My Wizardry game collection is close to complete and it’s been a while since I’ve found anything I didn’t have, so finding four items on the recent trip was a pleasant surprise.
The special edition of the remake of Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord comes with an art print and two booklets. Wizardry The Five Ordeals released just a couple of weeks before the trip and was widely available everywhere (it’s a port of a Japanese PC game). I’m looking forward to playing this one!
Elminage is a game series that is Wizardry in all but name and was developed by some of the same people that made the Japanese Wizardry games. I already owned two of the games and with the addition of Elminage II and Elminage Gothic I now have the entire series. Both of these games were quite expensive, and it’s worth mentioning that I can’t play Elminage Gothic since it’s a 3DS version and my 3DS’s are religion locked to USA games.
Incidentally, my collection of Wizardry games now exceeds 50! I believe I own every game in the series including all the Japanese ‘gaiden’ games, so from this point expanding my collection will only happen via new releases or if I manage to obtain more of the original computer versions.
I also purchased on this trip the above three Wizardry guides. Each of them are full colour with dozens of pages of monster and item art, and detailed maps of each game level.
As with the dozens of other (Japanese) Wizardry guides I already own, these are beautiful books with production levels that far exceed what we had in the west at the time. It’s evidence of how popular this series was in Japan that I now own multiple comprehensive guides for each of the first few games, each released by different publishers and yet I’m not aware of a single western guide for any of the first five Wizardry games!
Lastly I found this Wizardry fanzine in the retro game section at Shosen Book Tower in Akihabara. As you can read on the translation at right, it has a lengthy interview with Superdeluxe games about the collectors edition mentioned above, as well as a wealth of other wizardry-related articles and artwork. This book is obviously a work of love by dedicated Japanese fans and will require close reading via translator since I suspect there’s some good information in its pages 🙂
My Wizardry book collection exceeds 50 titles now as well, and continues to expand via novels, manga, game guides and RPG manuals. With hardly any information on such books available online I have no idea how much else is waiting to be found on future trips…