Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is, of course, a classic RPG and one of the top inspirations for every game in the genre, including Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. The NES port, released 1990, was not noticed by most gamers — Nintendo Power all but ignored it, apparently having had enough of pushing RPGs after spending all of last year publishing Dragon Warrior features. This port, though, was three years old by 1990. It was released in Japan in late 1987, not long after Dragon Quest II, and it was a huge hit — very much with the times, and just as revolutionary to the Famicom’s grade-school audience as it was on the Apple a few years back.

The FC Wiz is of particular note because of the people behind it. ASCII gave development duties to Game Studio, the independent outfit Masanobu Endo (Xevious, The Tower of Druaga) founded after leaving Namco. He headed a team that spruced up the wireframe RPG dramatically, throwing in monster graphics by Jun Suemi (who did design work for Game Arts and illustrations for about a million Japanese novels) and music by Kentaro Haneda, an extremely prolific TV scorer who also did the soundtrack for Suikoden (1).

It’s Haneda’s BGM that I like the most about this port — it creates that perfect sense of dark, dreadful adventure that Wiz is all about. Take the “Your party is dead” theme. It’s so…final. It makes you feel like the lives of your six adventurers were worthless, lower than dog scabs. I enjoy it to bits.

Anyway, the above video shows the US version of Wizardry being beaten in…er…45.82. Not 45 minutes and 82 seconds, 45.82 seconds. That’s one quick TAS, considering that gamers used to spend weeks roaming the dungeons. Click on to find out exactly what’s going on in the flick.

From the submittor’s page on TASvideos:

1. Execute a software reset in order to skip the publisher lo
2. Create a Thief with a Strength stat of 18
3. Create a party with this Thief and the Cleric you have available from the beginning
4. Take the elevator to B4F
5. Defeat the enemies in the room and use a Teleport-trap chest to reach the second elevator to B9F
6. Monster encounter caused by setting off an alarm on B4F — but they’ve been luck-manipulated to be friendly, so continue on
7. Defeat enemies and get the Epee of Excellence, a Ring of Movement, a Dagger of Thieves from a chest
8. Equip the stuff, which turns the Thief into a Ninja
9. Run into an encounter immediately and use the Malor spell to teleport — as luck would have it, to the space in front of Werdna’s chamber in B10F
10. Use a critical hit to defeat Werdna and a Dispel to get rid of his friend the vampire

So it’s all the work of luck manipulation and trial/error. Still, fabulous.