Category: Wizardry

Japan Pickups: Wizardry

June 25, 2026

I bought the above on my recent trip: Wizardry V for the PC-98. It’s the second copy of the game I’ve bought in the last six months (and my fifth copy overall), and my first ever PC-98 game. I’ll never be able to play it of course, but I’m happy owning it.

I actually didn’t know a Switch collectors edition of The Five Ordeals existed and when I saw this in a used store I couldn’t hand over my yen fast enough! I bought it without even knowing what was inside. The box is beautiful: faux leather with metallic ink printing in the Wizardry-style.

In addition to the game, a soundtrack, and an acrylic diorama of foes, it comes with an entire set of the cards that are randomly packed into the game and a binder in which to store them. As far as collectors editions go, this is one of the best I own.

Speaking of cards, in Mandarake (Osaka) I saw these in a glass case:

That’s a selection of trading cards that were included in Japanese Wizardry games. The above photo is only about half of what they had, which stretched from one side of the case to the other. They ranged in price from ¥2000 to ¥13000 which I found interesting since I would have assumed they were equal rarity? They were all in immaculate condition.

I’d never seen even a single card for sale so this display astonished me. I can’t imagine how difficult it would have been for the person who sold these to have collected them in the first place.

I purchased one from each of the four games they had cards from: Wizardry (FC), Wizardry III (FC), Legacy of Llylgamyn (PS1?) and Bane Of The Cosmic Forge (SFC). In a perfect world I would have purchased them all, but that would have literally cost me thousands.

These cards are the true rabbit hole of Wizardry collecting. There’s precious little info about them online, and I don’t even know how many Japanese games included them. Completing a collection seems impossible since only one card was randomly included with each copy of the game and some of the series have over 40 cards!

Incidentally I have a few others, including (I think) for Game Boy versions. Maybe I should get them all out one day and blog them?

I bought a few more Wizardry items on the trip – related to the collaboration with Atami castle – including a shirt and a face washer. Unlike the January trip I didn’t see any other Wizardry merchandise in stores, but apparently some more will be available soon. I guess I’ll have to go back 🙂

The Day The Gods Of Men, Elves, Dwarves, Beastfolk and Fairies Blessed Me With Serendipity

June 14, 2026

That’s Atami Castle, which I visited today. It’s not a real historic castle, but was built in 1959 as a tourist attraction. According to a plaque inside it became famous in 1962 for being destroyed in a Godzilla film, which I looked up:

The castle is up on the same cliff the ropeway took me yesterday, which means I rode the ropeway again today. Here’s a view looking up the cable (the opposite of the photo I posted yesterday):

The ropeway and area at the top was much busier than yesterday, so it seems Sunday is a bigger tourist day than Saturday here in Atami. There was a line to buy tickets for the castle, and as I was waiting I spied a sign hanging above the entrance which rendered me speechless:

Wizardry Daphne is currently one of my favourite games and I play it daily. I was even playing it in line moments before I noticed this sign! Not only did I have no idea there was a collaboration going on with Atami castle, but for me to arrive on the final day is incredible luck!

I was hopping with excitement waiting in line to see exactly what a collaboration between a game and a tourist attraction could be! When I purchased my ticket I was given a leaflet with a ‘quest’ inside:

You needed to find give of the games characters hidden throughout the castle (one on each floor) and you also had to find and defeat the ‘red oni’ to finish the quest. It sounds much harder than it was to complete, although I initially had some difficulty with defeating the oni since it required accessing a YouTube video via a fiddly QR code.

I went through the castle twice: once to complete the Wizardry quest and again to actually see the attractions. The quest didn’t take me long, and when I presented my solution to the man at the shop he chuckled, I assume due to my poorly written Japanese:

And my reward for this effort? A very high quality vinyl sticker:

Of course Japan being Japan, the collaboration also meant exclusive goods for sale, and you can bet I made a few purchases. Overall I loved doing the quest and experiencing the collaboration, and I’m still amazed how lucky I was to stumble onto it.

The castle itself had different exhibits on each of its six floors, including authentic samurai armor and weapons. The katana in particular were brilliant:

There was also an eight-barreled arquebus which is the most ridiculous firearm I’ve ever seen and took three minutes to load!

One floor had extensive historical information about Japanese castles in general, as well as a dozen or so extremely detailed wooden models of famous examples. Can you tell what these are made of?

They are entirely made of matchsticks! The detail was extraordinary and I can hardly imagine the effort that went into making all of these.

There were also displays of Edo-era art, and an entire floor dedicated to pictograms which was entirely lost to me because of the language barrier 🙂

The basement was a surprise: an arcade of mostly gigantic cabinet shooter and rythym games with everything on freeplay! I sat at that massive Space Invaders with the LED screen and played it for maybe half an hour, amazed that I could since this is usually a redemption game and it beggars belief anyone could last that long. It gets insanely difficult – almost impossibly – but with free play I just kept going. It was fun 🙂

In fact if this castle was next to my hotel I’d still be in that basement, playing the latest House Of The Dead and Jurassic Park shooters through to the end!

The highest level of the castle also provides the best views of Atami city. As you can see it’s cloudier than yesterday, although even since we had a light rain forecast today it never eventuated.

I’d say the castle would have been worth it anyway, but the Wizardry collab for me made it one of the most memorable moments of this entire trip!

Right next door was the ‘Atami Trick Art Museum’. These are common in tourist locations here in Japan, and are full of art based around optical illusion. KLS have always imagined these to be worthless tourist traps, so I was surprised today how much fun it was.

For starters, massive props to the employee who walked me through half the museum, taking the photos you’ve already seen. She had no English, but managed to show me how to pose and knew exactly how to take a good photo. She was lovely.

Secondly I was surprised how many adults visited. Or rather, how few children. I had been incorrect when I dismissed these places as just for kids!

Many of the illusions were extremely effective, including paintings that seemed to move when you viewed them, but my favourite is probably the one above. As you see, only my reflection in the mirror is visible. Can you guess how this was achieved?

Before we head back down to the city a word of caution: Beware the black kites!

I headed down and slowly back to my hotel, walking along the promenade. It was very hot and humid, and the light breeze was very welcome. The beach was more popular today, and there was some sort of event going on where a long line of men (possibly tied together) walked out into the water while being cheered by the crowd.

The sand is fine and in various colours. There’s almost no surf (probably due to breakwaters) and watching the men it seemed to deepen quickly. Compared to Australia it’s not much of a beach, but it’s probably the best I’ve seen in Japan.

I saw something unusual from a distance, and when I got closer it resolved into a giant monkey (Kong?) holding two buckets of pachinko balls! This is on top of a very old pachinko parlor down near the seafront. I didn’t go in and regret that. Silly me!

I returned to the shopping district near the station and it was even busier than yesterday! I saw many people eating the fish cake hotdog things, and it seems ‘octopus and ginger’ was the most popular at the stand with the longest line.

I was looking for ice cream (with no luck) and saw the above. This is puréed fish – tuna or salmon – in an ice cream cone. They refer to it as eating sushi in a cone and the photo at right is a stealth shot I took when two people ordered it. Judging by their reactions this is as unusual to the Japanese as it seems to us!

There were some performances going on outside the station, including a lady middle-aged rapper and a bunch of other older women dancing in kimono. These had drawn large crowds and were quite delightful to watch. These dancers in particular were excellent and very well coordinated.

Atami has been fun. It’s exactly what I needed, since I was so worn out. While I haven’t exactly been resting – I still did over 20k steps each day and climbed over 700 steps today alone – it was relaxing to be away from the crowds and intensity of Osaka. Plus I was forced to sleep in since nothing opens early!

Tomorrow I return to Tokyo for the last leg of this trip. Lots of shopping, lots of arcades, and a few blog posts about specific topics. Look forward to them!

Japan Pickups: Wizardry

January 16, 2026

This past year Wizardry Daphne broke into the top 50 mobile games in Japan, so I shouldn’t have been surprised on this recent trip to actually find merchandise! There were sections in both Animate and Gamers in Akihabara like this:

If you look closely you’ll note that not all of the above is actually Wizardry merch, but what there was a mix of Daphne and Blade & Bastard (the new series of novels and manga) items. The quality ranged from good to dubious such as this (which I obviously didn’t buy):

So what exactly did I buy? For starters, this acrylic of a character from Daphe that I had rolled (on the gacha) only a few days before:

Her name is Alice and she’s an irredeemably evil cleric possessed by an ancient god. She’s also the best healer in the game right now, and immediately went into my party!

This is a small notebook designed for mapping. It’s a curio today since all modern games have automaps, but for nostalgia value alone of course I was buying this. Even better was a black t-shirt with a simple red ‘W’ on the front and this extraordinary list on the back:

That’s an amazingly thorough list of all the games, and even included some I’d never heard of. The last western-developed one was Wizardry 8 in 2001; you can see how the series has shifted entirely to Japan since.

I also bought the badge and the pillow. The pillow was a ripoff, but I wanted to get the free-with-purchase bag (in the lower left) which required a total spend over ¥7000, so it made up the difference.

Speaking of Daphne, this was release only days before our trip:

Daphne is a beautiful game with particularly good character and monster design. This is a hefty artbook and I look forward to reading it.

But as happy as I was to find the above, it paled compared to me finally obtaining one of my grails:

This is Jun Suemi’s legendary artbook simply titled ‘Wizardry‘. First released in 2006 it had become highly sought after and the price had risen to hundreds of dollars in recent years. Happily it was reprinted in a revised and expanded edition just a few months ago and it’s now mine!

I’d been after this for over a decade now. I’d even purchased it twice on Amazon (the second time for $250!), and both times the orders were subsequently canceled and refunded. Several years ago I held a copy in my hand in Surugaya in Osaka and didn’t buy it since at the time I was awaiting delivery of one of the orders that would be canceled, and memory of that event had haunted me ever since. I even recall looking at the book on a Japan trip way back in 2006 and I always regretted not buying it (which was probably for weight reasons).

This is an important book in many ways and I’m so very pleased I now own it. I think I’ll dedicate a blog post to it in time.

In addition to the two artbooks above, I was astonished to find this on the shelves. I don’t know the exact term for these, but in Japan newsagents and bookstores sell these mini-magazines packed with another item, usually some type of bag. This one couples a little booklet on the history of Wizardry (“the excitement and the despair”) with a pouch bearing the logo. This was fairly common since I saw it in many newsagents and bookstores. I love that Wizardry is still very much in the public conscience in Japan 🙂

Some more books. On the top are the two most recent Japanese issues of Blade & Bastard, with the bonus postcard that came with issue 6 on the left. On the bottom left is a Wizardry 5 hint guide (for the SFC version) and a Wizardry novel entitled ‘Does the Wind Reach the Dragon’ from 1994. I own dozens of Wizardry books now but always seem to find more. How many exist?

Blade & Bastard incidentally is a novel series written by Kumo Kagyu, the creator of Goblin Slayer. I theorize that the Wizardry rights holders noticed Goblin Slayer was essentially set in the world of Wizardry so approached him to create a ‘true’ Wizardry story. I read the novels and manga adaptation of Blade & Bastard, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. There’s even an anime forthcoming!

The above was the most expensive single item I purchased in Japan. It’s a hefty box set campaign for the Japanese Wizardry TRPG. With four booklets, a large selection of maps and a wonderful DM screen, this is an impressive product. I believe the cover art is Jun Suemi as well.

The above is a clear file. It was very expensive. Much more than you think. It was in fact so expensive that only a King or a Fool would have purchased it. There was no information about its provenance, and I assume it was promotional and is at least a decade (even decades) old now.

The truth is I fell in love at first sight and it’s now one of my favourite items in the collection 🙂

Speaking of love at first sight, I went into a tiny and somewhat dingy retro game shop in Akiba and spied these in a showcase:

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but my Wizardry game collection is complete. I own all the games that were physically released, even to the point of having original and rereleased versions of many of them. But I don’t have all the computer versions, and I’m always on the lookout for more.

So I approached the employee – a young woman – and she gave me a weird look. I said I’d like to see something in the showcase and as she took me over she said in accented but good English “You want to see the Wizardry games don’t you?”

It was my shirt! I was wearing a Wizardry shirt which she’d noticed, and as it turns out this young lady was a Wizardry fan. This was extraordinary since she was no older than my students, and yet she quickly convinced me she was a true fan. She took me to a few other cases to show me other games they had (all of which I already owned) and she also knew about the merchandise at the other Akiba shops. She also played Daphne. My favourite quote of hers: “Ah these games can be hard on a Gen-Z like me, they’re so difficult!” (Yes, she labeled herself as a Gen-Z which surprised me.)

At any rate, these were in the showcase:

I don’t usually leave prices on items when I blog them, but this time I did and if you’re interested you can work out how much I paid. These are complete boxed versions of Wizardry 5 and 6 for the FM Towns and both are in immaculate condition. The contents of each are similar:

The manuals are 100+ pages, and each comes with a game CD and a 3.75″ floppy for save games. The middle book at the top is a setup guide, and that’s a customer response card (with the dragon from the cover on it) at top right. The packaging of Wizardry 5 in particular, with the embossing and metallic inks, is just beautiful:

It goes without saying that these are the first FM Towns games in my collection!

As for (let’s call her) ‘Wizardry-chan’, I asked her if she had seen the clear file at Beep and she hadn’t. I showed her a photo and she zoomed in to the price and gasped. I told her I had purchased it and she was speechless and looked at me like I was either a King or a Fool. I wonder which one she decided on?

Robot Claw