I was surprised a few months back when the Wizardry demo was released. I played the demo, and had such a good time, I quit playing it because I did not want to ruin my experience with the final game. Now, after countless hours of the end product, how did Wizardry live up to my initial impressions? If you read most other reviews and fan sites around the Net, you will read that this game is an RPG classic already, and that the game is perfect in all respects. Well, the truth is that although Wizardry 8 is a great RPG, there are several aspects holding it back from the top echelon of games.

What Wizardry 8 does well is gives the player a solid role-playing experience. If you’ve ever sat down with pen and paper dungeon and dragons, created your own characters, and led them into countless battles, this game will simulate that experience perfectly. The character classes are well defined, the spell list immense, the skills useful, the stat system top notch, the character creation is painless, and the combat system is perfect. By looking at the final product, it is obvious that the developers spent a lot of time looking at what has and hasn’t worked in past games and have delivered on all cylinders what a player wants.

Combat is handled in two ways: the first is a purely turn-based mode, and the second is a continuous turn-based. In my preview, I stated turn-based was the only way to go, but as I got deeper into the game, I switched systems. Combat just keeps on running, and I mark the targets I want the characters to focus on, and keep the spells rolling. The combat is never too fast to handle this. When we get bogged down with weaker monsters, I go grab a snack or do some housework while my characters continue to hack away. Combat for the most part was an exercise in strategy.

Now for the downsides of combat, and they are big. First of all, in outdoor encounters, monsters will attack at times en masse. That means you may be fighting groups of twenty-plus monsters at a time. If you lose down the line, you wasted maybe 20 to 30 minutes of gameplay. The large outdoor random encounters can be extremely annoying, and not only that, they may be extremely difficult. There is more than one time I turned the game down to the easiest setting, only to have a group of monsters kill a fully healed character in one round. This is a major issue since raise spells do not come till a high level, and items that raise are extremely rare. The other downside is the party formation. I was a huge fan of it at first, but upon more play, I started to despise it. The reason being is that it forces you to select your party a certain way. At one point, I picked up a Valkarie and a monk in my party, where I already had a fighter, Valkarie, and a monk. The fact is, I could not arrange the party so that they could all attack with melee weapons unless we were totally surrounded. I didn’t need more than the one mage and priest in the background, and my Gadgeteer was mostly worthless during the game. The long and short of it is, in a party of eight characters, only four or five are useful in any given combat.

At first, I thought the portraits and the characters speaking with personalities were a great addition to the game, and would add a lot of character. Occasionally, I was amused when they would pop up with their observations, but they were underused, and at the end of the game, one character’s personality and function did not differ that much from any other character’s. When compared to other RPGs, such as Planescape, Final Fantasy, and early Ultima games, you see very little in terms of a solid story or character development.

I wrote in my preview that the graphics weren’t up to par, but then I started playing the game and I actually liked them more. Unfortunately, then I spent a lot of time playing Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy 10, and now I have to revert back to my original thought. For a PC game, the graphics on Wizardry 8 are among the best, and they never detract from the gaming experience; however, they are not the cutting-edge flash and awe-inspiring graphics of today’s top-of-the-line games. Do not pass this game because I in any way imply that they are bad graphics.

Is this the best RPG of 2001? That is not an easy question, unless we throw out the recent PlayStation 2 titles. I would definitely say Summoner, Pool of Radiance, and Wizardry 8 are the best three for the PC, and no RPG lover should be without any one of those three. I am shocked to see that most of the sites that bashed Pool of Radiance praised Wizardry 8, when both games are extremely similar.

Finally, I will mention some bugs in Wizardry 8. First of all, it uses Safedisk copy protection, which is unworkable with various CD drives. Every other time I booted the game, it crashed complaining about my video device. That was a minor annoyance. Occasionally, the game would hang for a minute while trying to access the Automap. It was necessary to use the Automap because the onscreen radar map was totally worthless.

This is the end of the Wizardry series, and I will say that the series goes out with a bang instead of a whimper. This is old-school RPG playing at its best, and by far the best entry into the Wizardry series. The game is probably the best dungeon crawl I have ever played, but without a solid story line or something to amaze players with, it will never surpass Planescape or Ultima Underworld in my book. A great RPG that falls just short of being a classic RPG, and a must have for the Christmas season.

Final Grade: A-