler’s Property, is a bit of a basic one. The quest for this one is simple: find treasure. That’s it. There’s no big bad guy causing problems or an artifact that’s gone missing. Honestly, kind of refreshing just how simple this particular Wizardry is: Get That Money. Of course, the catch is that’s a ton of powerful monsters hanging around that will kill you before you can even blink if you aren’t careful, in addition to traps and cave-ins to impede your progress
Now, while the plot is simple, the game is anything but. This is a tough fucking game here, and it isn’t all based around the combat this time around. I’ve had a lot of moments where I’ve had to sit back, put my hand on my chin, and carefully think of my next move. Traveler’s Property is one of those scenarios where you are presented with a different situation on each floor, and the game plan is based around solving that situation. Navigating around cave-ins, moving switches in the right order to turn on abandoned machinery, exploring an entire floor covered in an anti-magic field that prevents you from healing or using your map, finding out how to enter a magic mirror, navigating a massive teleporter maze (though I felt a lot less intelligent when I figured out that the answer was to constantly hug the right wall (that’s your Protip for the sixth floor)), and so on. Of course, there’s still the old Wizardry standard of doing all of this while having to fend off large groups of Ninjas with a fondness for one-shotting you, or sorcerers with powerful magic that hits everyone at once, or big fuck off dragons that can turn you to stone, or large insects that can destroy your armor, and many other dangerous things that require commas.
murphy’s ghost even makes an appearance! i will forgive the fact that he is called “major ghost” here.
Traveler’s Property perfectly fits that Wizardry mold: it’s extremely difficult and immensely rewarding. Few games really nail that concept of slowly progressing through an intimidating structure. Solving a difficult puzzle and defeating strong opponents never really gets old. Plus, I’ll take any excuse to explore a black and white wireframe void.
Currently, I am on floor 7 (out of 10). My party has just killed two massive dragons, and I need to find an item to place on a pedestal so as not to trigger a trap that guards the item that I actually need. The 7th floor is also home to demons and giant elemental monsters who can hit the entire party for 30 damage every turn. My characters are all at level 11, and have reached a point where leveling up takes experience points in the hundreds of thousands. In any other game, that sounds extremely tedious, yet there’s this Wizardry uh, wizardry at work that makes this incredibly compelling
i appreciate that, despite being a japanese developed scenario, it still has the american sense of humor of the originals. “holey” armor is not a misspelling, it is actually really shitty armor that has a bunch of holes in it.
Because Traveler’s Property is even less interested in plot progression than any other entry I’ve played, it does that other thing Wizardry does well: the player’s ability to come up with a story and motivations for their characters. I still have not ever played a tabletop game, so this is the closest to roleplaying I get that doesn’t involve me doing sex work (yes, after I threw a big fit about quitting back in December, I made a return to Niteflirt because I wanted to get the money to order Forbidden Door). Why are all these people wanting to risk their lives and explore this mine for money? Why is the kingdom letting groups of ragtag adventurers explore, rather than using its own army and taking all the riches for themselves? What’s the deal with that? Just some blanks for the player to fill as they watch numbers go up. Hell, this game even lets you give characters their own birthdays, something I forget to do in all of these, so I have a bunch of 14 years olds running around that only age when they change classes or come back from the dead.
I’m looking forward to eventually finishing Traveler’s Property, and importing this party into the subsequent Ordeals once those have also been translated. I feel like that’s a bigger priority for the developers than the scenario editor right now, and that’s fine; I can wait. I’ll be here, ready to play and post about every new bit of this game there is.
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