The RPG that inspired Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Demon’s Souls is now more playable than ever

When game director Hidetaka Miyazaki tried to explain his then new game Demon souls for the masses, he chose another game as a reference point: the classic Dungeons & Dragons-inspired role-playing game Wizardry.

FromSoftware wanted to “make the fun and charms of a classic RPG interesting again with the latest technology on hand,” Miyazaki told Famitsu in 2008. “When you bounce long weapons against walls, light up the area in real time with the torch in your hand (…) and take the things you did through menus in your hand Wizardry and let you perform them in real life.

Miyazaki wasn’t the only one who thought this. Wizardry – alongside another RPG powerhouse from the early 80s, Ultimate – has been cited by dozens of Japanese game developers as a major influence on their defining work. This also applies to the creator of Final Fantasy Hironobu SakaguchiDragon Quest Creator Yuji HoriiAnd Secret of Mana game director Koichi Ishii. Wizardry And Ultimate defined the formula of menu-driven, turn-based RPGs for decades to come, inspiring developers to stick to the template and break away from it.

Thanks to the newly released Sorcery: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlordit’s now very easy to experience what blinding dungeon crawling fans were in the early ’80s. Wizardry: Proving ground of the mad overlord is a modernized overhaul of the original Apple II game, with beautiful new 3D visuals and dozens of quality of life improvements that ensure Wizardry easier to play – but definitely not simple — in 2024.

The new Wizardry serves as a streamlined entry point into a game designed for a very different kind of player, one who would bash their head against the RPG’s inexplicable rules and rudimentary graphics to enjoy the authentic, D&D-style party-based gameplay. The new version has been lavishly repainted with graphics that exude the atmosphere of classic tabletop RPG book art and vintage Wizardry magazine covers. It also makes the stats and percentages more visible, which explains why you might have failed an encounter with a group of angry goblin skeletons, slimes, or bushwackers. There’s even a rich bestiary that offers new information about the game’s 101 monsters and other threats.

Runs under the hood of the Wizardry remaster is the game’s Apple II source code, restored by developer Digital Eclipse from the original Pascal programming language. All dice rolls and random encounters defined by classic Wizardry‘s rules are present in the new version.

In addition to that reverent attention to the original rules, Digital Eclipse has included a long list of quality of life features in its new game. Wizardry. You can easily create a party of adventurers with the click of a button, or you can build your team of fighters, thieves, priests and mages from scratch. There’s a nice graphical interface that lets you easily jump from the Inn, where your characters rest and level up, to the Shop, where there’s actual useful information about the weapons and armor you can buy, to the Maze, where you do your job. dangerous first-person dungeon crawl.

Image: Digital Eclipse/Sir-Tech

Sorcery: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord does a great job of letting players go both ways; Digital Eclipse lets you choose which streamlining features you want to keep and which you don’t. The remaster even allows for different maze layouts, allowing you to choose between the PC version or the 8-bit console versions. (You can also choose to see the original Apple II image in the corner of the screen, so you can regularly marvel at 40 years of graphical evolution.)

During my first playthrough of the remaster, I defaulted to the sleekest version of Wizardry and quickly discovered that those changes definitely don’t make the game a pampering experience. Wizardry remains extremely difficult, even in its new form. I often lost members of my party after challenging them too much by pushing us all further and further into the maze. But the mysteries and chance encounters of Wizardry beckoning you to do so – to explore, die and try again. And maybe you can find the corpses of the previous team of hapless adventurers you sent to their deaths in the maze earlier in the game.

Digital Eclipse’s Sorcery: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is worth playing, especially if you’re a fan of classic Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest games and want to learn more about their inspirations. As part of Digital Eclipse’s growing library of beautifully restored historical games (Atari 50, Making Karateka, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story), it’s a new way to experience a classic game in a form clearly developed with reverence to the source material.

Sorcery: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is now available for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game was played on PC and Steam Deck using a pre-release download code from Digital Eclipse. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.