Wizardry: The Five Ordeals

The best version of Wizardry on steam IMO. The scenario editor alone makes this well worth the asking price. Not much else to say....it's wizardry. You know it. You love it. Watch as your entire party is decapitated or turned to stone.

As a long time fan of Wizardry, I love this installment. Very top tier 'classic Wizardry' experience with many scenarios to explore. I also love the Custom Portraits feature and adding my own characters to the game by creating custom portraits for them. The english localization is fairly weak, so keep that in mind. It doesn't bother me personally. I can look up things in the JP database if I need to, but not everyone has that skill. I've also played older games with much worse translations, so, again, doesn't bother me. But I'll point out the weak translation as the main and most notable flaw in the game in case you're the type of player who cares about that.

The best iteration of the old-school Wizardry dungeon crawling experience, with all the quirks that entails. When you get used to its interface, Five Ordeals plays at a lightning-fast pace, with a plethora of maps available if you include the user-made scenarios, enough to set you up for hundreds of hours. A lot of modern DRPGs are too gentle with the player, diminishing the fear a complex maze full of monsters should rightfully instill. Here, the unforgiving difficulty of the combat and maps, combined with Jun Suemi's art (which captures that old-school dark fantasy vibe perfectly) and Basiscape's moody soundtrack result in a very atmospheric experience despite the subpar dungeon graphics and the atrocious translation. The challenge keeps you engaged, and the game's fast pace smooths over the annoyances of grinding or having to create new characters because of TPKs. The scenario quality varies and some classic Wizardry mechanics, such as item identification and the inn system, could really do with some quality-of-life touches, as the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord remake demonstrated. But this remains a must-play for DRPG fans and those interested in the Wizardry formula. Th…

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 a…

Excessively punishing for a general audience -- this game is for hardcore fans of old pencil and paper 90's fantasy games. That being said, the reason why it's a No for me is because of the price. If it was a $15 game, I'd absolutely recommend it. It's a lot of fun - and the punishment is part of the fun. $40 is INSANE though. That's polished AA territory and this isn't that.

I wish the Scenario Editor would get a proper translation, but the game is great.