As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been selling off my game collection over the past five years. I’ll never stop being a game collector – I still have all my handheld games for instance – and I enjoy collecting a certain series now to keep my fingers dipped in some of the systems I’ve divested from. That series is Wizardry, and once again I bought some more games from the series while I was in Japan.
This 1996 Super Famicom game was the fourth in the Gaiden series (the first three were Game Boy games) and, like its predecessors, was never released outside of Japan. Wizardry still existed as an ongoing series in the west when this game was released, but the Japanese spin-offs were well and truly established by now.
The game is rare and somewhat pricey these days, and I’m happy I found a great condition version, especially since the box is beautiful and features silver ink. I can’t of course play it (I don’t have a Super Famicom), but maybe one day I will.
The two PS1 games shown above contain remakes of the first five Wizardry games fancied up with new graphics and sound, and the PC-Engine game contains Wizardry III and IV. While I’ve played all these games in various versions over the years, I’ve never been able to play the PS1 remakes and would love to since they contain all new Jun Suemi monster art.
No Wizardry games were released in the west for PlayStation or the TurboGrafx, but with the above pickups I now (believe I) have all but one of the nine games released for these two systems. The one I am lacking (Wizardry Empire) doesn’t seem particularly rare or expensive; it’s just I haven’t found it yet.
One of the Busin games was the only PS2 game in the series released in the west (as Tales of The Forsaken Land), and was in fact the last physical release Wizardry game released outside of Japan. I own it, and played it at the time, and it was a great new installment. In Japan Wizardry saw many PS2 installments in multiple series (main, Gaiden, Empire) and I think I now own them all with the above three pickups.
A PS3 game – Labyrinth of Lost Souls – was released in 2011 and even came out in the west. Alas it was digital only, and since my PS3 is long dead I couldn’t play it any more even were it available. I’ve read that the Japanese physical edition (which you can see in the pic) was limited release (which may explain why it was pricey)! I’m glad I now own it, since it’s the last physical release of any Wizardry game.
With these eight pickups my physical Wizardry console game collection is very close to complete, but since the original series was released for so many machines there’s still a lot of retro versions out these I’d like to get my hands on. Wizardry for instance saw releases on Apple-II (in 1981), PC, Macintosh, MSX and a bevy of different Japanese home computers. Wouldn’t it be fun to own one of them?
As far as the ‘Part 1’ of this post is concerned, I also bought a few Wizardry books while in Japan. I’ll detail them in the next post…