I’ve been posting mainly about PSP games lately, but my DS Lite is still around and in action. For a few days back in August or so, I played the heck out of WiZman’s World, a dungeon-crawler from Jaleco, but it’s been on hiatus ever since for reasons I will explain below.

Story: A tribe of wizards have been imprisoned in a small town, surrounded on all sides by labyrinthine dungeons. They explore the dungeons constantly, but have yet to find a way out. You play the part of a no-name orphan who was found in the dungeons and taken in by a witch who has since gone missing. Explore the dungeons to try and find your way out while looking for clues about what happened to your mentor.

Simple, right? Simple stories are always the best when it comes to dungeon crawlers. There’s a little bit of mystery in there about where you came from and what the wizards did to deserve imprisonment, which is enough to keep you interested without possibly leaving you going “Huh?” at end of the game. Final Promise Story, are you listening?

You are accompanied on your travels by the three fairy-like homunculi shown on the front cover. Strangely enough they look nothing like that in the actual game. None of them have blue hair, for one thing, and they’re wearing rather fewer clothes. They have no names, so in my infinite wisdom I dubbed them Foxy, Frisky and Booksy (my kids are so gonna hate me). You the MC are a wizard yourself with some very powerful magic, but these homunculi will form the bulk of your offense in-game. The battle system is pretty simple when it comes to playing it, but it’ll take a while to explain in writing, so bear with me here.

The battle system is the regular active time turn-based system, where you attack according to speed. If you’ve played Garnet Chronicle, a.k.a. Crimson Gem Saga, the screen layout looks almost identical to that. Using magic and special attacks delays your next turn, but can be more powerful. Chaining attacks from your party members leads to damage bonuses and multipliers, but there are no combo attacks.

You can see monsters in the field and get the jump on them or vice versa, which gives you an advantage or a disadvantage. The system also has shades of Saga 2 and 3, in that you can get into chain battles with more than one set of enemies. The EXP reward is slightly higher for such battles, but it’s usually not worth the aggravation.

There is also an element system with Earth, Wind, Water and Fire. Earth > Water > Fire> Wind > Earth. This is the basis of your entire strategy: hit the enemies with what they’re weak against while avoiding attacks you’re weak against. If you’re both Earth-element, you don’t do much damage, but you don’t take much damage either. It sounds like a lose-lose situation, but for bosses it can be life-saving. Tch, those damned bosses. I’ll get to them in a minute. But first, how do you make sure you’re one element or another?

Answer: by fusing your homunculi with monsters. WiZman’s World has a monster fusion system where defeated monsters frequently drop “souls”, which your homunculi can combine with for stat boosts, new element alignments and new moves. And not just that, but their appearances change as well into some sexified hybrid furry version of fairy and monster, and that’s what you actually take into battle with you. I suppose SMT & Persona players will be familiar with the concept of fusing monsters together to create new ones, except here it’s the same party member in a different form.

The homunculi level up as well, but fusion is really the only way to make sure they don’t fall hopelessly behind as the game progresses. What’s even better and even more important is that you can take two moves along with you when you fuse. Remember how I said Earth doesn’t damage Earth? Now you can have an Earth monster with Wind moves so she can damage the Earth boss without being hurt in return. If you go into battle and your strategy isn’t working, you can go home, fuse again, get some new moves and come back and try again. In theory, anyway. In practice this doesn’t work so well because the bosses are cheating bastards, but…we’ll get to them.

On top of everything else, the enemies also drop stat-boosting items that you can add when fusing. So if you switch from Monster A to Monster B and your HP goes up but your MP takes a hit, you can just supplement the fusion with an MP+20 item or whatever and then you’re right back where you started. It’s all kinds of awesome. I love this system, and I’d love to see it again in another game somewhere. I’d never heard of Jaleco before this, but I’ll be looking out for whatever they make from now on.

Unfortunately, despite how wonderful it was, something major got in the way of my enjoyment and led to me putting this game on ice. Those damned cheating dungeon bosses! They were created to keep the wizards trapped and boy do they take their jobs seriously! Long ago on 4chan, I remember seeing an MS Paint image that sums up what it’s like to play WiZman’s World. In fact this post was delayed by a few days because I was looking for it. Picture speaks a thousand words and all that. I still haven’t found it, but I did come across something close enough and even simpler, so:

That’s right. You spend your time in the dungeon fighting, beating enemies, you level up quite rapidly at first then you cap off, you fuse your homunculi a couple of times, give them great abilities, everything’s hunky-dory. After a while you start feeling pretty good about yourself, and you think: “Okay, I should be ready to take on the boss now.” Hahahaha, LOLNO.

Well actually, LOLYES. The levels are usually fine, it’s just that the bosses have so much HP and so many annoying attacks that you’re screwed no matter what you do! You need some really good planning, some serious stamina and quite a bit of luck before you can take them down. They’re like Megaten bosses: the first attempt is usually just information-gathering, you don’t actually think you stand a chance of winning. I’ve fought four bosses so far, and each one has taken me between 2 and 4 tries.

You need to damage the boss, but at the same time you need to hold back on the SP for when it inevitably goes berserk as its life runs low. And what I said about using special attacks the boss is weak against? That’ll drop your speed enough that when the boss goes crazy, he’ll be doubling and tripling you, i.e. KILLING you. And he might even start using attacks both of you are weak against, i.e. KILLING you. Oh, I finally found the image I was looking for:

Same thing. Anyway, basically the boss battles are a massive chore. I killed the first four (I think?), so it’s not like they can’t be done. It feels REALLY good when you finally kill one, but at this point I’m just bossed out. I made it to a desert stage which had a real boss that followed a false boss that was tough enough to waste your MP and deplete your HP, and I was just like “No más.” But it’s still an awesomely enjoyable game that I’d like to finish at some point in time, so I’ll be back eventually.

Moving on, I’m about 20 hours into UnchainBlades Rexx. It’s been fun, but the fun is rapidly turning to pain, so I’ll try and write something about it while we’re still on good terms.

Related posts:

WiZman’s World – Underrated dungeon crawler (2) Date ni Gametsui wake ja ne! Dungeon Maker Girl’s Type review Finished Conception. Verdict: Good dating sim, bad dungeon crawler. Dungeon of Windaria – Sometimes simple is good