Wizardry: The Five Ordeals

I had trouble getting into this, but now that I've got a feel for the game, it's a blast. I've played a lot of Wizardry-likes and old DCRPGs, but I keep coming back to Five Ordeals. Nothing seems to scratch the itch like this game does. Just be patient with it.

One of the best wizardry ports out there, you even get to make your own scenarios should you choose. Can be very tilting, especially if you wipe deep in a floor and lose some valuable party members. It's definitely worth playing if you're into crawlers like Shin Megami Tensei or Might and Magic. I don't suggest this game for beginners of the genre, even the intro scenario can be pretty tough compared to proving grounds but it's very well made and the first 3 floors will teach you pretty much everything you need to know about delving the underworld.

Wizardry 7 made me love Wizardry. The Five Ordeals made me realize that it wasn't just Wizardry's systems I loved. I really wanted to like The Five Ordeals, but compared to Wizardry 7, it feels astonishingly drab and lifeless. Wiz 7 had atmosphere, colour, personality, discovery and a genuine sense of adventure. Five Ordeals feels like a collection of gray menus and dungeon corridors with almost all of the charm stripped away. The contrast is especially painful in town. New City in Wiz 7 was an actual place you explored—you had to navigate it, find shops and locations, learn its layout and gradually become familiar with it. Here, the town is essentially just a context menu. Convenient, perhaps, but utterly devoid of atmosphere. The menus are convoluted, buying, selling, equipping or even managing inventory is a hassle, and the opening dungeon is full of familiar Wizardry tropes—rotating floors, chutes, fog, etc.—without much sense of wonder or discovery. Even mapping feels like a chore when you need a spell just to properly understand where you are and which direction you're facing, especially since the dungeon is designed to be confusing with tons of same-ish rooms that are indistinguishable from each other. Almost every battle producing a treasure chest makes treasure feel completely routine, while the lack of satisfying spell animations or visual feedback makes combat feel equally flat. I'm sure the mathematical systems underneath are polished to perfection, and there is clearly an enormous amount of depth here. But compared with Wiz 7, it feels like those systems have been separated from the world and atmosphere that gave them meaning. A perfectly engineered RPG system means very little to me if the game built around it feels sterile and soulless. Overall: Not recommended. Wizardry 7 made me want to explore its world because the systems were embedded in a place that felt alive. The Five Ordeals expects me to engage with and manage its systems. For me, that's the fundamental difference—and unfortunately, the reason I can't enjoy it.