Next time I'll be clever enough to escape! Let's Play Wizardry IV: Return of Werdna!

Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna is, as the name implies, the fourth game in the Wizardry series of classic first-person dungeon crawlers. The series created (or at least helped shape) many modern roleplaying game conventions, and in particular the idea of resource starvation -- in the early titles of the series conserving spells, managing party members and HP carefully, and knowing when to return to the surface were a set of important skills that every player had to master to win. Of course, these were old RPGs, so it really wouldn't do if they weren't excessively hard. That's why, in Wizardry II, one must import characters from Wizardry I, at a high level, in order to survive -- indeed, casting the maximum level mage spell Malor was required to teleport off the first level. Dead meant dead -- you could resurrect them at a temple, but a party wipe left their corpses wherever they were in the dungeon, so creating new parties and grinding was frequent. But for all this, the games were at least fair, and at least winnable, and they provided you with a bevy of tactical options and dungeons that, while hard to map, didn't throw 80s adventure game puzzles at you.



Wizardry IV is no such game. It hates you and everyone you love, and I mean that seriously. It answers the question "how do we challenge gamers in an era where gamers expected unfair challenge?" It is not merely a game that tried its hardest to be playable, and unfortunately failed, or a game with critical flaws that mar an otherwise all right product: it was engineered, built from the ground, to harvest the tears of teenagers, college students, sysadmins, and all other sorts of 80s gamers the world over. And it did. And it will.

Let's begin, shall we?



The game explains its backstory fairly well, but it does assume the completion and large amounts of knowledge of the prior four Wizardry titles. As noted, you play Werdna, the villain of the first Wizardry title. Werdna stole an amulet containing massive amounts of magical power from Trebor, Mad Overlord of Llylgamyn. Prior to now Werdna had 1000 hit points, on-tap access to the magical equivalent of a tactical nuke, and virtual immunity to magic himself. But giving him that would make for a very boring game, and besides...



It's not like Werdna's killers were stupid or anything. At least in sealing an ancient evil they were smart enough to strip him of his magical power and seal him at the bottom of his own (remodelled) dungeon, in a show of extremely cruel and frankly excessive irony.



The game's full backstory is available here. As with most all games of the era the game assumes you will thoroughly read the manual, so I will be referring back to it and quoting portions of it as they come up in the story. I do think the backstory is worth reading, because it gives some insight into Werdna's -- *ahem* -- character and you may be able to pick up what elements to the plot are important and which are not, but it's by no means required reading. For you, anyway.



We start on level 10 of the dungeon, and must work our way up -- a reversal of the usual Wizardry procedure. We also start out...



... Really pathetic, with no equipment. Werdna does not level up: he advances through other means, and all battles he fights serve only two purposes, which I will outline when they come up. The stats are not really worth discussing as they would be in a Let's Play of a conventional Wizardry game. Of note however is the Keys section of Werdna's character sheet: this is the number of keypresses, counting down, you are allotted to complete the game. When you reach 0 keypresses the game ends.



Also, I walk into a battle as soon as I take a step.



One hit here would kill me, as I only have 1 HP, and even a thief has a decent chance to hit me. Also, I'm completely unarmed, have no magic, and 8s in all stats. There was a very real chance of getting a game over here, but the thief kept trying to steal items (as they are wont to) rather than attacking, so two flee attempts later, I escape.

Werdna starts the game in a 2x2 box with no exits, so it doesn't take me long to discover the first dungeon feature, and the one that is by far of most important throughout the entire game.

Each time Werdna approaches his pentagram and opens the gate of summoning, he also absorbs some of his lost power from it, gaining a level, one point in each attribute, 10 HP, and another level of mage spells -- although the option to read his priest spellbook is available in the menus it will remain empty for the entire game.



Unlike mages in Wizardry Werdna has a maximum of 9 in each spell level that he can cast and automatically knows every spell of that level -- he already has them scribed in his spellbook, he simply lacks the power to cast them. At the moment, we can only cast the four most basic spells.

Halito throws a fireball the size of a baseball bat at one opponent, dealing 1 to 8 points of damage. In Wizardry, the back three characters in your party were immune to normal attacks but could not normally attack, so this was the mage's equivalent of a normal attack for the early game. In The Return of Werdna, Werdna is exposed to attacks and can attack himself, so past this dungeon level Halito will not be very helpful. It will still do more damage than his normal attack, but at the cost of a spell charge.
Mogref conjures magical armour around Werdna, reducing his AC by 2 for the remainder of the battle. Since this is an AD&D style game, lower AC is better, but 8 AC is not much better than 10.
Katino converts the air around a single monster group to stagnant, bad air and attempts to put each enemy in the group to sleep. Essentially this affects all enemies in The Return of Werdna: there is no difference between a monster group and all monsters. This was not the case in Wizardry where you might encounter 9 fighter, 6 ninjas, 3 slimes and 4 pit fiends -- each one a separate group. This is Werdna's strongest first level spell but even against enemies on level 10 it has a fair chance to simply be resisted. It is best against large groups of enemies.
Dumapic displays Werdna's coordinates on the dungeon level -- the direction he is facing and his current distance from [0, 0]. This spell is very useful for mapping: the game does not include an automap, and expects the player to map out the dungeon levels on graph paper.



Pentagrams are extremely important for other reasons, of course. The biggest one is that from them, Werdna may summon three groups of monsters to accompany him, of three distinct types. These lists vary from level to level and pool monsters from all three Wizardry games. As their functions are not explained to you this is one place of many where the game assumes Wizardry knowledge.

Creeping Coins have breath attacks and always come in groups of 9. In Wizardry they dealt 0 damage to characters most of the time, occasionally doing 1, which did make them dangerous as they struck the entire party and could theoretically kill low level mages. They were also lucrative in terms of experience, however, so they were well worth killing. In The Return of Werdna damage variance tends to be a little lower so Creeping Coins almost always do 1 damage to every enemy with their breath attack. They're fragile, but worth summoning.
Level 1 Priests can cast low level priest spells in combat, including Dios and Badios to restore or remove small amounts of hit points to Werdna or from the enemies, Kalki to reduce the entire party's AC by 1 each for the battle, or Milwa to light up the dungeon, increasing vision range and revealing secret doors for ~30 turns. You must get into a battle to have them cast spells, however.

Werdna cannot command his monsters: he is the only character you directly control in combat. If this seems limiting, it really is. Whenever Werdna approaches a pentagram his HP and spells are restored and he can summon new monsters. There is no limit to the number of monsters that can be restored but I believe you may only restore spell points up to three times.



Now here is the game's first puzzle, and it can and will trip up people who have never played Wizardry. In boxed copies of the game the puzzle solution was placed in a sealed envelope along with various warnings that the game really is for expert Wizardry players only. The solution is as follows:

1. Summon level 1 priests.
2. Get into an encounter.
3. Fight, win, and loot the bodies.
4. Continue until a level 1 priest casts Milwa, allowing Werdna to see the exit.

Note here that Werdna is facing off against single adventurers -- these are the same sorts of adventurers you control in the main Wizardry series, and they share all of their capabilities: fighters hit hard, thieves backstab, mages cast devastating damage spells and priests heal and revive allies. They don't lack any of their original capabilities: in fact, some, such as thieves (stealing items from Werdna) and lords (casting mage spells) have new capabilities.



This is one of battle's primary purposes: enemies (hereafter referred to as "do-gooders", regardless of their individual alignments -- you simply cannot beat Werdna in an evil-off, and these fellows know it, which is why they're guarding his tomb) drop items, some of which are required to complete the game, some of which are extremely helpful (utility or spellcasting items or usable equipment), or at least temporarily useful (potions and scrolls, which form Werdna's backup spellcasting capabilities and essentially his only source of on-demand healing), and some of which are simply useless (Werdna cannot equip most weapons or heavy armour, as he is a mage).



It's really too bad, then, that all he dropped was a shield and armour. Werdna leaves his boxy prison, and exits out into the dungeon beyond, cautious yet confident.



The game's flavour text is sometimes amusing, sometimes evocative, usually functional. There's not enough of it, and the screenshots aren't large enough, that I feel the need to transcribe it. In any case, now's the time to explain the level layout: right or left, we're going to basically the same place. The level is called the Pyramid of Entrapment, so it makes some modicum of sense that it's separated into symmetrical layers.



Our destination is on the opposite end of our prison from where we exitted. On our way there, we enter battle with a few more single do-gooders: Belgarion, like our previous opponents, is not particularly notable. Most of the adventurers in Wizardry IV that you battle were extracted from discs sent to Sir-Tech for recovery: this explains why many of them have wild capabilities (such as the above-mentioned Lords casting mage spells -- possible only through multiclassing in Wizardry, but something a dedicated player might do to increase their chances of survival especially in the second or third game).



We also meet the Wandering Oracle of Mron. Trapping him is a simple affair for Werdna, but at this point, it's not worth doing. He charges 2,500 gold pieces that we don't have and will need for the endgame -- there are no shops, but gold is required for certain events -- and provides extremely cryptic hints at the solutions to various puzzles throughout the game.

Werdna refuses his services.



I thought he was trapped? The oracle is far meaner than he looks.



In the following battles against Pigg-I-Iggy the Priest and Mighty Moh the Mage, both alone, Werdna obliterates them and loots their bodies for useful potions and equipment: the staff makes his normal attack slightly less worthless (dealing 1-5 damage per hit), and the robes make his defence slightly less worthless (reducing his AC by 1). The potions and scrolls cast their corresponding spells (Porfic is a defensive buff). Werdna has eight inventory slots, no more, which was an acceptable limitation for one member of a party of six but is a huge problem in this game.



We reach the end of the first layer of the Pyramid. Waiting for us just ahead is...



The Inner Guardian. While he like our previous opponents is alone, he is much stronger and has 20 hit points, capable of withstanding our attacks for two to three rounds, and can strike some pretty heavy blows.



But he still doesn't last very long. I don't bother sleeping him or attacking, relying on Halito's reliable damage to take him down quickly before he decides to target Werdna -- whose death, naturally, ends the game.

We loot some more potions and scrolls, and continue on to meet...



The Middle Guardian, who in spite of his lower AC and higher HP is really no more threatening than his predecessor. The only effect battles are having on me at the moment is damaging and killing my monsters; they are actually pretty fragile, and priests and lords can dispel zombies and other undead monsters instantly. Fortunately, there are only one or two priests on this floor and they die very quickly.



As we explore the third and final layer of the Pyramid looking for the exit, a thief steals from us and flees immediately. If thieves are successful in theft attempts they automatically escape, leaving their party behind. There is a really good chance that if a thief steals an item, you will never see it again. Thieves can steal key items such as gems or keys.



At this point, we enter two more battles during our routine exploration, but these are against full parties. This is a good time to explain party mechanics: in Wizardry dead characters become corpses that can be rescued by secondary parties and brought to a temple to be revived. The same can happen here: this is why one of the parties is carting around the corpse of an adventurer we've killed. Some parties are fixed, with four to six characters that do not change and do not leave the party. Most parties are composed of the random single adventurers or pairs who meet up during their own explorations and become allies. Priests can also revive enemy do-gooders: in other words, even if you kill a do-gooder, or group of do-gooders, now, you may meet them in better company down the road.



In any case, as innocently as possible, we approach the sanctum of the Final Outer Guardian...



Ambush him...



And are killed the following round. He cast a powerful Molito spell (3 to 18 damage to one half of a monster group from electric sparks) on Werdna, which naturally tended towards the average damage for the spell... about Werdna's maximum hit points.

Death count: 1 (Molito x1).
Next time: We'll be clever enough to escape. Didn't you read the title, or the last screenshot? Really, though, when I say "clever" I mean "lucky". These early fights aren't particularly kind. None of the fights in this game are kind. This game isn't kind.

That is... quite unkind. I'm certainly going to have to follow this one, Asema. Best of luck to you.

I was actually a little worried the game would seem tame at first, but I think anyone who ends up with notions like that will have them dispelled within the next couple updates at the latest. Or if not then, in a couple dungeon levels.

Heh... I'm familiar enough with dungeon crawlers and roguelikes to know difficulty when I see it. Most of them aren't quite this prone to screwing the player over when they get unlucky. (Unavoidable loss of key items? Urgh.)

I fully look forward to seeing how this gets worse.

This game seems interesting, but I don't think I'd want to play something so difficult. I guess now I don't have to! Good luck, Asema - seems like you'll need it.

Great read! I'm hooked. I will be following this LP with the most morbid of facinations.

People complain that games like EO or Dark Spire are too hard but they didn't do things like limit your keystrokes. Is 999,999 presses a reasonable limitation? Is it something you're likely to butt up against in a normal game or would doing so require lots of floundering? Or is this something you have to carefuly monitor and make sure you conserve presses (knowing the quickest route through the maze, avoiding spells with long names, etc)?

To tell you the truth the limit isn't that bad on a normal playthrough, but it's really just one of many kicks in the pants. There is supposed to be an autocomplete function for spells so that you only have to type part of the name, but it's never worked for me. I don't think the keypress limit is so dire that you need to know the maze beforehand or avoid spells with long names. But it does stop you from, for example, slowly clearing out levels full of adventurers and grinding out an ideal set of consumables and resummoning to get an ideal number of monsters constantly.

It should be noted that the game counts any keypress, including invalid keypresses such as my screenshot key.

: psyduck :

I approve of LPers torturing themselves for my amusement.

Not that you're exactly having an easy time of things, but the do-gooders job would have been much easier if they didn't leave that pentagram inside Werdnas tomb.

Welcome back! And say hello again to all of the do-gooders we killed. Whenever you reload the game, all of the enemies are restored to life and placed at their starting positions.



They also have defined patrol areas -- or at least, if you confront a group of do-gooders, flee them, and re-enter the square where they were, you will most likely fight that same group again.



Since I completely forgot to save after starting the game in the previous update, I essentially started a new game. This is not as big a deal as it sounds: while I lost all of my items, I'm also not in the middle of the dungeon surrounded by do-gooders with no way home.

Note that you can re-summon monsters at the pentagram even if you already have three groups. This will let you randomize their formation, to put sturdier monsters up front, and get larger numbers of monsters in each group, if possible (Creeping Coins always number 9; level 1 Mages never number more than 1 in my experience).



The fact that I lost my items by restarting the game doesn't matter too much because my first battle is against a well-equipped mage.



A note about the AI of level 1 Priests and most other humanoid monsters you can summon: it is somewhat random, and even if they have spells available, they will only cast them most of the time. Other times, they will use their (typically rather bad) normal attack, or even flee the battle.



So far, so good, it might look to you looking at the above screenshots. What I didn't show you is mass adventurer slaughter, and what that didn't show you is that I can no longer enter into battle. This means that I cannot have priests cast Milwa to reveal secret doors.

All of the exits from the Pyramid's layers, inner, middle, and outer, are secret doors, if memory serves. At the very least the middle and outer layers are protected by secret doors. This means that priests are not just essential at the beginning of the dungeon: at least one compliant priest is needed to finish each layer of the level.



I restart the game, and am back in business fairly quickly. Enemy AI is typically the same as the AI of your humanoid monsters, which is why the Outer Guardian isn't trying to kill me with Molito again here.



In the event you haven't encountered Mighty Moh yet, the Outer Guardian drops a staff and robe that you can use.



But it's of little use to me, because I know that the Final Guardian is very strong, so I head back to the first section of the Pyramid, to the pentagram, to summon a fresh batch of monsters. If I had returned here without any adventurers alive, I would be trapped. It is possible that even with do-gooders alive you can be trapped if there is a low number: your monsters may kill them before your priests can cast Milwa.



But fortunately, this is not a problem.

... Or at least, it isn't, until we reach the outer layers, Milwa wears off, and we have no adventurers to attack so we can cast Milwa again to reveal the secret door out. This traps us, so I simply quit and restart.



I make it to the Inner Guardian this time, before he decides to attack Werdna, scores multiple hits, and kills Werdna once with each blow. This wasn't likely to happen, but there is always the risk that enemies will target him.



This time I was killed by a random group of do-gooders. I believe the finishing blow was, again, a normal attack (although from a much lower-level fighter).

Death count: 5 (2x longsword, 1x molito, 2x entrapment).



This time we defeat the Outer Guardian again, but something interesting happens when we are trapped within the tomb by a lack of light and adventurers: Trebor's ghost appears, and kills Werdna where he stands. There is flavour text to this event, but it scrolled by quite fast: I will see if I can catch it when it next comes up (or any of the times after, for that matter).

Trebor's Ghost wanders the dungeon floor you currently occupy from the moment you enter it. Werdna cursed him with his dying breath, so now he hunts down Werdna, seeking to kill him and end his eternal torment. Trebor's Ghost moves slowly, but passes through walls, and occupies space much as adventurers do. You can hear him talking as you navigate the dungeon, and what he says indicates his current distance from you.

Trebor's ghost moves in real time, so simply sitting with the dungeon displayed while not in camp can and will let him float up to you and kill you with his touch of death. In other versions of the game he only responds to keypresses, even if they are invalid, but this one is not quite so merciful; as a matter of fact, it is the least merciful version of the game available. Not that the others are much better.



But the game did receive a remake for the PSX that gave it actual music and greatly enhanced graphics. It was released in Japanese but it does include a mostly completely English translation that uses the text pieces from the original game pretty much verbatim. Unfortunately I don't have it myself and the original version is much easier to play and screenshot in any case.



I have a lot of game over screenshots but I don't always have screenshots of what caused them. Given the other screenshots near this one in the folder though, I'm led to believe the Outer Guardian killed Werdna with his normal attack.



And to close off this update's deaths, I once again end up with no way to get light -- although this is due to level 1 Priests fleeing when there is only one of them left, rather than their being killed by do-gooders (this is an issue I cannot solve with crafty tactics, like rearranging formations, so I'll have to grin and bear it).

My current strategy is to restart the game in the middle of one of the layers with priests already summoned and Werdna healthy and equipped. With any luck I can handle the number of do-gooders long enough to make it to the final layer and survive to ascend to the next level.

Next time: I will probably make some progress. I'm thinking of cutting out shots of each death and simply adding them to the count.

Death count: 7 (3x longsword, 1x molito, 2x entrapment, 1x Trebor).

I'm trying to think of a good example of a crazy person we have here to compare you to.

And I don't think we have a proper metric for you.

You broke the scale of insanity.

There's a lot of really complex stuff going on behind the scenes. Keeping track of indiviual enemies and building parties and carying around corpses. And a ghost that movies in real time. I wouldn't have ever guessed these old, simple-looking games had such sophistication--if you want to call it that.

You really wouldn't expect this game to be so sophisticated, especially because it uses a modified Wizardry I engine, but it had to be to make the game so gut-wrenchingly difficult. It isn't the sort of cheap difficulty you get from bad hacks but it can produce similar results: the game really is engineered to kill you with mean tricks.

...why.

Why would someone MAKE a thing like this?

Save your horror for later, don't wanna blow up your tear ducts and nerves before the first few levels are over.

At this point I'll be surprised if we even get to see level 2.

You're lying.

You HAVE to be lying.

The alternative is too goddamn SCARY!

Dude, what the hell are you doing to yourself?

This. . .this is like the MegaMari of. . . whatever, but it sure is a mean mean game.

Welcome back to more wholesale slaughter! I'm your host, Asema, and tonight we'll be wheeling and dealing in some fairly scummy tactics, so if you're offended by the idea of me saving time by beating my head against a brick wall, skip this update and pretend I never posted it. But you won't do that, because by now you probably realize that this game is just really mean.



This is one of a Wizardry IV player's tools of the trade: in the previous games, where you controlled entire parties of adventurers, you could save in the middle of an expedition but not continue playing with that same save file or party of adventurers after you died: you would have to retrieve their corpses from the dungeon and have them raised. There are people who play this game Ironman -- that is, without saving -- but I am not one of them, and I believe the three people mentioned previously are currently living in an insane asylum. That or they gave up.



The idea here is to save before engaging each boss when I am in good condition. This will reset the adventurers on the level, but will also allow me to engage them again should I die -- which is entirely possible, given that the odds of the Outer Guardian charging at a single creeping coin and missing are roughly the same as the odds that the Outer Guardian will shock me to a crisp with one spell.



But against the Outer Guardian, I miraculously triumph on my first attempt. So far, so good, right? But there is one last guardian to fight on your way out of level 10, and he is, naturally, the hardest. Before approaching him I save the game and throw some salt over my shoulder for luck.



He's not joking.



That last screenshot appears three times a row in my screenshot folder. Past a certain point I became quite lazy in keeping track of my deaths.

The Outer Guardian is a samurai -- a class that blends high combat capability with the ability to wear decent (but not great) armour and equip special Japanese swords with high attack power. He is also quite high level -- his normal attack hits 3 times for around ~25 damage total on average. He is capable of casting Katino, Halito, Molito, and a spell we haven't seen before, Mahalito, which deals 9 to 18 damage to an entire group with a spray of fire.

For me to actually win this battle with two groups of monsters, the planets had to align: if he targets Werdna with anything other than a Katino, I lose the battle. In addition to that he can obviously wipe out all of my coins at once, to say nothing of killing any priests I do have. Most of my attempts at the battle ended in death. My successful attempt had Werdna ambush him, down a potion of Porfic on the surprise round, and get lucky -- 8 damage with each Halito casting, the Outer Guardian attacking Coins or casting Katino on Werdna or his monsters, and just generally making a fool of himself.

I would estimate I died ~20 times fighting this battle. I can confirm that the ratio of deaths was about seven times to his sword, seven times to Mahalito, three times to Molito, and three times to a stray Halito.



But eventually I triumphed, and looted a Black Candle (casts Lomilwa, a permanent light spell; key item) and a Jewelled Amulet (casts Dumapic). Items that cast spells can break, rendering them unusable, but you need every advantage you can get in this game.



Death count: ~27 (~10x longsword, ~4x molito, ~7x mahalito, ~3x halito, 2x entrapment, 1x Trebor).
Next time: Level 9: The Catacombs.

They said I was mad for running 7th Saga.

At least 7th Saga looks pretty.

There's a certain simplistic appeal to wireframe graphics.



At least when the games themselves are good.

I have to admit I'm having fun watching this race to see who can do the most masochistic LP. I expect the next entry to be a single-sequence run of Super Kaizo World.

I'm not racing. I'm taking this game at my own pace.

That's really the only way to beat it.

I've been curious about this game for a while, so it's nice to see someone else play through it. I think the concept is really cool, even if the result looks like it's one of the worst RPGs ever made.