Wizardry V: The Heart of the Maelstrom

When we last left off, reviewers (myself included) had complained that Wizardry III was far too much like its predecessors. This led to Wizardy IV taking a clever, but drastically different approach to dungeon crawling. After receiving the worst sales of a Wizardry title yet, the series returns to form with Wizardry V. This marks the last of the “Wireframe Wizardries,” the last game to involve (well, just one of) the original creators, the last of the series to run on the Apple II, and the last game running on an engine originally written in 1981.

That’s right – these are the same wireframe dungeon graphics from almost a decade ago, leading critics to bemoan that Sir-Tech was just making basically the same game for the last seven years. The one thing players really seemed to want – solid Wizardry gameplay with updated graphics like those seen in The Bard’s Tale or Might and Magic – was the one thing that series creators Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead were not going to give them.

Not to say that changes weren’t made. For one, there was a graphics update – since Wiz III, the engine was improved with detailed enemy and location art, windowed information on the main dungeon screen, and the ability to drop the UI and show the dungeon in full screen. They also added quality of life improvements, like seeing current health values when casting healing spells, or being able to divvy gold with a single key. But you’d only notice these playing on an Apple II. The later remakes – namely the popular PC DOS ports for the Wizardry Archives – already incorporated these improvements across all of the titles.

This also marks the last game where you can import characters created back in Wizardry 1, so the original Retro Knights® (proper name still pending) gear up for one last adventure. Previously, our six heroes (well, their “sons”) had reclaimed the Orb of Earithin and saved the land. Now, some many years later, Llylgamyn is under siege again. A portal has opened beneath the castle, with monsters, demons, and other beings of chaos pouring out of this, erm, ahh, maelstrom. An entity known as the Gatekeeper can seal this portal, but is being held captive by a mad sorceress called The Sorn.

As you play, you’ll learn a bit more about how natural forces have fallen out of balance and you’ll need to put them back to save the Gatekeeper. It’s the most involved tale in a Wizardry so far, building logically off of storytelling methods introduced in 3 and 4. NPCs are guilty of info-dumping, but learning more about those forces and what happened seems honestly meant as a reason to keep playing. You can’t beat the game without information from NPCs – you can’t even attack The Sorn without the Gatekeeper’s help – so you’ll need to pay at least a minimum amount of attention to the plot. This is well beyond Wiz 1’s basic “here’s a dungeon, go kill Werdna” story.

At the same time, this is still a Wizardry game, so dungeon encounters are just as irreverent as ever. There’s an NPC on the first level that sets up the story – his name is “G’bli Gedook” (as in gobbledygook?), making it seem like they’re already blowing off the introduction. New manual art by William Briggs sits right along reused drawings by Will McLean, both in a very lighthearted, joking style. You’ll encounter characters like a talking duck and a teasing dominatrix. The promised Hurkle Beast taunts you with “Hurkle Hurkle!” as it draws close. You can visit “Bubba’s Health Spa,” while all of the fifth floor is a posh club, complete with dance floors and a bouncer. You’ll fight “Yomamas” further down, while “Lord Hienmighty” blocks the entrance to an important temple. Whimsical machines control everything from a dangerous conveyor belt to the flow of time itself.

It’s a mismatched tone that means you shouldn’t be coming to Wizardry for deep RPG lore. Leveling characters and taming the dungeon is absolutely still the focus, but Sir-Tech was also clearly taking steps into a larger world. I’ve read that Wizardry VI is where they really start to fully embrace a Western-style narrative, and not surprisingly, is where the Japanese audience splits with the series and starts making their own. Ultimately, this is the last Wizardry with characters like “Thelonius P. Loon,” an encounter in the ladies’ toilet, and the deadly Cuisinart.

Newly created or imported characters all start at character level 1. They can barely last a few battles before needing to scurry back to the castle and rest. Extremely limited healing spells chuck an invisible die that sure loves to roll a stinkin’ 1, while resting at the inn burns weeks off a character’s life and costs gold that you don’t have. Gold you’re saving to spend on equipment routinely gets diverted to paying for resurrections or to remove status effects – it will be a long time before any Priests learn the spells that cure poison or paralysis for free.

Enemies quickly get deadlier the further into the dungeon you go; even on the same floor. So, unless you want to sit in early rooms and try to level characters via 10XP per battle, you’re going to have to take some risks. And when you take those risks, you inevitably run afoul of the consequences.  It’s a miserable cycle, and after doing this many times through new titles or do-overs, there is little joy in Wizardry’s early levels. Mr. Creosote was right – I didn’t give Wizardry IV enough credit for dropping the level grind entirely.

That said, this is where Wizardry V starts to break from its predecessors. Wiz 1-4 were always locked to 20×20 levels. While this helped guide you in drawing your maps, it also meant each floor used extensive trickery to fill itself out. Floors wrapped around on the edges, creating hallways that seemed to run forever. Portals and rotating titles intentionally tripped you up. And of course, the small map sizes pushed you toward running boring laps for experience, as you’d probably mapped the whole floor well before you were tough enough to tackle the next.

By contrast, Wizardry V’s maps are vast and varied. Floors are much larger – 35×35 is a rough average, with Floor 4 stretching out to 38×72 (appropriately labeled as “The Long Dungeon Hall”). No map uses every block anymore, with the space instead used to let passages wind around and branch off a little more naturally. There’s no shortage of rooms and paths to discover and my characters were Level 6 before I left the first floor – it took that long to map everything. It gives you much more time on a “safe” floor while still letting you discover new things. If you’re here for the exploration (as I am), then the leveling curve is going to feel much more natural than it did in previous games.

Maybe by virtue of larger maps, there’s also few attempts to trick you. I went back and counted – there’s only five spinning tiles in the whole game, and they’re all in the same room. The one-way walls that made up all of Wiz 3’s third floor are similarly condensed to just a single room here, appropriately called the “Hall of Mirrors.” It still lets you experience the disorienting effect, but in a contained and less-frustrating zone.

But don’t start thinking Wizardry V is safe and boring. There are still damaging pits. There are slides you either trigger intentionally, or slip down because you didn’t pay attention the signs. Some of the most dangerous traps are a handful of chutes that suddenly drop you in the middle of a new floor, breaking your tether back to the castle. There’s less confusion here, but still danger, which seems like the right balance to me. I found this straightforward mapping much more enjoyable than in previous Wizardries, where I suddenly noticed my map no longer made sense and had to figure out when I had secretly teleported.

It also wouldn’t be Wizardry if they didn’t outright fuck you over. There’s a room on the fifth floor that traps your entire party if you enter it. The sign outside indicates it’s a new area, but no clues about the imminent danger. Your party now wanders in circles and takes damage from a repeating pit trap. Send in a high-level Mage with the MALOR teleport spell in an attempt to pull them out, and you’ll find the area is covered in a magic-disabling fizzle field. Now the Mage is trapped too. It’s less of an issue if you’ve been great about backing up your character disk, but even then, you’re guaranteed to lose some progress. If you haven’t backed up anything at all, then you’re starting over with a new party – I wouldn’t blame you if you just didn’t bother coming back. Having it five levels in guarantees that you’re losing a party you’ve spent some real time developing.

I similarly didn’t appreciate the room with a surprise electric bolt – again, no warning of any kind – that randomly turns party members to ash just for entering it. As a reminder, “ashes” is the final, failsafe state before permadeath. It costs twice as much to cure at the castle’s Temple and they can still botch it. Failing an ash resurrection (or teleporting into rock) are the only two ways the game will delete a character from the disk, so this trap just jumps right to gambling your characters’ lives on one final die roll. All because you were dutifully mapping every square like you’re supposed to.

I *think* it’s supposed to be part of the “fun” – it’s absurdity humor like a random Terry Gilliam animated foot dropping down to squash a party member. But if you’re mapping as thoroughly as you should be, you’re guaranteed to run into these.  With permadeath on the line, you’re looking at double digit hours potentially wasted just from the malicious teasing of a level designer. You become the butt of the joke instead of someone in on it.

Death in combat still comes cheap for any character – even a highly-leveled fighter can get decapitated by a lucky assassin. However, Wiz 5 now gives you a way-better-than-average chance of escaping the fight entirely. Select “Run” on your turn and you’ll take a step back from the tile you were on, but will not encounter that group again when you step forward. It’s an easy way to “nope” out of Wizardry’s more lopsided battles, where unlucky rolls can pit you against a scary number of baddies. This way you can, if nothing else, try to roll for a better encounter. Running can still fail (and then you’re in for some hurt) but it’s vastly more reliable this time.

Wiz 5 finally lets the back line participate in combat for free. In previous games, the last three characters were protected from melee attacks, but could only fight by spending spell points – low-level enemies aren’t worth it, while a Thief can’t cast spells at all. Tapping out Fight, Fight, Fight, Parry, Parry, Parry, became a very familiar rhythm. Now, the Thief can ambush in a system identical to The Bard’s Tale, and all characters can equip weapons with different ranges. Even the Mage gets a special bow just for them. I love that necessary characters like the Thief and the Bishop no longer feel like burdens in combat, while being able to lock in six Fight commands per turn was always a joy.

Holding over from Wiz 4, there’s a long list of puzzle items to find. There’s an almost adventure game slant here to uncovering items and figuring out where to apply them. Most of these are obvious – Silver Key for a silver door – but even the ones that require a little lateral thinking or answering a riddle are pretty straightforward. Nothing as weird and obscure as Wiz 4 asking you to find the one unlabeled square to eat a carrot and hop over a wall. The only real issue here becomes inventory space. Each character has eight slots and equipped gear also takes up these spaces. I ended up having to create two Bank characters just to sit at the inn and hold used items – if a door needs a key to open, it will always need that key, so don’t toss anything.

Tying into these puzzles are new, interactive NPCs. You’ll run across these fellows guarding specific points on the map, or roaming around somewhat like Werdna’s ghost in Wiz 4. You can buy items from some, try to steal from them, give them puzzle items, or try to talk. Chatting gives you a prompt where you must type whatever word you want to ask about. Similar to Ultima IV or Mean Streets, character’s responses will include topics that might unlock more information. Note that these keywords are never highlighted. You will have to take notes – probably extensive notes – in case something becomes relevant later. I can tell you that the final puzzle of the game pulls together multiple bits of info from NPCs across the entire dungeon.

You can also fight these NPCs, which is rarely a great idea. Their stats are wildly inflated, they’re immune to most spells, and you’d lose out on any information or items they could give. You won’t be stuck though – along with your slain party members, you can also revive dead NPCs at the castle’s Temple for a generous fee. This gives you a little leeway to experiment. Killing one NPC for massive XP is key to speeding along mid to end game grinding, while another blocks your passage unless you hand over a fresh bottle of booze every time. I finally just stabbed the son of a bitch and am pleased to report there were no repercussions.

Not all changes are great. Secret doors no longer appear when light spells are active – instead, you have to manually search for them with the I key. Occasionally you can look at your map and see that a hallway dead-ends against a room for no reason – probably a secret door there. Entering an empty 1×1 room is similarly a clear sign that you should search for items. NPCs sometimes even clue you in on where to look. But it still means you’re going to to spend long swaths of time banging against featureless walls because you’re stuck and desperate. Especially when the search isn’t reliable – there were a few rooms I crossed off my list, thinking I had been thorough, only to check online maps later and find there was absolutely a door there the whole time. My party just rolled low, I guess, which is more infuriating randomness to deal with.

Mage and Priest spells are rebalanced, often to be slightly weaker. A number of new spells are added – all which must still be typed out in the Apple II version – so I never stopped having to reference a giant list of nonsense fantasy words to remember what I was able to do. The big one, in theory, is that you now have defense against magic. These take the form of magic “screens” or the ability to sap enemies of their spell points. I never got the screens to work – enemy spells just kept blasting through, so maybe they only lessen the damage? They weren’t as useful as stripping spell points, which, in turn, wasn’t as useful as just wasting the casters with a high-level magic blast. Those spells are limited, of course, so back to the castle early to recharge.

Characters can now pick locks. No, this does not mean you can bypass puzzles. Doors that need keys will still need those keys – pickable doors are just marked as “locked.” You either send your Thief to pick them, or cast a new “unlock” spell for your Mage. Trick is, these doors are quietly gated by level. You’re never told this. Instead, you fumble on a door for a while until giving up and assume it must need an item. In reality, you’ve got to remember to check back later each time you level up. Hope your maps are meticulous, because there’s late-game locked doors on early levels you’ll need to pass through to beat the game.

The final major addition are pools. Every character now has a Swim stat, always starting at 1. Pools are single squares that go down to a maximum of 16 depth levels (through a text interface – you don’t navigate them like the dungeon). Each time a character successfully reaches a depth, they have a chance to improve their swim stat. Depths up to that swim stat are safe. Depths past it give a chance to drown. It’s very impractical to train all six characters, so I recommend you assign a dedicated swimmer and drop them in every time. You can’t avoid pools because key items or encounters are usually found at the bottom.

The catch is that each depth almost always has a character effect. A few of these heal. but most of them hurt; stealing gold, sapping health, or inflicting stone or poison. Some even change the character’s stats – increasing age, draining levels, or dropping base attributes like Strength or Vitality. You have no way of knowing what a depth does until you hit it and note the effect. You could maybe find an attribute-boosting pool and exploit it to make your characters stronger, but overall, you’re weakening whatever character you use to explore. This means that dedicated swimmer should probably just be a throwaway new character. Let whatever awful effects fall on a replaceable nobody, rather than a core party member. Or, save scum in the emulator like I did.

There’s one more minor addition, involving the Bishop. In the Wizardries, puzzle items and combat loot are always picked up unidentified. You can pay at the castle to identify items for the same price as their value. This means you can never sell loot for a profit, while identifying key puzzle items becomes yet another money pit. However, Bishops can identify all items for free. With one in your party, you can sell unwanted loot for pretty good returns, while saving tons of gold on puzzle items. The tradeoff is that the Bishop can’t equip great combat gear, making the overall party weaker.

So, online guides say the Bishop should stay at the inn and never enter the dungeon. Initially, I tried to bench Stoo in favor of a third fighter on the front lines, and combat really did go much faster. However, when I brought loot home, he was flatly unable to identify any of it. 20, 30, 40 attempts – didn’t matter. I vaguely remember trying to do this trick in Wiz 1 and having similar results, where a level 1 Bishop couldn’t even identify his own dick. Guides don’t agree, so I’m wondering if this an artifact of the Apple II version.

Either way, Wiz 5 clearly doesn’t want you doing this. In addition to an abysmal identification rate at low levels (especially for puzzle items, which always had to be paid for), there’s a random roll to see if the Bishop touches the item. In previous games, this only mattered if the item was cursed – if it was, it sticks to the Bishop. Now, any time the Bishop touches any item, he become “Afraid” and refuses to identify anything else. You’ll have to head into the dungeon to clear the status effect. This becomes an extra pain-in-the-ass when it’s already taking 20 attempts to identify a basic dagger. In short, include the Bishop in your party so he can level. Give him a flail to hit things. Just don’t leave him at home. Wiz 5, at least on the Apple, doesn’t like that.

So, Wizardry V is a mix of welcome changes and some frustrating ones. Beyond that… yeah, okay, it’s pretty much the same game for the last seven years. Combat is enhanced, there’s some new spells, story and NPCs are fleshed out, the maps are vastly extended, but these are just additions to a very familiar Wireframe Wizardry experience. It’s built on good bones – but very old bones by now. And I’m not saying “old” from a 2025 perspective; I mean from it being the fifth or sixth time I’ve done this.

Plus, any misery I’ve described comes while still cheating flagrantly through emulator save states. I can’t imagine trying to slog through all of it legitimately. In every Wizardry review, I’ve said some variant of “it might be different if it was 198X and this was the only game I had,” and that’s still very true. But it asks an incredible amount of time and dedication regardless of what decade you’re playing in, or what other games are in your backlog. I can’t imagine many are truly going to be willing to put up with the grind and the abuse of playing as intended.

But whether playing legit or not, what you should absolutely NOT do is play Wizardry V on the Apple II.

It’s impressive that you can still play a 1988 game on a stock Apple II from 1977, but you’re not going to want to. Wiz 5 spans NINE floppy disks – roughly one disk per level – and requires so much disk swapping that a dual disk setup is basically mandatory. That way, you can keep the character disk in drive 1 and swap out floor disks on drive 2. If you happen to have the expanded memory of a II+ or II/e, the game will load major portions of the engine into memory and cut down on loading times somewhat. Even if you do, you’re looking at constant long loads. 40 seconds on a II/e when you start up.  38 seconds when you move to a new floor. 20 just when you leave camp (aka the party menu) in a dungeon.

These add up fast, especially in the early game where it’s a short trip to a portal (load new floor) then 26 steps to an elevator (load new floor again). I pretty quickly abandoned authentic emulator speeds for both processor and disk drives. With no onboard storage, you’re loading just too damn often for creaky, first-generation home hardware. Sure, if you had nothing to compare it to, this would be the coolest shit ever. I remember dial-up modems and never thinking loading a picture line by line was absurd. But I still needed to do something else while waiting. You could probably finish a few books across all the load times of beating Wiz 5.

Honestly, there was never a good modern reason to play any of the Apple versions, but the hardware has never been a problem in the way it is here. Wiz 1 and 2 smartly and nimbly fit on one disk. Even 3 and 4 had relatively short loads. Wiz 5 has simply outgrown the Apple II line. Once again I’d recommend the New Age of Llylgamyn Japanese remake on the PlayStation, but really, any version other than the Apple II is going to be a better choice. I’ve read especially great things about Capcom’s Super NES version, which seems to be quite a few people’s introduction to the Wizardry games.

A downer ending, but overall, I liked what Wizardry V brought to the series. Most of its expanded ideas are welcome ones, while all of them make for a richer game. For most of the series, I’d have recommended the first to newcomers – it’s lean, it’s balanced, it’s focused. But I’m going to have to switch that recommendation to Wiz 5. There’s enough great additions and quality of life additions here to make it more accessible, while still being an authentically tough game of Wizardry. It’s the same permadeath and map cartography here from the first game, with less trickery and more utility for every party member. The Llylgamyn series is still a kick in the pants by design, and therefore you might not want to play it at all, but Wizardry V is going to offer the best experience if you do.

 

The Good

True to the previous titles with some smart updates. Floors are comparatively huge and easier to map. Puzzle items give life and flavor to the dungeon crawl. Still a good combat system with all characters able to find weapons to participate without using up spell points. Better chance of running from bad encounters.

 

The Bad

Can still hit unfair random encounters and party-ruining traps. Built as a game you’ll spend months beating, but more by taking away your progress and forcing you to repeat levels. Miserable load times and sluggish performance on the Apple II.

 

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