Review by ASchultz

"You kids think you've got lousy RPGs today? I used to play Wizardry II out in a foot of snow wearing boots with holes in em...and the game stunk too"

After Wizardry was such a huge financial success, SirTech whipped up another remarkably similar effort and repackaged it as Wizardry II: Knight of Diamonds. In this game, you fight one item on each level (armor or weapon) after solving minimal puzzles. Once you've gotten the whole Knight of Diamonds clothing line, you've won the game. Although it contains six levels to the original's ten, it is actually a more complex game, not that that is hard. The idea, however, fails miserably. It seems to be a poor effort and possibly very greed-laced, and there are no improvements in game play. Oh, sure, there is a puzzle, and on one level, your mapping skills are slightly tested, and there's no way to march through the castle in fifteen minutes as there was in Wizardry I, but I just didn't see enough improvement, especially with something Sir-Tech conveniently left out.

The most shameful thing Sir-Tech did was to force you to transfer characters over from Wizardry I. ''New characters cannot survive long in this realm.'' As for creating characters that start at, say, level seven, this little feature was too much for the programmers. It helped make packaging a lot easier; there was a nice card in the box saying that you should refer to the Wizardry I manual for help and Thank You for Buying Wizardry II. The only thing I was grateful for was that I didn't pay full price. That Ultima started unknown compared to Wizardry and had a considerably longer run is the sort of thing that keeps my faith in this world. I'm sure the greed rebounded when Wizardry III was sitting on shelves without any Wizardry I to go with it.

Granted, the game has the old features from Wizardry I(including the fabled cheat that would have helped new characters)--the castle/town scene where you tinker with your characters has another in the chain of Gilgamesh's Taverns, the temples still hold risks of turning dead players to ashes to eradicated(no more character X.) You can still sleep in the inn, where the stables are your best bet, and there are overall more and more interesting items. You can also switch character classes as you did in the original, but probably you'll get through the game before you have the time. There are also the negative features, like extra tough dungeons where it's too easy to teleport into rock and having to rescue your characters with Disk Utilities if they're lost in a maze(i.e. you shut the computer down a moment before they all die.) Your characters still have the ultimately useless passwords to use them which Sir-Tech would be happy to remind you of if you forgot--for postage, a fee, and a bit of a wait. Even the manual recommended against using them except in extreme incidents, and it was only a week until it didn't sound cool any more. Combat isn't actually too bad although you had better not have lost the flyer relating which spell does what. The spells have a sort of language about them, which may be the neatest part of the game. I'd like to rip on the dodge command for being another useless Wizardry feature but that's usually a given across RPG's.

The graphics are still the same, with walls in your 3-d perspective all being white lines, and doors slapping a few more on. Shucks, they stayed that way through Wizardry V. The monster pictures are simplistic compared to Bard's Tale(which had a variety of colorful walls, too. Gee, wonder why that series is better loved) and they're not even nice to look at as the color-by-number drawings suffer from a lack of detail. Okay, the introduction actually has decent graphics, but there's not much after that.

There is really no reason to play through this game again. I don't believe I've ever solved an RPG more quickly; after the initial self-congratulations wore off, I realized what a terrible game I'd bought. There are laws against software piracy but this is the reverse in a way; you had to buy the original to buy the next two, so if Wizardry III actually seemed to have a story, well...

Reviewer's Score: 1/10