Wizardry 8 Review | Extreme™ Roleplaying™

Hey hey people! Sseth here. Today, I’ll be breaking away from tradition. I’ll be covering some old-ass game that’s probably very: obscure, long, frustrating, dehumanizing, but also very fun. Ask yourself: Have you ever wanted to experience the role-playing equivalent of poisoning yourself- repeatedly- for many weeks- [HORRIFYING SCREAMS]

Until you gradually build up a tolerance for self-inflicted pain and suffering? You see? Much like eating a bag of raw potatoes; do it in one go, and you might die. But do it gradually and you might live. Keep at it, and you might just… start enjoying it. I present to you: Wizardry 8

Released in 2001 by [the Canadian Government], Wizardry 8 is one of the finest torture devices to be released on the personal computer. Wizardry 8 takes place in the Dragon Ball Z extended universe. You and your party are space-travelling aliens, hired by the Wookies to retrieve all three remaining Dragonballs –

The Astral Dominae, the Chaos Moliri, and the Destinae Dominus – and, use them to ascend as literal gods and reshape the universe. Ascension takes place on a planet called Dominus. Unfortunately, the process of ascension has been complicated by the involvement of a Dark Savant – who, to put it simply, is Space-Hitler –

Setting up an interplanetary, anti-Semitic blockade around Dominus. Unfortunately, your ship bears the Mark of David and is quickly shot out of the sky, forcing you to make a crash landing. All things considered, that’s not too bad, except:

Space-Hitler has also rigged the planet with a nuclear payload that is large enough to glass the entire surface, in case anyone (who isn’t Space-Hitler) tries to ascend. I hope you’re following all this because this is just the intro.

And now I’m gonna quickly summarize the plot to help you understand how amazing this game is. Space-Hitler is not very popular. As a result, he loses the only Dragonball he has to the Italian mafia, because he neglected to pay their godfather, Don Barlone.

By the way, the Italian mafia in this game is composed of rats, and speak in an Italian-American accent. Don Barlone switches out the Astral Dominae with a shiny salt lick. The melanated master finds out and has an autistic tantrum in front of you. You’ll come to find: this is a common theme.

You take the imitation and buy the real thing. It costs most of your life savings. So instead of paying, you might try and whack him instead. (Not a good idea, apparently.) Luckily, the best tricks are so nice, that they work twice. First: you gotta get chummy with the Umpani or the T’Rang.

This is the choice between authoritarian rhinos or, literal bug men that reproduce faster than India. I usually roll Umpani because we share a common bond in our attraction to anthropomorphic rhino girls. Siding with one of those lets you visit the local Wookie embassy to have a look at their Chaos Moliri.

And by “having a look at their Chaos Moliri”- I mean: snatching it in front of him, apologizing sincerely, and then replacing it with a knockoff glass bulb. Then you gotta find the Destinae Dominus, Which is really the “search for enlightenment.” As the source of all knowledge in the universe, you find it –

Naturally, by consuming a lot of silobison, DMT and ayahuasca – so you can project yourself to a higher plane of consciousness and talk with Joe Rogan. With all three dragon balls in your dragon sack, there’s still the small matter of nuclear oblivion.

So you gotta go up north and offer your sweet body to a goat demoness. This game was very progressive for its time because Al-Sedexus is *fiercely* heterosexual, and rejects the very concept of scissoring. She also rejects the concept of monetizable content because her milk jugs are anything but modest.

Anyway, to disarm the bomb, you have to get inside it. How? By breaking and entering into people’s bedrooms because, logically speaking, one of them is bound to have a direct access, interdimensional portal into the bomb, which can be disabled by pressing random keys and getting lucky.

With the bomb no longer armed, you smack the Savant, leaving him… disarmed. The Savant dies, but in his death reveals to you the ultimate truth: that he’s been using a voice changer on Discord this whole time. and: He’s… not actually that dark. The end! Any questions? No?

Then, in that case, welcome to Wizardry 8! I love this game. Now let’s talk about playing it. To play, you need to make a party from characters you make yourself. If I said there’s a lot of options, that would be an understatement. You can be… anything you want to be. Humans? Non-humans? Sub-humans?

Furries. Scalies. More furries, and even short kings. There’s so many short kings in this game you can pick by your preferred size, anything from 5 foot 11 kings to a 5 foot 10 “pocket prince,” who are so light at this point they get carried away by the wind. Race!

Is there a link between race and i- There’s 11 races, and that’s only including ones you can pick. There’s about 16 in total. Do anything you want to do, and I mean it. I don’t care how many classes your game has because Wizardry 8 has 15. Including, but not limited to:

Fighters, which fight; Valkyries, which fight using female privilege to avoid death; Ninjas, which fight with the empty space representing their lack of contribution to the team until two weeks into the average game. However, if you rolled a Faerie Ninja: Congratulations, because your pocket prince can now solo the entire game.

Alchemist, makes potions and breaks the economy by making infinite potions you can sell for infinite money, letting you buy everything in the entire game. 10 out of 10, working as intended. Gadgeteer, who uses an unconventional form of weaponry: a gun. But that’s the boring part.

The interesting part is overloading a microwave in a monastery, ripping out the microwave chip, and using it to give your enemies brain tumors. Gadgets are essentially random pieces of trash, duct-taped together, to inexplicably cause widespread devastation! And if you think that sounds ridiculous, then let me tell you about the Bard.

In most games, a bard plays music, keeps up morale, and probably cooks and cleans for the party as well. In Wizardry 8, the droning melody of a bard’s bagpipe brings pandemonium, the plucking of his harp causes cerebral hemorrhaging, and the blowing of his horn results in nuclear fallout.

Building the optimal six-man party is difficult. Explaining is difficult, and we don’t have time. Here’s my build. Follow it. Copy it. Enjoy it. It’s very powerful, very well-rounded, and gives you a complete first experience of the game. By the way, this game’s got a lot of voice dialogue-

And most of it comes from your own party. There’s 18 different personalities for each gender- which is 36 fully voiced personalities in total. And that’s absolutely nuts. Now, on to the fun stuff. I present to you all: my current party. That’s right, I manually imported all this to work inside the game.

By the way, they’re fully animated. The portraits, not even that bad. But manually animating the eyes and mouth? Yeah, that took a while. As our first fighter, we got Internet Historian. Physically, he’s a giant. Mentally he’s… He’s very stable. Mr Mandalore as our second fighter, whose voice I absolutely adore. [level-up harp]

It’s just so expressive. As our morally bankrupt, backstabbing, conniving and scheming Je- We got my man Uber Danger as a rogue, who sounds exactly as he does in real life [level-up harp] For spellcasters, I put Frederick Newton as our resident psionic.

There’s nothing wrong with him; he’s actually the most well adjusted of the entire group. Also, I put him as female. Sorry, Fred-baby, but the best jewelry in this game is for girls. And we need to min-max. Myself as the party’s dark, brooding alchemist-

Who, over the course of the story, has been one-shot many times. And finally, Ken Ashcorp as our local priest- ho’s also completely unhinged. I did originally consider adding Pyrocynical to the team. But unfortunately, Youtube does not let me feature minors in this video. There’s a lot to do in Wizardry: Explore amazing places;

Visit the swamp; catch malaria; climb a tree; get body blocked for hours by hamsters; go to the only functional city in the game, with a grand total population of about 12 people; get harassed by Space-Hitler and the androids of the Fourth Reich; head to the bar; get blackmailed;

Go to the bank, because of course, it’s still open; go to the airport because, why not? Because this is the one game where you can talk to a starship and tell it to go fuck itself. The dialogue system in this game is nothing short of amazing.

You have to manually write down, memorize, and figure out the keywords for conversational topics you’re interested in. The game will then try to identify your intent, and produce you a fully voiced answer. There’s not many NPCs in this game. But I remember every single one of them.

Whether it’s the Umpani and their militaristic tendencies- [PERFECTLY HARMLESS EXPLOSION] The slick talking Don Barlone of the Razuka- or even your own biological daughter, conceived as a result of sleeping around with demons, because their voice acting is absolutely fantastic!

Some can even be convinced to join your party. Unfortunately, most of them are highly superstitious of their own planet and won’t go where you want them to. The workaround to this is running them to exhaustion with a heavy backpack, knocking them unconscious, and forcibly dragging them past the load screen.

Once they wake up, they’ll complain and bitch about this breach of consent, which is why people generally avoid them. Except RFS-81, who is the best boy because unlike everyone else, he’s not programmed to be a bitch. Quests are also equally brilliant (until you get stuck),

Until you get frustrated and desperate enough to read the damn walkthrough instead. There’s no shame in that because I do it. And I’ve finished the game twice. Some of my favorite quests include: protecting a ‘Verified Twitter User’ from hateful comments online,

By crushing someone into meat paste after luring them in using the sweet aroma of a female girl; getting motion sickness from the mind tunnels; and of course, retrieving the black box flight recorder of a crashed ship, so you can triangulate the position of Space-Hitler’s ship

And use a heavy surface-to-air battery to shoot him out of the sky. Yeah, this game goes zero to a hundred real fast. Anyway, let’s get back to something sensible, like using medieval weaponry to kill fantasy creatures. The biggest part of this game from beginning to end;

From the moment you wake up on that beach, to the moment you pass out each day from exhaustion, is combat. This game has a lot of fighting. A *lot* of fighting. the hardest thing in this game is to simply walk unmolested through a short forest trail, which is physically impossible,

Because every step of a way, you’ll be harassed, molested, and physically assaulted by the entire regional populace. Should you survive your first experience of the great outdoors, You’ll reach Arnika (the first city in the game). And don’t worry, that’s where I *also* let my guard down: Sleeping with a door open?

Peeking out from a dusty window, only to catch a faint glimpse of moving pixels in your peripheral vision? I’m very sorry, but you’re now in combat with the entire city. Because even “civilization” is an unstoppable barrage of random encounters. To understand my frustration, here’s an example:

Previously, I have walked five meters on a tropical island, got jumped by crustaceans walked five meters back because I realized I was going the wrong way, got jumped by more crustaceans, only to walk forward again, and get jumped by the SAME GROUP OF CRUSTACEANS, which have now respawned.

This wouldn’t be so bad if combat wasn’t turn-based. But it is, and it’s slow. This won’t hit you immediately, but believe me, it will. And once it does the following information will make sense: “Hello future viewer. Like you, I have also had a mental breakdown after watching combat animations for many hours.

“So I’ve installed the Wizardry 8 Speed Mod to quicken animations, “I’m running WIZ8FAST at 625x speed, “and I’m simultaneously speed-hacking the game with Cheat Engine at 3x speed.” And… It’s still slow! But don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean combat is easy; it’s absolutely the opposite!

It’s sadistically hard, it doesn’t care, and it’s going to keep beating you until you break. Sure, you can put down the difficulty; you’re still gonna get shredded by the 10-plus juggernauts that just came out of camouflage. The only way to avoid dismemberment is to play “intelligently.”

This game is a constant battle of overwhelming odds versus your own capacity to game the system. To charge the juggernauts is suicide; They swing potentially three times a turn and they’re not stupid. They’re gonna surround you, flank you, and hack your spellcasters to pieces.

Positioning is important: instead of charging, we herd them into a choke point. Their numbers become worthless, and we reduce the fight into a glorified meat grinder. And that’s not hyperbole! Enemies get visibly wounded the more you hurt them.

It provokes a very Pavlovian response as I get satisfaction from seeing whatever has inconvenienced me get reduced to a bloody pulp. Other times, I’m left thinking, “Jesus fucking Christ! Please, stop! Just put him out of his misery!” as i’m beating a bandit so hard that we’ve ripped the very skin off his face

And his skull is visibly poking through the flesh. Tactics are important. Your fighters do most of the damage. Your mages control the battlefield. Why deal with a crowd when you can make the crowd insane and kill each other in a psychotic rage? And if that doesn’t work? Paralyze them, curse them,

Give them topical dermatitis, make them throw up and induce nausea. You know the best way to stop an animal attack? You know the best way to stop an animal attack? Diarrhea. Because it’s very hard to focus on anything when your ass is exploding.

However, any status that affects enemies can affect you as well. And you’ll find it’s very hard for your party to focus when they’re in the process of getting vored and digested by wild animals.

Luckily, combat is extremely rewarding. You only have to win a couple of fights appropriate to your level to level up. With that comes increased stats, skills, and spells to expand your options. Also, the game gets harder! Early game might be spent on the verge of death,

But, given time, you’ll find that this is a constant state of tension. Except, you’re no longer afraid of it. Instead, you learn to enjoy it, and even revel in the act, as you realize you’re quite good at it I do, however, have some critique.

Traps are randomized, and one of them stole 90% of my current assets. Philosopher’s Bane turns your gold into lead, and… I forgot to quicksave. On the other hand, my critique is also praise! Because traps are a perfect example of how god damn good the sound design is in this game!

First, you gotta tumble around, to try and guess the mechanism. Next, you need to try and disarm them one, at a time. Listen to this: the sound… is so goddamn crispy, that you can… physically *feel* the tension, as your rogue fiddles with the machinery, which can snap, at any given moment. [NO!]

Good god, I love it. Just, uh, remember to save. Lockpicking is not based; it is cringe. It is an endless hell of clicking tumblers to make him rise, only to watch the rest fall, as you persist in your futile struggle.

Which is why I *strongly* recommend you use earth magic to magically hold the tumblers because otherwise, you’re gonna have a bad time. Don’t even bother. Because it’s fucking broken. No one’s really sure how it works, but you can’t save scum and the responses are hard-coded. It’s actually almost creepy.

I once pickpocketed an NPC five times with the same negative outcome only to reload the quicksave and discover that the NPC was missing. Or rather that they were deleted from my save file, as if to send me a message.

I know this sounds like I’m losing it, and you don’t have to believe me because I managed to record the whole thing. I used to think you couldn’t alt-tab out of this game because alt-tabbing breaks the keyboard. Turns out: it doesn’t. you just have to hit the alt key once again.

How could you know this? You can’t. How did *I* learn this? I smashed my keyboard and it worked. Then, I reduced the surface area of my fist, smashed keys at random until, through order of elimination, found the secret combination. This game has several features on the level of esoteric knowledge.

That is to say; nobody knows shit. Wizardry 8 is absolutely fantastic. Yes, there’s annoying bullshit to deal with. But hey, it’s almost 2 decades old and released in less than ideal circumstances. That’s why there’s still a fucking hardware advert that pops up whenever you try and close the game,

Because the publisher was broke! And the developer was about to be, so they had to shill out. By advertising higher FPS, in a turn-based RPG, where FPS doesn’t matter. On the other hand, holy shit, that advert aged well! They still exist to this very day. Pre-built computers? Now *that’s* a future-proof business model,

Not some turn-based PTSD simulator that blew its entire poly count on jiggle physics! This game will try to break you. It’ll spit in your mouth, call you names and crush your self-esteem. But if you persist, that’s when real satisfaction kicks in. When you’re no longer at the mercy of its bullshit.

It’s the feeling of control. And let me tell you; it is an all-encompassing, Intoxicating sensation. I give Wizardry 8 an extremely high score! I also give it 80% off on GOG because I have that power. All this for about $2. If it sounds like something you’d enjoy, give it a try!

An average playthrough will run you anywhere between 100 to 150 hours of game time. And, given the vast range of builds and character classes, It is very much replayable! Preferably with breaks of several years in between. As always, more content to come, so stay tuned.

A warm thanks to the many members of the Merchant’s Guild, generously funding and bankrolling these videos. You’re all truly wonderful. Have a good one, stay safe, and please, enjoy the credits.