Hip to be square
Sir-Tech’s original Wizardry games were among those that defined the entire RPG genre, particularly those concerned with sending a party into dungeons to kill everything. In 1991 they inspired a separate branch of spin-offs in Japan that continued long after the North American series petered out. This entry in that line finally came to English speaking PCs today.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Wizardry is a series in the odd position of being enormously influential, yet semi-forgotten. The originals spanned the 80s and 90s, dying out in 2001, not long before Sir-Tech (also ofJagged Alliancefame) folded. They are, let us say, an acquired taste. Tile based dungeon crawlers with an emphasis on the crawl, in which you drag a party around every inch of somewhere horrible looking for chests to open (wooden) and chests to cave in (fleshy). On reflection, their focus on grindy party based combat, complex character classes, and hidden depths and details are an obvious fit for JRPG design in general.
