A phone based Gacha Wizardry Dungeon Crawler

I started to play Wizardry Variants Daphne when it launched on iOS a few days ago. I’ve been playing Wizardry since it first came out, back on an Apple //e, and am a big fan of Dungeon Blogger games. I’m not a big fan of Gacha games, and this is definitely a Gacha game. It is a dungeon crawler blobber, in the traditional Wizardry mould.

You, the player character, are some kind of special person (though given that it is a multiplayer game, not that “special” since every other player is the same – though it seems like in universe you might be the only one? That isn’t clear to me yet). Your right hand is able to “reverse” that state of things in some way, so old bones that you find in the dungeon can be “revived” and turned into party members. This is primarily where the Gacha mechanic comes in. You aren’t able to roll your own party members, you need to randomly roll character that you revive at “The Ruins”.

As with previous Wizardry games, party members have alignments (Evil, Neutral, and Good) though in this game you can mix Evil and Good members in the same party without much trouble. Apparently there is some, but I haven’t come across anything major yet. You also have different races, Human, Elf, Dwarf, Beast, and maybe some kind of undead? Different races are more suited to different classes than others.

You wake up in the dungeon, meet a ghost who talks you through things, and you find your way back to the surface.

You have a standard town menu here. The Inn lets you rest to restore hit points, magic points, and skill points, with different costs for different rooms. You can rest in the Stables for free, though there is apparently a chance for things to get stolen. Also, you aren’t able to clean your characters, which got to me after a while: the character models pick up dirt and grime after a while, and it bothers me. You have to spend 200 gold (a world currency you can get fairly easily) to stay in the lowest class room that lets you “wash off” with water. That cleans up the character model again, which is kind of nice. It reminds of Baldur’s Gate 3 where my party is thoroughly blood soaked, talking to vendors and I don’t understand why they don’t run away screaming. In that game I’ll use soap and sponges occasionally to clean up as well.

The Ruins is where you go to use the Gacha mechanics. So far I’ve discovered that you can revive old bones to get adventurers for your party. Of course there are grades of bones, and the really good adventurers have low pull rates from the normal bones. You have to get Legendary bones to guarantee one of the named and voice acted party members.

The other thing you can “revive” is “old junk” which turns into equipment. So there is a Gacha mechanic to that too. Different equipment comes in different colors and has different star levels. Honestly, it’s way too much. You can go to the Blacksmith to upgrade equipment for Gold, and apparently some features unlock if you do that enough. It starts to get expensive quick though. I guess there might be some other currency you can use, but I honestly haven’t figured it out yet. And I don’t want to. These things get too complicated – just give me something like in Baldur’s Gate 3, where you find stuff and it is good or not, take it or leave it.

I’ve also unlocked The Temple when I came back with some poisoned characters. The game talks about how you can resurrect characters, just like in the old game, but they may turn into ASHES. Just like the old game. So try not to die too much. The game in the dungeon crawling portion has a really good handle on the risk / reward component of “Do I push on a bit more, or head back to town?” This game is a bit more lenient though – you get three allocations of a resource that lets you re-try a fight from before you started it if the main character dies. I haven’t seen what happens if you fail all three times; I wonder if you can create a second party to go down and find the old dead one? I doubt it.

If your party members die, you get a chance on the round that they died to resurrect one of them with your right hand power. You get the same timing based mini-game for all right hand power usage, with a circle zooming in to a point, and you have to hit it at a certain timing. In this case, if you fail, you take damage, and you can kill yourself that way. Each time you fail the circle gets a bit slower though, and I’ve been able to do it on the second round usually. That still does some damage to me and leaves me paralyzed for a few rounds.

Still, those two options make Wizardry Variants Daphne a bit less difficult than the original Wizardry.

At the Adventurer’s Guild you form up your party. You have to add people to the Roster before you can select them (“Edit”). If you have a bunch of unnamed characters you rolled, you can “Inherit Skills” from them (destroying them in the process!?) to get small improvements to your characters. The better and higher level character you Inherit from the better effects you get. There is also some gating on how much you can do this, but I don’t know what controls it – experience it looks like? This game isn’t great at explaining things, and I think it expects that you know a lot about common Gacha game mechanics.

You also use the Adventurer’s Guild to pick up your daily login bonus, and other things you get from fulfilling certain constraints. I think you need to have some sort of “Adventurer Pass” to get a lot of these, which I got because I pre-registered months ago. This is another Gacha mechanic that I don’t really understand or care about, but I have been logging in daily to get my “Adventurer Supplies”.

You can also somehow communicate with other people that play the game here, you get a party “password” that people can use to contact you. I don’t know what that is about. You also get a chance to sometimes drink with people in your party at the Tavern, and you can talk to people there.

You can also look at an accept quests, some which send you off immediately to fight some monsters with your party, others which need you to explore in the dungeon somewhere and have some story associated with them. There is a “Dispatch” function which lets you send people you aren’t using on timed quests where they come back with some experience and stuff. That’s also a common Gacha mechanic I think, and the app annoys you every three hours or so when someone comes back. I guess some of that has been seeping into real games too, like Dragon Age: Inquisition might have had some kind of mechanic like that? Seems lame to me. Make a game that is fun, not some dumb dopamine injection device by giving time gifts to people. I can see why they do it though, it certainly works.

In the Dungeon

The meat of the game is mapping a dungeon, fighting monsters with a party of six adventures, three in the front row and three in the back row. There is a mini-map that is automatically filled in as you walk around the dungeon. There are squares with special events and cut-scenes, as well as quests that you can take at the Adventurer’s Guild that spawn monsters to attack or squares you need to walk over with some cutscenes. It’s fun! You get experience from defeating monsters, and are generally limited by the spell points of your party. A Priest can heal you (and also do some buffing / de-buffing), a Mage can cast mostly offensive spells (but also de-buffing or buffing), a Thief is good at opening Chests and avoiding traps, and Fighters Fight. I have a Legendary Knight that heals people at the end of battle, which is nice. You have to balance the risk of staying down in the dungeon for too long vs. going back to town to heal and level up, buy potions, and so on. The auto-navigate feature really takes some of the pain off of leaving the dungeon and coming back though, which is a change from the original Wizardry. It’s still a fun formula though, they have a good balance here.

I’ve only made it down the B2F, but this game is fun in the same way that Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land was for me. You have little story snippets in the dungeon, some environmental storytelling, you get missions from people up above in the Adventurer’s Guild, and you have an over-arching mission to achieve in the dungeon. The initial mission is at least, to rescue the King who is trapped down here.

The graphics are in my opinion, very good. But I’m also very old, and may be comparing these graphics to what I remember from when I played Wizardry I: Tales of the Mad Overlord on the Apple //e. You rush in and attack your opponent when you melee them.

On Twitter, someone told me that they got themselves stuck in a bad situation in the dungeon and had to re-roll their character, so it sounds like you can get in a bad spot if you aren’t careful.

My overall impressions

Overall, I’m really impressed with the game. It’s got a good dungeon crawler feel, and looks really good on my phone. I haven’t played any games on my phone in the past five years or so though. The game is also entirely in English, and has very good voice acting compared to what I was expecting. I don’t want to play a Gacha game, and I think all the mechanics are too complicated, and not well explained, but the dungeon crawling itself is fun. I’m sure I’ll keep playing, and I’ll probably buy the introductory 3500 JPY pack for one Legendary Bones things to show my support. I think the Gacha elements will get to me too much at some point though, and I’ll go and play some games on my Steam Deck instead.

One thing that annoyed me is that I rolled only Evil characters at first. It took a while before I could make a party with named people – I want named characters because they seem to have story with them, and they are voice acted – but I can see how you might spend money to get good characters that way. I don’t know if you will get as attached to your party that you didn’t create as you would if you create them yourself, but this does allow for personality and enables the main Gacha aspect.

I’d write about the different currencies, but I don’t understand them. Gold is something you can get by selling junk in the dungeon. You need some other currently to buy party members, or special (good) weapons. There is a green gem, the Gem of Org (green) but I don’t know what I can do with it. There is also a Gem of Erin (purple) that you need, but I don’t know what for. There is a Blue gem, and some sort of Adventurer Guild point or something. The Jeweler is where you spend some of these things, but honestly I can’t understand what the different things are for, where I can get them, or where I can spend them. It’s pretty bad. I’m happy to spend some money to get adventurers that I want – there was a merchant that sold me a legendary bone for 100 GP early on, and that was great. I doubt I’ll see him again. Everything else is too confusing.

This could be a fun game if they got rid of all the currencies, weapon levels and grades, and other stuff. As it is, it is a good game with a lot of micro transaction stuff you need to work around.

The other thing is that the game Communicates with Servers for a lot of stuff. When you defeat a monster party, and get a chest. When you enter the Dungeon. The game definitely isn’t playable without an internet connection, and that is something I’m never happy about. So we’ll see how long it lasts on my phone. I’m enjoying it for now at least. I hope others do too, and we see some real new Wizardry games in the future!