Wizardry runs on one addictive loop: dive into the maze, hunt monsters, upgrade your gear, then dive deeper still. But Wizardry Empire: Princess of the Ancient, which Starfish and Taito shipped in December 2000, wires a bomb into that familiar cycle — party compatibility. Depending on how race and gender line up across your party,…

Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers is the sequel to Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner, and it landed on the Sega Saturn in 1997. Cyberpunk fused with the occult, a hacker crew called the Spookies, and the mysteries buried under the networked city of Amami — among everything Atlus has put out under the Persona and Devil…

The Persona series did not start out looking anything like the flashy games from Persona 3 onward. Megami Ibunroku Persona, released for the PS1 in 1996, was a dark high-school RPG with Shin Megami Tensei blood running straight through it. The town gets swallowed by another world, your party options are limited, and the maps…

The Wizardry Gaiden line is a monument to the way Japan took the dungeon RPG and evolved it on its own terms. Its final entry is also the odd one out, the only game in the line that never wore the word “Gaiden” on its cover: Wizardry Dimguil, released for PS1 in 2000. A world…

The game barely gets started before the hero is murdered. He wakes up inside the body of a detective he has never met: Kyoji Kuzunoha. That is how Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner, released for the Sega Saturn on December 25, 1995, opens its story. The setting is the fictional city of Hirasaki. You take…

Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna is the entry that flips the entire series on its head. You are not the adventurer here. You are Werdna himself, the evil wizard who was cut down at the end of the first game, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and sealed away in the dungeon below. You…

The Famicom version of Wizardry III: Knight of Diamonds is one of the easiest games in the series to get wrong before you even start it. First, this “III” is actually the second scenario of the original — the Japanese releases swapped the numbering. Second, where the original demanded a maxed-out party imported from the…

The Famicom version of Wizardry II: Legacy of Llylgamyn is a game that confiscates your weapons the moment you walk in the door, especially if you beat the first scenario. That Level 13 Samurai you spent months building? Transfer him over with a Turbo File and he drops straight back to Level 1. Adventurers who…

Born in 1981, it’s the game that defined the RPG genre itself — that’s Wizardry. More than 40 years later, in May 2024, a full 3D remake titled Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord landed on Steam, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox. “I’m used to modern RPGs, this is going to chew me up, isn’t…