Once again I made a few additions to my Wizardry collection this past trip, although for the first time in many years of Japan trips I didn’t add any actual games. Here’s what I got:
These are guides for the 6th and 7th Wizardry games, and as with typical Japanese game guides they’re in depth and comprehensive. One of the Dark Savant guides seems to be a transition of a western guide written by the developers (SirTech) but the other is Japan specific and written by a self-proclaimed ‘Wizardry Expert’! It’s worth nothing that I already have other Japanese guides for both games, and it’s quite possible others may exist!
This is a collection of three short stories set in the Wizardry game world. While I can’t read this, I’m guessing they’re all set in the world of the first five games, since things got a bit weird after that. This is yet another in a growing list of Japanese Wizardry novels I own, which now also includes…
This is an absolutely beautiful set of four more Wizardry novels, each by a different author and published in 1992. They share the trade dress of the first three games, and based on the extensive English on the front and back covers, seem to tell stories influenced by the games.
Each of these small hardcovers features a few colour art pages at the start, and have wonderful black and white illustrations throughout:
This is a lovely set of four books, and I dearly wish I could read them! For their quality they were extremely inexpensive as well.
Incidentally there have so far been two English-language Wizardry novels, one released decades ago and one only last year (by the write of Goblin Slayer no less)! I own both and have read the first, which was better than I expected.
My last pickup this trip was something I’d been hunting for a while: Wiz Ball, the Wizardry baseball card game (yes you read that correctly). This is actually the expansion to the original release, which still eludes me…
This contains additional magic and item cards to expand the main game. It seems as crazy as it sounds, and translations of the cards show that the various items improve things like batting strength or running speed and (as with the RPG) can only be used by specific characters. The magic cards utilize the same names as the game, but where Mahalito is an explosive damage spell in Wizardry, here it ‘increases ball speed by 2’!
Why does this product exist?!? Who ever thought to pair a technical and complicated computer RPG with a baseball card game? I’ll never know, but I’m glad I finally own it 🙂