New Interest in the Old

In the last few months, I've noticed that I've acquired a new found interest in dungeon crawlers, both old and new. I suppose it was natural, I think, because of my interest in RPGs and a lot of genres Japan excels at; or used to. But that's not all; I believe this particular one surfaced because of my curiosity of a lot of older American dungeon crawlers, games that probably haven't aged all that well and are only worth a curious glance these days. (Perhaps games that The Dark Spire took a little too much inspiration from.) This was something I realized when a couple of new Wizardry games were announced in Japan.

Like any person worth his salt that has interest in video games, new and old, I decided to harness the power of the of the internet and find information on the franchise. My only prior knowledge with it was the existence of Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land for PS2, which was released in America by Atlus in 2001. A lot of the information was pretty interesting. Most of the American-developed games in the franchise made a home on PC, of course, but they were ported everywhere. You can check them out on Wikipedia, the undoubtedly most reliable source of anything on the internet. Also interesting is that one of the co-creators of the franchise, Robert Woodhead, went on to co-found North American anime distribution company Animeigo. The more you know.

The series went on to become pretty popular in Japan, and a little while afterward they started to produce some of their own games in the franchise. America hasn't developed an entry since Wizardry 8, which was released in 2001. But there have been quite a few Japanese games in the franchise since then, though next to none of them have been translated. With that, who knows if the new games, the "Wizardry Renaissance" as they're calling it, will make it outside of Japan.

First, there's the Acquire developed title, Wizardry: Dungeon of Imprisoned Souls, for Playstation 3, which will be released digitally via Playstation Network in Japan this fall. There's also Wizardry: The Wedge of Life for DS, which releases in Japan in November. The kicker about that last one is that it will be on sale exclusively through Amazon of Japan, which is kind of bizarre. There aren't any details on the PSN version (except for an official website with some fine music), but the DS game, judging solely from the screen shots, looks like it uses a clever fusion of traditional RPG battles and real time dungeon crawling and death trap dodging. There's also Wizardry Online for PC, which...could be interesting (though there's nothing known about it). Oh hey, and there's also Wizardry Zeo, which is a manga. Yeah, they're pretty serious about reviving this.

When I started reading a bunch of information on the games on Friday, I thought there would be a very good chance of getting these games in America due to some popularity driven by the Etrian Odyssey games and Demon's Souls. But Jeremy Parish's post on 1up's Retronauts blog brought to light a recent harrowing reality; in his post, he talks about the increasing amount of Japanese games being passed up for localization. Seems like it's going to be a fun time for niche gamers. To be honest, I actually think the PSN title has a better chance of seeing a release in the US solely because of the fact that it's digitally distributed. Well, that, and the fact that most games being passed on these days are sadly DS games. So uh, cross your fingers, I guess.